Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I did not try the dining-room but went, knocking and looking in, to the drawing-room at the back. It was empty and orderly, with folded newspapers, a sewing-basket and a darning mushroom on a side-table—things that a masculine household must have. From here a door was open into the kitchen, which I had not seen before. With its wall-cupboards with frosted glass sliding doors, its stoneware sink, round-topped Electrolux fridge and green enamelled gas-range, it resembled a colour plate from my dead grandmother’s just post-war copy of Mrs Beeton; the plugs, which were of black Bakelite and only two-pinned, perfected the image. At a small table under the window Charles and Lewis evidently ate their meals. The pans and plates of a modest lunch stood untouched in the sink. I felt a strong desire to loiter and look, but also, in case I was observed, to appear not to. And I began to worry about Charles. If Lewis was not around the old fellow might have collapsed undiscovered. I had not noticed whether there were bells in the rooms. I might be alone in the house with a cat and a dead man. It was an idea I did not find wholly unattractive. I strolled back through the hall, glancing at the pictures; hesitating at the foot of the stairs I peered at a little sketch of a dragoman, just a few swift lines that denoted turban, smile, sword and curled-up shoes. As I turned I saw a figure move beside me. My heart leapt and continued to pound when I realised it was only myself swivelling towards the dim old mirror I had looked in before. The gloom made it more mysterious and nervousness quickened my reaction. I did not wait to look at myself, but started to climb the stairs. I never wore metal-tipped or noisy shoes, preferring to sneak around unheard. Still, the treads of the stairs themselves so moaned and cracked as I went up that there was no chance of being furtive and I climbed boldly, two at a time, to the first floor. In the silence as I stood at the top I heard another dull noise, faint but heavy, and the indistinct sound of a voice talking. It seemed to come from the room at the back of the house, the one above the drawing-room, which would very likely, I thought, be Charles’s own bedroom. I didn’t want to interrupt what might have been a private rite, but I acted on a more reasonable belief that something must be seriously amiss. When I pushed open the door and went in it was at first impossible to say which was really the case. ‘Charles,’ I said clearly.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Hundreds of people were now entitled to pursue new sentences, and most were in states where they had no clear right to counsel. In states like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, there were hundreds of people whose cases were affected by the recent decisions, but no lawyers were available to assist these condemned juvenile lifers. We ended up taking on almost one hundred new cases following the court’s ban on life imprisonment without parole for kids convicted of non-homicide offenses. We then took on another hundred new cases after the decision banning mandatory life without parole for juveniles. In addition to the dozens of cases already on our juvenile docket, we were quickly overwhelmed. The total ban on life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicides should have been the easiest decision to implement, but enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling was proving much more difficult than I had hoped. I was spending more and more time in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia, which together had close to 90 percent of the non-homicide cases. The trial courts were often less sophisticated in thinking about the differences between children and adults than we had hoped, and we would often have to relitigate the basic unfairness of treating kids like adults that the Supreme Court had already recognized. Some judges seemed to want to get as close to life expectancy or natural death as possible before they would create release opportunities for child offenders. Antonio Nuñez’s judge in Orange County, California, replaced his sentence of life imprisonment without parole with a sentence of 175 years. I had to go back to an appellate court in California and argue to get that sentence replaced with a reasonable sentence. We met resistance in Joe Sullivan’s and Ian Manuel’s cases as well. Ultimately, we were able to get sentences that meant they could both be released after serving a few more years. In some cases, clients had already been in prison for decades and had very few, if any, support systems to help them re-enter society. We decided to create a re-entry program to assist these clients. EJI’s program was specifically developed for people who have spent many years in prison after being incarcerated when they were children. We were committed to providing services, housing, job training, life skills, counseling, and anything else people coming out of prison needed to succeed. We told the judges and parole boards we were committed to providing the assistance our clients required. In particular, the Louisiana clients serving life without parole for non-homicides faced many challenges. We undertook representation of all sixty of those eligible for relief in Louisiana.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I didn't think he had. I was completely distracted that day; and I couldn't sleep at all that night. Whenever I hear the phrase 'a sleepless night' it is that one that comes back to me, which lasted for ever, though it was a short summer night, with Maurice across the room, who was in far greater danger than me, sleeping peacefully. I went through every possibility and in the end I decided I would have to give Willem up. But I decided that I had to try one desperate measure, and ask him to renounce the Fascists before it was too late. I thought maybe I could save his life. I spent many hours running through the words I would say and bringing all the arguments of love to bear. My wildest plan was to persuade him to become an informer, I thought I could introduce him to my father, with his contacts in the underground, although I knew that would be to risk the lives of hundreds of other people. I felt the most dreadful weight on my heart, that I had to make such decisions and know such things when I was so young. I suppose the truth was I had to grow up over night, and I rightly doubted whether I was able to. "The next evening I cycled out to the Hermitage, but he didn't come. I waited at our usual place till it was almost dark—I remember there were noises of other people moving about, I was afraid I would be found." Paul spread his fingers as if to conjure up the woodland maze in front of us, with all its blind options. "I was acting with a strong, if very romantic, sense of honour. My mind then, as I've said, was full of chivalrous imaginings, though now they carried a darker burden.