III

So it was in just another such autumn, the autumn of 1967, when Vietnam was a big issue, and the tempers were fraying, but a year before the year, when self-revolutions like the Kirks’ turned into a public matter, that the Kirks moved themselves, south and west, to Watermouth. They drove down from Leeds in the minivan, an item of possession they had just acquired; the new university of Watermouth had tempted him with two additional increments, and for the first time in their lives the Kirks found themselves with a little money to spare. In the van they sat side by side, watching motorway unroll, the landscape change. The baby chattered in its large basket in the back; on the rear window was a sticker saying ‘I live in an effluent society’. In front the Kirks sat silent, as if each one of them was all ready to leap out, as soon as the van rolled to a stop at their destination, and tell his or her own story. It had been a busy summer; and there were stories to tell. For now it was coming to seem to Barbara that this was a false move, a victory for Howard, a defeat for her; passing through the Midlands, south of Birmingham, they crossed a line into error. One trouble was that, over the summer, despite the fact that she believed herself scientifically sealed inside against this sort of intrusion, she had found herself pregnant again; it was a matter of mystery and anger. She was also angry because she saw now that Howard was in the vastly stronger position over the move; he was coming to Watermouth with a reputation ahead of him. It was, admittedly, a slightly shaky reputation, for popularizing innovation; but it really was a reputation. For, also over the summer, his book had come out, and done well. The publishers had changed a franker title to The Coming of the New Sex, which they thought would sell widely; and it was already clear that the book would be a commercial success. It had also been greeted, by the culturally attuned critics of the Sundays and the intelligent weeklies, as a work in consort with the times. Howard had not done a great deal of research on the book, and it was weak on fact and documentation; but what it lacked there it made up in argumentative energy, and a frank sense of participation in the permissive scene. As Barbara would tell people who came up to talk about it, at the many parties they were invited to in Watermouth that autumn: ‘Oh, sex is Howard’s field. I think you can say he’s done a really big probe there.’ But it had generally been found a committed, advanced book, on the right side; and it did sound quite sociological as you read it. So Howard, of course, arrived with an air of esteem already promised him, as well as a useful status as a sexual performer. Barbara, on the other hand, was coming pregnant, and part disabled, and with no reputation ahead of her, one way or the other, and brooding on this over the summer she had begun to resent the fact.

It was lucky that, on arrival, they were able to stay for a while with some old Leeds friends of theirs, the Beamishes, who had made the move down to Watermouth one year earlier, and had helped interest Howard in the place. Henry Beamish was a social psychologist, who had himself made quite a stir the year before by proving in a book that television socialized children much more effectively than their parents ever could. From this controversy he appeared to have done extremely well. Certainly the Beamishes, when the Kirks found them again, had changed. They had left the atmosphere of Leeds’ radical bedsitterland, of beer parties and trips to watch City on Saturdays and demos outside the Town Hall, well behind them, and had found a new style for their new setting. These people who in Leeds had no money, and used to borrow kettles from their friends because they could not afford to buy one of their own, were now settled, outside Watermouth, in an architect-converted farmhouse, where they were deep into a world of Tolstoyan pastoral, scything grass and raising organic onions. Henry Beamish had grown a new beard of the naval type, heavily touched with grey. He looked very well, despite the pallor left by an unfortunate episode shortly before when he had been poisoned by a mushroom, gleaned at dawn off his own estate; he had even acquired a certain baffled, slightly elderly dignity. Myra now looked stouter, wore her hair in a tight Victorian bun, and smoked small brown cigars. It seemed to Howard that there were two accurate phrases for what they had become over the move, though he forbore to use them, for they were his friends, and they both involved the profoundest condemnation: but weren’t they both middle-aged now, and middle-class? The Kirks stared, on their arrival, at the house, at their old friends; they spent much of the visit on their hands and knees with wet toilet paper, sponging out babysick from the good carpet in the smart guest bedroom. It was not an encouraging arrival; but, on the first night, as they sat in front of the opened-out brick fireplace, Henry, pouring homemade wine into Italian glasses, said: ‘It’s strange you should come today. I was just telling some friends of ours about you last night. About that time your marriage nearly broke up. And you came and stayed with us in the flat, Barbara, do you remember? You were carrying the television set and a saucepan.’ ‘Christ, yes, that’s right,’ said Barbara warmly, and immediately felt better, because she realized that she did come with a reputation ahead of her, after all.

