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Just as it seemed things were going his way, that is, not all his troubles were over, they never are, except through death, of course, that's ironic, just before all his troubles were over, then, no, about this time, then, he finished his thesis, after three and a half years, could now apply for jobs at a reasonable salary, what he had been aiming at these seven years, a long apprenticeship to learning, just then, ah, the pity of it, it all comes back to me, the pity, the training college job had enabled them, given them enough money, they thought, at Lincoln, to have the baby, again, a triumph, a justification, one in the eye, for those mean educationalists who had cut his grant because he had got married, who had thought it probable they would have a baby by accident, ruin his course, a vin- dication of their discipline, of his dedication, of her co-operation. Though he had been ill on and off the last six months of working on the thesis, and June had been pregnant, and they had moved house to the flat in Lincoln, and the teaching, I do not think he liked the College very much, either, did not find either the staff or the students very congenial, but nevertheless he had finished his thesis, had submitted it by the Xmas deadline he had been set, or had set himself. But he told me it had made him ill, that the thesis work had made him ill, but that he had done his best with it, in the time available, it was early work, he hoped it would be recognized as such, he was quite willing for it to stand, but as apprentice work, or something, I grow weak at the pity of it, the self-interestedness, probably, that it could happen to me, that his death was quite gratuitous, at this point, so young, as twenty-nine, as to be useless, pointless, why?

When everything was moving for him, just when he had achieved what he had always wanted to do, so I believe, the rotting, the whole of a man's rotting telescoped into two years, was it, from then, less than two years, to what end, ah, with what point?

There was some trouble at the hospital where Tony went, just before Xmas, when the baby was about to be born, yes, he told me much later, when we knew, we all knew, something about being refused admission to the labour room, after being with June, in trouble, they had wheeled her off in a bad state, the labour was a long one, told Tony to go home and they would ring him but it would not be for some time, so from this he thought something was wrong and they weren't telling him and as he left, went past the porter's lodge, or somewhere, he saw the Death Book, and the ideas were associated in his mind, ha, Sterne, and he was affected by this as though he had seen June for the last time, as though she were going to die, all the way home he thought she was dead, and at home the fire had gone out, had it, did he or June tell me that, I think so, anyway, it was a very bad winter, that winter, it must have been very miserable, in the cold coming home, he'd had trouble persuading the car to start that day, as well, and perhaps no heat at home, and the hospital did not ring, or there was some mistake, I don't remember, but Tony was left wondering, thinking her dead, his life destroyed, for longer than he need have been, should have been, the bastards, oh, he was ill then, and this, and the weather—did he in that moment, under that duress, decide he did not want to live, did something inside him decide, some organism, was something set in motion, irrevocably, irremediable? That is fanciful perhaps, they would call it that, the medical people, and unscientific, of course, how could it have started it, no, but Tony believed it had something to do with it, he seemed sure, said so to me, it was not just looking for a reason, or was it? For him it was too much to believe that there was no reason, not for me, it is all chaos, I accept that as the state of the world, of things, of the human condition, yes, meaningless it is, pointless, but for Tony? Perhaps he had to believe there was a cause, intellectually, he had to satisfy himself by ratiocination, not believe it was just random, arbitrary, gratuitous, or he could not have gone on, could not have held out hope for himself, though it was pointless, anyway, whether he held hope or not, in the end, though they went through it, yes, both of them, the pattern of hope, holding on to something.                             The baby was born just before Xmas, perhaps it was Xmas Eve, which meant Tony was alone on Xmas Day, the parallel, miserably, some meal he tried to cook was a disaster, milk fell out of a fridge and smashed, he knocked over a saucepan with food in it, the car only being started with great difficulty to go and visit June and his son.            Though I think they told me June's parents went over to Lincoln, made the trip with some food, for Boxing Day. He was never very good at looking after himself anyway, June said.

And at about the same time, within weeks of the baby being born, the best thing of all happened, for his career, he was offered a university job, which was what he had been hoping for, aiming at, far better than the training college one, when, I can't remember, but it was about then, and the first I heard of the thing, the illness, the disease which had attacked him was when he wrote just before they moved, to Chester, in a letter that Spring he said he had to go into hospital for a minor operation, the way he put it it did not sound very serious, because of the way he put it, a nuisance coming just at the time when they were moving, though where to, he was looking for a house, up there, Chester, he was area extra mural tutor for Liverpool University, yes, and based in Chester.            And at the same time as he was still worried about his thesis, the external examiner was ill and it had delayed the final decision, and he had to wait to go to Edinburgh for a viva on it. It seemed so trivial, he had been ill before, I knew that he was prone to illnesses, used to think he made more fuss about them than they were worth, perhaps, but they all seemed fairly trivial, not serious. That it was serious, the first thing that brought it home to me, was that he was too ill to come down to London for the publication party of my novel, in my flat, the novel which was so much better for his work on it, for his attention to it. It was dedicated to them! This shocked me, I was annoyed, angry even, that he, that both of them, should find any excuse whatsoever for missing something so important, that its importance to me should not be shared by them, it made me think almost that he was backing out of his support for the book, my paranoia again, yes. But they sent a telegram, and a letter the next day, very apologetic, he was ill, but he still had faith in the book. And was it before this, just, he had heard that his viva was successful? I think it was, we wrote notes congratulating one another, mine calling him Doctor, for the first time, acknowledging the start of a long academic career, ha.

