Enlightenment

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

And why does he never name the mother of his child, who presumably nursed him when things were bad, pressed pills out of their packets when he needed them most, washed him, held his body when it was pliant with sleep, saw the stitches dissolving in his spine?

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

A man was crossing the vacant floor towards him. The distance between them was so great this took an hour or two, and in that time Thomas felt no anxiety and no surprise: ‘James,’ he said, smiling with an uncompromised happiness he knew would be brief, and taking account of the ways in which the man was altered.

The following Sunday being Easter, every church in Essex prepared to celebrate the resurrection of the Son of God. In the cathedrals of Chelmsford and Brentwood, nervous choirs assembled in their stalls, and the clerestories made their hallelujahs ready; in the cold stone temple of St Peter-on-the-Wall, white tulips were cut for white vases on whit

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.

Grace Macaulay – in whose veins ran Essex rivers and Bible ink; in whose philosophy the devils of hell and the saints of Bethesda did battle with her reason and her nature – sat with her phone on the bare floor of a Hackney room and thought of Thomas Hart. Come home, he’d written, you wretched child, and I am wretched, she thought, and I think I’d

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

Since it’s Halloween, and the wall between the worlds of the living and the dead has got a hole in it, this night is as good as any to confess: I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them.