The real truth about coming to Watermouth, Howard tells people now, with great frankness, is that their arrival unnerved them both. They had known how to live in Leeds, since it was a society that simply amended the one they had grown up in. But Watermouth, from the start, made them wonder what to become, how to build a nature. Leeds was working class, was built on work; Watermouth was bourgeois, built on tourism, property, retirement pensions, French chefs. As they inspected the Beamishes, it seemed to deny existence, to be a freak bazaar of styles; you could be anything here. Radical philosophy approved this, but here it was bourgeois indulgence. Admittedly, as Howard said, we are all performers, self-made actors on the social stage; all role is self- or other-assigned; yet, for a man who believed that reality didn’t exist yet, he had to admit he found Leeds more real. The Kirks, staring at Watermouth in the indulgent sunshine, discovered they did not know how to place themselves, house themselves. They drove around in the hilly inland behind the town, in Henry’s little 4L Renault, looking at what Henry termed ‘properties’. There were a lot of properties. Myra and Barbara sat in the back, the baby between them, a tight squeeze; friend to friend, they explored and analysed in high detail the latterday ebb and flow of Kirk marital history. In the front seat, Howard sat next to Henry, peering through the windscreen, the visor down, an estate agents’ map on his knee, noting with Northern radical scepticism the exotic social mixes through which they passed. From time to time, feeling the need to counter-balance the prejudiced narrative recorded in the back, he talked, victoriously, to Henry, in the sunlight, of his well-liked book, of the reviews, of the new commission and large advance the publisher had given him. Now and then Henry stopped the car, and they got out, and solemnly examined a property. Henry’s taste in property had been transformed, become rural and bourgeois; he praised, mysteriously, ‘advantages’ like paddocks and stables. The Kirks stood and stared, peering through trees at hills. Never having encountered a property before, they had no idea how to behave in the presence of one; they knew their radical desires were being subtly threatened and impaired, even though Henry told them what was true, that they had more money now, that a mortgage was a good investment for the advance, that the time in their lives, with a second baby, was here when they should settle down. But down was not where they wanted to settle; a hideous deceit seemed to be being practised; Henry, having already destroyed himself, was seeking to inculpate them too. ‘A property is theft,’ Howard kept on saying, looking around at the endless wastes of unpopulated, orderly countryside that surrounded them, depressed them with its frightening timelessness, its unlocated look, its frank detachment from the places where history was happening, the world was going onward and on.

After two days of this, when Henry was about to take them into yet another estate agency in yet another commuterized small town, somewhere in the hinterland of Watermouth, its windows filled with announcements about retirement bungalows, Howard felt the need to speak true. ‘Look, Henry,’ he said, ‘you’re trying to impose some false image on us, aren’t you? We’re not like this, Barbara and me, remember?’ ‘It’s a very sound residential area,’ said Henry, ‘you’d keep your resale value.’ ‘We’d go off our heads in one of these places,’ said Howard, ‘we couldn’t live with these people, we couldn’t live with ourselves.’ ‘I thought you wanted something nice,’ said Henry. ‘No, for Christ’s sake, nothing nice,’ said Howard, ‘I don’t come from anywhere like this. I don’t accept its existence politically. You don’t either, Henry. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’ Henry stared at Howard with a slightly shamefaced, slightly baffled look. ‘There comes a time,’ he said, ‘there comes a time when you realize, Howard. You might want change, well, we all want change. But there is an inheritance of worthwhile life in this country, Howard. We all come to need a place where you can get down deeper into yourself and into, well, the real rhythms of living. That’s what Myra and I are into now, Howard.’ ‘Here?’ asked Howard. ‘There’s nothing here. You stop fighting.’ ‘Well, fighting,’ said Henry, staring at little photographs of houses in the window, ‘I’ll do my bit for betterment. But I’m divided. I’m not wild about all this violent radical zeal that’s about now, all these explosive bursts of demand. They taste of a fashion. Punch a policeman this year. And I can’t see what’s wrong with a bit of separateness and withdrawal from the fray.’ ‘No?’ asked Howard. ‘That’s because you’re bourgeois now, Henry. You have the spirit of a bourgeois.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ said Henry, ‘that’s nasty. I’m trying to give my life a little dignity without robbing anyone else of theirs. I’m trying to define an intelligent, liveable, unharming culture, Howard.’ ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Howard, ‘evasive quietism.’ ‘You know, Henry, I’m sorry,’ said Barbara, ‘but if I lived like you, I’d die first.’ ‘Bourgeois, bourgeois,’ said Howard the next day as, their things packed, the baby in the back of the van, they drove off from the farmhouse after an uncomfortable parting. ‘Well,’ said Barbara, trying to be kind to the kind, the people who had saved her when she was wandering loose with a television set, ‘don’t forget, they haven’t had all our disadvantages.’

