How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Love? She still, she thought, loved Tristram. He was kind, honest, gentle, generous, considerate, calm, witty sometimes. But it was Tristram in the living-room she loved, not Tristram in bed. Did she love Derek? She did not answer the question for a moment. [. . .] She thought it was strange that there flesh should be the same. But Tristram's had become carrion; that of his elder brother was fire and ice, paradisaical fruit, inexpressibly delicious and exciting. (1.7.1)
No doubt about it: if a lady associates her husband's body with dead meat, they're in for some awkward times in the bedroom. Unless, of course, she's a lady vulture, in which case, yum!
Quote #2
Derek swiftly undressed, disclosing a spare body knobbed and striated with muscle, and then the dead eye of the television screen on the ceiling was able to watch the writing of a male body—crust-brown, delicate russet—and a female—nacreous, touched subtly with blue and carmine—in the exordia of an act which was technically both adulterous and incestuous. (1.9.13)
Although Derek isn't technically a blood relation, he's Beatrice-Joanna's "brother" through marriage. There are shades of Shakespeare's Hamlet at work here. As the young prince himself would say, Derek is "more than kin, and less than kind."
Quote #3
At that moment Beatrice-Joanna had a sharp revisitation of a sensation that, just for a blinding second, had buffeted her cortex when lying under Derek on that crumpled fever-bed. A sort of eucharistic moment of high-pitched trumpets and a crack of light like that (so it is said) seen at the instant of severing the optic nerve. And a tiny voice, peculiarly penetrating, squealing, 'Yes yes yes.' (1.12.27)
What is this passage describing? Is it a moment of sexual climax, or is it the moment of conception? And why, do you think, does the novel's narrative voice describe it as a "eucharistic" moment?