Victoria Hislop

Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.

She stood smiling, accustomed to men running to wait on her, enjoying them enjoying her.

It was about ten in the morning, an ordinary London day, neither hot nor cold nor clear nor clouded nor wet nor fine.

He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behind me with his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glacés, lay his offering upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude.

And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years.

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.