They drove, over bridges, through chines, towards the town and the sea; they were escaping, back into Watermouth to get the feel of urban life again, to consort once more with staple reality. There were houses and dustbins and rubbish and crime. In the end, Howard resolved to visit the Social Security department in Watermouth; he needed to set his spirit right, to reassure himself that the place in which he was planting his destiny really did have a sociology – had social tensions, twilight areas, race issues, class struggle, battles between council and community, alienated sectors, the stuff, in short, of true living. Leaving the van in the car park, with Barbara and the baby inside, he penetrated into the bleak offices, and was granted a stroke of luck. For here was working one of his own former students from Leeds, a girl called Ella, who wore granny spectacles, and denim jeans and top, and knew his radical temper, and, like any good student, shared it. An adult girl, Howard said to Barbara later, after she had left her desk in the office and got into the minivan with them, crouching in the back, next to the baby’s basket, promising to show them the real Watermouth. She hunted out the areas of deprivation hidden between and behind the old private hotels, the new holiday flatlets; she probed the unexpected social mixes tucked behind the funfair and the holiday façade of the town; she showed them the acres of urban blight, the concrete of urban renewal. ‘Of course it’s a problem town,’ said Ella. ‘Oh, they’d like to pretend it isn’t, that might discourage the tourists. But anywhere that brings in people for the holiday trade in the summer and then dumps them on unemployment pay in the winter is going to have problems, and they’ve got them.’

‘Any radicals?’ asked Barbara. ‘Plenty,’ said Ella. ‘It’s full of hippies and dropouts. All these places are. It’s a town you can run to and disappear. There are empty houses. Visitors are soft touches. Lots of marginal work. No, it’s a good place.’ She gave some directions and brought them into the slum clearance area. ‘Of course nobody wants to see this, but here’s what they ought to rub their tourists’ faces in,’ she said, pushing her way into an empty old house where meths drinkers, drunks, addicts and runaways came, she said, to spend the night. You could see they did; the Kirks penetrated through the back door into the chaotic brokenness of the house; its stair-rails were snapped, and there was excrement in the corners, litter on the floor, bottles smashed in the bedroom, gaping holes where the glass had been knocked out from windows. Barbara stood in the bleak spaces, holding the baby on her shoulder; Howard wandered around. He said: ‘We could get some permanent squatters into this.’ ‘Why not?’ asked Ella, ‘this one’s going to be around for a long while yet. They’ve not got the cash to pull it down.’ Barbara, sitting down on the bottom stair with the baby, said: ‘Of course we could squat in it ourselves.’ ‘Well, we could,’ said Howard. ‘Maybe this sounds immoral,’ said Ella, ‘but you could even do it legally. I think I could fix it for you. I know all the people in the council to talk to.’ ‘It’s a good scene,’ said Barbara. ‘You couldn’t really call it a property,’ said Howard.

