from penelope fitzgerald, human voices:

At that precise moment, while the juniors were eating their dessert at Prunier's, Annie fell in love with RPD absolutely, and hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way. After the war the species no longer found it biologically useful, and indeed it was not useful to Annie. Love without hope grows in its own atmosphere, and should encourage the imagination, but Annie's grew narrower. She exerted the utmost of her will power to this end. She never pictured herself trapped in the mainlift with Mr Brooks above the third floor, or of rescuing him from a burning building or a Nazi parachutist or even a mad producer armed with a shotgun. He existed, and so did she, and she had perhaps sixty years left to put up with it, although her father died at fifty-six. She was in love, as she quite saw, with a middle-aged man who said the same thing to all the girls, who had been a prince for an evening which he'd most likely forgotten already, who had given her a ring with a red currant in it, and who cared, to the exclusion of all else, for his work. As a result, it was generally understood, Mrs Brooks had left him, and the thought of his loneliness made her heart contract as though squeezed by a giant hand; but then you couldn't pretend he was lonely, so Annie didn't pretend. This of course, meant she suffered twice, and she failed to reckon the extra cost of honesty.

Vi wanted to be of help, but it was difficult to find facts which Annie had not already faced.

"He's old, Annie," she ventured at last.
"He is," Annie replied calmly, "He's forty-six: I looked him up in the BBC handbook, and it's my opinion he's putting on weight. I daresay he wouldn't look much in bed."
"But what do you expect to come of it?"
"Nothing."

Vi felt troubled. She was conscious, as she sometimes was when Willie Sharpe was talking, of a sort of wrong-headed dignity. Willie, saddened by the experience in which Annie seemed to be trapped without escape, took her to task.

"It's wrong, because your situation isn't natural. I've worked that out to my own satisfaction."
"I can't get it to go away, though. Doesn't that make it natural?"