Enlightenment

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.

‘I haven’t found my faith,’ said Dines between bites. ‘I wonder where I put it?’ ‘But isn’t this faith?’ said Thomas, tugging at the fringed stole, noting that it could do with a clean. ‘Doesn’t an attempt at faith constitute faith itself? It’s a dreadful thing to confuse faith with certainty.’

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

This was Bethesda Chapel, as fixed in time’s flow as a boulder in a river: Aldleigh ran past it, and round it, and could never change it. Above the door a narrow plaque read 1888, and beyond the bristled threshold mat, 1888 persisted. All the dreadful business of the modern world – its exchange rates, tournaments, profanities, publications, electio

Abruptly, and with unwelcome compassion for a woman he’d despised so cheerfully and for so long, he understood what loneliness had compelled Lorna to Bethesda’s door, and to all the church doors after it – recognised, in fact, her capacity to modify herself to please her company. Wasn’t he a different man to different men? It was among the least of

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

They say it was a quiet quick death while he was sleeping. I found out two years after. Nobody told me. Nobody knew they should.’

I wonder in that case if the world and everything in it – you, me, the moon and the water – consists not of solitary beings, but rather out of how each thing relates to another, so that in the end it is only out of connection that the whole world is made.

‘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?

‘I was sorry,’ said Thomas gravely, ‘to hear of your loss. The death of a father,’ he said, frowning at the window, ‘is at the same time both quite proper in the order of things, and incomprehensibly stupid.’ ‘I never saw him use it,’ said Carleton, containing tears, ‘and I don’t know how it works. It is a planisphere. A map of the stars.’