So Ella and the Kirks walked out, through the broken back door; they stood and inspected the remnants of the curved terrace in which the house stood; they looked across to the castle and down toward the promenade. It was the debris of a good address. They drove back to the council offices, and Howard talked to people, and said he was going in there anyway, and he made an arrangement to rent the property, for a very small sum, promising to be out when it was all to be torn down, which would not be until two years’ time. And so the Kirks ended up with an unpropertylike property after all. So, in that autumn, they rented a Willhire van. Howard drove the van, and Barbara tailed him in the minivan, and they moved all their stuff south and west down to Watermouth. When they came to load the van with their things, it was a surprise and mystery to them to see the amount of it; they believed they had almost no possessions, being free-floating people. But there was the cooker, the stereo system, the television set (for by now they had bought one), the blender, the wickerwork rocking chair, the Habitat crockery, the toys, the two filing cabinets and the door that Howard laid across them in order to construct his desk, the many books that he found he had accumulated, the papers in their files, the index cards, the Holorith system, the demographic graphs and charts that came from Howard’s office at the university, the table-lamps, the rugs, the typewriter, the boxes of notes.

They had an official key to the house in the curved terrace; they turned off the main road, parked in front of the terrace, opened the house, and unloaded. It all made a modest presence in the decrepitly fine rooms, with their filth and chaos. They spent three days just cleaning out. Then came the business of tidying, mending, reconstructing, a terrifying task; the house was badly damaged. But Howard now revealed a certain talent for fixing things, a handyman’s skills he had not known he possessed, skills he had, he supposed, picked up from his father. They had all the windows fixed and the boards taken off the ones at the front. Of course, because the place was condemned, it was pointless to do anything major to the fabric. But the house was surprisingly sound. Water ran in through the roof beside the chimney stacks; someone got up there and stripped away all the lead flashing, not even before they had moved in, but a little after, one night when Barbara was there but Howard was away, up in London doing a television programme on the drugs problem on which he was taking a liberal line. The windows kept getting smashed, but Howard learned how to putty in new ones; and after a while this stopped, as if, by some massive consensus created between themselves and the unknown, their residence had at last been granted.

All through that first autumn term, the Kirks worked on their terrace house, trying at first to make it habitable, then more than habitable. Howard would dash back from the university in the minivan as soon as he was through with his seminars and tutorials – those instructive, passionate occasions where he was experimenting with new forms of teaching and relationship – in order to change clothes and set to work again on the rehabilitation. He got some help to fix things, like the lavatories, which were smashed when they came, and the stair-rail which he couldn’t manage himself. But most of the work the Kirks did together. They spent two weeks stripping off all the brown paint that coated the interior woodwork, and then brushed seal into the natural colour of the wood. They bought saws and planks and rulers and replaced floorboards that had gone in. Singlehandedly Howard started painting, doing a lot of walls white and a lot of facing walls black, while Barbara borrowed a sewing machine and put up wide-weave curtains in yellow and orange at the windows. Since the place had to be rewired, they took out all the central lights from the ceilings and focused new lights off the walls at the ceilings and off the floor at the walls. Howard, as the term went on, got to know more and more students; they started to help. Four of them with a rented sander exposed, and then waxed yellow with a rented waxer, the good old wood of the floors. Another brought a sand-blaster and cleaned off the walls of the basement. They would stop in the middle of this to drink or eat or make love or have a party; they were making a free and liveable open space. At first the main furniture was the mattresses and the cushions that lay on the floor, but gradually the Kirks got around to going and buying things, mostly on trips up to London; what they bought was transient furniture, the kind that inflated, or folded up, or fitted this into that. They built desks with filing cabinets and doors, as they had in Leeds, and bookcases out of boards and bricks. What had started as a simple attempt to make space liveable in gradually turned into something stylish, attractive, but that was all right; it still remained for them an informal camp site, a pleasant but also a completely uncommitting and unshaped environment through which they could move and do their thing.

