How Do I Love Thee?
HOW DO I LOVE THEE?
…
HOW DO I LOVE THEE?
Stories to stir the heart
…
EDITED BY
VALERIE PARV
First published in 2009
Copyright © Valerie Parv 2009
Copyright of individual stories remains with the authors
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No matter whose name is on the cover, no book is ever the progeny of an individual. Behind the scenes there is always a dedicated group of specialists making sure we authors look as brilliant as we dream of being. This book owes much to the foresight and friendship of Annette Barlow, publisher at Allen & Unwin (how many books have we done together now?); the hard work of her skilled and unfailingly pleasant team (I’m looking at you, Alexandra Nahlous); the equally hard work of my agent, Linda Tate of The Tate Gallery; and, of course, the passion and talents of the wonderful contributors who would undoubtedly have a long list of acknowledgements of their own. Reading each of their stories as it came in was like unwrapping a supply of presents, each one more exciting than the last. You guys are the best and it’s a privilege to have the chance to work with you all. How soon can we do this again?
Valerie Parv
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Anita Bell KILLER SMILE
Ann Charlton LOOKING FOR MR AVPR1A
Valerie Parv NEVER TOO LATE
Alexis Fleming PACK RULES
Anne-Maree Britton SOME KIND OF HAPPINESS
Sonny Whitelaw MORE THAN ONE LIFE
Craig Cormick WHY FIJI?
Judy Neumann NIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES
Daphne Clair VIOLET’S GIFT
AJ Macpherson INTO THE LIGHT
Alan Gold MIDLIFE BLOOM
Anna Jacobs A MUCH-NEEDED WIFE
About the Authors
INTRODUCTION
LOVE BROUGHT TO A COUNT
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
Romance has been likened to addiction by some psychologists, who regard love as a kind of oxytocin-fuelled temporary insanity, cured by long proximity to the beloved. According to this theory, when the spark inevitably wears off, we settle down to comfortable, if boring, companionship for however long the relationship lasts.
Having published more than fifty romance novels in twenty-six languages, and a great many short stories with romantic themes, I see romantic love as exciting and fulfilling, provided you’re prepared to work at it.
We wouldn’t expect a career to flourish without effort, study, regular appraisals, team-bonding sessions, time away to nourish the self, and persistence when the going gets tough. Why, then, should we assume that our most vital personal relationship requires a once-only commitment, and will maintain itself till death do us part?
After debating the issue with a romance-doubting psychologist on national television a few years ago, I wrote a book showing that you can have a love like those in my novels. This was I’ll Have What She’s Having (Random House, 1997). The desire of many couples to have what the heroes and heroines enjoy in romantic novels proved to be a strong selling point, not least to the book’s editor, Jennifer Byrne. I’m told that many men bought the book, seeking to answer the age-old question of what women want.
The ways I describe to keep romance flourishing are similar to those for career-building, including arranging team-bonding sessions and time-outs; being persistent in adversity; and regularly appraising how you’re doing as a couple. I know the methods work because they underpinned my own marriage for nearly thirty-eight years until death did part Paul and me in 2008.
So when asked to compile this anthology of romantic short stories, it’s hardly surprising that I chose as a theme Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …’ Her words speak directly to my own ideas about love, not only as powerful enough to endure after death ‘if God choose’, but as an ideal worth striving for ‘to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach’. There are no guarantees that everything will go smoothly because we are ‘feeling out of sight/For the ends of Being and ideal Grace’.
Browning agrees that love is not all heart-stirring moments, either, but includes times spent quietly ‘by sun and candle-light’. The poet also acknowledges one of love’s greatest truths—that it must be unconditional to be worth anything. ‘I love thee freely, as men strive for Right’, I take to mean giving one’s love, not for reward or to bring the beloved to heel, but because it is the right thing to do. Paul was much better at this than me, but it’s still an ideal worth striving for. Love is also pure, ‘as they [men] turn from Praise’. The satisfaction of giving from the heart, without thought of return, is its own highest and best reward.
According to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, love is not only an ideal, but a way of living. It is ‘passion put to use’; turning ‘old griefs’ and ‘a love I seemed to lose/With my lost saints’ into a relationship that restores her faith in love. She also makes the point that real love endures through the ups and downs, ‘the breath/Smiles, tears, of all my life!’.
Whether Browning was writing about her deep love for her husband, Robert Browning, a more spiritual love for God, as has been speculated over the years, or a universal love for humanity, she sums up the challenges and joys of love as no other poet has done.
