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)

  ‘You see, I didn’t know until today that you even knew him.’ ‘I didn’t even know until yesterday that you did.’ He did not smile, and I suspected some slight friction, or horripilation of jealousy like that of the cattily possessive Lewis. ‘He knows a huge number of people,’ he said more tolerantly. ‘How did you get caught up with him?’ It seemed disloyal to tell the truth so I said simply that I had met him at the Corry. ‘He doesn’t go there very often these days,’ said Bill, as if to imply that in that case I had been exceptionally lucky. ‘No, it was fortunate. The thing is, Bill, I would value your help—what you know about him. I would acknowledge it of course in the book.’ He appeared satisfied by this. ‘I suspect you may be a leading witness.’ ‘You make it sound like a trial or something,’ said Bill. I picked up my beer and looked at him interrogatively. ‘Do you want me to tell you now?’ he asked, clearly uncertain, as I was, about how biographers worked. ‘Not now,’ I smiled. ‘But I’d like it if we could get together soon. You’re not touching your drink.’ ‘I’m sorry, Will. I’d like to in a way, but I think with the mood I’m in tonight it wouldn’t be a good thing. It’s never a good thing, to be honest, when I go back on the booze. Somehow it always lands me in trouble.’ Looking at his ungainly muscularity, I wondered if it nursed and suppressed an instinct for violence. Perhaps his self-denial had been painfully learnt, and was the clue to a double life whose difficult side was all in the past.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Nevertheless, as I learned from talking with both of her parents, she was the soul of discretion. When she was fourteen, she explained to me, “I have two different lives. Everybody is happier this way. They have different expectations. Mom lets me do more of what I want. She has few rules. She understands me more. Dad expects a lot more, especially in schoolwork. He and my stepmother are into table manners and formal dinners. My parents still don’t get along. My dad and stepmother really hate my mom. They would tell her how much they hate her except for me. I keep them apart. You see, my mom is pretty isolated. She would like a relationship with my dad and stepmother but there is nothing there for her. I don’t want her to find out what they really think. So I keep it cool and I always, always watch what I say. And we manage.” This was the first inkling I had that the “don’t fight” rule had limitations. In their behavior, Lisa’s parents had had the most civilized divorce of all the couples in the study. If parents got grades for how they handled divorce and the postdivorce years, these people would have earned an A plus. There was no open fighting during the marriage and there was almost none after it ended. An only child, Lisa continued to see both parents in ways that felt fair and equitable to everyone. Sometimes her father and stepmother babysat her in her mother’s home, which remained her primary residence. Both parents were devoted to their daughter. Money was adequate in both homes and included college support and vacation trips. Although her mother and stepmother experienced the kinds of ongoing tensions I just described, there was never any open conflict. Neither woman expected Lisa to take sides and both went out of their way not to criticize any family member. But there are things that adults cannot hide from children. Continuing tensions between ex-partners and stepparents are conveyed directly to children via countless nonverbal signals. A roll of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders, an edge in the voice are enough to tell any child the truth—these adults are getting along on my behalf but they’re pretending. Lisa grew up aware of their intense enduring anger and her mother’s hurt. Good intentions can always become undermined by the frailties of human nature and its passions. Except for her continued worry about her mother and an occasional mother’s “boyfriend who drives me up the wall,” Lisa enjoyed her adolescence. Unlike children living under strict court-ordered visiting schedules, she had lots of choices about what she could do and when. Her father called her every week to arrange what they would do, according to her preferences—which included not seeing him if other activities were more desirable.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I think you should come on Friday,’ he said. Then: ‘Who knows, I may be dead by Friday. Perhaps better make it tomorrow—I should still be quick then.’ It was a bizarre usage, which it took me a second or two to see; I had a fleeting image of him chasing me round a huge mahogany table. ‘Well, that would be very nice.’ ‘Nice for me, William,’ he insisted. It seemed to be settled in his mind, and he wandered away holding his towel in front of him as though he expected to bump into something. I had to seek him out when I had finished dressing, to enquire which Club it was and what name would find him. At home it was always very hot; the central heating throbbed away as if we feared exposure, and often, though high up and not overlooked, we kept the curtains drawn in the daytime, only a mild bloom of pinkish light penetrating into the rooms from outside. The creation of this climate was barely conscious, as people in crisis habitually transform their surroundings, the miserable sitting cold through the dusk without turning lights on, and the endangered, like Arthur and I, craving rosiness and security. The penumbra helped us to hide from each other. As soon as the new terms were forced upon us by Arthur’s coming back he must have felt as much as I did a sinking of the heart at our incompatibility. Inflicted with this new anxiety, we were afraid to annoy or burden each other. He spent much of the time asleep or sitting in a chair; and he bathed long and often. Very young and worried, he seemed to fear my resentment, and his gestures towards me took on a nervous respect; I would go to the dining-room and read alone, and he would come in with a cup of tea and touch me on the arm. If I had not been so fiercely and sexually in love with him, these days would have been utterly intolerable. And even so there were spells of repugnance, both at him and at my own susceptibility. Sex took on an almost purgative quality, as if after hours of inertia and evasion we could burn off our unspoken fears in vehement, wordless activity. Sex came to justify his presence there, to confirm that we were not just two strangers trapped together by a fateful mistake.

