not here, though, in the Dominions. Local government funding has never interested him that much per se, rather, it had been a niche he’d spotted in the bland cliff-face of his subject, one he scratched his pen away at with sozzled persistence over the years, thus carving out tenure. I don’t think, Sirbert used to chide his eldest son, I’ve ever in my life observed such a determinedly consistent wastage of ability as yours. My own intellectual interests lie, as you know, in the realm of the synthetic, while my analytic powers are indefatigable — I could no more prevent them from processing data than I could. . than I could. . It had been a rare moment of speechlessness on Sirbert’s part, and Kins felt he’d done well not to offer up: Than you could coin a metaphor, or any other figurative language. Anyway, Sirbert had resumed, that’s by the by — you, on the other hand, excel at theoretical analysis, and here you are, well advanced in middle age, and an academic at a minor university, teaching a pseudo-science that really doesn’t require any great breadth of mind, let alone focus. Is it your dipsomania? Is it this weakness that’s so hamstrung you? Kins had shrugged it off. We never talked, if by talking is implied an exchange of feelings, we only swapped information, took argumentative tricks, made opinionated bids — those were our conventions, that was our contract. And although he remained eternally grateful for the forbearance his father had displayed during the war — better than forbearance — true tolerance, as the old man grew more and more casually bigoted, reverting in his dotage to a purblind Edwardian perspective, from which he dimly perceived that London was filling up with wogs, blackamoors and shonks whatever THEY may be — so Kins protected his inner self, one he saw as possessing all the characteristics his father inveighed against: a tiger, roaring at a palm tree, at the top of which crouched Little Black Kins, wearing a girly grass skirt and scoffing Scotch . . It would’ve been well beyond Sirbert’s vestigial imagination to have seen the world the way I often do: as a complex structure of mown verges, cleared drains, tarmacked roads, electrified traffic lights and, industrial action permitting, regularly removed bins — all of it held together by the local government funding that, while invisible to everyone else, Kins can see perfectly clearly when I’m a bit blotto. — At Michael’s funeral he had been. . more than a bit blotto. He’d struggled through his own short eulogy and left it to the burgundy-faced politician to do the career review: Michael’s distinguished war record. . Most missions flown. . DFC and Bar. . Youngest Group Captain. . The Hiroshima epiphany. . The experiments in communal living. . The charitable homes that grew out of these. . — Hearing his brother so anatomised, Kins wanted to cry out, You make it sound so bloody simple! but could think only of Michael’s final earthbound moments. He’d eaten at a cheap Chinese restaurant in Soho — one he’d gone to for many years, purely on the basis it occupied the building where there’d been a British Empire Restaurant during the war. . the two of us patronised. Not nostalgic or sentimental exactly, Michael had shared this characteristic with Kins’s teeth. . so bloody sensitive. No doubt this quality had informed his final bites . . Five years have passed, yet still Kins cannot tear himself away from this last supper: the sweet-and-sour pork balls, the rice grains strewn across the utilitarian tabletop — and Michael, chewing it all over, and quite possibly remembering — the evening during his first leave when they’d heard Myra Hess play at the National Gallery. Walking out from under its sugar-shaker domes, they’d seen the searchlight beams of the batteries in St James’s Park stroking the low clouds’ grey bellies and the greyer ones of the barrage balloons — a sight of such unearthly beauty they stood there arm in arm for sometime. Under the influence of the Brahms, Kins had disinterred a God he hypothesised might in fact be a bit like Myra Hess — in appearance, at least: mannishly handsome in profile, with a broad low brow and powerful upper arms sheathed in black silk. God was. . immanent, certainly, why else would his immaterial fingers arrange this dramatic light show, compose these thrilling and explosive chords, and direct all these extras to scatter across the doomy square, so abetting the little house painter’s Gesamtkunstwerk? — In 1952 Kins had been in digs in Nottingham, teaching evening classes for the WEA to men from the bicycle factories who called him The Prof, and took diligent notes about Weber and the puritan work ethic. He’d little to do in the day but walk the streets, or haunt the public library — at lunchtime he’d eek out half-pints of wallop in pint glasses. — One crisp autumn morning he took the local stopper to Matlock, then walked on along the river and into Lathkill Dale. The damp grass and bracken soaked Kins’s flannels and after this his socks — the stream trotted along beside him, and the walls of the modest limestone gorge, with their perpendicular joinery of embrasure and shelf, suggested to him the furniture of a natural public library . . Evidence, if any more were sought, of ubiquitous. . local government funding. By the time the sun was at its zenith, the stream had dwindled and disappeared underground, while the chunk of Wensleydale in his jacket pocket had fallen apart in its own sweat. He sat on a rock, everted the pocket and sucked at its seams as he looked about him. . rather madly at the trailing ferns scintillating with moisture —. Suddenly a man was there, trudging stolidly down the hushed defile, wearing old-fashioned leather gaiters and a well-worn tweed coat. Kins thought of Williams’s words: They’ll be coming for me any day now and it’s the fucking glass-house for me — how d’you think I’ll stomach that, eh? Least you can do is be free for the both of us . . Then he noticed the collie the man had cradled in his arms. The dog was dead — of a heart attack, the farmer explained: They’ll run and run, yer can’t stop ’em — but ’e were exceptional, should’ve stopped back home by the fire, but ’e insisted on coming with. One second ’e were running — next ’e were stone dead. Any road, it’s a good way to go, ’appen y’ull agree? The man’s philosophical attitude was, Kins thought, confirmed rather than belied by the tears streaming down his wind-worn cheeks — a weeping that silently continued, unremarked by either of them, as they took it in turns to carry the body back down the dale. The dead dog was still warm and. . beastly heavy. Shifting its awkward weight in his arms, pressing its matted fur to his own soft cheek, Kins felt privileged to be having a part in this small drama, one with the sweet animal reek of authenticity. That evening, on his way to the Institute, the paper-sellers were crying, A-Bomb Test! A-Bomb Test! The photograph showed a filthy ball of exploding dirt that was formerly one of the Montebello Islands off western Australia. When his students had assembled, a gawky bat-eared young fellow called Weaver — Kins had pegged him as the brightest of the bunch — seemed to be voicing the sentiments of all when he said, It makes Britain great again. . Kins, by then long used to silence and exile, kept his lack of bellicosity to himself, only observing gnomically, The poet wrote, No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main — but what is Man when he can destroy an entire island? Kins felt the dead collie’s paradoxically heavy phantom to be still hefted in his arms. Looking at his earnest and patriotic pupils, he thought, Nature will have its revenge on us all — there can be no apologia pro vita nos. Our shackles will bite into our shins — when the boat casts off and sets course. . for the Isle of the Dead. The following spring the Rosenbergs went to the chair. — And when Michael’s boat cast off?