Had she lived in the present day, Browning may well have been a romance writer. As in the conventions of romance novels, the sonnet form she uses is subservient to the emotions she pours out.
The words scan effortlessly, so we notice first the power of her sentiments, and the discipline of the poetic form secondarily. Romance writers are often accused of writing to a mythical formula, but there also the form is secondary to the emotions we share with readers.
Browning’s own experience of romantic love and loss shines through her words. The eldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was educated at home, reading the works of Milton and Shakespeare before she was ten. She had written her first epic poem before she was twelve—which I echoed with my own first publication in The Australian Women’s Weekly at the age of fourteen. In 1828, Elizabeth’s mother died and the family moved to Devon, then back to London where Elizabeth continued to study, write and publish while living under her father’s tyrannical rule. Plagued by illness all her life, she spent a year in Torquay by the sea, accompanied by her beloved brother, Edward, whom she called ‘Bro’. He drowned in a sailing accident at Torquay, and a heartbroken Elizabeth returned home to spend the next five years in seclusion, although she continued writing and publishing.
A volume entitled simply Poems, was published in 1844, and she received a letter from another poet, Robert Browning, praising her work. The two met that summer and began a clandestine courtship, exchanging more than five hundred letters over the subsequent months. Elizabeth’s father bitterly opposed the relationship, not wanting any of his children to marry.
In 1846 the couple eloped to Italy and settled in Florence. Three years after their marriage, she gave birth to their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, known as Pinino—Italian for ‘little darling’—anglicised to ‘Pen’.
During her courtship, Elizabeth secretly wrote ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …’ in her book Sonnets from the Portuguese, which she dedicated to Robert, although he was not to read the verses until after their son was born. The sonnets were published in 1850, the title reflecting Robert’s nickname for her, ‘my little Portuguese’, inspired by her dark colouring. In 1850, as the foremost woman poet of the Victorian era, she was seriously considered for the post of Poet Laureate. Tennyson was ultimately elected, and no woman poet would hold the post until May 2009, when the election of British poet Carol Ann Duffy finally ended four hundred years of men holding the position.
Elizabeth continued writing until she died ‘from a chill’, held lovingly in her husband’s arms, on 29 June 1861. She was fifty-five.
Asking a diverse group of writers to choose a few words from the sonnet as their inspiration proved popular with all the contributors in this book. The stories are as distinctive as the authors themselves. Anita Bell takes the last line of the sonnet as her springboard, but gives the result her own quirky twist. Alan Gold navigates the minefield of internet dating, while Ann Charlton takes matchmaking down to the genetic level.
Anne-Maree Britton looks at the contemporary idea of Mr Right-for-Now, as does Judy Neumann, whose lovers tap into the superhero in us all. Erotic romance novelist Alexis Fleming challenges all the rules of love, including those between species, while AJ Macpherson finds that love can redeem the most damaged soul, even if you are a vampire.
Time is no barrier to Sonny Whitelaw’s lovers, who may well have learned a thing or two from the past, where saga writer Anna Jacobs’ characters also dwell, and we learn that the good old days were every bit as challenging to love as the present day.
Showing that love is not only for the young, New Zealand romance writer Daphne Clair sheds a poignant light on love as a gift to all ages, while Craig Cormick takes his lovers to Fiji in their quest for romantic answers. My own story finds love in deliverance—literally—which I hope will satisfy the many readers who email me regularly wanting to know what happened to Cade, the ‘fourth brother’ introduced in my romantic suspense series, Code of the Outback (Silhouette Intimate Moments, 2004).
This varied collection of stories has another link with the words of the sonnet. Every story is written from its author’s heart—so let us now count the ways.
Valerie Parv
Canberra, 2009
KILLER SMILE
ANITA BELL
‘I shall but love thee better after death’
A flash of light made me blink, and I heard one of the paramedics say something about my heart beating too slow.
‘Great,’ I mumbled, trying to grin.
It could have been worse. I should have been flatlining. Sprawled half naked on my kitchen floor, the first thing that came into focus, aside from the size of the schnoz on the cute medic, was the knife behind him, sticking out of the top of my muffin toaster.
If my chest hadn’t hurt so much I would have joked that I’d been testing a gag for my next cartoon strip. But truth is, I didn’t want to blurt anything to make them think that my neighbour had nearly killed me with his latest token of kindness.
