For everything she did, when I was first in love, was separated from all else that I heard or saw or touched; the magic was there, and the magic laid an aura round her; she might have been a creature from another species. For me, that was the overmastering transformation of romantic love. And in part it stayed so – until in middle age, a generation after I first met her, years after she was dead, there were still moments when she possessed my mind, different from all others. It stayed so, after that January afternoon in my attic. There were nights when we had walked hand in hand through the bitter deserted streets, and I went back alone, rehearing the words spoken half an hour before, but hearing them as though they were magic words. The slightest touch – not a kiss, but the tap of her fingers on my pocket, asking for matches to light a cigarette – I could feel as though there had never been any other hands. Yet that January afternoon had added much. That I knew even as she stood there, her face dissolved by tears.
