The Wanton Angel

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Edmund Hoode was shouldering his way through the crowd in Gracechurch Street when it happened. The realisation took him completely by surprise and brought him to a sudden halt. He did not even notice that he was standing in a puddle of water or that his shoes were attracting the sniffing nostrils of a stray dog. Truth hit him like a shaft of sunlight breaking through the dark clouds above. He was happy. Gloriously and seriously happy. For the first time in several years, he was unaccountably filled with a pure contentment. It was a small miracle. On a dull, cold, wind-blown morning, amid the jostling elbows and deafening noise of a bustling London thoroughfare, he experienced a quiet joy which took his breath away.

It was baffling. Hoode was no stranger to the exhilaration of lust, still less to the pulsing delights of love, but here was ecstasy of a wholly different order. It was no brief flame of passion which would burn itself out and leave him in the pit of depression which was his normal abode. Indeed, romantic entanglement was, for once, markedly absent from his life and had no bearing on the feelings which surged within him. What he now basked in was a deep and satisfying inner glow. Edmund Hoode, the loyal, hapless, overworked, teased and tormented playwright with Westfield’s Men, was enjoying a peace of mind that blocked out all else.

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