Enlightenment

Last week they brought in the hospital bed, and we put it where the dining table was, where every Sunday we ate tea at five o’clock and your father read from his Bible. Now I can hardly remember the room without it: the present comes in like a tide over the past.

The thought occurred to Thomas that it might have been preferable to lose her to water than to anger: then he might have mourned the girl who’d loved him, and not been subject to withdrawal of that love. Then God forgive me, he thought, and it would have to make do for a prayer.

In fact, all your life you’ve been radiating electromagnetic waves, but since you never radiate the part of the spectrum that can be seen, we can tell nothing about you just by looking.

The absence of her aunt did not exist only in the places where she ought to have been – in the empty bed, the tapestry armchair, the places on the kitchen floor where she’d worn the linoleum thin – it existed down to the last corner of the house. She was gone from the bathroom pipes, she was gone from the doormat, she was gone from the bone-handled

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.

He survived, as he put it to himself, by dividing his nature from his soul; so he left his nature in London on the station platform, and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage. How he could explain to this ardent boy that no, he didn’t want to get coffee, and sit together on the train; that yes, he was aware of the various places

paths should cross at certain times on certain days. That they’d become friends seemed to her both natural and miraculous. From the minute she’d seen him blinking behind the hard dark ranks of Bethesda’s pews, she’d felt he belonged to her: evidently God had ordained the whole business.

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

What should I do now, James? I’ve seen Foulis Street on the London map, I know the look of the houses – I could go there now and look through each letter box, and see if comet-light comes out. But after all this time I have no name and no house number, and what would I be but an old fool limping back to Liverpool Street empty-handed and alone, on s