A man who loiters

My friend told me how surprised she had been to realise that the youngish man she often passed on her way home from work in the mid afternoon – a youngish man who usually walked not on the footpath, which was narrow, but in the middle of the street, walking slowly, without shoes on, as if he had no good, no honourable purpose, and so was beginning, in her words, to freak her out – was in fact none other than the trombonist whose virtuosic solo performance nearly a year beforehand at Angel Place had astounded her, since it had come from a man with so slight a frame and whose moustache, in her opinion, had been grown only to hide his gentle, too effeminate lips. She now saw him, she told me, in a completely different light.