Enlightenment

‘You busy?’ said the boy to Grace. ‘Do you want to do something? What do you want to do?’ She looked astonished. What did she want to do? ‘I don’t know,’ she said. The thought had rarely occurred to her. She knew what she ought to do, and what she ought not to do; the idea that she was allowed to want anything at all was appalling.

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

‘This is Thomas,’ said Grace, without explanation. She stood close by the boy with the ease of long acquaintance, and seemed to Thomas they were in some way ranged against him – that it was possible to make out some connective tissue dissolving between himself and Grace, and re-forming between the other two.

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

He prepared himself a meal: radishes in a saucer with Maldon salt and grassy olive oil; good rye bread, and red wine poured with the pleasure of a man who’s elected to sin.

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.

‘I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t know why I did, only I’d been waiting all my life for something to happen that would change me, and it never did.

Did women really assemble themselves out of the parts they thought most likely to be wanted? Was that love’s requirement? If so, she’d have none of it.

As every child knows, a body must orbit something – so the earth orbits the sun, and the moon orbits the earth. The sun is the earth’s focal point, and the earth is the moon’s focal point. This is quite straightforward – but I have discovered that the more I learn, the more I’m apt to be confused. In fact, there are two focal points inside the orbi