The atmosphere between them had become both lighter and more weighty, somehow. What Hawthorn had implied about Edwin, the purple tract had confirmed. And it would have been far more than that, for Edwin. It would have been tantamount to realisation—a first dawning glimpse of the fact that Robin, too, was a man who sought the company of other men, or at least was familiar with one of the more popular writers of homosexual erotica distributed through an otherwise reputable shop on Charing Cross Road.