When, then?                         Just after the book was published, then, I had a little money, spare, and part of it I spent, loosely, unwisely, on hiring a big car, a Ford, and going to see friends in North Wales, and I wrote to Tony to say I was coming, and that Chester being near to North Wales I would like to come and see them, and have a special post-publication party, privately, just us. They were staying in the house of his predecessor in the job, intending to buy it, it was a good, big white house, that one, but he wrote to say he was in hospital for the removal of a tumour in the neck, on the neck, and would not therefore be at home when I came: but I could see him in hospital, if I cared to, and I did, it worried me, shocked me, thinking the obvious, yes, I cared to very much, when I heard.                                The house was on a main road, I had difficulty getting the big car into the driveway, scraped it ever so slightly, as I remember, on the gatepost, wooden, fissured with age, and June was there, with the baby, which I had not seen before, sandy hair like Tony's brother's, it was early summer, the lawns were very green, covered with daisies, the couple there already were friendly, sympathetic, gave us lunch, kitchen with much bare wood, no? And the wife painted, pictures there were, by her, on the walls, with a three-dimensional effect which she said she achieved by dipping silk was it, or tissue, in paint. And the husband talkative, with on that occasion the purple stuff, what is it, yes, gentian violet, on a sore of some sort, apologized for his appearance to me, unnecessarily, said the stuff was best for whatever it was he had wrong with him. They discussed Tony quite ordinarily, June told me the tumour was on his collarbone, that they had cut him open to remove it but had found that its feelers or fingers or tentacles had grasped right round the collarbone and that therefore surgery would not be effective, could not get rid of the tumour, and that now they were trying radiotherapy to kill it, to stop its growth, at least, but to kill it was what they were aiming to do, then. And that he was in a hospital nearby, now, then, having this treatment, radiotherapy, which I knew little about, but did know that it was drastic, that it involved bombardment by radioactive rays, that that was dangerous, that they had to kill the good as well as the bad cells, in this operation.

That big car I parked where June showed me, it was like an airfield, that hospital, one-storey buildings scattered over a wide area, linked by concrete walkways, cream paint on concrete prefabrications, the buildings, rough grass and chalk, stones, where I parked, there, yes. Each had a corridor along the south side, or the one I remember walking along was in the sun, full, that afternoon, it was early summer, and there were patients, not only old men, all ages, but all men, obviously, it was the men's department, ward, though it was too spread out really to be called that, no, not a ward, section.                     Tony did not look at all ill, that was the thing, I had expected him to look different, worse, but he looked just the same, we talked just the same, only now we had another subject, an additional subject, he was keenly interested in what was going on, what was happening to him he was interested in intellectually, had distanced himself from it, I think, no, impossible, but he had persuaded the doctors that he was intelligent enough to understand whatever they would tell him, they so often don't tell you what's wrong with you, doctors, the old complaint.                      Inside, the place was like a barrack room, too, it could not have been, but it seems I remember it that way, army issue blankets on the beds, they looked like, only Tony there, I think, the others were all out in the sun, or some were having treatment. He talked of the others, one man in particular, still in his twenties, who had the same thing bizarrely, ironically, in a testicle, the radioactivity would make him sterile, had made him sterile, luckily he had one child already, he was married. And Tony talked calmly about all the fear the word caused, how everyone dreaded it, but only because of its mystery, he insisted, this was, that once you faced it and understood it and knew that eighty per cent of the cases could be cured, were cured, either by surgery or by radiotherapy, then it was quite acceptable, was that the word he used? Surely not. And that percentage looks very wrong to me. When I said half-jokingly that it was a good chance for him to read, solidly, that he could could catch up on so much of the reading he was always complaining he never had time for, he said No, he couldn't read, in the circumstances, and I could never understand why, all through his illness, that it deprived him of his ability to read, as he had always read so much, the way he read, the way he held a book, turned over its pages, was so practised, so professional, so dedicated, reverent almost, but familiar, at the same time, the way a craftsman holds his tools, instruments, no, the image is not right, does not help. But here he could not do this in any case, perhaps it was that the idea of dying, of pain, filled his mind all the time, from then on, that he could not think of anything else properly, what he was reading, or supposed to be reading. But I think the treatment also left him very tired. He told me, us, the wife came with us, of the room, building, where the treatment was carried out, which sounded like a great bunker, a scientific torture chamber, where he had to lie alone, still, for half an hour, I think it was, with some emergency apparatus to sound or signal if he felt panic, ha, to the nurses and doctors watching through the plate-glass, uncontaminated. But Tony was very glad, he said, that this was the best place in the country for this treatment, there was only one other place, which had just opened, in Surrey, or somewhere, and he had been lucky enough to be living within its catchment area, but Tony was always like that, I thought, everything he espoused was always the best of its kind, to him, but I was in this case sceptical, for I could not see the hospital as very efficient, hated its atmosphere, of an army camp, even of a concentration camp. His in this case touching faith in doctors, in cure. I suppose it was necessary to him, he had to have it.                    He could walk about well enough, spent the day up, apart from his treatment, lounging on the bed, watching television. The area bombarded was so much larger than the actual tumour, as he described it: a square, the top line of which crossed his upper lip, to the bottom of his ribs, taking in the arm on the side the lump was, I forget which, but not the other arm, the line was drawn down the chest. They did mark this area with lines, ink of some kind, target. The treatment saved him from having to shave those parts of the face it covered, for it killed the hairs, for good. It also destroyed the saliva glands, so that he had to keep taking sips of water, liquid. For good. The area had to be this large in order to try to kill all the explosive, runaway, zealous, monstrous cells of the tumour: if one single cell escaped to another part of the body, by insinuating itself into the bloodstream, then it would grow and multiply there too.