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

  But we did have our suspicions. We had been contacted by a white man who seemed intensely interested in the case. He would call wanting to talk at length about what we were investigating. He would hint at having information that could help us, but he was coy and slow to share anything concrete. He repeatedly told us that he knew that McMillian was innocent and he would help us prove it. Eventually, after several calls and hours of conversation, he claimed to know where the murder weapon, which had never been recovered, might be located. We tried to get as much information out of him as we could. We also checked his background. He told us that he’d had some conflicts with another man in town and that the more he talked the more he blamed this other man for the shooting death of Morrison. When we investigated this theory, we weren’t impressed. The other man didn’t match the eyewitness descriptions of the person seen leaving the cleaners, and he didn’t have our caller’s history of stalking, violence against women, and preoccupation with the Morrison murder. We began to think that our caller could be the person who had murdered Ronda Morrison. We had dozens of phone conversations with him and even met him a couple of times. We were less and less convinced that the man he was accusing of committing the crime was involved. At some point we asked him some direct questions about where he was on the day of the murder, which must have alarmed him because we heard from him less often after that. Before I could tell any of this to the ABI investigators, Taylor said, “We think you may have interviewed our suspect and may have collected a good bit of information from this guy. We were hoping you might allow us to have access to that information and those interviews.” He named our suspect. I told them we would give them access to the information we had collected. None of it was protected by attorney-client privilege; we had never represented this man or obtained anything confidentially. I told Taylor and Cole to give us a few days to organize the information, and then we would turn it over. “We want to get Walter out of prison as soon as possible,” I insisted. “Well, I think the attorney general and the lawyers would like to maintain the status quo for a few more months, until we can make an arrest of the actual killer.” “Right, but you do understand that the status quo is a problem for us? Walter has been on death row for nearly six years for a crime he didn’t commit.”

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

  I sat on the sandy shore and watched the brilliant white pelicans gliding effortlessly over the still waters in search of food. Small fiddler crabs scurried around me, too fearful to get close but curious enough to linger nearby. I thought about Walter making his way back to Holman, shackled in the back of the van again. I wanted him to be hopeful but grounded enough to manage whatever the court decided. I thought about his family and all the people who had come to court. They’d kept the faith through the five years that had passed since Walter was first arrested, and now they had cause to feel energized and encouraged. I thought about Mrs. Williams. She had come up to me after the hearings and had given me a sweet kiss on the cheek. I told her how happy I was she’d come back to court. She looked at me playfully. “Attorney Stevenson, you know I was going to be here, and you know I wasn’t going to let these people keep me out.” Her words had made me smile. Michael got out of the water looking worried. “What did you see?” I joked. “Shark? Eel? Poisonous jellyfish? Stingray? Piranha?” He was out of breath. “They’ve threatened us, lied to us, there are people who have told us that some folks in the county are so unnerved by what we’re doing that they’re going to kill us. What do you think they’re going to do now that they know how much evidence we have to prove Walter’s innocence?” I had given this some thought, too. Our opponents had done everything they could to frame Walter—in order to kill him. They’d lied to us and subverted the judicial process. More than a few people had passed on to us that they’d heard angry people in the community make threats on our lives because they believed we were trying to help a guilty murderer get off death row. “I don’t know,” I told Michael, “but we have to press on, man, we have to press on.” We both sat there in silence, watching the sun fade into darkness. More fiddler crabs emerged from their holes, scurrying crazily and getting closer to where we sat. I turned to Michael in the approaching darkness. “We should go.” Chapter Ten [image file=image_rsrc32V.jpg] MitigationAmerica’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been largely fueled by misguided drug policy and excessive sentencing, but the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment. It’s created unprecedented problems.

