Another Country

The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. An hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded

Somewhere in his heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white.

‘Sweetheart, suffering doesn’t have a colour. Does it? Can’t we step out of this nightmare?

I hope you don’t think I loved your brother in that terrible way that you describe. I think we really were very good friends, and – and it was an awful shock for me to hear that he was dead. I was in Paris when I heard.’

But, as he said this, he realised that he did not care what Richard had been doing. He was merely being polite because Richard was married to Cass. He wondered if he had always felt this way. Perhaps he had never been able to admit it to himself. Perhaps Richard had changed – but did people change? He wondered what he would think of Richard if he were meeting him for the first time.

‘Did she like to be beaten up? I mean – did something in her like it, did she like to be – debased?’

French logic is very simple. Whatever the French do is logical because the French are doing it. That’s the really unbeatable advantage French logic has over all others.’

he saw the long, lean figure of a boy.