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It seemed Matt was toying with the idea of a phone-sex line. He already had a couple of ansaphones on a separate number with tapes in them of American porn-stars giving true confessions. Occasionally throughout the evening as we sat watching football there would be the clatter of the tape starting, and a real American voice, turned right down low and sounding oddly fake to me, would drawl away, half-obliterated by the chanting in the stands and the raving of the commentators—"Hi, you've reached Chad Masters, I guess you've seen me around . . . Yep, it's one of the biggest . . . oh, boy . . . could you take all of that motherfucker? . . . like I had to every day when I was a kid . . ." It left me shivering and anxious, the night around me, it seemed, threaded like tracer fire by lines of anonymous lust. I squashed up uncomfortably with Matt in his chair and drank bottle after bottle of beer. Later Matt got out a video; I supposed he was trying to arouse me or distract me. His business was pleasure and people paying for it: he couldn't fathom those darker states of mind that were immune to titillation, or that took it somehow amiss. I groaned and thought I might weep if I had to watch people fucking. "Let's just go to bed. Can I stay the night?" "Sure. I think you'll be really interested in this though." "I'm not one of your punters, darling." I was yawning and stumbling round. Matt pressed the cassette into the machine. "It's got someone you know in it. Someone who once made a big impression on you." "I refuse to think," I said, my mind none the less thumbing through the torn catalogue of men I'd known or merely seen and felt for. "Anyway, I don't have friends in that world." An unsteady card appeared on the screen, and a soundtrack of rock music came through fitfully. "This is just an amateur thing, made locally, no production values or proper editing—a lot of people like them better, when it's boys they might know in real life, they're getting very popular." I'd read about something similar at home, where men on a housing estate would gather to watch a video of one of them fucking one of the others' daughters: I felt I was seeing my own fantasies held up to the distorting hetero mirror—how they liked the men beery and unshaven and the girls busty and young. I covered my face with my hands; then, when Matt had wandered to the kitchen, I reached for the remote control and fast-forwarded for ages. Matt woke me with a shake and I sat up and frowned at a couple of men going at it dementedly, with the noiseless hysteria of an early motion picture. He took the remote, and abruptly slowed the film—I groaned at the artless dawdling of ordinary time, the wanton deferral.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I’d put a suit on, smarter perhaps than I needed to be, but I enjoyed its protective conformity. I so rarely dressed up, and not having to wear a suit for work I seldom took any of mine off their hangers. My father had had me kitted out with morning suits and evening dress as I grew up and I had always relished the handsomeness of dark, formal clothes, wing-collars, waistcoats over braces: I looked quite the star of my sister’s wedding when the pictures appeared in Tatler. But I rarely wore this stuff. I had always been a bit of a peacock—or rather, whatever animal has brightly coloured legs, a flamingo perhaps. I was a bit late so I took a cab—which also solved the problem of finding Wicks’s. My father was a member of the Garrick and my grandfather a member of the Athenæum, but otherwise I was unsure about London Clubs. I could easily confuse the Reform and the Travellers’, and might well have wandered into three or four of them this morning before hitting on Wicks’s. Cabbies, through a mixture of practicality and snobbery, always know which of those neo-classical portals is which. ‘I’ve come to see Lord Nantwich,’ I told the porter in his dusty glass cabin. ‘William Beckwith.’ And I was told to make my way upstairs to the smoking-room. As I climbed the imposing stairway, lined with blackened, half-familiar portraits, a mild apprehensiveness mingled with a mood of irresponsibility in my heart. I had no idea what we might talk about. Entering the smoking-room I felt like an intruder in a film who has coshed an orderly and, disguised in his coat, enters a top-secret establishment, in this case a home for people kept artificially alive. Sunk in leather armchairs or taking almost imperceptible steps across the Turkey carpets, men of quite fantastic seniority were sleeping or preparing to sleep. The impression was of grey whiskers and very old-fashioned cuts of suiting, watchchains and heavy handmade shoes that would certainly see their wearers out. Some of those who were sitting down showed an inch or two of white calf between turn-up and suspenders. Fortunately, perhaps in recognition of the dangers involved, almost no one was actually smoking; nonetheless the room had a sour, masculine smell, qualified by the sweetness of the polish with which fire-irons, tables and trophies were brought to a blinding sheen. Lord Nantwich was sitting at the far end of the room, in front of one of the windows which looked down on the Club’s small and colourless garden. In this context, unlike that in which I had last seen him, he appeared almost middle-aged, robust and rosy-cheeked. I approached him self-consciously, although I reached his chair before his gaze, which wandered halfway between the cornice and a book he had open on his knee, distinguished me. ‘Aah …’ he said. ‘Charles?’