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

  By the end of the decade, some justices had become openly critical of the review that death penalty cases received. Chief Justice William Rehnquist urged restrictions on death penalty appeals and the endless efforts of lawyers to stop executions. “ Let’s get on with it,” he famously declared at a bar association event in 1988. Finality, not fairness, had become the new priority in death penalty jurisprudence. — Two weeks after my first conversation with Herbert Richardson, I was frantically trying to get a stay of execution. Even though it was very late in the process, I was hoping that we might win a stay when I saw some of the compelling issues in Herbert’s case. While his guilt wasn’t really in question, there were persuasive reasons why this case should not have been a capital murder case, above and beyond the absence of a specific intent to kill. And even if you disregard that part of it, there was strong evidence that the death penalty should not be imposed because of Herbert’s trauma, military service, and childhood difficulties. None of this compelling mitigating evidence was presented at trial, and it should have been. The death penalty can be imposed fairly only after carefully considering all the reasons why death might not be the appropriate sentence, and that didn’t happen in Herbert’s case. I was increasingly becoming convinced that Herbert was facing execution because he had been an easy target. He was unaided and easily condemned by a system that was inattentive to the precise legal requirements of capital punishment. I was deeply distressed that, had he gotten the right help at the right time, Herbert would not be on death row with an execution date in less than two weeks. I asked several courts to stay Herbert’s execution because of his ineffective lawyer, racial bias during the trial, the inflammatory comments made by the prosecutor, and the lack of mitigation evidence presented. Each court said, “Too late.” We got a hastily scheduled hearing in the trial court in Dothan, where I tried to present evidence that the bomb Herbert had constructed was designed to go off at a certain time. I found an expert to testify that the bomb was a timed device and not intended to kill on contact. I knew that the court would probably conclude that this evidence should have been presented at trial or in prior proceedings, but I hoped that the judge could be persuaded. Herbert was in court with me, and we both immediately recognized the lack of interest on the judge’s face. This heightened Herbert’s anxiety. He began a whispered dialogue with me, imploring me to get the testifying expert to say things about his intent that were really outside the expert’s knowledge. He became contentious and started making comments that were audible to the judge.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  hear. She tries to time her heart, her breath, to his. Ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum. A tribal forest beat. The hairs on his thighs tickle her and she fights an urge to break into hysterical giggles. Her stomach is hot beneath him, an interior soup. She twists her head to the left and sees Eddie’s hand flat against the dirt, his wrist encircled by a thin strand of leather that she remembers Lisa Wallach brought him from Brazil. The leather strand had magical powers, Lisa told him, and he would have very bad luck if he unknotted it himself. Jennie wonders if Eddie Fish will wear that strand of leather until it disintegrates. Eddie speeds up. A vein in his throat pops out and he is looking down, down to the place where their bodies are joined. With a gasp and a grunt, he collapses on top of her. Jennie can feel his heart through her chest. Eddie Fish’s heart! She will remember this moment, she promises herself: the faded blue summer sky, the worm inching along the edge of a pale yellow leaf, the soft smell of dirt. She will color it with a patina of great beauty. She thinks about Eddie’s question—Are you using anything?—and her fingers grow icy. She wonders if i't can happen the first time, if the grassy mess oozing between their legs can grow into something more complicated—a pun ishment, a life sentence. She closes her eyes and prays: Just this once, never again, please not notv, a jumble of wishes. “What?” asks Eddie, looking down at her. “Sorry?” “Your lips were moving.” “Oh, it’s nothing.” “You’re not getting weird on me, Jen, are you?” She doesn’t answer. Getting weird. Eddie’s words echo and bounce through her skull. She twists her neck once again, her cheek resting on the cool earth, and stares at the empty heart carved into the base of the tree. She imagines her own initial

