. . By night Kins forced himself to go on . . accepting profound isolation as the price for making any progress at all. Objectively he understood there was a place for him with the duffel coats and the kitbags — he might’ve walked on. . to Aldermaston, then Greenham Common, but faith, he believed, was not so readily transferable — there could be no démontage, the machinery of conviction crated up, shipped out and. . put to another use. He remained all at sea . . with this cry ringing in his ears: Sauve qui peut! To be shunned were he to break the surface — this was to be expected — but to be shunned by the shunned? Well, this seemed. . very hard cheese indeed . . The cushy billet that your father’s influence secured you disgusted me then and disgusts me to this day! While I suffered imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs and abuse at the hands of warders and inmates alike, you, by reason of your upbringing and connections, sailed through the war as free as a bird! Jack Clarke’s vehemence wheezes through under-linings and exclamations — the emphysema keeping him trapped in a sitting sprint is not his only chronic obstructive disease, but Kins wearies at the idea of trying to clear away his former comrade’s dense delusions. He’s written to Jack at length, several times — he’s tried, fruitlessly, to obtain copies of his own and Michael’s tribunal decisions, with a view to proving what everyone who ever had dealings with Sirbert soon learned: His probity was absolute — and punctilious. If Kins could’ve been exculpated, he knew this wouldn’t appease Jack, who remains stuck in a counter-factual past, one in which he didn’t run his Exmoor smallholding into ground that had been poor soil to begin with . . and latterly whisky-sodden. In this sunlit Cockaigne, Jack had won the fair and bounteous Annette — not, as he insisted on maintaining, been robbed of her by Kins, the scheming Lothario. Maeve and Kins received a round-robin letter from Annette every Christmas — this was littered with names such as Boffo Teaser, Pride of Whitby and Lord Monboddo, the fox terriers she’d taken up breeding since her retirement after a long and probably perfectly fulfilling career as the headmistress of a girls’ grammar in Staffs. In the photographs Annette enclosed, the terriers’ sharkish muzzles wreathed her own unsmiling one — she’d never married, and Kins thought meanly: They’ll turn on you some day, your canine children, and tear you to shreds. — Although really he was thinking of his own boys. . the Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick Maker . . This being how he mocked them in the most secure cubbyhole of his mind. . Maeve must never know. The Butcher detoured to visit them when he drove from Cheltenham to see his masters in London. In winter he wore well-tailored overcoats of cashmere or still more exotic wools — there was never any dandruff on his velvet collars. He’d park his sporty little German car in the drive behind his father’s ancient Rover, then come in to sit at the kitchen table, eat his mother’s banana bread and inquire after her jumbling. The Butcher’s closely shaven face was rather pink, and, although his mother never seemed to notice it, Kins could see through his expression, which was mixed with two parts interest to one of filial concern — concern that evaporated when he saw his father pottering by the drinks cabinet, bottle of Gordon’s in one hand, Martini in the other. Bombshell? Kins would ask his eldest son, and Jonathan invariably snarled, Not when I’m driving — you should know that. . with all the emphasis on should. On occasions when he’d detonated one bombshell too many, Kins needled the Butcher: I shouldn’t’ve thought you spooks get your paws on quite enough of the public purse to aff ord BMWs and Savile Row tailoring — is there anything you’d like to confide in us? P’raps you’ve some secrets of a personal rather than a political nature? — Over the years Jonathan’s once visceral contempt has grown more rarefied — during his furious adolescence they’d re-created other battles — Londonderry, Goose Green, Orgreave — and he’d squared up to his pacifist father, his fists raised. To deflate him, Kins would say, Come along now, old boy, I’m just pulling your leg. He doesn’t say it any more — he feels no need to mollify Jonathan since the turkey shoot on the Basra road, a slaughter that in some indefinable, yet for all that real, way he’s convinced his son had a hand in. And having a hand is surely what it’s all about — Kins has never felt that homoousian unity, the flesh-of-my-flesh, with the Candlestick Maker, the Baker and certainly not with the Butcher that he knows he ought. Worse, he has this sympathy for others — for Michael. . for little Jeanie too. The Butcher is, Kins believes, the victim of a double-bind far more exacting than that imposed by his ramshackle upbringing: the red-brick semi in which everything was present and correct . . except for his father’s soul, which was intermittently and confusingly. . AWOL. Not much given to psychologising, Kins nonetheless has a hunch his eldest’s willingness to fight for the old cunt in secrecy might relate to his own compartmentalised life. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck cur-i-osity . . Jonathan has never evinced — but what if he had? How could Kins have explained this to him: Moira, on her hands and knees, cleaning out the inglenook fireplace at the cottage, her bottom switching back and forth lasciviously, in time to her raucous obscenity. . fight for the old cunt, fight for the old country! as the ashy dust rose. — That morning, the sunlight dazzling through the diamond mullions. . I couldn’t control myself: he’d pounced on her, and she’d been delighted by the violent passion she’d provoked even as. . she beat me about the head with the filthy brush! They’d dragged each other by the hair into the poky scullery with its flaking plaster and cobwebbed empties, Kins had lifted her skirt, torn down her underwear and. . had her — a quick and savage knee-trembler that climaxed for the both of us, I think when one green bottle did accidentally fall and the shattering glass was the blitz of our orgasms. Because that had been the way of it between them. . for more years than I ever wish to forget. If Kins wanted Moira he had to. . Fight for the old cunt, fight for the old cunt. . He wondered then — and wonders still as he unscrews his pen and resumes his letter to her daughter — if she made her other lovers behave in this fashion, or if it was only impotent him she took such pleasure in antagonising. Not that it happened often: maybe five or six times a year on average . . in the thirty or so we consorted. Kins had found it hard to understand why it was that I persisted with a relationship that, realistically speaking, was little other than abusive. Now that Moira was dead, however, he could see its entire course laid out in front of him: another long walk into my captivity with Maeve — who intuited that his fleshly infidelity was meagre and incidental to the drama