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, I'll tell you. If you promise not to be upset." He was silent, as though considering his rights. So I went into a long spiel, full of lulling reasonableness, about how I wasn't used to spending so much time with someone else, the years that had passed since I'd had an affair like this, how my sex-life had pretty well petered out before I came to this country; how of course it was all amazing and wonderful, but how I was still naturally a rather solitary person, and also, as he knew, trying to be a writer, and messing round with a few ideas. . . The thing was that just now and again I would need a bit of time to myself. I'd like to go back by myself tonight, and could he go out to the hostel? As a lie, this one had the merit of being almost entirely true, but Cherif didn't see the charm of it. His head jerked back as if from a blast of heat, his jaw rounded biliously. The whole clumsy plan depended on the fact that he had never seen Luc and his friends, and on the last bus out leaving surely any moment . . . I was prepared for a sulk but hoped to avoid a row. I pressed on him with a sort of blind volition, at the same time struggling to appear honest, weary, calmly elevated, the saint sighing for his cave and his lion. After a fashion it worked. I sucked the sting out of it, made the little passionate avowals that came automatically to me now, adding in a bit of reproachful cant about maturity and trust, and by the time it was over he had to sprint to the Grote Markt. I was amazed at myself—I had been watching my own performance as if I were Luc, say, craning over the back of the booth. I went for a pee and then waited, as if soliciting, just inside the door. The Durex machine was beside me, I bought a packet of three for something to do; then I washed my hands with anxious thoroughness and checked myself in the mirror under the illusionless strip-light. I was terrified. Someone murmured something to me—I stared blankly at him in the mirror and he shrugged and went away. There I was again, but now entirely by myself in that further observable world; I leaned forwards as I might have to study a portrait that was brilliantly but ambiguously painted. What was it that made the subject tick? It was hard to tell. I stooped closer, in a kind of vertigo of detachment. I saw that the lenses of my glasses were covered in dust—smoke particles, stuff out of the air, tiny flakings of skin and scalp.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I didn't want to get more involved with Matt; I bridled, as I often did these days with beautiful men ("Don't bother about me")—and I was a clumsy, nervous swimmer. But the thought of a distraction from Luc, an hour or two saved from a night that would otherwise be rushed and lost in drink, made a sudden appeal. And perhaps I did quite like the idea of being stripped out with Matt and the ten minutes afterwards in the showers, chatting like straight boys and sharing his shampoo. I said I'd come, and took directions to the place without being able to concentrate on what I was being told. Matt gave me a wink, I slammed his door; and it was only as I watched him fight his throttle and catapult through the empty street on some imaginary challenge that I doubted if I had any trunks with me. Then Marcel appeared, slightly anxious, but with a new comic silly-old-me look to him that was far from welcome. I made every effort, through the hour that followed, to be helpful to the boy: I was becoming a friend of the family, which entailed certain obscure but real duties; and I had started to see how Marcel himself played a part in Luc's world and must be courted for access and information. I was quite alarmed at the thought of what he could tell me, the dreams he could unwittingly nurture or destroy. I'd lost the courage I had in questioning Luc, and paced the lesson carefully, making sure of each hesitant step, taking nothing for granted. The time was horribly elastic. While we toiled through basic irregular verbs, while I sat and waited for answers and gazed past him to the trees and church tower outside, the minutes and seconds seemed actually to slow. I had the sense that movement would be laborious or impossible, and that my voice would emerge in an ogreish growl, fractured into its separate vibrations. But when he lost me, when my mind ran over the whole story of Luc so far, when I thought jealously of Matt with Cherif, time looked dramatically condensed, it was all happening, fierce, bright and purposeful, like the top line in some great canon, whilst in the depths the basses pondered on the subject in inexorable slow-motion. Suddenly, at last, St Narcissus was announcing the hour, its elderly clatter unleashing the rumpus at the school as lessons broke up and masters, half-relieved themselves, shouted their last instructions over the rising din. Marcel unthinkingly shut his notebook, in which he had been writing out the verb "to forget", and beamed cheekily. He was still conditioned by the rules and stimuli of the school he had escaped; and seeing this I went to the window and questioned him amiably, as he packed up his satchel, about his time there and his friends. "Do you still have some pals at school? you know, friends."