Perhaps The Greatest Reading Pleasure Has An

Watching Him During The First Several Minutes Of His Delivery, Cecilia Felt A Pleasant Sinking Sensation In Her Stomach As She Contemplated How Deliciously Self-destructive It Would Be, Almost Erotic, To Be Married To A Man So Nearly Handsome, So Hugely Rich, So Unfathomably Stupid. He Would Fill Her With His Big-faced Children, All Of Them Loud, Boneheaded Boys With A Passion For Guns And Football And Aeroplanes.

He Knew These Last Lines By Heart And Mouthed Them Now In The Darkness. My Reason For Life. Not Living, But Life. That Was The Touch. And She Was His Reason For Life, And Why He Must Survive.

And Though You Think The World Is At Your Feet, It Can Rise Up And Tread On You.

There Was, In My View, An Unwritten Contract With The Reader That The Writer Must Honour. No Single Element Of An Imagined World Or Any Of Its Characters Should Be Allowed To Dissolve On An Authorial Whim. The Invented Had To Be As Solid And As Self-consistent As The Actual. This Was A Contract Founded On Mutual Trust.

But What Really Happened? The Answer Is Simple: The Lovers Survive And Flourish.