Last week they brought in the hospital bed, and we put it where the dining table was, where every Sunday we ate tea at five o’clock and your father read from his Bible. Now I can hardly remember the room without it: the present comes in like a tide over the past.

‘I do.’ Horribly it occurred to her that perhaps she wept because in fact she did not want this real Nathan, in his compromised flesh. Was this what she’d waited for? Had she bartered her soul for a gaunt man with a wife and child and a dragging foot?

Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its

Starlight and sunlight, split by a diffraction grating, display their own distinctive patterns of colour. I have always wanted to see this for myself, and recently bought an old spectrograph. It resembles two miniature telescopes mounted on a dais marked with numbers, and has been testing my poor skills and my patience for weeks. Then yesterday, ju

Perhaps there’ll be a disaster, Carleton had said; and Thomas felt again the blow of the hooded creature fleeing Bethesda with paint on its hands. But that had been no disaster, only something strange and soon forgotten in the order and quiet of his home – so Thomas, who had a gift for self-persuasion, placidly ate a radish.

The two men walked together to the safety of the hall behind Bethesda, where time never passed, and never tried to: the white cloths on the trestle tables, the steel tea urns, the Ten Commandments bleeding ink behind their mottled glass, all resisted the ticking of the gallery clock.

Then he does mention home – he mentions his daughter, he implies a wife, and never names either – and this brings a grieving splitting sensation: there’s a whole life there she cannot see and will never occupy – a series of loves and languages all incomprehensible to her, she is absolutely peripheral, bolted-on, and the bolts are coming loose.

He prepared himself a meal: radishes in a saucer with Maldon salt and grassy olive oil; good rye bread, and red wine poured with the pleasure of a man who’s elected to sin.

Perhaps it’s better I lay down my arms and leave the field of battle where I only ever lost – perhaps it’s better to live with hope than disappointment: