Noah was fifty-one years old. His best feature? A kind of stamina, a kind of staying at the wheel. He thought of himself as settled: the way a landslide was settled, once everything had fallen and afterwards lay still. Staring into space sometimes, Noah still pictured the man in a dress suit with a white dinner jacket, stepping down from a train arriving from the anonymous Lancashire Hills. The man was always arriving. But Noah had never known anyone to tell.