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Also, how the demand for purple ribbon dried up abruptly after that. So I had some idea what might be going on. School was full of gossip and rumour, of course, and I learned about all sorts of things there that were never mentioned at home—often, it must be admitted, because they were completely untrue. My recollection is that you never knew if you could trust somebody." I looked at him steadily, with a renewed sense of how much he wanted to trust me; but he avoided my eye, his gaze wandered nervily in the gloomy oblong of the window. "One day at breakfast my father told me we were having some other children to stay. A boy of about my age, about fifteen, which I wasn't altogether pleased about, and a rather younger girl. I was told I had to look after them, as they had left their families and would be very lonely and unsure of things. The boy would be coming to school with me and I remember being very anxious about having to introduce a stranger to my own rather exclusive little group. I clung to the thin excuse that he was apparently a cousin, though one so infinitely distant that I had never heard of him before. But I needn't have worried: he turned out to be very bright indeed and had read more books and seen more American films than anyone I'd met. He was actually a great asset and if anything enhanced my standing with my friends, by association, as it were. He had to share my bedroom, and he talked all night—all about books: I know it sounds unlikely." "Oh, not to me," I said quietly; and he smiled. "The girl, I can tell you, was a very different matter. She seemed utterly lost, a little dark-haired thing, sunk in herself; at night we used to hear her crying in her room and my mother going in to comfort her. I'm afraid I probably neglected her, I left her to do tasks in the kitchen, where she seemed happiest. She gave the impression of living in another world. Of course she was terribly homesick, and she had the curious habit of not answering to her name, until the second or third time you called her, which was unsettling to my new-found self-importance." "What was she called?" "She was called after St Augustine's mother: Monica. But as you will have guessed that was not her real name. I'm amazed now to think how long it took me to realise that we were sheltering two Jewish children, and how confidently the boy disguised the fact. Actually he was full of confidence; in some odd way he was able to block out what was going on by concentrating intensely on his school work and living so much in books.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And perhaps I did quite like the idea of being stripped out with Matt and the ten minutes afterwards in the showers, chatting like straight boys and sharing his shampoo. I said I'd come, and took directions to the place without being able to concentrate on what I was being told. Matt gave me a wink, I slammed his door; and it was only as I watched him fight his throttle and catapult through the empty street on some imaginary challenge that I doubted if I had any trunks with me. Then Marcel appeared, slightly anxious, but with a new comic silly-old-me look to him that was far from welcome. I made every effort, through the hour that followed, to be helpful to the boy: I was becoming a friend of the family, which entailed certain obscure but real duties; and I had started to see how Marcel himself played a part in Luc's world and must be courted for access and information. I was quite alarmed at the thought of what he could tell me, the dreams he could unwittingly nurture or destroy. I'd lost the courage I had in questioning Luc, and paced the lesson carefully, making sure of each hesitant step, taking nothing for granted. The time was horribly elastic. While we toiled through basic irregular verbs, while I sat and waited for answers and gazed past him to the trees and church tower outside, the minutes and seconds seemed actually to slow. I had the sense that movement would be laborious or impossible, and that my voice would emerge in an ogreish growl, fractured into its separate vibrations. But when he lost me, when my mind ran over the whole story of Luc so far, when I thought jealously of Matt with Cherif, time looked dramatically condensed, it was all happening, fierce, bright and purposeful, like the top line in some great canon, whilst in the depths the basses pondered on the subject in inexorable slow-motion. Suddenly, at last, St Narcissus was announcing the hour, its elderly clatter unleashing the rumpus at the school as lessons broke up and masters, half-relieved themselves, shouted their last instructions over the rising din. Marcel unthinkingly shut his notebook, in which he had been writing out the verb "to forget", and beamed cheekily. He was still conditioned by the rules and stimuli of the school he had escaped; and seeing this I went to the window and questioned him amiably, as he packed up his satchel, about his time there and his friends. "Do you still have some pals at school? you know, friends." "I have one or two."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Yes, take it," she said—I was only borrowing it, but I could tell it helped her to let it go, it confirmed how she was rising to the challenge. She seemed almost enthusiastic when she saw the clumsy simulacrum of her son that had assembled itself in her own house. In the breast-pocket was a carnet of tram-tickets, half of them already punched with the dates and times of errands across town—remote evidence of. . . something; a pair of rosy ticket-stubs from the Memling Cinema that spoke of a shared two hours of darkness with . . . someone; and a folded strip of paper with St Alban Street 73 written on it, which was my address. I had no idea how he knew it, or why it was there; it seemed vaguely incriminating, so I tore it up, and then struggled with the question of where to put the scraps, when I was in his clothes and in his mother's car. Chapter 21 I waited for Paul in the portraits room. The women and children there were strangers to me still, waiting themselves, it seemed, pink-cheeked from the outside world, in the vestibule of the dark laboratory. I had hardly been to see them since that first half-conscious visit, stumbling from the early shock of Luc. They were the beginning of the tour, spirits of the happy region the painter had left behind. They looked out, from their background of indecipherable old tapestry, like figures from a sunlit ante-bellum, suspecting nothing. The children especially, girl-cousins and long-legged boys, were stirring and faunal, for all their blue-ribboned hats and courtly knee-breeches. Orst captured their restlessness, the brevity of the repose he had exacted from them, penned in a deep corner of the sofa, or in a fur-edged coat and hat as if just returned from a winter walk alive with new knowledge, hands behind back pressing the door to, the attention barely held. He discovered the girl in his mother, also, though the swept-back hair was grey, the skin silvery-soft above the high white collar. Her eyes were cast down Memling-like on an open book, her cheek flushed as if by a first compliment. Paul came in with his briefcase and trilby. We were going up to Brussels together, where we would see on Orst sculpture that was due to be auctioned, and I would go on to a chat with Martin Altidore that filled me with apprehension laced with furtive eagerness. Paul handed me the catalogue with the place marked, and I looked at the photo of the naked plaster torso, disingenuously called "Printemps", and the high-class patter beneath, "une de ses très rares uvres plastiques".

