Enlightenment

I lost my faith,’ said Thomas, ‘I don’t know where I’ve put it, and now my house is empty and I live alone.’

Then dancers came by, and for a time obscured the view: old men and young ones, half-drunk or drunk entirely; girls clasped together and turning in stately circles; old lovers quick-stepping in practised concourse. Dazed by beer and music, Thomas saw all the threads that bound them in varieties of human bondage – knots made of habit, blood, resentm

‘I am sorry. We should never have grown up!’ ‘I’m not sure we have. I’m not sure we can.’

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

It is uncontainable, he cannot stand it: the comet is only going to rise, and equally dispense its pearly light on love offered and met and refused and mistaken, the law of harmonies unfailingly in operation on the human heart. He hears the ticking of his watch, and music drifting down from Lowlands House: everything that would ever happen had happ

It suited her few friends to imagine she’d been subject to a thousand physical and spiritual abuses, and been thrown out of chapel doors that then were bolted against her. It was difficult to explain that her father and her aunt received her absence with sorrow tempered by their trust in the will of God. She would return to Bethesda, or she wouldn’

return. In some quarters he’s believed too sentimental to be taken seriously, and fatally flawed by a tendency to think too kindly of his characters – but Thomas believes that any writer who thinks himself better than the products of his own imagination should seek out some more appropriate profession (such as dentistry, for example, or the constru

His hands were large and expressive, and he had moved easily in his chair, as if he felt it a pleasure to inhabit a body of which he’d never been ashamed – he’d smelt not of soap or fragrance but of clean skin. His lips had looked as if they had ashes on them: ‘He needs to drink more water,’ said Thomas tenderly, ‘or he’ll get headaches.’

The room was cold; it contained nothing of what Grace Macaulay loved. No absurd petticoats of lace and silk – no pendants, bangles, hair-combs and boots with laces replaced by ribbon. She had severed herself from herself.