I could still see the charred remains of his post-it-note stuck to the side of the toaster, signed with that adorable little smiley face he used lately so I knew the gift was from him—in this case, two English muffins prepared for me the night before so I’d have no excuse for skipping breakfast. If only my eyes hadn’t been so blurry before I went for my shower, I might have noticed they’d been wrapped in clear plastic to keep them fresh overnight. And if I hadn’t rushed back with suds in my eyes when I smelled burning, I might have noticed the switch didn’t flick off properly at the wall before I tried to dig out the melted plastic.
Hilarious, I thought, considering all the other disasters I’d suffered within a nautical mile of poor Marty, and as I pictured myself sprawled on the wet floor in my bath towel and fuzzy slippers, I realised that all I really needed now was a notepad and a punchline and I might even make the deadline for the Sunday Times—provided the emergency ward had a fax machine.
That’s where I was headed now, apparently. A creaky stretcher had already been wheeled in to squat beside me, which made me wonder how they’d gained access to my sixth-floor beachside apartment in the first place. The elevator was barely bigger than my toilet. Just as puzzling was how they had known that I’d toasted myself at five in the morning. Had a surf lifesaver been glancing the wrong way with binoculars at the precise moment to notice the flash in my window? Or had Marty heard the bang from his unit across the hall?
But if he had, where was he now?
The only other living things in my apartment aside from the two medics were my Siamese cat and a Happy Plant—both staring impassively at me right now from the hall.
Okay, strike the Happy Plant. It’s been dying since Marty gave it to me in January for my birthday. Not that I’m complaining. I once gave him a set of ice-cube makers but the ice-shaped smiley faces usually break as they come out of their moulds, so I guess we’re even.
‘A good thing you’re wearing … pink slippers,’ stammered the cute guy with the schnoz.
I wondered briefly why the colour of my slippers made any difference—until I felt his hand on my boob. Totally innocent. My towel had fallen open just as he and his partner shifted me from the floor to the stretcher. While he was fixing it, his cheeks turned pink and his voice cracked with embarrassment.
Too late for modesty now, I thought, since I could tell from the sticky itch of a heart-monitoring tab in my cleavage that they’d already seen more than any other man since my husband died—not counting those two horrible incidents in the Snowy Mountains, of course—but aside from those, Marty hadn’t even tried to peek inside the hem of my neckline, and we’d been tripping over each other off and on for the best part of a year. He was always such a gentleman though. I’d never met anyone as sweet, calm and kind as him.
Maybe he was gay?
‘I’m f-f-fine,’ I tried to reassure the two medics as they checked my pulse and oxygen supply, but I guess a swollen tongue and chattering teeth are two of those things that undermined my credibility.
They wheeled me out to the balcony to lower the stretcher over the side with ropes slung as high as the floor above me, just as my alarm chirped in
the bedroom, and it occurred to me that I was not only late for an early meeting with my editor, I hadn’t fed the cat, turned off the shower or eaten the muffin which had started the whole disaster.
Next thing I knew I was groggy in a ward room. Again with the bright light! I cringed, wondering why everyone in a white shirt wanted to shine things in my eyes today—that’s if it even was still today?
Dazzled, all I saw at first were blurry faces shifting around my bed—and none of them sounded like Marty. To my right, I heard bleeping; the irregular sound of a heart monitor.
‘Turn that off!’ ordered the gruff man standing over me. ‘It’s starting to annoy me.’
‘If you’re talking about my heart …’ I coughed, ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
He chuckled just as his grey beard came into better focus. ‘I meant the sound effects, Emily. Not the whole screen. Good to have you back though, and well enough to joke about it.’
Synapses fired deep in my head and I recognised him as Dr Darius D’Ath, my late husband’s GP. I didn’t know he worked at a hospital now, but I hadn’t suffered so much as a flu in the last decade to warrant seeking him out, and wasn’t sure if I would have anyway. Not since I’d overheard him at Roger’s wake explaining that his surname, which is pronounced as Deeth, had originally been spelled D-e-a-t-h. But he’d found it so hard to attract patients and kept them long enough to explain it—until he dropped the e for an apostrophe, and voila! Instant practice! So sure, being suavely intelligent and drop-dead gorgeous probably boosted his career often enough too.
Personally, I couldn’t help shrinking from him, knowing it was really Death looming over me.
He poked a flat stick on my swollen tongue and supported my numb jaw while he peered down at my tonsils. ‘You’ve never struck me as the type to fry yourself deliberately in your own toaster.’