One of the results of this was that things became surprisingly better between the two of them. For the first time, they were giving shape to their lives, making a statement, and doing it out of their own skill and craftsmanship, working together. Watermouth began to please them more and more; they found shops where you could buy real yoghourt, and home-baked bread. They acquired a close, companionable tone with each other, partly because they had not made other friends yet, acquired other points of reference, partly because the people they did meet treated them as an interesting, attached couple. Towards Christmas, Howard got a large royalty cheque for his book, and put most of the money into the house, buying some white Indian rugs that would cover the downstairs floors. Barbara’s was a smaller, more manageable pregnancy this time. Because they lived in a slum area, she got a good deal of treatment and, though it was a second baby, she was allowed forty-eight hours in hospital after the delivery. Howard was there, instructive in his white mask, as she produced the new child. It was a simple, routine delivery, she knew the rhythms perfectly: an elegant achievement, and one that, this time, seemed to offer no direct threat to Howard. He had not had time to get on with another book, but he was deep in pleasure with his new job; he had good students, and the courses he was working out were going well, amassing a considerable following. The house was now in good shape for the baby to come back to; it had its own room, as did the older child; the floors were clean, and there was a sound kitchen. The baby lay in its carrycot in its room; a lot of people came by; they spent a buoyant Christmas. ‘I never wanted any possessions, never,’ you could hear Barbara saying, as they stood in the house, during the parties they now started to give. ‘I never wanted marriage; Howard and I just wanted to live together,’ she said too, as they met more and more people. ‘I never wanted a house, just a place to be in,’ she also said, as they looked around at the bright clean walls and the clear wood floors, ‘they can pull it down when they like now.’ But the house was a perfect social space, and it was regularly filled with people; and as time went on and the place became a centre it seemed harder and harder to think that it ever could be.

As it turned out, there were a lot of people, and a lot of parties, in Watermouth. All through that autumn they had been going to them, in the gaps between working on the house: student parties, political parties, young faculty parties, parties given by vague, socially unlocated swingers who were in town for a while and then disappeared. There were even formal parties; once they were invited out by Howard’s head of department, Professor Alan Marvin, that well-known anthropologist, author of a standard work entitled The Bedouin Intelligentsia. Marvin was one of the originators, the founding fathers, of the university at Watermouth; these were already a distinguishable breed, and, like most of the breed, the Marvins had chosen to live in a house of some dignity in the countryside on the further side of the university, in that bewildering world of paddocks and stables Henry had adopted. The Kirks had already made their mark with the young faculty, but they were instinctively at odds with the older ones; they had a clear-headed refusal to be charmed, or deceived by apparent or token innovation. They drove out in their minivan, self-consciously smelling of the turpentine they had used to get paint off themselves after an afternoon’s work on the house, a smell that gave them the free-floating dignity of craftsmen. The Marvins’ house turned out to be an old, whitewashed converted farmhouse; there were Rovers and Mercedes parked in the drive when they arrived. Howard’s colleagues had warned him that the Marvins lived in a certain Oxbridge dignity, even though Marvin himself was, in the department, a shabby little man who always wore three pencils held by metal clips in his top pocket, as if research and accurate recording of data were never very far from his mind. And so it was; in an ostentatious gesture, lights had been strung in the trees of the big gardens that surrounded the house, and there were people in suits – the Kirks saw suits infrequently – on the lawn, where white wine, from bottles labelled ‘Wine Society Niersteiner’, was being served by quiet, recessive students. The Kirks, Howard in an old fur coat, Barbara in a big lace dress spacious enough to contain the bump of her pregnancy, felt themselves stark against this: intrusive figures in the scene. Marvin took them around, and introduced them, in the near dark, to many faces; only after a while did it dawn upon the Kirks that these were people in disguise, and that these faces he was meeting, above the suits, were the faces of his own colleagues, clad in the specialist wear they had acquired from marriages and funerals, supporting ceremony.

In the adjacent countryside, disturbed birds chattered, and sheep ran about heavily and snorted; Howard stared, and wondered at his place in all this. Barbara, who was cold, went inside, escorted by a punctilious Marvin, concerned about her pregnancy; Howard found himself detained in lengthy conversation by a middle-aged man with a benign, self-conscious charm, and the healthy, crack-seamed face of an Arctic explorer. Moths flew about them while they talked. Howard, in his fur coat, discoursed on a topic he had grown greatly interested in; the social benefits and purgative value of pornography in the cinema. ‘I’ve always been a serious supporter of pornography, Dr Kirk,’ said the man he was talking to, ‘I have expressed my view in the public forum many times.’ It dawned on Howard, from the tone of demotic regality in which he was being addressed, that he was talking to no other person than Millington Harsent, that radical educationalist, former political scientist, well-known Labour voter and mountain climber, who was Vice-Chancellor of the university of which Howard was now a part. He was a man of whom Howard had heard much; the radical aroma, the sense of educational freshness, that the colour supplements and professional journals had found in Watermouth were said to emanate from him. More locally, he had the reputation of suffering from building mania, or, as it was put, an Edifice Complex, and to have put many of his energies into dreaming up, along with Jop Kaakinen, the futuristic campus where Howard taught. It is hard to be a Vice-Chancellor, who must be all things to all men; Harsent had won the reputation for being this, but in reverse; he was thought by the conservatives to be an extreme radical, by the radicals to be an extreme conservative. But now this man, who was known for bonhomous democracy (he rode round the campus on a bicycle, and was said to have smoked pot occasionally at student parties), stood before Howard, and spoke to him warmly, and squeezed one of his shoulders, and congratulated the university on Howard’s presence there, and discussed his book as if he knew what was in it; Howard warmed, and felt at ease. ‘I can’t tell you how pleased we are to have someone of your stature here,’ said Harsent. ‘You know,’ said Howard, ‘I’m quite pleased to be here.’