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We raced on for maybe a quarter of an hour, switching rather madly from lane to lane, Paul hunched forward as if the road demanded all his attention. I thought, if he's waited fifty years, what's fifteen minutes? But Brussels was already beginning to rise around us and inflict its own further squeeze of anxiety. Paul said, "Do you know where I mean by the Hermitage?" "Yes, I do," I said, with a relieved smile that he turned for a second to see, and thought perhaps was satirical. "Oh, I daresay it's very routine to you. I believe it's very busy, what's the word, very cruisy these days." "It's not part of my routine. I've been there once and got completely lost and freezing cold and had . . ."—well, I mustn't mistake brutality for honesty. "I had a hopeless time. I've sometimes thought of going back in the daylight, just to look at the trees, but I've never quite got round to it." "It is a lovely park. There's only a fragment of the Hermitage itself left, very badly restored"—his confidence quickened with that professional phrase—"but fine avenues and a canal, and the remains of a round garden with a basin that is fed by a natural spring, and alcoves of yew—it's like a three-dimensional Fragonard." "Yes, I think I saw all of that on my, probably rather drunken, peregrinations." "I just heard someone mention it at school," said Paul, with a swift compression of time that it took me a moment to catch up with. "I pretended to take no notice, but like a lot of the boys I was fairly preoccupied with all that. This boy said that someone in the town, a shopkeeper who was very obliging to the Germans, was always going there in the evening. He went on with quite a detailed account, until he started to get funny looks—You know, it seemed he knew too much." He gave me a quick smile that was all at odds with the expression of his eyes. "Anyway, the idea took hold with me. I became somewhat obsessed with the Hermitage, though I knew I would never dare ask about it directly; I used to provoke other people into mentioning it, and then make a great thing about how I'd never want to go there. Which, of course, is what I finally did, one Saturday evening in early May of 1944; and not before establishing elaborate alibis to Maurice and Lilli and stuffing my head with excuses in case I should meet anyone I knew. As I told you before, we all found we were quite brave in the war, but I had only been brave up to then in obvious common causes—never for myself. I was almost running up to complete strangers to explain what I was pretending to be doing."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I don't know," I said. It was priggish, wasn't it, and sneaky? But then Arnold didn't know about me, about us. Nobody did. "I want you to find him," she said in her cracked, imperious way. "Well, of course I'd love to, but I've just been searching . . ." "I think I know where he's gone. There's no point in my following him, alas—it wouldn't help. It's not easy for a mother to look after a seventeen-year-old boy alone. He misses his father, it's quite natural." "You think he's gone to his father, gone to Brussels?" I was alarmed that he might blurt out about last night. She chewed her cheek. "Can you drive?" "Yes . . ." "Then take my car; I'm sure you should go straight after him. He trusts you and likes you and you're . . . disinterested — you could get him back before he does anything stupid." I saw myself boarding a ship in disguise and infiltrating a tense strip-poker game deep below decks. It was going to be a test of initiative, like one of our mad field-days at school. It still seemed to me somehow beside the point, but I began to catch the mother's agitation, her dread not only of where he was going but of having driven him out. "I don't want him falling into rough hands," she said, glancing narrowly at Cherif as if he were himself a manifestation, a messenger, of the underworld (long ignored, long suspected and feared) that was waiting to receive her son. "I'll do whatever you like," I said. "But first I really must change, I'm soaked to the skin." It was clear she hadn't noticed this till now. She tugged open drawers, and chopped through the clustered hangers on the cupboard rail. I wasn't sure if she was looking for old things that didn't matter or for something good enough and suitable. She didn't know the leather me, only the sports-coat and tie me. She laid out a couple of shirts. "A vest?" I nodded. "Underpants? Well, you can help yourself—thank you, I will. "But can you get into his trousers?" I said I'd try them and see. "The two of you are the same height, but you of course are much fatter." She lifted out some dreary flannels which none the less had a beauty when you imagined them ironised by Luc's long legs. I couldn't really start changing till she'd left; I squatted to untie a shoe, and she watched me interestedly, as if to say it was years since she'd seen a man undress even so much as that. "I'll give you the keys to the car," she said, "and to the Pavillon de l'Aurore."