the seed pods are Ceres’s corona . . carefully applies a layer of salad cream, then fork-lifts the pathetic smorgasbord into his mouth. I’ll keep on exactly like this, he thinks, until. . — Maeve has thick and full-bodied hair. . fat hair that’s grey at the roots where the henna’s grown out. She has a heavy, sensual face — the mouth wide, the top lip dimpled, the lower one curled. Her nose is. . predatory. She also has a prominent brown mole at the corner of her jaw. When the boys were small enough to be embarrassed, she agonised over whether to have it removed. Now the boys are removed . . and her weight-gain has overwhelmed the mole: soft powdered flesh sliding down on top of it. From time to time Maeve attends Weight Watchers in Stevenage — Kins thinks for the socialising. At night she cleans her dentures with a toothbrush before combining them with two parts Steradent tablets and one of water in a bombshell . . she carefully places in a cabinet, in the bathroom she’s filled with polished conch shells, scallop shells, convoluted sponges and a sailor doll she bought in Brighton in the mid-sixties, whose white bell-bottoms, tunic and dish hat have long since faded to the same sickly green as his synthetic face. Surprisingly confident in her body, Maeve always enters their bedroom entirely naked, her breasts and belly swaying around the storm cloud of her pubis. But she keeps her hand tightly clamped over her slack lips and caved-in cheeks until the bedside lamp is out. In the darkness — which is utter — Kins hears the bombshell bubbling in the bathroom cabinet, the Steradent tablets’ eff ervescing amplified by its fibreboard into a tidal race that gradually ebbs, even as he himself. . slips down the wetted and re-wetted sand into the sleepy sea. — His own teeth are a disaster. He sees his dentist, Mister Eckersley, out of a perverse loyalty — which is what, Kins acknowledges in insightful moments, has ordered the remainder his life. . once my fundamental disloyalties are subtracted. Eckersley is as old as Kins, and surely would’ve retired by now as well, were it not the tinkering he does with his obsolete equipment in his ill-lit surgery is much the same as anyone else’s retirement — a hobbyist in his shed. . or Sirbert, for that matter. To be fair, Eckersley doesn’t pretend there’s much he can do: from year to year the proportion of weedy gum to eroded tooth increases, Kins’s crowns are cemented and then washed away. . You can rinse the briny for me now . . At least there isn’t much pain, so long as Kins avoids anything requiring a proper bite. — On the days Kins goes into town to visit the valetudinarian dentist, he walks through the woods skirting Hemel to Apsley Station, takes the train into Euston and walks on from there to the northern end of Wimpole Street. Every time, he remembers the same long-ago morning: waking in the bombed-out house on the west side of Fitzroy Square, Timofei bringing one of those thru’penny cartons of milk they sold back then and making tea for them on a spirit stove in the corner of the room with the sooty nets and the perished, rose wallpaper. Or at least he thinks he remembers this. It could be the memory, like Eckersley’s handiwork, is only. . a partial reconstruction. If so, it’ll do, because, now that Kins is faced with this — the fatty soups and the cold-meat lunches, the steamed-fish suppers and the Lincoln biscuits dunked in front of the nine o’clock news — he understands that all the rest — the thousands of students that have passed through my mind — my own children, too — has constituted no progression at all, but only been. . a sort of filling. The long, painfully bright days, when he’d lain in the hedges and copses of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire — the shorter nights, when he’d cooled his heels on the icy stars strewn beneath his feet. All that strange time, when he’d schooled himself to shun lest I be shunned, it was this: the long walk into captivity that had been mine and mine alone, the sole portion of his life he’d managed to grasp and hang on to. . entrails of self-knowledge and self-forgetting that now lay in thick loops and coils around the bungalow, tying together the toby jugs and embroidered cushions Maeve bears back from bazaars and car boot sales. But who is that apart? His path disappears in the bushes, behind him the branches spring together, the grass stands up again, the waste land engulfs him —. Is it Jack Clarke you’ve been replying to? Maeve now asks — she’d seen another letter from him arrive that morning and. . she knows the bad effect they have on me. No, he says, dabbing the salad cream from his lips, I’m writing a note to Moira’s Jean suggesting she might go to work at Michael’s London place. Oh, Maeve says, poor little Jeanie. Kins dutifully rolls and inserts his napkin in its ring, knowing as soon as he’s gone Maeve will repeat the operation. There is, he believes, great comfort to be had for the both of them in the long impasse of their marriage: not going anywhere is by definition. . a respite. He thanks her for lunch and places his plate, beaker and cutlery on the draining board. The only time in his life that he actually did any washing up was when Moira and the children were still at Dudswell — then, in a craven attempt to be the new man she said she wanted, Kins had ministered ineptly to Jean and Hugh, preparing breakfast for them and tidying up a bit after they’d left for school. Coming down from her bedroom, hung over and caustic as vomit in her fluffy dressing gown, Moira had railed against him: You — you’re as yellow and sticky as the yoke on that plate. You can’t get it off — and you’ll never get it off you: while you were pissing about in London better men than you were dying in their droves — innocent women and children too. In his hand Kins holds forever the egg the oddmedodd woman gave him on the morning he was released from Louth police station. He has only to clench his fist to smell anew its richness of nutrition and fertility, and to feel its heat passing through his skin. . into my flesh and bone. Jack Clarke’s letter lies opened but unread in the wire tray on top of the half-sized filing cabinet in Kins’s cubbyhole. Jack is old now of course — sick as well, while his long-festering resentment cramps his hand, malforming all it writes. There is, Kins thinks, something rather unfair about the eff ort he has to put into deciphering the abuse Jack directs at him. . through the picture window from God’s waiting room in Torquay. Kins has had to wear a mask of eff acement so as to slip past all the snares set and nets laid by society — the Loyal Toasts and Remembrance Day parades, the more subtle and diffuse conventions calling upon the individual citizen to express pride . . and thereby to enlist his own murderousness in the cause of the State’s. The long walk has continued throughout his life: he has lain up in the daytime, hiding inside his pedestrian career — after all, what else would be expected of a sociology lecturer at a provincial plate-glass university but such a nondescript and wet socialism? A Gannex ideology . . slung about his shoulders as a protection against the persistent drizzle of capitalism. Vote! Vote! Vote! For Mister At-lee! Punch old Churchill on the jaw! If it wasn’t for the King, we’d do the bastard in