A Memory from London

But we aren't leaving with Patrick; we're sitting with Bess as she watches the taillights disappear. She sat there for a long time, thinking of her crazy youth: the briskness and constant construction of post-war London, the rough tweedy material of Patrick's dressing-room couch under her bare back, the foolhardy way her heart flung itself at her ribs when she looked into his smiling blue eyes, so hard that once he laid his manicured hand over her heart and said he was afraid it would break through. Desperate, desperate.