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I pictured the future Rembrandt scholar running errands through the town and leaping to the shop door when its bell tinkled for a new customer—and with something of his present dignity already. "What did you think they were doing?" Paul smiled wistfully. "I mustn't exaggerate my innocence. You probably know about the Rexists, who were the French-speaking fascists in this country, and of course there were various Flemish groups of Nazi sympathisers. I think I just absorbed my parents' contempt for them, as a child does—though the picture wasn't entirely clear: several people on my mother's side of the family welcomed the idea of our becoming part of a vast new Germany. It's too complicated to explain. Anyway, I don't need to explain. Many of the Nazis went straight into the local militia the Germans raised. I remember a boy called Frank, who'd been an assistant at our shop and played with me when I was little, coming in one day in uniform and shouting 'Heil Hitler' when I opened the door." Paul muttered the infamous salute in a half-suppressed belch. "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.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As a young adolescent, Lisa took on the responsibility and role for keeping her two worlds separate. She tried with all her might to conform to the standards of each household and to say as little as possible, but she was an observant child and it was hard for her to keep everything to herself. Nevertheless, as I learned from talking with both of her parents, she was the soul of discretion. When she was fourteen, she explained to me, “I have two different lives. Everybody is happier this way. They have different expectations. Mom lets me do more of what I want. She has few rules. She understands me more. Dad expects a lot more, especially in schoolwork. He and my stepmother are into table manners and formal dinners. My parents still don’t get along. My dad and stepmother really hate my mom. They would tell her how much they hate her except for me. I keep them apart. You see, my mom is pretty isolated. She would like a relationship with my dad and stepmother but there is nothing there for her. I don’t want her to find out what they really think. So I keep it cool and I always, always watch what I say. And we manage.” This was the first inkling I had that the “don’t fight” rule had limitations. In their behavior, Lisa’s parents had had the most civilized divorce of all the couples in the study. If parents got grades for how they handled divorce and the postdivorce years, these people would have earned an A plus. There was no open fighting during the marriage and there was almost none after it ended. An only child, Lisa continued to see both parents in ways that felt fair and equitable to everyone. Sometimes her father and stepmother babysat her in her mother’s home, which remained her primary residence. Both parents were devoted to their daughter. Money was adequate in both homes and included college support and vacation trips. Although her mother and stepmother experienced the kinds of ongoing tensions I just described, there was never any open conflict. Neither woman expected Lisa to take sides and both went out of their way not to criticize any family member. But there are things that adults cannot hide from children. Continuing tensions between ex-partners and stepparents are conveyed directly to children via countless nonverbal signals. A roll of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders, an edge in the voice are enough to tell any child the truth—these adults are getting along on my behalf but they’re pretending. Lisa grew up aware of their intense enduring anger and her mother’s hurt. Good intentions can always become undermined by the frailties of human nature and its passions.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  So many changes will come about, things that I haven’t even begun to think of, can’t think of. Will Taha stay with me, will they want to live here? Niri, I believe, lives with her mother and an old uncle out west somewhere … I thought of the appalling magnanimity I will have to show & realising I wd not be able to control myself if I saw him again so soon I went out, had a further drink or two at Wicks’s & then as evening came on found myself wandering somnambulistically towards Clarkson’s Cottage. It was welcome enough: I needed some narcotic, some soulless distraction. The broken light has been replaced, so it was rather bright in there. There was a sort of businessman at one end in a raincoat & that thin, anxious little chap who’s always there & keeps Cave at the other. He reminds me of a college servant, making sure that the gentlemen are happy—his payment, I suppose, being the