LOVEBOOK

WHAT WILL SURVIVE OF US...IS LOVE

With Valentine’s Day only a hot breath away, all the restaurants booked and every red rose sold or blown, may I be so bold as to recommend my latest novel, just out in paperback, as the perfect gift for lovers

https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Will-Survive-Us-heartfelt/dp/1529921481/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title

Here’s an extract: -

DO YOU LOVE ME?

One day, it doesn’t matter when exactly - nowish - she asks, ‘Do you love me?’

He replies, ‘More than that, I like you. Liking is rarer than love. Liking has it reasons. Liking is reason.’

‘But do you love me?’

‘I more than love you. I admire your character, I revere your intelligence, I venerate your being. I tremble in your presence.’

‘But do you love me?’

‘I find you endlessly, limitlessly, absorbingly interesting.’

‘I ask if you love me.’

‘You engross all my waking thoughts and nine tenths of my sleeping ones. I am overburdened by what I feel for you, in the sense that you outweigh and occlude all else.’

‘So you don’t love me?’

‘I’m searching for a bigger word.’

‘The smaller one would have done just fine,’ Lily says.

One day he asks ‘Do you love me?’

‘I love you,’ she says. Her eyes say it too. Her skin says it. ‘I love you.’

He wonders if that means she doesn’t like or find him interesting.

And here’s another extract: -

THE HONEYMOON IN BALI

‘Frangipani,’ Lily declares, as they enter their hotel.

Sam tosses his head back like a wild animal, testing the air for danger. It’s an act. His sense of smell is poor. But he wants to show Lily that he smells what she smells and is equally overcome by it.

The feature of which the butler who shows them to their room is most proud is the outside shower, a simple bamboo spout protruding from the side of a rock on which orange and purple hibiscus grows and kaleidoscopic lizards take fright. Lemon grass candles burn around the heart-shaped pool. ‘Totally private,’ the butler tells them with a smile, meaning they can swim here naked. Sam kneels to feel the water. Warm, warm. Lily has a flower in her hair

‘God Almighty,’ Sam thinks. ‘Do I have the capacity for satisfaction equal to this?’

Dinner is a beaten copper platter of aromas. The bay sighs, throwing back reflections of the stars. They kiss each other with mouths tasting of French champagne. How many days is it since they first kissed? They agree there has not been a single one of those days they have regretted. But what if this is the hour of hours, the peak from which no more can be expected and all there is left to look forward to is decline? Each feels the other’s nervousness. They get up from the table to dance slowly, no matter that it isn’t dance music that’s playing. Tightly, tightly, they cling to each other as on a boat that’s slowly sinking.

The bedroom door recognizes their breath and opens automatically. There are rose petals on their pillows… No sooner do they lie down than they fall asleep. It’s been a long flight.

Over fourteen days they shower in the open, swim without clothes, inhale rare odours, dine on rare fragrances, sip sweet coconut milk, dance to music that isn’t designed to dance to, repeat the rhyme of their extreme good fortune at having met, retire to beds of the crispest linens, and fall asleep. For his part, Sam marvels at the faerie spirits of his new wife: her floating golden on the perfumed pool like a princess from the Arabian Nights; her padding noiselessly through their marbled rooms like a faun; her sitting under the shower on the artfully arranged rocks, combing out her dripping mermaid’s hair - but the sight of her so engrosses his senses that he wants nothing more, seeks neither to possess her nor be possessed by her. And Lily, too takes pleasure watching her new husband crouching beneath the bamboo spout every hour that God sends, letting the water spill like stardust down his chest, then striding dripping into the bedroom like the dog he is never going to have – without asking for anything further. She has, of course, brought their accoutrements of desire, the corsets for him to lace her into and out of, the bordello spikes, the belt whose magic properties she must have discerned in new Mexico before being able to give them a name or understand their function, and whatever else might just, from one passing hour of experimentation and fantasy to the next, make both of them gasp anew. But she will not bring them out of her case; it would be a profanation to use them as the bellows to inflame a lust which, for whatever reason, and for however long, has cooled.

Has it?

Cooled, no. Wrong word. It matters what words you use. Words are like those ignes fatui that lure travellers into bogs and marshes. You have to interrogate every one. Check their papers. Make sure they have a right to be here. Cooled, never.

Ask another question then - Have the winds of your desire for Lily died down or just taken a different direction?

And the winds of hers for him?

Ask another question.

No, ask nothing.

Sam is not sure, as their old patterns stubbornly refuse to return, how much trouble he’s in. Has the man in him finally given up the ghost as he has so often feared it would, or has it mutated into a new aesthetics of appreciation, loving Lily for herself, for the shape she makes in the world rather than for the dents, or whatever one want to call them, she puts in him.

He sees her at the end of a passage unaware of him, engrossed in some thought he cannot guess at, or descending a staircase with child-like concentration, or sitting at the dinner table, awaiting his return, looking out for him, ever so slightly anxious, as though afraid he never will return – and he is overwhelmed by his sensory dependence on her, not her company or even her presence but the never-ending astronomic fact of her, the starlit heavens he cannot now imagine ever looking up and not seeing her presiding over. Well, he is a strange man and these are strange times. Forgive his excesses.

No. I take that back. I have chosen to make a hero of him. Luxuriate in his excesses.

Their room is like a temple with a golden cupola for a ceiling. As he lies on his back, looking up into it, reliving every sight of her he’s enjoyed today, a new thought forms - Am I loving her for the first time?

He’s been alive too long to suppose that desire must always take the same form. He has waxed and waned a sufficient number of times never to be sure what manner of man he’s going to be when he rises from his pillows next, but this migration of ardour from his selfish generative parts to his self-renouncing, all-receptive senses is not like anything he has experienced before. At any moment, as he lies there, he imagines Lily rolling into his arms, and asking ‘What is the matter? Have you stopped loving me?’ and he answering, ‘Stopped loving you? God, no. If anything, at this moment I love you more than I have ever loved you. More variously. More surprisingly. Less urgently perhaps, because I don’t hear the chariot of lawlessness at my back, but with a grander apprehension of all the world and time we have, all the changing relations to each other we can map.’

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

They have not stopped touching but they touch with an unaccustomed diffidence. Suddenly a touch is not a signal for something else to happen. Nor is it in all circumstances as appropriate as it was before. Should he be asking permission?

Sam watches and waits.

Lily waits and watches.