Harsent and Howard passed into the house together, in search of the source of the Niersteiner; Harsent pressed on Howard, out of a briefcase in the hall, a copy of the university’s development plan, and a special brochure, an elegant document printed on dove-grey paper, and written five years earlier still, at the beginning of all these things, by Jop Kaakinen, whose inspired buildings were springing everywhere into existence on campus. ‘That’s Genesis,’ said Harsent, ‘I suppose you might say we’re in Numbers now. And, I’m afraid, getting close to Job and Lamentations.’ Harsent moved on to speak to other guests, doing his social duty; Howard stood with a glass of wine in Marvin’s kitchen, with its Aga cooker and an old bread oven in the wall, and studied the brochure. It was called ‘Creating a Community Building a Dialogue’, and on the cover was a drawing of five students, for some reason in that state of crotchless nudity beloved of the stylists of the early sixties, and talking to each other in a very energetic dialogue indeed. Inside Howard read, in facsimile handwriting: ‘We are not alone making here the new buildings; we are creating too those new forms and spaces which are to be the new styles of human relationship. For an architecture is a society, and we are here making the society of the modern world of today.’ Howard put down the brochure, and went out, under the low oak beams of the living room, to survey his colleagues, chattering on the darkness of the lawn; he thought about the contrast between this rural place and the tall Kaakinen buildings that were transforming the ancient estate where the university stood. After a while, he looked around the house and found Barbara, lying on a sofa in an alcove, her head in the lap of a senior lecturer in Philosophy. ‘Oh, boy,’ said Barbara, ‘you’ve made a good impression. The Vice-Chancellor came and found me, just to tell me how much he liked you.’ ‘He’s trying to nullify you,’ said the Philosophy man, ‘steal your fire.’ ‘He couldn’t,’ said Barbara, ‘Howard’s too radical.’ ‘Watch it, they’ll charm you,’ said Barbara later, her foetal bump against the dashboard, as they drove home through the darkness into Watermouth. ‘You’ll become an establishment pet. A eunuch of the system.’ ‘Nobody buys me,’ said Howard, ‘but I really think there’s something for me here. I think this is a place I can work with.’

