Fire and Hemlock

To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much.

"Heroes see things like that," he said.

"It's obviously an enchantment of some kind," Polly agreed, humouring him.

"It must be," he said. It sounded as if he was humouring her.

Pretending was like that. Things seemed to make themselves up, once you got going.

"If nothing happened, then there's nothing to remember," she told herself, trying to sound philosophical. "Of course there's nowhere to start."

"Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things."

Dear Polly,

Tom wishes you, for some reason I can't understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs - backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair.

This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can.

Yours ever, Sam.