Those, then, were the facts, insofar as my choice of words can describe them.
How I reacted to all this is another matter. Nearly everyone has to suffer the loss of a parent at some point in life, new jobs and flats can be found in time, and the unhappiness that follows the end of a love-affair eventually goes away, or is replaced by the excitement of meeting another person. But for me all these came at once; I felt like a man who had been knocked down, then trodden on before he could get up. I was demoralized, bruised and miserable, obsessed with the accumulating unfairness of life and the crushing mess of London. I focused much of my distemper on London: I noticed only its bad qualities. The noise, the dirt, the crowds, the expensive public transport, the inefficient service in shops and restaurants, the delays and muddles: all these seemed to me symptomatic of the random factors that had disrupted my life. I was tired of London, tired of being myself and living in it. But there was no hope in such a response, because I was becoming inward-looking, passive and self-destructive.
Then, a fortunate accident. Through having to sort out my father's papers and letters, I canie in contact again with Edwin Miller.
Edwin was a family friend, but I had not seen him for years. My last memory, in fact, was of him and his wife visiting the house while I was still at school. I must then have been thirteen or fourteen. Impressions from childhood are unreliable: I remembered Edwin, and other adult friends of my parents, with an uncritical sense of liking, but this was second-hand from my parents. I had no opinions of my own. A combination of schoolwork, adolescent rivalries and passions, glandular discoveries, and everything else of that age, must have been making a more immediate impression on me.
It was refreshing to meet him from the vantage of my own adulthood. He turned out to be in his early sixties, suntanned, wiry, full of an unassumed friendliness. We had dinner together at his hotel on the edge of Bloomsbury.
It was still early spring, and the tourist season had barely begun, but Edwin and I were like an island of Englishness in the restaurant. I remember a group of German businessmen at a table near ours, some Japanese, some people from the Middle East; even the waitresses who brought us our portions of roast topside beef were Malaysian or Filipino. All this was emphasized by Edwin's bluff, provincial accent, reminding me irresistibly of my childhood in the suburbs of Manchester. I had grown used to the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of shops and restaurants in London, but it was Edwin who somehow underlined it, made it seem unnatural. I was aware all through the meal of a distracting nostalgia for a time when life had been simpler. It had been narrower, too, and the vague memories were a distraction because not all of them were pleasant. Edwin was a kind of symbol of that past, and for the first half-hour, while we were still exchanging pleasantries, I saw him as representing the background I had happily escaped when I first moved hack to London.
Yet I liked him too. He was nervous of me--perhaps I also represented some kind of symbol to him--and compensated for this by too much generosity about how well I had been doing. He seemed to know a lot about me, at least on a superficial level, and I presumed he had got all this from my father. In the end his lack of guile made me own up, and I told him frankly what had happened to my job. This led inevitably to my telling him most of the rest.
"It happened to me too, Peter," he said. "A long time ago, just after the war. You'd have thought there were a lot of jobs around then, but the lads were coming back from the Forces, and we had some bad winters."
"What did you do?"
"I must have been about your age then. You're never too old for a fresh start. I was on the dole for a bit, then got a job with your dad. That's how we met, you know."
I didn't know. Another residue of childhood: I assumed, as I had always assumed, that parents and their friends never actually met but had somehow always known one another.
Edwin reminded me of my father. Although physically unalike they were about the same age, and shared some interests. The similarities were mostly my creation, perceived from within. It was perhaps the flat northern accent, the intonation of sentences, the manneristic pragmatism of an industrial life.
He was just as I remembered him, but this was impossible. We were both fifteen years older, and he must have been in his late forties when I last saw him. His hair was grey, and thin on the crown; his neck and eyes were heavily wrinkled; there was a stiffness in his right arm, which he remarked on once or twice. He could not possibly have looked like this before, yet sitting there in the hotel restaurant with him I was reassured by the familiarity of his appearance.
I thought of other people I had met again after a period of time. There was always the first surprise, an internal jolt: he has changed, she looks older. Then, within a few seconds, the percep tion changes and all that can be seen are the similarities. The mind adjusts, the eye allows; the ageing process, the differences of clothes and hair and possessions, are edited out by the will to detect continuity. Memory is mistrusted in the recognition of more important identifications. Body-weight might differ, but a person's height or bone-structure do not. Soon it is as if nothing at all has altered.
The mind erases backwards, re-creating what one remembers.
I knew Edwin ran his own business. After a few years working for my father he had set up on his own. At first he had taken on general engineering jobs, but eventually set up a factory that specialized in mechanical valves.
These days his principal customer was the Ministry of Defence, and he supplied hydraulic valves to the Royal Navy. He had intended to retire at sixty, but the business was prospering and he enjoyed his work. It occupied the major part of his life.
"I've bought a little cottage in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border.
Nothing special, but just right for Marge and me. We were going to retire down there last year, but the place needs a lot of doing up. It's still empty."
"How much work is there to do?" I said.
"Mostly redecorating. The place hasn't been lived in for a couple of years. It needs rewiring, but that can wait. And the plumbing's a bit antiquated, you could say."
"Would you like me to make a start on it? I'm not sure I could take on the plumbing, but I'd have a go at the rest."
It was an idea that was sudden and attractive. An escape from my problems had presented itself. In my recently acquired hatred of London, the countryside had assumed a wistful, romantic presence in my mind. Talking about Edwin's cottage, that dream took on a concrete shape, and I became certain that if I stayed in London I would only sink further into the helplessness of selfpity. Everything became plausible to me, and I tried to talk Edwin into renting me his cottage.
"I'll lend it to you free, lad," Edwin said. "You can have it as long as you need it. Provided, of course, you do a spot of decorating, and when Marge and me decide it's time to give it all up, then you'll have to look for somewhere else to go."
"It'll he for just a few months. Long enough to get myself back on my feet."
"We'll see."
We discussed a few details, but the arrangement was finalized in a matter of minutes. I could move down there as soon as I liked; Edwin would mail me the keys. The village of Weobley was less than half a mile away, the garden would have to be looked at, it was a long way to the nearest mainline railway station, they wanted white paint downstairs and Marge had her own ideas about the bedrooms, the phone was disconnected but there was a call-box in the village, the septic tank would have to be emptied and perhaps cleaned out.