But that was in the late autumn of 1967; and after 1967 there came, in the inevitable logic of chronicity, 1968, which was the radical year, the year when what the Kirks had been doing in their years of personal struggle suddenly seemed to matter for everybody. Everything seemed wide open; individual expectation coincided with historical drive; as the students massed in Paris in May, it seemed that all the forces for change were massing everywhere with them. The Kirks were very busy that year. On campus the Maoist and Marxist groups, whose main business up to now seemed to be internecine quarrel, found a mass of activist support; there was a sit-in in the administration building, and a student sat at the Vice-Chancellor’s desk, while the Vice-Chancellor established his own office in the boiler house and tried to defuse the tension. The Revolutionary Student Front went to see him, and asked him to declare the university a free state, a revolutionary institution aligned against outworn capitalism; the Vice-Chancellor, with great reasonableness, and a good deal of historical citation, explained his feelings of essential sympathy, but urged that the optimum conditions and date for total revolution were not yet here. They could probably be most realistically set some ten years away, he said; in the meantime, he suggested, they should go away, and come back then. This angered the revolutionaries, and they wrote ‘Burn it down’ and ‘Revolution now’ in black paint on the perfectly new concrete of the perfectly new theatre; a small hut was set on fire, and seventeen rakes totally destroyed. Hate and revolutionary zeal raged; people in the town poked students on the buses with umbrellas; there were demonstrations in the main square in town, and some windows were smashed in the largest department store. The faculty, as faculty do, divided, some supporting the radical students, some issuing statements recalling students to their duties. People stopped speaking to people, and offices and professors’ rooms were broken into and files removed. A state of minor terror reigned, and minds were stretched and strained; ancient marriages broke up, as one party went with the left, the other with the right; all old tensions came to the surface. But Howard was not divided; he joined the sit-in, and his intense, small face was one of those that could be seen, by those locked out, peering forth from the windows, shouting, ‘Free thought is at last established,’ and ‘Critical consciousness reigns,’ or waving the latest slogans from Paris. In fact he was an inevitable focus, and was very active everywhere, radicalizing as many people as he could, leaving the sit-in to speak to workers’ groups and trades union meetings. Their terrace house became a meeting place for all the radical students and faculty, town drop-outs, passionate working communists; there were posters in the windows that said ‘Smash the System’, ‘Reality does not exist yet’, ‘Power to the people’. And as for the Kaakinen-plan university, and its pious modernismus and concrete mass, and the radical new education, the new states of mind and styles of heart, enshrined inside it, that all came to seem to Howard a hard institutional shell designed to restrain and block the onward flood of consciousness. Not radical enough. Nothing was radical enough for the Kirks that year. Howard stared at the campus from the sit-in and what he said was: ‘I think this is a place I can work against.’

The summer realized the Kirks as they had never felt realized before. Time no longer seemed a contingent waste in which one passed out one’s life; it was redeemable; the apocalypse stood at hand, the new world waited to be born. All present institutions and structures, the structures whose nature he had so carefully elaborated in his classes, now seemed to be masks and disguises, crude acts of imposition set over the true human reality, which came real around him. A massive, violent impatience overcame him; he looked around, and saw nothing but false and corrupt interests checking the passionate movement towards reality. But the times were his times; his beliefs were at last activated and made real. He found, too, that he was good at persuading people that this was so, that a new era of human fulfilment and creativity was at hand. He was busy at many meetings; and lots of people, on the edge of breakthrough, came to talk to him. He discussed with them their struggles with the vestigialities of the past, their breaking marriages. Barbara, large and yellow-haired, grew alive with expectation too; she began to push at the world. She felt herself on the front line again; the baby was old enough to leave. But now her old idea that she would go into social work, which meant a formal, institutional course, seemed just a compromise with the system; she wanted more, to act. She helped start a community newspaper. She led consumer protests. She shouted, ‘Fuck,’ in council meetings. She joined in with a group of Women’s Libbers and led consciousness-raising sessions. She hurried women to clinics and welfare services, hoping to strain them to the point of collapse, so the people could see how they had been duped. She arranged sit-ins at doctors’ surgeries and employment agencies. She helped get a Claimants’ Union started. The sub-culture, the counter-culture, clustered around them, and the parties they went to, the parties they held, were now of a different kind: activist occasions, commemorating the anniversary of Sharpville or the May struggle in Paris, and ending in a plan for a new campaign. The running motto was ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’; it was in the summer of 1968 that Howard was thirty, and Barbara thirty-one. But they did trust themselves, and they were trusted; they were on the side of the new.