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When we came to a wide bridge he jumped on to the wall, and walked hastily along its coping, arms stretched for balance. I'd seen younger kids doing it before, here and there, and wondered if I would jump into the icy water to save them if they slipped. The wall was broad enough, but I heard the scrape of his jeans as he set one foot directly in front of the other. How strong and beautiful his white legs were in the glare of an old rococo lamp with wrought-iron shells and other reminders of the not-so-distant sea. I didn't know, but I thought he'd probably never "taken someone home", the walk wasn't crowded for him with curious precedents, it wasn't the mock pick-up it was for me. I leant at the bridge's apex; there was a hint of mist on the still canal. Then he came trotting back and steadied himself for an instant with a hand on the top of my head. I was mentally searching my room, noticing things as a newcomer might. It was bleak and barely furnished—a loft, a fashionable space, Luc might think, and feel at home there, unaware of his own clothes lying newly laundered in the cupboards. I felt secure about that, I kept all the Luciana tidied away from Cherif—in fact the past two weeks had turned me into a humourless char, putting everything straight at once where Cherif had made himself at home. I wondered if the room was going to smell. When we approached the house Luc fell back, as though having second thoughts, or thrown into a reverie by the sight of the white façade. I opened the wicket and looked round and after a moment he jogged up to me with a smile that seemed to deny his hesitation. "What a quite obscure place, Edward," he exclaimed. There was something camp, mischievous, about him that I hadn't heard before; I hurried through into the yard with my face fixed and tormented. Of course he'd been drinking. It occurred to me he might be deliberately teasing me and tempting me into some bungled assault—I wasn't sure I could carry on being pally like this any longer, without at last defying the force around him, like some enchantment in The Magic Flute, that froze my intentions in mid-air and padlocked my tongue. "Is that where you live?" he said, looking up at the square of the Spanish girls' window. I caught a strand of music and laughter.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I had come out in search of breakfast, but any appetite I had was obliterated by worry. We moved off towards an old cafe on the far side of the square, a place I thought might be too smart and hushed, but I lacked the will to suggest an alternative. "Have you heard from Luc?" I said lightly. "Not for a week," he said, almost as though he didn't know anything had happened. "Ah. I thought you might have done." "No, I haven't seen or heard from him since that night we all met in . . . the bar. I think you're the last person to have actually seen him." I knew I was in very deep. I wondered at moments if I had murdered Luc and then wiped all memory of it—he was crouched rigid in one of my big cupboards, and the Spanish girls were picking up the smell. "Your friend Sibylle has spoken to him since, of course." Patrick shot me a glance that was oddly mournful. "Well, she may have done," he said, pushing open the door and giving me a shiver as we stepped into the warm. I sat down wondering why I went through life not knowing anything, never any the wiser; I seemed to be my pupils' pupil. "You mean she was lying?" Patrick flung himself down opposite, his chair at an angle—his arm sweeping the table. "No, I wouldn't say that." He seemed to me reserved and proud and a little solemn with those early emotional upheavals adults are accused of not understanding. "She makes up shit," he said, like the bully he once was, and with the same hidden doubt. I thought of her snooty theories about my friends—but wasn't a certain premature decidedness allowed among the young? It was how they charmed and achieved—I was suddenly on her side. "Why would she make up that? I mean she borrowed your car, I think I'm right in saying, and drove all over the place on the strength of that phone-call—he told her to meet him at . . . wherever it was." "No, you're probably right . . ." The waitress came and he left me to order; I was aware of him watching me. "I don't know what you know about Luc," he said afterwards. "Urn . . ." "Sibylle is madly in love with him," he shied away. "That is why she can become very rude—she always looks so cool, and so bloody beautiful, you don't realise she is very worried underneath and says things she doesn't mean. She's trying to keep hold of him and keep him away from everyone else." He looked at me with the large brown eyes of an extrovert boy who is learning about the heart; I thought he would always be unafraid of its demons and would get what he wanted. "She thinks of you as a great threat."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Next day I was desolate, and even coaxed out a few tears in my room, which I found impressive and almost cheering. I knew I had to ring Dawn, and got up suspiciously early to do so, hanging about in the hall with a book, until I thought the coast was clear, and then swiftly dissimulating my intention when my mother or Charlie came heedlessly through. I was more and more nervous the more I deferred. I didn't know their routines or anything about them; the phonebook gave me their address and I worked up an image of 12 Sands Road—by the sound of it pleasant enough—as a household severely unwelcoming to phone-calls of any kind, much less those from boys who wanted to fuck their son. I imagined Dawn denying all knowledge of me, hanging up on me, or just giving me some casual putdown. I had actually started dialling when my mother looked out from the kitchen and said, "Can't it keep till cheap time, love?" And I accepted her objection with only a show of reluctance. From 5 o'clock on I was locked in a parched rehearsal of my opening remarks, which involved an optional parent-charming paragraph (always say who you are and apologise for troubling them) that snagged on the question of how I should refer to him. Then I had to say "Hi! Dawn? It's Edward . . . Yeah, g r e a t . . . " and hope to catch the warmth in his reply and if at all possible lead him on to propose a meeting himself. By six these simple phrases had become a kind of hysterical gibberish in my mind, as though they'd been passed round the room in a game of Chinese whispers. I went to the phone, but thank god someone rang up for my father just at that moment, and I put it off till 6.30.