Jude Morgan's 'Passion'


'You make me sound quite a tyrant to you.'

'You could easily be so. If you chose.' He chuckled, his head down, 'There is so much in words, isn't there? Turn them another way - they catch a different light. You have chatted and tiffed with a dozen men in just this way, I should think. And I'm flattered, because I know I'm not like them to lookt at.' She opened her mouth to say something - he really thought, did he, that he ranked below the six-foot swaggerers with their vacant displays of teeth? - but he went hoarsely and swiftly on: 'But the curious thing is, though the words are the same the meaning is quite otherwise, and if you were to call yourself my tyrant and I your vassal or slave it would not be drawing-room blather, it would be true. It would be real.'

'Is this,' she said at last, 'what they call an understanding?'

'Yes,' he said, and reached over and kissed her. More roughness of beard than she expected from that fair skin. Sweet breath. Strongly pressing communicative lips, reminding her somehow of the way a cat thrust its urgent purring head against you. Their open eyes reflected astonishment at each other as he drew back. 'If it is an understanding - then it must be on the understanding that you understand -'

'Oh, Lord, stop.'

'That you understand my position,' he persisted. 'What I can offer you. Or rather what I can't yet. I have no money nor expectations, only my pen. I have not made my mark -'

'Yes, you have,' she said, and greatly daring, took hold of his hand and pressed it flat against her breast above her heart. 'Here.'

'I should also tell you,' he said, after a long moment, his tongue thickly stumbling, 'that I never meant to fall in love. Didn't want to. Don't want to -'

'There, we understand each other again. I'm going to give your hand back now, because I can hear Mama coming.'

'And my heart?'

'No, no, you can't have that back. I'm keeping that, Mr. Keats.'

This would always win me over for romance, hands down. This old gentility...

And yet these days, we cannot as much as hear these words spoken, as read them in a book.