Paper, yes, Chelsea result. Photo, pink football paper, I thought that City bastard did that deliberately, this proves it, the goalkeeper has the ball safely and Robbins still has his foot drawn back to boot him. Chelsea result, down the bottom, nearly, West Brom 1 Chelsea 1, oh, they could have done better, a disappointment, still, it could have been worse, a draw, they must just do better for the rest of the season. As indeed
About thirteen minutes to wait.
This worn wooden handrail, familiar to the touch, polished brass knobs every few feet, the wooden treads, in small squares, worn, wooden, wood wears more quickly than most things, like him, like me, at something like the same rate, perhaps, how can I know? The permanent way, ha! Gantries in the distance, defined against the night and by lit signals, shunted trucks, a signalbox. The rails pick up light from the shuntingyard towers, this line is not electrified, yet, will it be? Fussy girder-work above, column supporting the roof a bad combination of angleiron and steel pillars. Rivets everywhere, heads dustgathering. The roof of corrugated asbestos, the fretted edging, the usual wooden possibilities of hole and cut. Fluorescent tubes, the name of the station on them, the new BR style, or how new is it? Still the old style on other notices, white letters on Midland red ground. Low baggage trucks, cartilage height. Over these worn platform flags, flaking slowly, would not think any station could be so old, would wear so much, so soon, would have so little life. But this Midland red-brick architecture good in its way, the refining of St Pancras here through scale and economics, unplaceable in an academic sense, perhaps, but good because it is itself, it is specifically railway architecture. A modern clock. Five minutes more. The benches, try to remember, curious, some ironcaster's fancy to make bench legs like thin branches, with knobs, marks where other branches had been as if lopped, a comic imitation indeed, of wood, swelling to club feet, on which to stand, wonder if they were ever painted to resemble wood, now black, chipped, but kept from bright rust by something, red worn planks, Midland red again, these seats. Matching terracotta. How I dull myself with architecture!
My death would be far easier than his in front of this train, not suicide, just death, this instrument of death, as it were, I do not want to die, no, but this uncommon way of dying presents itself to me now as a preferable one to his, so much, as an example, to remind me I may not go as he did, that there are some better, because quicker, ways, the thought occurs, should relieve, even please. And passes.
Price of meal governed by main dish and if I have half a bottle of even something as cheap as Maçon then it will push it over what I can reasonably charge the office: still, what the hell, I indulge, indulge, to preoccupy. Pink paper. Reg Straker, City's manager, said after the match that he thought his boys played well enough to Christ! I was supposed to go to see Straker, never thought of it, haven't given it another thought since they asked me Thursday, oh what the hell, I wouldn't have got anything interesting out of him in a poxy interview anyway, what has he got to say that I'd be interested in? And I shall tell them bloody so. No, that I forgot, that I did not consider it important enough. No doubt he will say I should not be in journalism if I do not accept these things, just as he does every time I complain about butchery by the subs. And no doubt I should not, that I want it to be better than it is, to be more like writing. I never know where I am with journalism, I feel. So the only satisfaction must be in the money, which is good for what the job is, I suppose, and the occasional good game. I go over and over these things, forget! A river, yes, they have good fishing, I seem to remember, up here. Ah, I should not distress myself with these things, it is the only way. Cheap, salt butter, that I like.
June wrote to ask me for an epitaph for some memorial, his, I was not interested in memorials, really, but I remembered the poem Brecht wrote, saying the only way he wished to be commemorated after death was by the line: He made suggestions, and we accepted them. This I thought appropriate for Tony, from my point of view, but there would have been copyright problems, ha, I suppose, and probably that was not how June saw him. So eventually the best I could do, in the time, ah, were the three words: He gave freely. In the end she used nothing, gave him no memorial, in words.
Bow windows glimpsed at a crossing, by the track, in sodium lighting.
Yet, but for his illness, death, it seems probable to me that we might have grown further and further apart, he becoming more acaedemic, I less and less believing academic criticism had any value at all, perhaps saying to him in anger Let the dead live with the dead! In any case it does not matter, now, his death makes so much irrelevant.
At least this is better than lunch, sometimes they can be good, as this is, or even very good, railway meals. And the Maçon honest enough, rough, to my common palate.
Can any death be meaningful? Or meaningless? Are these terms one can use about death? I don't know, I just feel the pain, the pain.
That gross laughter must be from my colleagues, ha, yes I recognize it, have heard it before. Why have they stayed to catch the later train, not having my cause?
All coloured by rust, affected by the action of oxydization, these textures, from the window, wear of metal on metal, wood sleepers, granite chips, are they granite, the rails the only bright positive, the rest an alloy of rusty textures. A pool of light from that signalbox, someone inside I imagine waiting to make a decision which will set us moving again.
Steven will be in bed, but I can still look at him sleeping, my son, the warmth of returning, to Ginnie, to our son, the flat will be lit as I come across the Square, always stands out, as we do not have curtains, being on the second floor, and warm, Ginnie perhaps sewing, how oldfashioned a picture it seems, warmth, I can enjoy this for now, must, it is all there is. June noted how, in the space of about eighteenth months, her and my positions reversed, almost too correspondingly neatly, it could happen again, anything could happen, again. Next? John Dwyer, sometime drinking companion, worried at his wife's illness, told me she was not going to recover though she did not know it, worried about being left with three children, but died himself of a heart attack before her, ironic.
Regular sag and rise and intersection of the trackside telegraph lines against the sky, on their own, then echoing or contradicting the folds of the landscape, the sheds and shapes of the trackside towns.
The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.
Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of con- cern, to me, only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us