Alan Judd

“She got out and shut the door without looking back, picking her way through the snow to the black wooden door in the college wall. At least she hadn’t told him not to follow. He watched as she carefully brushed the snow off the latch with her rolled umbrella before touching it with her suede gloves. She left the door half open behind her. He followed. When he reached the door he saw she had paused on the garden path leading to her hall and was doing something in the snow with the tip of her umbrella. Still not looking back, she moved on without waiting for him. When he reached the spot he saw that she had written ‘I love you’ in the snow. It was that night, he believed ever after, that she became pregnant.”
― Alan Judd, Uncommon Enemy

“When you are young you do not understand how different then and now are because you have lived only in now and it feels as if that is where you will always live. You do not realize that your now -and you- are becoming then. And when you realise how completely now has become then, how different it is, it is like the fall of the axe. It splits you off from all these younger people, who, however much they think they know or understand, cannot feel life as it was then. The pulse if it, that was the thing, always, with everything, and that is what cannot be conveyed.”
― Alan Judd, The Kaiser's Last Kiss