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The faint terror of being back in school, but now as a forgetful grown-up among teenagers primed like guns, overcame me, and I slipped back downstairs, leaving the ponds for another day. Paul Echevin was coming up, but something made me shrink and look down as we passed, as though I might go unseen in the oaky half-darkness; a second later I hated having flunked the meeting I had already pictured to myself with pleasure, even excitement. "Edward!" He had turned with a hand on the banister. "Oh, hello . . . " I wasn't sure what to call him. "You didn't tell me you were coming in." "I didn't know," I said, with sudden force on the final word which surprised both of us and made him pause a moment. "I didn't know," I repeated more sensibly. "Tell me if you're coming again—don't pay." "That's very kind of you." He started up the stairs again. "Are you running off now? Have you seen it all?" "I have to. It's Marcel's lesson in half an hour." I smiled and shrugged to suggest that that was life, but that it wasn't a burden. "Ah yes. Well, come and see us again, won't you? Perhaps you'll join us for supper tomorrow. We'll have a couple of people in, but nothing formal. I'm a bit worried about you," he said, nodding, whimsical but clairvoyant. "I think we need to feed you up." I'd just turned into my street when there was an annoying pip—pip—pip on a horn, and a kind of jeep, metallic blue, with yards of chrome trim, triple exhausts and gigantic tyres, pulled up just past me. It reminded me of the uncomplaining toys which tumble over and right themselves all day long in trays outside Oxford Street gift shops. I looked in and Matt was leaning across, trying to open the passenger door. Our relations had been cool and abstracted on the night of the Hermitage, so I knew he must be stopping to show off his ridiculous vehicle. "Hey, Ed!" he said. "Jump in, let's go for a ride." "I can't," I said, "I've got a lesson." The mistaken diminutive rattled me. My mother had insisted on the full Edward all my life, and so had I—though my uncle Wilfred was allowed the deviation of Ned. Yet there was a pleasure to be had from answering to it—a hasty, holiday intimacy. Ed was someone it might be a relief to be for a day, under a sunny sky. I felt a frisson of recall, just half a second of access to a keen, lost mood—a childhood summer at Kin chin Cove, my brother nagging me to put down my book and play rounders, a beach bully shouting, "What's his name? All right, Ed, you're over there, Ed . . ." "Is he the cute one? We could take him for a ride too."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I would borrow Matt's jeep for a day, pick up Luc quite early, showered, talced, full of curiosity and a sense of privilege, and drive out to some historic town for lunch, a walk, both of us admitting boredom in the brown old museum, conversation freed of the inhibitions of the Altidores' dining-room and their starchy ancestors. To be out in the storm-crossed countryside together, both rising to the occasion with new charm and candour! And then—best leave it there. I sprang up the steps and pressed the bell with a zing that felt slightly manic. His mother opened the door, clasping a knitted orange shawl round her throat and almost over her mouth. "Quick, quick," she said. "We've all got colds." "What, all two of you?" "I got it from going out in the rain, and now he seems to have got it from me." You stupid old nit, I thought, just don't go out in the rain. I thought of him almost like Dawn in his latter days, he must be kept from the least infection. "I'm so sorry." "You may prefer to cancel your lesson." "No, no," I said with a hasty cough, a covert self-inspection as to whether I didn't myself have a slight sniffle. She shooed me into the dining-room, still with the shawl swept across her face. She was very pathetic in it, like an elderly actress playing a veiled houri. Then she flitted off, leaving me with my darling's forebears. There were those I saw each time, who hung facing me and behind Luc, and whose features I tried absently to map on to his in a kind of genetic photofit; and the others, behind where I sat, whom I looked at for a moment now. There was the interesting Guillaume, with a thin grey book in his hands, but a dull picture. Why didn't he get our mutual friend Orst to paint him rather than this conventional journeyman, whose muddy signature was already obscured by candle-smoke? And balancing him, his wife Anona, the Princess Cirieno, no less, a fine-featured woman with sexy eyes but equally subdued to the sobriety of her new family. And after them, nobody; it was as though they had hidden their faces. "Are you going to be painted?" I asked as I heard Luc come in. "Not like that," he said. "And not like this." I turned and saw what he meant. "Oh," I mildly protested.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Altidore could hardly object," said Paul, "after everything he's done. You know, the poor mother must be sick of being run away from. But I think you're quite right. You're being truthful to yourself, and that needn't call for exhaustive or unnecessary truthfulness to others." There was a long pause in which I ran mis-trustfully over this welcome advice. "I've never told anyone about my first affair, because it would have caused distress and served no purpose—it would have been . . . gratuitously honest." His discomfort was palpable, his determination dried his mouth and gave an odd new depth to his voice. I was being callous: he had planned to be listened to; but even so I wanted to let him off the hook, spare him these abrupt breaths and incessant mirror-checkings. Perhaps he could tell me about it on a later day, when we weren't so busy, weren't riding steadily above the speed-limit. "I do think that, don't you? One mustn't mistake brutality for honesty, as so many young people do nowadays, or impertinence for wit, incidentally! Oh, in my case it was a summer's passion, when I was seventeen too, as it happens—with an older man." So there he went with the oddly similar—and brought out lightly