At least once he visited us at the Angel, we were married then, it had hardened into marriage very happily, what Tony used to call the saga of my women had ended very well, for me, he was happy for us, I think, had brought us a belated wedding present, a whisk, a whisker for the kitchen, a good one, he said it was, they had the same model themselves, and it was good, yes, though we did not use it until our electric one failed, but for some uses, in some ways, it was better than the electric one, that's true, handier, as well, how I try to invest anything connected with him now with as much rightness, sanctity, almost, as I can, how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected with him.
He had come up to London to the BM again, to do research, although he had had his doctorate more than a year by then he was still working on Boswell, needed, as I remember, to check some references available only in the BM, for an article he was writing for some academic magazine. He was working as hard as ever, then, he said, since the cure, though he had found it difficult to pick up the threads again, and he seemed just the same as before the tumour had appeared, perhaps a little slower in his physical movements, but he had never been exactly agile, sprightly, in any case, and his mind seemed as good as ever, too. That must have been very early in our marriage, for we were still in my old flat, very cramped, sleeping in a single three-foot bed, the two of us, but it was not for that long, after about two months we moved, made a pawnlike move of one Square to another, very nearby, Tony never saw that flat, our present flat. Remember little else of that visit except he still had to keep sipping water. I still found it hard to accept that they had been destroyed altogether, the saliva glands.
We went shopping down the Market, the three of us, went into a Greek Cypriot café, played table football, the machine with handles, attack and defenders, enjoyably, went again the next day, or the evening of the same day, how little I remember, accurately, of the little things, it's the little things which they say are important, ha! But they turned us away, the second time, I do recall that, said it was a private social club, or something, it looked just like a café to us, of the ordinary kind, in our ignorance. And we went to the theatre, it had been a long time I think since Tony had been to the theatre, in London at least, and saw a piece by Beckett, yes, Play, which I had read, and wondered then whether it would work on the stage, as a piece of theatre, but it did, brilliantly, of course, I should have known it would, held one untiringly, in the theatre, that hot, as I remember, night in May would it have been, yes, we moved at the end of that month, when Tony came to stay for the last time.