The floorboards hummed and tickled shod feet with the work of the hidden hypocaust.
The railway station had changed since he had last had call to use it. In the meantime its soot-coated, rentboy-haunted vault of tarry girders and toilet glass had become a flowing atrium of boutiques and croissant stalls and limitless cappuccino. Trains no longer dominated it with their train cultu…
Somehow it always happened that Richard was out on the street when the German car ripped past—frozen with loathing, his imprecations tousled and tossed aside by the barreling backdraft.
How civilized, how spacious, how decent everything must have been, when his nose wasn’t nuts, when his eye wasn’t black. Everyone stared at him. No one sniffed at him, but everyone stared at him.
The only place he felt any good was in the Adam and Eve. No one stared at his black eye. No one noti…
