Sublime

I am superterrestrial, he thought, and passed untouched through crowds on Aldleigh High Street with the waters of his body drawn up by the moon with the tides.

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.

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

‘Dorian Gray’.

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

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

That Anne should herself be noticed she felt to be astounding, and she’d received Lorna’s first attention with a confused shyness that looked aloof.