. . up from the station’s undersea gloom and towards the bright surface of war-torn London, to where there floats along every gutter a newsstand folded out of Picture Posts and Home Chats, and all the paper-sellers cry out, Ben-nar-ezzz surr-vi-verzzz! — Kins takes in the gas-mask bag hanging from Michael’s shoulder and is on the point of saying something contemptuous, but checks himself: Have you been by the Paragon already? He rattles on: Obviously I didn’t quite make it back last night — those banshees start a’wailin’, old man, and everything goes to pot by way of buses, trains and cabs. I’d’ve strolled back, taken in the show, but everybody gets frightfully officious during a raid — shouting at one and so forth. . Besides, one might easily trip over a hose and biff one’s nose. — The crowds start to press in on them, and before long there’s no further headway to be made towards Parliament Square. Kins says, Apparently there were some incendiaries dropped on the Army & Navy warehouse in Greycoat Place, p’raps Jerry thought it was the actual Army and Navy! He laughs at his own joke, mirth soon dispelled when they’re diverted towards Petty France by. . pettifogging tyrants! — Michael smells the stale beer on his brother’s breath, and suspects he may still be tight — wonders also if the reason Kins keeps such a grip on him is so he can maintain this morale-sapping flow — The ARPs’re nothing but little Hitlers — they’d be perfectly satisfied really if he were the big boss here — under the protection of his brother’s RAF uniform. Certainly they don’t attract any attention, most of those they pass — clerking types, junior civil servants, secretary girls — have weepy exhausted eyes, and their mouths are tightened by the effort required to keep their jaws jutting. Everyone’s too preoccupied to take exception to the sight of two apish pals, arm in arm, out for a stroll. — Ape had been the Lancing boys’ nickname for Kins’s housemaster, a balding man whose tonsure, pot belly and permanently exposed yellow teeth would’ve been an embarrassment of riches for schoolroom satirists, were he not such a kindly fellow. The Ape had been gassed at Ypres — or so the boys whispered among themselves while he whistled gerunds — yet he’d none of the twisted cynicism of other masters who’d served. Happiness, the Ape fluted from his high desk, his gown completely enfolding him, is a by-product of existence in the way that coke is a by-product of coal — you cannot obtain happiness directly, you must mine, sort, ship and finally consume the hard and dirty business of life before you’re granted a little piece of it. — A by-product of the Ape’s wounds was surely his swing-armed and bowlegged gait, his rounded shoulders and the asthmatic sough he made as he sipped the air to see if it was breathable. The De’Ath boys, only a year apart, and pressed into sympathy by their odd and secluded childhood, noticed that they also shared these characteristics with the Ape — although not so well combined with his affability or quiet piety — so they took to calling each other Ape in affectionate remonstrance. — Happiness is a by-product, Ape. — I know, Ape, I know, and the Holy Ghost is a by-product of the Trinity. Beyond this simian similarity there’s hardly any resemblance between the two. Michael cannot fathom from which branch of the family tree his ripe looks have fallen — the flaxen hair, the creamery complexion, the firmly dimpled chin. Bumbly’s people are certainly fair, but, judging by the foxed ovals of their faded studio portraits, these gentle country parsons and dotty spinsters had always been dough-faced and weak-featured, while the current generation — Uncle Martini, the remittance man, Uncle Melville, the DC in Nyasaland — have the distracted appearance of men. . out of kilter with the times. As for Sirbert’s line, there’s so very much of him in Kins — the Baroque dome of his forehead, the spear-point of his nose, the heavy cheeks with their insidious veining — it’s no wonder there was. . nothing left over. Michael has entertained the idea. . I may be some throwback, although he can muster no evidence, his grandfather being long departed, and his grandmother encountered only once, when, on a tour of the links courses along the Dorsetshire coast, Sirbert having unexpectedly kept the driver on, they motored into Devon for a day and paid a call on a peculiar bundle of black silks in a tiny whitewashed cottage. Ignoring Kins and Sirbert, the old woman had stroked Michael’s hair, chucked his chin and clucked, Ain’t ’e the spit, ain’t ’e the bloomin’ spit. . while an indeterminately younger boss-eyed woman sat on a stool by the low window, the drool from her open mouth tangling in the thread she pulled as she sewed the simplest of samplers: a single word, misspelt by blue cross-stitching, JEBUS. — That these were Sirbert’s mother and sister Michael realised much later and purely circumstantially — for his father said nothing. It had been the first summer. . when I was eleven that his father had begun to engage Michael in conversation at all, Sirbert viewing intercourse with men as only really appropriate on the golf course or at the bridge table, and with women solely the latter. By the age of ten, Kins. . my Irish twin could play every convention there was, and so received paternal favour. . doubled and then redoubled. Albeit this mostly consisted of Sirbert saying, Are you completely certain you can make four diamonds? while the boy stared furiously into the fan of his cards. — There’d been little sociability beyond this at the family home, and there was less still during the vacs when the boys returned first from prep school, and thereafter from Lancing College. Sirbert had a loathing for that sort of carry-on. He had raised his voice to Bumbly on just one occasion that Michael could recall, when she’d accepted a dinner invitation on their behalf without consulting him, imagining since it came from such a powerful personage. . the Beaver himself, I think, her husband would forgo his usual cocktail, one mixed — Michael had assumed for a long time — from two parts rectitude to one of outright disdain. You silly woman! he’d cried — and Missus Haines scuttled away to hide in the cupboard beneath the stairs. Don’t you realise, he boomed on, his face engorged, that if we go there they may very well form the expectation they should come here! — The brothers stand beside the. . Sirberts-upon-Sirberts . . of sandbags piled up by the entrance to St James’s Park tube station. Michael’s eye strokes their prickly sacking, then slides up the smooth sooty sandstone laid down aeons before Ussher’s world began . . to rove the rigid folds of the skirted figure sitting on the pediment. . a bearded lady Jesus who I daresay wears no blackouts! He turns to Kins: So, what’s it to be — I see the Karloff ’s still on at the Paramount. . His brother sneers: I see you’ve secured yourself a cushy commission. Michael softly admonishes him, Ape, I don’t think I’ll stand it if. . Ape, please. . ZZZZZZZZUM! Kins swipes his stick across the façade. This rotten pile, he says, would be just the ticket for you and your United Airmen, eh? Unfortunately you’ve come from your HQ in Basra a little precipitately, eh? After all — he pulls his younger brother on — the wandering sickness is still very much abroad. What was the timing Wells proposed for civilisation’s collapse and resurrection? Ah, yes, I remember it now: social vitality begins to return in 1967 and the pestilence finally ceases in May 1970. Very factual when it comes to his fantasy, is Master Herbert, however, like all systematisers he prefers the bigger picture, doesn’t want to bother himself with fiddly little details such as how the BLOODY HELL DO WE WEATHER THE NEXT THIRTY YEARS! Breathing heavily, Kins pulls up short and tugs a pack of Tenners from his jacket pocket. Gasper lit, he puffs away with both hands on his hips while declaiming: War can be a stimulating thing — and you can always do with stimulus! — Not having his brother’s perfect recall for words, any more than he does Sirbert’s for figures, Michael doesn’t remember the line. In place of their flat certitude he has only these swelling sensations: