The world might hinge a little at dawn and dusk, showing something of what was coming and something of what had gone before. Privacy is a rare and special blessing within institutions. At the centre there were off-duty times when David would go up the hill behind the grounds and buildings. At gloaming often, when there was a hiatus between sea breeze and shore breeze, and the soft valleys of the hills across the sound were the colour of a bruise as night came on, when the lights of the block windows began to draw the eye, and cattle on the road flat bugled to those on the hill, with the smell of prime, crab-bearing mud, and the spent greens and browns of broom and gorse fading with the light. David felt at those turning points of twilight experience ineffable, something significantly beyond and greater than himself. A message was given then, wasn’t it? But always just out of earshot, or beyond his comprehension. Then came the night itself — Harlequin, perhaps, in his original guise.