dubious pleasure of having a jolly good look. I took up my position in the middle & fiddled about for a bit as my brief mood of anticipation dwindled & then there was a familiar clippety-clop & Chancey Brough came in & force majeure took the stall on my right. He had the most tremendous & businesslike pee—he must have been saving it up for hours so as to seem (vain hope!) an authentic convenience-patron—& then weighed his immense tackle in the palm of his hand for a while. We obviously cdn’t remain where we were, but I knew his sticking-power & so I buttoned up & slipped off, tipping my hat with a polite ‘Good evening’ & best wishes to his wife. I went along Old Compton Street, wishing Sandy were still there, & rather wanting a pal to get drunk with. The Leicester Square lavs seemed a possibility, so I popped in, but there were all the usual faces turning expectantly, Major Sprague & that butler from Kensington Palace & a few anxious youngsters on the make. Andrews tells me you can have a wonderful whirl at Victoria these days with all the tommies & tars; he picked up a couple of the latter there some time last week & had the night of his life, if he is to be believed. I wandered down towards Trafalgar Square, thinking I might get a bus, but the sunset came on & I was suddenly flooded with misery again & just gave it all up & went back to the Club for a chop & a glass of beer & was wretchedly rude to anybody who approached me. ———

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Philippa had a picturesque and romantic attitude to her children (there was also a little girl, Polly, aged three), and Gavin allowed her a free hand, concentrating his affection for them in sudden bursts of generosity, unannounced treats and impulsive outings which disrupted the life of the picture-book nursery at Ladbroke Grove, and were rightly popular. ‘I left a note,’ Rupert explained, standing up and beginning to walk around the room. ‘I told Mummy not to worry. I’m sure she’ll see that it’s all for the best.’ ‘I don’t know, old chap,’ I demurred. ‘I mean, Mummy’s jolly sensible, but it is quite late, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she were getting a bit worried about you. Did you tell her where you were going?’ ‘No, of course not. It was a secret. I didn’t even tell Polly. It had to be very very carefully planned.’ He picked up a Harrods carrier-bag. ‘I’ve brought some food,’ he said, tipping out on to the sofa a couple of apples, a pack of six Penguin biscuits and a roughly sawn-off chuck of cold, cooked pork. ‘And I’ve got a map.’ From inside his jerkin he tugged out an A-Z , on the shiny cover of which he had written ‘Rupert Croft-Parker’ with a blue biro in heavy round writing. I went into the bedroom and rang Philippa. A maid, Spanish by the sound of her, answered the phone; they had a fast turnover of staff, and if I had been Philippa I would have been led by now to ponder why. Almost immediately she came through from another extension. ‘Hello, who is this?’ ‘Philippa, it’s me, I’ve got Roops here.’ ‘Will, what the hell do you think you’re playing at? Can’t you imagine how worried I’ve been?’ ‘I thought you would be—that’s really why I’m phoning …’ ‘Is he all right? What’s been going on?’ ‘I gather he ran away. Didn’t you see his message?’ ‘Of course not, Will, don’t be so bloody silly. He doesn’t leave messages. He’s six years old.’ ‘I’m sure I left messages when I was six and I wasn’t nearly so clever as Rupert.’ ‘Will, we are talking about my baby.’ (I suppressed recall of the song of that name by the Four Tops.) ‘Look, I’m coming round straight away.’ ‘OK. Or give it a minute or two. We haven’t really had a chance for a little chat yet.’ I was aware that Rupert had entered the room. ‘Are you talking to Mummy?’ he said, with a solemn look on his face.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  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. ‘For God’s sake!’ The reply was desperate, muffled and close at hand. ‘Open the bloody door— please! ’ I can only have taken a second to work this out, but already there came the pent-up banging I’d heard before. I crossed the room to a smaller door whose handle I tried and a moment later turned its stiff brass key; it was a door which was rarely locked, but which, gratifyingly, still could be if need be. Charles was not gratified. He had retreated to the other side of what was evidently a little dressing-room, with a chest-of-drawers, an open wardrobe, and a corner washbasin against which he leant, red in the face, his tie and collar undone, a look of both apprehension and fury on his face. He made me think of a boxer, penned in his corner, honour-bound to make a final and fatal sortie. He had no idea who I was. ‘Where’s Lewis?’

