Enlightenment

‘Yes,’ said Thomas, ‘goodbye.’ Distantly he felt a pain like that of the ache in his hip. It would recede; it would return.

‘My trouble,’ said Thomas, ‘is that I have two suns, and neither outshines the other. In Bethesda I’m the worst of sinners, and in London I’m the strangest of saints, and I am never comfortable anywhere.

They were alone up there, in the box pews that could be fastened with a latch, where once when Thomas was young he’d found a note pushed between the seat and the arm of the pew – Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, the note had read, and troubled him for weeks.

‘We are solving a mystery,’ said James, examining Grace with pleasure, and becoming extraordinarily handsome. ‘Would you like to see?’

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

Stitched among the whorls were so many seed pearls, in such a massed weight, the dress could only have been worn by a strong woman whose love for extravagance and style exceeded the desire for comfort.

He held out his hand. Grace looked at it, and her own hand lifted in response. Then she remembered her anger at the power he exerted over her happiness, and how unconsciously he exerted it; so she put her hands in her pockets, and shrugged, and delighted to see him flinch against this small refusal.

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

If everything that will ever happen has happened, and is happening, at last I understand how it might be possible to fall in love at a glance, and know a stranger like a lover – perhaps already that love and all the events that followed were already unfolding elsewhere, and elsewhen. And I also understand how it might be possible to despise those w