Chapter 11: What Dorian Saw in 1943

The morning had gone wrong before it properly began, which was, Dorian reflected, the particular character of mornings that had always been going to go wrong: the wrongness preceded the morning and merely used it as an occasion.

He had woken at precisely the moment the blackout curtain in the bedroom stirred — not from wind, the window was sealed to a standard he had tested in four seasons, but from some atmospheric shift that the old building's Victorian bones transmitted as a sort of structural breath, a periodic exhalation of the accumulated weight of its floors and the lives that had pressed down upon them. The curtain moved two inches. Stopped. The slant of light that came through was November light, thin and without conviction, and it illuminated precisely the section of far wall that he had arranged to be blank, stripped of every surface that might return an image, the plaster painted in a flat, unreflective taupe he had selected from a sample card with the kind of focused deliberation another man might apply to selecting a wife.

He was up and dressed before the curtain had resettled.