Sublime

Quite a strange man, thought James, watching him go – but what a relief to discover he still contained the capacity to be taken by surprise.

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

it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

This is what people do—solve their own problems in others’ lives.

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