who loves exactitude in all things, not at all the imprecision of his own flesh and blood . . cannot help but favour the older son over the younger one, whatever their political diff erences. — The brothers meet, and Michael feels first. . the bone of my bones, and only after this the unfamiliar calluses on Peter’s palm. He wonders if his brother can also sense the changes wrought in his own fingers by the plying of dividers, the flicking of switches and clips — and the tremor that’s always there nowadays, an echo of the shuddering control column, which, as he hauls it back to climb, makes of Michael. . a marionette, enlivened by the wires passed through wing and fuselage from ailerons, flaps and rudders played upon by the wind. — Well, well, well, this is a bally business, Peter says, I’d heard about it, of course, from the old people, but you didn’t write yourself — ashamed? Michael says, I don’t think I can bear it, Ape, if you’re going to bang on at me. — He deploys their mutual nickname deliberately — each dubs the other Ape. . we’re two sides of the same simian — hoping thereby to drag Peter back to their nursery, and out on to the heath, where, throughout endless skylarking evenings, they played two-boy test matches, each standing proxy for eleven men: Chapman, Wyatt, Peebles and Hammond were all him — Bond, Merkel and de Klerk, all me. . Bumbly keeping score in a wide-brimmed umpire’s hat she’d ordered especially from Lillywhites. — Peter releases his brother’s hand, and over his heathery hill of a shoulder, Michael sees a placard that’s been put up on a pillar: it’s a crudely painted map of the surrounding streets, showing the location of the public shelters. THEN GO TODAY! is its injunction and he thinks, That covers most contingencies. . Peter’s bottom lip is moist, as always — but his wide cheeks and broad, high brow are sunburnt, while his thin black hair is so long it curls up artistically from his grubby collar. His heavy and colossal old brogues are recognisably from Sirbert’s stock, shoes laid down shortly before the General Strike on the basis that Northampton pygmies would cease production . . and. . we might be giants. — How long’re you going to be up in town? Michael says — before rushing on: I’ve a seventy-two-hour pass, I’ve to report to ITW 10 at Withernsea by 0800 Sunday, so I expect I’ll have to head off in good time on Saturday evening, trains being the way they are — spent six bloody hours in a siding at Didcot on the way up to town yesterday. — Peter’s only response to this busying bulletin is to suck his bottom lip redder and wetter as he prods the stone flags with his stick. . seeking a better lie. Michael persists: Shall we take in a flick — or a feed, or a show, or all three? Sirbert gave me a sub’ so we can swank it a little if you fancy, Kins. — Peter — as in Peterkins Custard, so Peterkins, which has been abbreviated to Kins, and is what family and friends alike call him — at last shakes himself heavily. Michael thinks of Louis, the De’Ath family’s Old English sheepdog, and for a moment imagines it is he, back from the grave with bloodshot eyes, who’s awakening to the clatteration of pigeons’ wings and the shrilling of. . hard peas in steamy spittle. But it’s Kins who is growling yet again: What the bloody hell have you got that on for? His tone no longer comically belligerent but wondering — and Michael Lincoln wonders the same thing thirty years later, as he steps from the bank of telephone boxes beside the Grosvenor Hotel and peers through sepia smut and bluish diesel smoke towards where they’d rendezvoused. . What the bloody hell did I have that uniform on for? And as he walks away across the chilly nave of the station, which is steeped in the cabbagey smell of recently departed crowds, he self-sermonises: What if I’d known then what I knew later, what then? And if I’d had the compassion I pride myself on now — an empty pride, emptier than any other — would I have seen things any diff erently? No! He stands before the gaping hole of the vehicle exit on to Buckingham Palace Road and the sunsplash drenches everything in a ghastly luminescence, revealing the very cracks in the secretaries’ makeup as they mince past in their maxis, and setting fire to the chromium trim of the taxis drawn up at the rank. — Michael’s head swims, wobbles, falls back — his eyes. . lift up to the Lord, but he sees only dirty old glass soaring above, patched here and there with squares of chipboard. . Underneath the ar-ches, We dream our dreams away . . — But these aren’t dreams — they’re daymares that are always close to him. — Close to Michael in the Worthing stopper as it crept along beside the cement works towards Hove. He tried to distract himself by reading the Land Agent’s prospectus for the vacant building in Covent Garden. . another home on high — a seventh heaven. But the phantoms crept back and were more intrusive on the London train, jostling in the corridors, pushing into the crowded compartments, and either squeezing between the living commuters — who rattled their newspapers and played their patience, entirely oblivious — or plopping right down on to their unsuspecting laps, while more of their hideously disfigured kind lay in the luggage racks. Always there’s the moaning: a low susurration deeper and more persistent than any human in pain. It is, Michael has often thought, the agony of the earth herself — the sound she makes when her soft flesh is sliced through by the rails, and spikes are driven into her muscles and sinews so that she may be crucified on the sleepers . . — Only at one or other of the five nursing homes he’s founded and now runs is Michael free from the attentions of these revenants . . he pushes this archaism at them, hoping it will remove them in time, if not in space. . but it never sticks. At the Lincoln Homes — which are part communities and part rehabilitation centres for ex-servicemen — there’s always plenty of tortured flesh. . for me to feast my eyes on. The livid burns smouldering in the day-rooms for three decades alight, while in the aquarial sun porches the amputees’ fins flip — and, notwithstanding graft upon graft, nothing ever covers up the inflictions made by bullet, shell and shrapnel on the fly-boys who lie, swatted, on the couches of the physiotherapy suites. Among these eternally wounded men Michael finds himself unburdened of his compassion by the weight of their suffering. . the Homes are the fulcrum . . and. . there all is in equipoise. — It had been like this for years now, as he made his ward rounds from Shoreham to Bexhill to Banstead to Royston to Torbay, then travelled anti-clockwise, speaking at schools and universities, Rotary Clubs and chambers of commerce — anywhere, in fact, I can rattle my tin . . in front of. . anyone who’ll listen. He keeps a small room in all of the homes, each equipped with a put-me-up, so when he isn’t in residence it can be used for an office. Otherwise, there were a few personal eff ects, some sticks of furniture from the Cyrenians. . worse than utility . . and framed photographs of Bonhoeffer, de Chardin and Schweitzer — men he’d once thought of as. .