✣

Then he was doing research, enjoying not having the tie of lectures to attend, he said, or wrote, and they had moved from the Park, or the Estate, whatever it was called, and were living in one of the towns on the outskirts of this city, contiguous with it, really, at least connected by ribbon development, if it is not a suburb, it has its own name, something beginning with B, how soon I forget the simple things, remember the odd things, on a main road, their house, the short gardens of two or three houses together setting them back and apart from the shop-fronts most of the way along that High Road. The house itself was perhaps mid-Victorian, with a bay window, small, two up and two down, kitchen and bathroom built on half-width at the back, so that there was a common concrete area with the next house and a shared garden, their garden had shoulder-high shrubs and growths of some kind, or higher, unkempt, and Tony and I laughed at the idea of him gardening, as I remember, at the idea of him wanting to impose some order on this overgrowth.                           He worked in the front room, had his books around him, did he say for the first time all his books were with him, now they had a house? They were so pleased with having a house, they kept referring to it as a whole house. It was reasonably cheap, the rent, they managed better now Tony had some sort of research grant, something more than his undergraduate one, a post-graduate scholarship, even, and I think June was teaching by the time of my first visit to that contiguous town, the town beginning with B, what the hell, she had left the industrial designing job she had had, to teach art to children.                   The traffic was quite noisy, from outside, Tony said it took him some time to become used to it, and I could not work there with him very well the first day I tried to, we talked and read, and I worked on a poem, desultorily, finished half-a-dozen lines only during the few days I was there, whereas he made notes on half-a-dozen books, I think.            Long afternoons there, where we would fall asleep, I would, anyway, feel guilty that we were not working as the world was working. June I remember saying something like that, finding it difficult to accept that Tony was working when lazing comfortably in an armchair reading a book. We were working really, it is difficult for others to understand.           The first time I saw a fan heater, or knew they existed, they were just coming in then, or they then impinged on my consciousness, as they say, was when I saw the one they had bought, in that shabby front room, the books out of place in it amongst the suburban lumber that passes for furniture and does not acknowledge the existence of books, or accommodate them, and the fug it created, and the humming noise, it was an alien place for me to work, I'm sure that's why I tended to fall off to sleep, especially in the afternoons, as we talked, or he talked and I listened, there were times when he talked so much that I had to shut off part of my mind, he talked me into that much insensitivity. Shocking now to remember the times he bored me so. And what was it bored me? Department politics, for one thing, as an undergraduate he had followed each staff member's special academic interest, or most of them, he had been able to do this more easily than most students because he was older, had done national service and had also had some time in a job, I think, though what job it was I never knew, probably, and the details retold to me of such matters were not really of interest, nor hardly did I believe that the staff, or some of them, did not find him presumptuous, I was not convinced, why should I have been, or something, it's too easy, this does nothing to ease the guilt. Such as it is. Everyone is boring to someone or another or everyone at some point, but his death makes me guilty that I do not value every word he ever said, every moment I knew him. Anyway, he formed a kind of link between staff and students when he was an undergraduate, I was told by a contemporary of his, another Tony, Barker was it, who I met at about that time, and talked to then, at a dinner in Hall, a more or less formal thing, as I remember, though I had no formal clothes for it, where I sat next to a botanist, and asked him what he thought of plastic flowers, which caused some amusement to Tony Barker, and to Tony, or hardly so, I forget, but I thought it was quite good, as spontaneous things go, on the spur of that moment.                         It was not that he was obsessed, that would be the wrong word, by academic success, by being or becoming or having it recognized that he was a scholar, but since this was what he wanted, to be an academic, then he followed department politics, as far as an undergraduate could, he noted each lecturer's interests more especially when they coincided with his own, and most of all he was keen on not failing, yes, that was it, I think, he was not obsessed by success but he was determined not to fail, he was worried about failing, worked hard not to fail. In what? Anything which served his desire to know, to learn, he had that voracious appetite to understand, to enquire into as far as possible, an enthusiasm for completeness, depth, in all subjects in which he was interested: and he tolerated the trivia of department politicking only to be assured of a living to go on understanding, to have time for investigation into his interests, which coincided with mine at many points, he put me on to many things I should not have known about, as well, his generosity of mind was directed and constructive, though I took from him only what I needed, what was determined by my own needs, directions, but it was good to have him to bounce ideas off, to learn from, to have him pull me up when I committed wild excesses, made a fool of myself, in my work.                                  He was still engaged in the publication of the new academic magazine, was one of the editors of it, it had been gaining a wider and respectable reputation, was thoroughly academic, I had disliked it when I saw it, the sort of magazine that elevates criticism above what it criticizes, if I remember correctly one contributor to a number he showed me actually said that books were only the raw material which critics explained and embellished, the stupid bastard. And it contained those hairsplitting correspondences with rejoinders, redefinitions, from number to number, which are waged so viciously and as if importantly, in these petty circles. I had no sympathy with, never remember finishing, any of the articles, they were so pointless, so irrelevant to what it is actually to write, and usually so badly written themselves, these men as readers simply cannot know what it is to write.

