Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 23

And this was brave. This was acting. It sometimes seems as if a romantic history is the history of the removal of the need for courage. As you get older, you only need it for leaving. And even the braver of us – among whom I do not number myself – only use our courage two or three times in a life. It takes too much out of you, until you don't have enough to lose really to call it courage any more rather than heedlessness. So I stepped forward and lost my courage virginity. I would have two or three more to lose only. He reorganised his mouth and kissed me back as he straightened up.

And when we went back to his flat at the top of a tower block by Mornington Crescent, I was bouncing around like Zebedee, not only in the delight of possession but in the joy of having created it all myself. I did this! I thought as his puritanical flat revealed itself to me. I made this!, and this, and this hair, really the colour of rust right up close, and the taste of it too, and these collarbones and these elbows, and these ribs, and these grooves between his belly and his hip-bones, and even these jokes he's cracking causing me to look momentarily up, and these thighs and long shins – all of it magicked up by my courage. Anything I did, like this, and this, and that, and that again, I had brought into being!

Love runs through you and uses you as a device to get what it wants, and when you're in love you're simply keeping pace with it for a moment, briefly allowed to lope along at the front where everything that comes into view is new.