, while she tolerated him as a cack-handed supernumerary during pregnancies, confinements and feeding times. His elbows on a sodden beer mat in a local saloon bar, Kins had once heard this miserable dispatch from the front line of the sex war: A man doesn’t pay a prostitute to have sex with him, he pays her to go away. This, surely, had been how it was between him and Moira, with this forlorn permutation: I paid her to tell me to go away . . Dear Jeanie, here’s a little something to help you get back on your feet, and to go towards anything Pippa might need for her new school. Things are very quiet at my end, it’s really rather amazing how long you can drag out a single round of golf if you try —. He stops and has the wild notion of tearing the unfinished letter to pieces. She doesn’t want to hear this rubbish — rubbish verging on a. . confession. He looks about desperately at the shelves lining his cubby-hole — shelves stacked with peeling old plastic-covered ring-binders and superannuated textbooks. . One Dimensional Man — then, exhaling with a long shudder, he resumes: Anyway, as I was saying, my brother set these places up, and it occurs to me that now Pippa’s in school most of the day you might want to think about a little work. When I saw you at the clinic you said you might be interested in counselling, or at any rate something in that neck of the woods —. Again he stops, appalled by this trope, and envisions himself stark-naked, standing chest-high in sopping bracken, a rope in one hand, all about him squat and shaggy Forestry Commission conifers. . slouching in the grubby mist. He releases another shuddery breath and considers: P’raps it will end like this — another suicide defeated by the practicalities. He puts his pen to one side and gets a pack of ten Silk Cut out of the desk drawer. It’s a sort of paradox, Kins thinks, that he began controlling his smoking and drinking at about the same time he retired, and so no longer had any real need to. Only. . sort of, because the initial impetus was supplied a few years before by Sirbert’s death — after it Kins could no longer bear all the clutter of intoxication . . nor the spectacle of ashtrays. . overflowing with dead thoughts. — After the funeral the De’Ath brothers spent a long weekend together at the Paragon house. To begin with, they attempted a dispassionate cataloguing of the ballast their father had taken on as his sharp prow of a nose cut through life. Soon enough they were defeated: there was quite simply. . too much of it, and it was too heterogeneous. Their father’s phenomenal obsessions — the radio equipment, the hearing aids, the optometrists’ lenses, the laboratory beakers and retorts, the woodworking tools — were mixed in willy-nilly with their mother’s flimsier sentiments: she’d left no christening card unbound or lace pillowcase unbundled. No sooner had they succeeded in gathering together all the golf clubs, balls and tees than they would light upon a cache of hundreds, if not thousands, of score cards. Byrnes, Michael had read aloud, J. F. Byrnes. Whoever he was, Sirbert soundly thrashed him in Bermuda in ’45. That’d be Roosevelt’s turncoat southern Democrat, Kins observed drily. He was director of their Office of War Mobilization — then Truman gave him the title of Assistant President. There can’t — he laughed abruptly — have been a senior politician or bureaucrat from any of the Allied powers — barring the Soviets, of course — whom the old man didn’t humiliate on the course after intimidating them across the conference table. — Upstairs in the attic the brothers disinterred their fossilised nursery from beneath several strata of the more recent past. Inhaling must and linseed oil, they dug into back-of-beyond numbers of the Magnet and pulled up squash rackets thumb-screwed into their presses for half a century. Michael began to speak, a little, about the wars they had fought as children — the chipped Scots bugler. . he’d cherished. But then he threw up his hands: I’ve no stomach for this, Ape. I vote we get someone in to clear the lot, flog it off and divvy up the balance once they’ve covered their costs. And Kins, thinking of the modest bungalow on the outskirts of Hemel — of which Maeve had already said I’ve set my eye on it — and factoring in the emotion required to empty their own semi full of redundant family life, threw up his own hands: You’re right, Ape, after all reminiscence is a by-product of serendipity — you can’t simply extract it from the past through an industrial process. — They spent no more than five minutes wandering the gloomy reception rooms — it’d been sufficient for them to snatch up enough souvenirs to last the balance of our lifetimes. Michael took only a cigarette box in the form of a silver-plated lighthouse, an ugly bibelot Sirbert had received in his capacity as one of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House. When Kins queried this choice, Michael only shrugged his shoulders because. . he must’ve known he was already heading for the rocks. Kins chose some evidence of his father’s punishing mental callisthenics: a few of his extramural degree certificates and the typescript of The Substantiality of Consubstantiation, a monstrous work of synthesis that, beginning in the sixties, had occupied Sirbert’s final years. The book was his attempt to reconcile the Romish and Reformed churches within the context of the then fashionable existential phenomenology. . I’d no idea he knew anything about. Bundling the fusty pages into a cracked leather portfolio of comparable redundancy, Kins solemnly swore to himself he’d do what was necessary to secure a publisher for the magnum opus, a task he very soon acknowledged — Dear Professor De’Ath, I am returning your father’s manuscript, which, while interesting . . — was beyond him. Unless, that is, he was prepared to spend the remainder of his inheritance on having it privately printed, and. . what would be the point of that? — Lodged in his cubby-hole, Kins has an apprehension of time slowing down around him: he has entered the eye of a temporal storm. The milkman who left the Express Dairy. . aeons ago piloted his electric float at supersonic speed along the somnolent suburban streets, the boom echoing over the rockeries. When he reached their cul-de-sac, and leapt down to fetch one gold-top and two red from the crates, the inertia spreading out from Kins’s mind gripped him. The milkman waded a few steps through this time-treacle before coming to a halt on the garden path, teetering, then toppling over. . it’s taking him hours to fall. He’s falling still — while the spilt milk has long since seeped away, and, although several times during the long morning of our retirement, Maeve has speculated, I wonder what’s happened to the milkman? she’s done nothing towards finding out, not so much as raising the blinds, let alone opening the front door. Kins sighs acridly — Maeve would prefer it if he didn’t smoke in the bungalow, but then there are many things she’d prefer. He rereads the last line he penned: especially since the London one has been obliged to take local government funding . . and laughs mirthlessly. The English language, he knows, with its superfluity of vocabulary, presents any moderately well-educated user with near-infinite means of expression. . Be that as it bloody-well-may-be . . For Kins, all sentences, no matter how far they may travel, always wheel round before homing in on: local government funding. During his academic career he wrote three books on the subject — the last of which achieved the status of a set text in certain universities. .