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Vivifying the tensions between freedom and determinism in the fourth century was the spread of Manichean beliefs. The strongly dualist religion offered answers to the problem of evil that were seductive in their simplicity, proposing to solve through myth some of the most impossible theological conundrums of late antiquity. It is telling that the Manichean threat called forth Augustine’s tract On the Free Choice of the Will, a work whose principal agenda is to exonerate God by assigning the origins of evil to human will, which Augustine already in this early work, more clearly than any of his predecessors, construes as a faculty rather than a condition of being. It is equally telling that within a few years the Pelagians will attempt to throw Augustine’s own arguments back in his face and accuse him of being, under the bishop’s cloak, still a Manichean.65 The primitive embrace of free will would crumble in the generations on either side of AD 400, in the period of rapid Christianization. Two blows were to bring the edifice tumbling to the ground. Though in very different ways, both arose from the expansion of the church and the need to reconcile the religion with mainstream society. The first was the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians, a theological controversy that unraveled with astonishing force in the 410s. The polemics over original sin had little purchase in the Greek-speaking east, though Augustinian pessimism would be officially ratified as orthodox doctrine at the Council of Ephesus. But the triumph of original sin over Pelagian optimism undercut the ancient models of free will, ultimately providing a new model of “the will” as a faculty lodged in the flesh and disobedient to reason. The stakes of the debate were so high, not least because “Pelagius and Augustine were both religious geniuses. Both made unambiguous sense of a conglomerate of ideas and attitudes which men of a previous age had been content to leave undefined. Both men were revolutionaries, and the controversy which followed their disagreement, far from being a purely academic wrangle, was a crisis in which the spiritual landscape of Western Christendom can be clearly seen for the first time.” In the course of the Pelagian debate, human sexuality, which had for centuries of Christian apologetics been a paradigm of human freedom, rapidly becomes, in the hands of Augustine, the paradigm of human bondage to the flesh. That Augustine was capable of rebuilding entrenched Christian assumptions out of the elements of Christian orthodoxy in so short a space of time is testimony not only to his individual genius but also to the subtly rearranged position of the church in the world.66

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I knew from early on that Mirabelle was somehow in tune with sex in a way that I couldn't believe my parents were. On the other hand she seemed to have no real rapport with her husband, whereas my mother and father were clearly linked by some deep if reticent bond. Geoffrey was a decent, disappointed man, who would ask you about your O levels, whilst Mirabelle called you darling and winkingly cross-questioned you on your non-existent girlfriends. They seemed to embody some mysterious thing—perhaps a flaw, perhaps a principle—about matrimony and the unimagined later centuries of adult lives. She was always pumping me for information on their heavenly son Willie, who was in the year above me at Stonewell and fancied by absolutely everybody; and it was a disturbing moment when I overheard her saying to my mother how easily she could fall in love with the boy, and my mother replying, "He's too young for you, dear!" Alas, Willie took after his father in conscientious dullness, and was aloof to all pashes and advances. Later, when it became clear to my mother that I was gay, it was Mirabelle who helped her come to grips with it, and spoke of it as an enviable state of being, the opportunities . . . She brought it up all the time, with slightly wearying good-heartedness. After my father died, she kept close to my mother, and developed the habit of dropping round for coffee three or four mornings a week. For years she was associated in my mind with our neighbourly sitcom doorchime, which didn't so much ring as brightly announce impending good-fellowship with its halting ditone. Once it had been an incongruous interruption of my father's practising. But later, when nobody else much came, the words Mirabelle and doorbell became almost synonymous with each other. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, looking at Gray's "Elegy" in The Golden Treasury: I was amazed to find how little of it I remembered. I didn't see it as especially appropriate for my dead friend, who blushed, but not unseen, and wasted none of his sweetness. I thought she must just like its tone of maxim-studded consolation. "It's the end," she said, and pointed to the verse beginning "One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill". Then the bell ding-donged. "Ten fifty-five," she said, with irony but no resentment. Mirabelle was sixty-four now, a year older than my mother; but whereas my mother never aged in my eyes, and remained at an ideal forty of competence and prettiness, her friend struck me, after a couple of months' absence, as abruptly an old woman. The hugeness had become wheeziness and powdered underchins, and the odd compromise of her marriage, it turned out, was under unexpected strain.