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 culture of industrial burdens dumbly and filthily borne. Trains now crept in round the back, sorry they were so late, hoping they could still be of use to the proud, strolling, cappuccino-quaffing shoppers of the mall. There was even a brand-new Dickensian pub called the Olde Curiosity Shoppe whose set was dressed with thousands of books—written not by Dickens but by that timeless band of junkshop set-dresser nobodies … In other words, the station had gone up in the world. And Richard didn’t like it. He wanted everything to stay down in the world—with him. Envy and schadenfreude and invidiousness: they arise from poor character, but also from a fear of desertion. The entrance to the platform he stood at called itself the Gateway to East Anglia. Monolithically overweight, like a prehistoric snake that had eaten not a mastodon or a mammoth but another snake of the same dimensions, the train moved toward him with its yellow eyes satedly averted. Asian and West Indian staff stood ready with their black ten-gallon rubbish bags. Richard stiffened in his soiled bow tie.

[...] The television in his room went about its transmissions nonjudgmentally, but to Richard the set itself often seemed scandalized and even persecuted by these gladiatorial displays—this modern marriage of window-shopping and blood sport. Or this post-modern marriage: pornography tried to occupy the basements of other genres (sex Westerns, sex space operas, sex murder mysteries), but it looked to be increasingly preoccupied by pornography: by “adult,” as the industry called itself. Pseudo-documentaries about adult; rivalries between adult stars; the ups and downs of an adult director. There was also many a talentless parody of other small-screen entertainments. There was even a loose parody of The Simpsons—called The Limpsons. All this footage had been bowdlerized, on the set, for hotel use, with a strategic lampshade here, a fruit bowl there. You saw faces, not bodies. The men perspired and bared their teeth, as if under torture. The women snarled and whinnied, as if giving birth. So: The Simpsons, The Limpsons, and room service.

[...] The only other good news to come Richard’s way since his return from America was that Anstice, his devoted secretary at The Little Magazine, had not taken a welcome break, alone, in the Isle of Mull, as everyone thought, but, instead, had gone home and killed herself.