true english style

from Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008)

She would never, in the old days, have expressed curiosity about something as prosaic as a flight. Her truest self resisted triteness, even of the inventive romantic variety, as a kind of falsehood. When we'd fallen for each other it had not been a project of bouquets and necklaces and strokes of genius on my part: there were no ambushes by string quartets or surprise air tickets to a spit of Pacific coral. We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically. Our love started in drink at a party in South Kensington, where we made out for an hour on a mound of dark woolen overcoats, and continued in drink a week later at a pub in Notting Hill. As soon as we left the pub she kissed me. We went to my flat, drank more, and grappled on a sofa squeakily adrift on a four wheels. "What's that horrible noise?" Rachel exclaimed with a ridiculous jerk of the head. "The caster," I said, technically. "No, it's a mouse," she said. She was casting us in a screwball comedy, herself as Hepburn, whose bony beauty I recognized in her, me as the professor with his head up his ass.