A good short story captures a moment in time, but a great one captures the temper of the times. David Constantine's "Tea at the Midland", which won the 2010 BBC National Short Story award, could be credited with having achieved that: its subject, with fateful irony, is a fierce argument over the dubious sexual tastes of a dead celebrity emblematic of the BBC.

Whatever opprobrium has been heaped on Jimmy Savile, no one has yet accused him of having sex with his pets. In that sense he had some way to go to match the carnal appetites of Eric Gill, who was revealed in Fiona MacCarthy's 1989 biography as having intimate relations with his sisters, his daughters and practically anything else that took his fancy. Yet his artistic reputation remains largely undiminished, and his iconic sculpture of Prospero and Ariel still stands above the entrance to Broadcasting House.

If one were to erase all traces of Eric Gill from the BBC one would presumably also have to do severe damage to the recently restored Midland Hotel, an art deco gem overlooking Morecambe Bay for which Gill designed a set of reliefs. In Constantine's story, a man and a woman in the tea room of the hotel are debating the works. She admires them as objects of exquisite beauty; he cannot bear to look at them. "A paedophile is a paedophile," he says. "That's all there is to it."

The woman persists: "Would you have liked it if you hadn't known it was by Eric Gill? Or if you hadn't known that Eric Gill was a paedophile?" "That's not the point," comes the reply. It's a masterful story, pregnant with fluctuating interpretations and concealed motives, in which Constantine allows the argument to erupt out of nothing. Prior to the outburst the woman has been quietly contemplating the sight of windsurfers in the bay, though even the restless, unsettled weather suggests that this relationship is doomed: "The afternoon winter sky was torn and holed by the wind and a troubled golden light flung down at all angles, abiding nowhere, flashing out and vanishing."

Constantine's prose and poetry contain many such instances of gazing out towards the horizon. It happens in a significant poem, "Watching for Dolphins", in which a crowd of expectant holiday-makers line up on a cruise ship: "Every face after its character implored the sea / All unaccustomed wanted epiphany." And it happens often in this collection, whose protagonists are frequently loners, such as the narrator of the long tale "The Island", who exchanges life in a monastery ("being amongst monks killed even my desire to believe in God") for the greater isolation of a remote Cornish promontory: "I could hear the sounds of it, the breathing of water over shingle, and this morning I felt something had been added to my stock of resources against disintegration: an ocean entering quietly and giving bearably."

Constantine's characters are generally engaged in a losing battle to shore up their resources against disintegration. It is impossible not to be moved by undemonstrative, desperate souls such as Mr Barlow, who puts on his best suit to read poetry, despite a growing awareness that his careful routine "henceforth would not be able to hold out the flood of loneliness of the years still needing to be lived"; or the more spirited Alphonse, who breaks out of a nursing home and cycles to France knowing he only has six months to live.

But the most troubling narrative concerns a soon-to-be-defrocked canon who spends Christmas Eve in a derelict schoolhouse with a vagrant known as Goat, on account of the horn-like nubs on his forehead and delight in exposing himself. The story climaxes with a frenzied pagan dance during which "the canon unbuttoned his immaculate collar, removed it, buttoned it again and with unrepeatable sureness of aim, with the skill suddenly given you in dreams, hoopla-ed it over the risen vicar of Goat". Whatever this perverse hallucination might signify is left to the reader's imagination. But it seems a fair bet that Eric Gill would have relished coming up with the illustrations.