after nearly half a century, in a tone not practised but certainly rehearsed, it caught my sympathy. I could see what it had cost him, though not yet why. If I still failed to encourage him it was because I didn't want to seem crudely eager for the details—I didn't quite know in what terms to express an interest. I assumed an indefinably sham expression of sober receptiveness. "Tell me about it if you're sure you want to," I said. He nodded irritably, but then waited, as though struck unexpectedly by the margin of doubt my words allowed for. Or perhaps the rehearsed words had died on him, or turned into nonsense with time. My head was a little on one side, I was focusing on his predicament, which seemed to grow and become more inexpressible as a full minute passed, and then another. The tension became rather sickly and embarrassing then, and I couldn't look at him. I found myself shifting and gazing out of the side-window while my own briefly arrested spools of anxiety and regret started up again. I made some trivial remark, but he didn't reply, only held up his hand in that gesture of his that called for patience and consideration. We raced on for maybe a quarter of an hour, switching rather madly from lane to lane, Paul hunched forward as if the road demanded all his attention. I thought, if he's waited fifty years, what's fifteen minutes? But Brussels was already beginning to rise around us and inflict its own further squeeze of anxiety. Paul said, "Do you know where I mean by the Hermitage?"

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Herbert had no money, nothing to offer her if he was executed. But he was a military veteran, so his survivors were entitled to receive an American flag upon his death. He designated his new wife as the person to whom the flag should be presented. In the days leading up to the execution, it seemed that Herbert was more concerned about his flag than his impending execution. He kept asking me to check with the government about how his flag would be delivered and urging me to get a commitment in writing. His new wife’s family had agreed to spend the last few hours with Herbert before the execution. The prison allowed family members to stay until about 10:00 P.M. , when they would begin to prepare the condemned for execution. I was still in my office waiting to receive word from the Supreme Court. When the clock passed 5:00 P.M . without any news, I allowed myself to become cautiously hopeful. If the Court wasn’t troubled by anything we’d presented, I expected an earlier ruling on our motion for a stay. So the later it got, the more encouraged I became. At 6:00 P.M . I was pacing in my small office, nervously running through the possibilities of what the Court might be debating so close to the execution hour. Eva and our new investigator, Brenda Lewis, waited with me. Finally, a little before 7:00 P.M ., the phone rang. The clerk of the Court was on the line. “ Mr. Stevenson, I’m calling to let you know that the Court has just entered an order in Case No. 89-5395; the motion for a stay of execution and petition for writ of certiorari have been denied. We’ll fax copies of the order to your office shortly.” And with that, the conversation ended. When I hung up, all I could think was, why would I need a copy of the order? To whom did the clerk think I would show it? In a matter of hours, Herbert would be dead. There would be no more appeals, no more records to keep. I’m not sure why I was struck by these peculiar details. Maybe thinking about the procedural absurdities of the Court’s order was less overwhelming than thinking about its meaning. I had promised Herbert I would be with him during the execution, and it took me a few minutes to realize I needed to move quickly to get to the prison two hours away. I jumped in my car and raced to Atmore.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  He waited for the moment when one more glass would deprive me of my reason. Everything reeled about me in this hall where barbaric trophies of wild ox heads seemed to laugh in my face. The wine jars followed in steady succession; a vinous song would spurt forth here and there, or the insolent, beguiling laugh of a page; the emperor, resting an ever more trembling hand upon the table, immured in a drunkenness possibly half feigned, lost far away upon the roads of Asia, sank heavily into his dreams. . . . Unfortunately these dreams had beauty. They were the same as those which had formerly made me think of giving up everything for the sake of following northern routes beyond the Caucasus toward Asia. This fascination, to which the elderly emperor was yielding as if entranced, had lured Alexander before him. That prince had almost made a reality of these same dreams, and had died because of them at thirty. But the gravest danger in these mighty projects lay still more in their apparent soundness; as always, practical reasons abounded for justification of the absurd and for being carried away by the impossible. The problem of the Orient had preoccupied us for centuries; it seemed natural to rid ourselves of it once and for all. Our exchanges of wares with India and the mysterious Land of Silks depended entirely upon Jewish merchants and Arabian exporters who held the franchise for Parthian roads and ports. Once the vast and loosely joined empire of the Arsacid horsemen had been reduced to nothingness we should touch directly upon those rich extremities of the world; Asia once unified would become but a province more for Rome. The port of Alexandria-in-Egypt was the only one of our outlets toward India which did not depend upon Parthian good will; there, too, we were continually confronted with the troublesome demands and revolts of the Jewish communities. Success on the part of Trajan's expedition would have allowed us to disregard that untrustworthy city. But such array of reasoning had never persuaded me. Sound commercial treaties would have pleased me more, and I could already foresee the possibility of reducing the role of Alexandria by creating a second Greek metropolis near the Red Sea, as I did later on in founding Antinoöpolis. I was beginning to know this complicated world of Asia.