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was wonderful who came—our old friends, school contemporaries I hadn't seen for a decade, unfamiliar queens from London in oddly cut, somehow cheerful suits, antiques young men and other frauds, a tall deaf man whom nobody knew, who was Colin Maylord's father, a lad fresh off a motor-bike (oh Ralphie!) climbing in leathers and pony-tail into a pew beside startled country aunts and uncles, Gerald and Anne de Souzay, grandly self-effacing, with Edie's unhappy young brother Pip. I went to greet them, like an usher at a wedding, wondering if perhaps Edie wasn't coming. I was apprehensive about seeing her, after what she had been through, and about seeing her grieving, which I knew might be more harrowing than the grief I felt myself. But she had stopped outside to talk to Danny and Simon, and came in just behind them looking pale and composed, with the ghostly beauty people sometimes have when they are ill. She wore a magnificent black hat, with a tumbled pomp of sooty plumes about the brim. We embraced but said nothing, and she slipped in beside her immaculate mother. I took a place at a pew's end and waited through that grim interval before the entry of the family and the bearers with their shocking burden of proof. The organist was wittering on through his formless and infinitely extendable introit, music that had never been written down, mere sour doodlings to fill the time, varied now and then by a yawning change of registration like a false alert. The occasional chink of a chisel or half-sung call came from the workmen outside. A sliver of a last night's dream came back to me and melted away as I tried to grasp it. Matt in the bar teasing me and mocking me with the story of how he'd seduced Luc the afternoon I'd left town—how easy it had been for him, the boy almost bawling for it, four, five times, how he was having him again tonight . . . I started thinking forward impatiently to my return flight tomorrow, wishing away the unrepeatable hours.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We sat in silence for a while in one of the side bays, like a couple of forgetful old drunks in the Golden Calf, who had known each other all their lives. When I looked up and across I saw the darker far reaches of the bar, towards the lavs. There was a group of men there who only appeared on Sunday nights, heavily leathered, cropped, studded and tattooed, quiet amongst themselves, like steady-nerved conspirators, holding each other's eyes as they contemplated whatever it was they were about to do. I suspected it would be something demanding and uncomfortable but I envied them—they gave off, in their sexed and sombre way, the certainty that it was what they wanted. Then I heard Luc saying, in his Ealing FUms toff accent, "Well, what's it to be?" For a second I thought the question was addressed to me. I started and then sat very still. A girl's voice replied, "How frightfully kind!" and a rowdy young man said, "Simply splendid!" I reddened at this English mockery, turned, mad and frowning, to face it, but in fact the high varnished back of the stall cut them off from view: they couldn't have known I was there. My heart was pounding with danger and opportunity—the Three right here in the Cassette, joking in spiffing English that no one younger than Perry Dawilsh used, though they still clearly thought it was spot-on. I felt crowded and troubled. Why were they here? They were the world beyond, the bar was where you came for refuge and solace from them. I hushed Cherif to hear them better as they dropped into Flemish. It was possible they had just blindly and high-spiritedly stepped in for a beer, or they might think it coolly affirmative to drink in a more or less gay bar; what I dreaded was the note of mockery flaring up again, the trouble there sometimes was with het trash. I would have to join them, of course; I was destined to go through that little purgatory. "Cherif, darling, I'm sorry I shushed you then, I was just thinking, which you know I find hard enough." I was rather feline in my pissed decoying movement, my nest-plunder obliquely in view. "Sometimes I don't understand what you are thinking about," he said serenely, even proudly. I looked down and smiled.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, that's perfectly true," he said, "though not exactly the point." He looked at me shrewdly. "I'm quite a reluctant curator, you know"—almost with the implication I had somewhere claimed the opposite. "I certainly never planned to end up back here, where I'd begun. As I think I told you, my original field of interest was the seventeenth century; I spent a year at the Courtauld in London, with your famous Sir Anthony Blunt! Then I came back and taught in Amsterdam, and so on and so forth, I won't bore you." He was nervous these past few days, and I often found him, despite all my sympathetic politeness, my genuine delight in being with him, at least a step ahead of me, or to the side. I caught his arm to stop him as the tram came silently across our path. "I'm not at all clear how the Museum came about," I admitted; "I ought to be by now." "Well, that is perhaps where the problem lies, the problem of my talking nonsense. The point is if you have been spending years with Van Eyck and so on, and then with Rembrandt and even Rubens, and you have your own passion for Delacroix, or Manet, or Picasso, then Edgard Orst does not seem after all to be an artist of, shall we say, world standing. Then his sister is dying and she asks me to help her set up a trust, to make a permanent museum of his works; she says it was his wish and she thinks I would be the right person to run this museum, which is to be in the family house—where she, incidentally, continued to live, unmarried, to the end. That, very briefly, is the story of how this place pulled me back. And also perhaps explains a little of why I felt the need to protect him. Now if he were a Delacroix I don't suppose I'd worry." It couldn't be the whole story. I said, "Nowadays people are more interested if they know, say, that an artist had syphilis." "And even more so, don't you think, if that artist had the image of being austerely celibate? For years the pious people here saw him as a model of devotion, the scandal of his affair with Jane was completely forgotten, they knew nothing about it, they thought of him as a kind of hermit, like St Anthony or something. And like St Anthony he had his temptations."