Here, too, some ground has been cleared
by the square of its distance. He wasn’t specific,
but more or less conceded he had elaborated the mad
scheme that first gripped him as a student, the day he
sat down together on the sofa, fifty yards of absolute
darkness pocketing interjections as the years passed
and the stunlight flickered. He turned to Dalgliesh,
I mean Newton, and said: “What’s the matter?
What did she say?” No one answered, but the
crowd edged forward expectantly, having paid
in good faith for an admission. He said Grace
had the task of feeding the hens the details of her
physical presence, and that his own individual cells
had challenged the quantum flux to a duck race:
having found a way to go wayward faster,
he’d lost to his lucky stars — a disaster!
(‘A disaster’ borrows words and phrases from Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way and from P.D. James’s A Dalgliesh Trilogy.)