He was fairly depressed that visit, said so, anyway, because of the death of a friend, another postgraduate, Paul, who had been very bright, seemed well-balanced, but had apparently killed himself. The circumstances were obscure, even bizarre, Paul's wife of just a few months had come back one morning, after a very short while out, and being without her keys had knocked and eventually looked through the letterbox to see his legs dangling. The strange things were that he had no trousers on and that his toes were only an inch or so from the ground and that on his desk were diagrams of a man hanging, measurements and calculations of a drop, the stair well. And a poem. He had been in some way talking about this recently, the gratuitous act, as a philosophical phenomenon, I think Tony said, Paul was reading philosophy. Tony and June had recently been to the funeral, had been dismayed that the wife had been persuaded to give him a Xtian funeral with all the trashy ceremony and with all the words in which Paul did not believe, did not accept, it was a travesty, that ceremony, he said, Tony, but he felt he could not interfere, could not speak to the widow about it, condemn her, in her pain.        I was interested enough in the story, the event, at the time, but not enough to write it down. We speculated on motives, Tony and I, he more than I, who am not really interested in motives, actions are what are important, but he did say he thought sex was something to do with it, that Paul's wife was a Catholic and that they had decided that they would have no children until after they had both finished their research, she was a postgrad as well, and that the form of birth control they had elected to employ was self-denial.

At dinner, in Hall, top table on the same occasion, discussing with Tony Barker and Tony the interesting man who worked in the kitchens there, a refugee, who had written and published at his own expense a treatise on the ills of the world, and his own proposed cures, and had given copies to both of them. Sometimes Tony's enthusiasms were too extreme, I thought, too indiscriminate, in this case, for instance, as I remember. The new Hall of Residence, neo-gothic, architecturally sterile, aping the Oxbridge dead.

Reading one night in bed, he gave it me to read just before I went to bed, the Obelisk Press edition of Fanny Hill, said it was part of his eighteenth-century background, ha! from which I had great pleasure at its impossible but entertaining enormities.

The house was agreeably situated at the end of a bus-route from this city, and within a few yards of a fish and chip shop. Thus we could always be sure of a bus waiting, or could watch for one to come in and stand waiting at the front room window: and hot meals were even more conveniently available, if one liked fish and chips. Since June was at work Tony and I used the shop at lunch times: one of us, we took it in turns, would go across the road and bring back cod and chips and peas, they specialize in peas with their fish and chips in this city, bright unnatural green, and over it we would perhaps discuss our weight problems, amongst other things, and I think that was the occasion when he tried to diet, or shortly before, it could not have been then, no, and kept asking, or several times asked, whether I thought he had lost weight, and I could hardly see it, we were both about sixteen stone, it's my natural weight, I've been that since I was sixteen or so, so had he, I gathered, or had he? I do not remember. But the fish and chips were good, it was pleasing that they were so near, for some reason, too, I enjoyed eating in this way, and being outside London they were that much different, as too were the pubs, there was one quite near, almost as near as the fish and chip shop, to which Tony introduced me, though it was by no means his local, he was not a drinking man on the whole, I often felt as though he was drinking to please me, who enjoy pubs, and enjoyed this one, where the bitter was noticeably cheaper, and where they had floury soft rolls, were they called baps, or is that Scottish? The cheese ones had raw onion in them, anyway, a new taste, I enjoyed it, the crispiness and the soft dough and clinging cheese. Ah.