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The office wasn't locked, thank god, and I closed the door behind me as if I had just escaped from something vile in a dream. I was telling myself already that it was absurd to have such a phobia of a person—it was the kind of loathing that could creep into your empty corners, a neurotic preoccupation. I switched on the lamp and sat down and stared across at the place where normally Paul would be sitting. I was remonstrating with him silently, how could he have taken on Ronald Strong, how come he had never mentioned him to me? I felt as if I were the Director of the Museum and Paul had gone over my head in some important decision. I took out "Orst and his English Contacts" again and stared at a paragraph of it for five minutes. The truth was I felt a real anxiety about being in the place by myself—not a day I normally came in, Paul "away" but perhaps about to return, no arrangement having been made. And it wasn't as if this was an ordinary office, it was almost part of his house, he might come through the little passage in his dressing-gown, in unsuspecting possession of his morning, to find me there: not exactly an intruder, so surprise and displeasure would be mastered but revealed in later mortifying hints. I'd got the terms of our friendship wrong, it seemed, perhaps it would be better if I didn't come in any more. As it happened, another young Englishman, Rex Stout, was interested in Orst, really very keen, he could be a great help, a trained researcher . . . I got up and looked out of the window. Of course I had no intention, no desire, to go through Paul's desk, but I began to feel a queer conviction of petty criminality. I left everything just as I'd found it, and went out very quietly on to the stairs.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The idea that Luc and Sibylle were somewhere ahead of us and would wait to be found lost all sense in the midday darkness, streaked with cars' lights, in the drowned anonymity of the road. Oh, I wanted to get to him first, to find out what story he was telling, to do a deal with him—but if he had been at the station early he could be hundreds of miles away by now. His mother thought not; she said it was another of his moody crises, which could be drastic in effect but were local in physical range. I gripped the wheel, ignobly anxious for myself but also with a larger, dimmer wish that he shouldn't fuck up his young life. Marcel was restless, eager, whisked away from his lessons on a quest for his beautiful and scandalous senior. He was pink-faced at the privilege of it and chattered solemnly until my nervous silence, my curt demands for help with road-signs and turnings, affected him too, rather as a parent's misery seeps into a child and subdues it. I heard the drag of his breathing amid the heater's bluster, and then the breathy squawk of his inhaler. When I remembered I gave him a little side smile and saw him sigh with sudden reassurance. I knew that under all our tension and ignorance we were both excited by our own activity, and admired ourselves, swept forward through the murk by the exhilarating imperatives of a crisis.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The main part of the Pavillon de l'Aurore was a French-looking villa with long windows boarded up and stucco that gaped here and there on to cheap red brick. One end of it had sunk and opened a wandering crack in the upstairs wall; above it the roof was hidden under a canopy of rusting corrugated iron that the wind had loosened and buckled—from time to time it gave a squawk. Marcel was quite excited. "I think he could be here," he said. He'd been exploring the garages and the kitchen-yard—apparently a window had been forced, but he wouldn't be able to get through it without a leg-up and a push from me. He took me round to show me and I peered in at a derelict pantry, the door at the back half-open on to pale gloom. Well, it could have been Luc, but I played down the likelihood. "Thieves always break in at the remotest part of a house," I said, alarmed for a moment that Marcel might dare me to go in. I poked at the mossy sill as if I knew what to look for. "It's probably not that recent." He leant in and called "Luc", then jumped back when there was a distant scuffling and the creak of a pigeon's wings. I laughed nervously and Marcel gripped my arm. "I do have the keys to the front door," I said, and he gazed at me as if I might unlock his first grown-up experience; he was shrinking from it already. I thought how later I would tell Luc about this—then remembered that he might actually be here, might have heard the car ticking over and taken it for steady rain on the laurels, might have heard our voices beyond shuttered windows, might be roused from shivering runaway sleep by the key in the lock and the scrape of the heavy door. The air inside seemed to wake reluctantly, to turn and eddy in the light and draught after years of accumulated stillness. Dust climbed and spun on the edge of the bright threshold; the hall smelt musty but obscurely alive, as if animals tunnelled and marked their territories in it. I groped and found a stiff old metal light-switch and forced it till it gave out a dead click.