Blog eared corners: Soft by Rupert Thomson

I noted this single passage from Soft by Rupert Thomson. I just thought it was so well observed:


Waiting for the tube at Tottenham Court Road one Monday morning, Jimmy noticed a man standing further down the platform. The man was in his late forties. Dressed in a cream-coloured raincoat and a dark-grey suit, he was reading a copy of the Telegraph, which he had folded until it was small enough to hold in his left hand. His right hand moved rhythmically, almost mechanically, between the pocket of his raincoat and his face. It took Jimmy a few moments to realise that the man was eating.  What, though? Curious, he circled round the man, edged into position at his shoulder. Then, peering down, he saw three glistening, chocolate-coated spheres. Maltesers! He watched them bounce and jostle in the man’s cupped  palm, almost as if they were being weighed. He watched them being lifted swiftly towards the man’s lips, which had already parted, bird-like, in anticipation. He heard their crisp pale-yellow interiors surrender to the man’s determined teeth. Sometimes there was  a slight delay, the man’s hand unable to find the opening in the pack, perhaps, and a look passed across his face, the troubled look of a child dreaming, but he never took his eyes off the paper he was reading and in the end his hand always emerged again and moved unerringly towards his mouth. how much of what we do is automatic? Jimmy wondered as the westbound tube pulled in.
 

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