But that was in 1968; now time has passed. Since then much has been going on with the Kirks, but the intimacy, warmth and consensus of that year, seems hard to recover. They look for it; they have a strong sense of something that was undelivered then, and a hazy dream still shimmers ahead of them: a world of expanded minds, equal dealings, erotic satisfactions, beyond the frame of reality, beyond the limits of the senses. They remain in their terrace house, and they stand somehow still on the fulcrum between end and beginning, in a history where an old reality is going and a new one coming, living in a mixture of radiance and radical indignation, burning with sudden fondnesses, raging with sudden hates, waiting for a plot, the plot of historical inevitability, to come and fulfil the story they had begun in bed in Leeds after Hamid had slept with Barbara. They are busy people. Howard, with a group of students and a deep radical intent, has had a rehabilitation study done of the entire area where they live, part of a grass-roots exercise in local democracy. The local council, now impressed with Howard’s urbanology, have accepted this scheme; this has the beneficial consequence that the Kirks will keep their house, while the surviving houses in the terrace will ultimately be restored. Beyond the windows of their house still stretches the waste, the transitional acres of devastation, the touches of reconstruction. Children have made playgrounds in the rubble, out of which, at a distance, prod grey, shuttered concrete tower blocks, new precincts, the terminus of the urban motorway. In the distance, across the mess, signs flash, saying ‘Finefare’, ‘El Dorado’, ‘Life Again Boutique’. Jet fighters fly overhead; motorscooters whine in the streets round about; there are muggings in the spaces between the bright sodium lights. By day, adolescent bottle-breakers and five-minute fornicators inhabit the rubble around them. At night the Kirks can stand inside their house, fresh from Wiener schnitzel, and see a flicker of small lights spurting in the derelict houses across the way: the meths drinkers and wandering hippies creep constantly into occupation, making an independent lifestyle, groaning in the darkness, sometimes setting fire to themselves. The Kirks respond each according to his competence: Barbara takes them Thermoses of coffee and blankets, and Howard counts them and, in the basement study he has now made – a guilty item in their now all too passable life – he writes up the results in indignant pieces for New Society and Socialist Worker.

The Kirks do not believe in property; but they look out upon this apocalyptic landscape of the times, these craters, this rubble, these clutches of willow-herb, these drifting migrants, with a sense of territoriality. It is the outside of the inside of their minds, their perfect vista; like landed squires having their portraits painted, they can be posed appropriately against it. Here is Howard, small and elegant, his Zapata moustache drooping around the corners of his mouth, the hair thinning slightly and therefore combed forward, the firm jaw jutting in an angry, thrusting look; beside him, his good wife Barbara, in her long caftan, large and light-haired, Thermos in hand, one fist slightly raised and clenched; behind them, in strong detail, a scatter of broken forms, a coming down and a going up, society and consciousness in transformation; the two central figures equal, their eyes alert, their limbs twitching, struggling to get out of the frame and on with the plot of history. The plot of history; it serves them, and it matters to them, but somehow it doesn’t quite give them all now. For of course they are now in their middle thirties, and certain things have been achieved; that is part of the trouble, as Howard, who is frank in his own self-exposure, will tell you. As a famous radical at the university, Howard has a senior lectureship there, and has been put on a fair number of committees. He is still active in the town’s radical causes, in a free school for underprivileged children, a rescue campaign called People In Trouble, and in the radical journals, where he writes often. He edits a sociology series for a paperback publisher, and has published a second book, The Death of the Bourgeoisie. The Kirks go to publishers’ parties in Bloomsbury, and radical socialist parties in Hampstead, and parties for new boutiques in the King’s Road. And of course they give good parties of their own, like the one they are giving tonight.

They are very busy people, with very full diaries; the days may lie contingently ahead of them, but the Kirks always have a plot of many events, an inferior plot to the one they have come to desire, but one that gives them much to do. And this is as well, for it means that they do not conflict with each other as directly as they might, for each in his or her own way distrusts the other, in some nameless; unexpressed dissatisfaction. Having bound themselves by marriage, they persist with it; but it is an adult, open marriage. They are both having affairs, though affairs now of a rather different kind. ‘See a friend this weekend’ say the advertisements at the railway station; Barbara does. She has met an actor called Leon, twenty-seven years old, who wears yak coats and does small parts at the Traverse and on television, on the train up to London one Friday. Now, every so often, she takes a weekend in London, and spends it at his flat, having first been careful to ensure that proper arrangements have been made about the children. These she calls her shopping trips, for she shops too: she makes avaricious love to Leon over the weekend, and then moves on to Biba, coming back home on the midmorning train on Monday with a brighter look on her face and several dresses, each in their elegant, dark brown plastic bags. Meanwhile, Howard is not idle. He has various desultory interludes; he has been having these for several years. But now he is spending a good deal of time with a colleague of his, a handsome big girl in her late thirties, whose name is Flora Beniform, a social psychologist who has worked with Laing and the Tavistock Clinic. Flora is formidable, and she likes going to bed with men who have troubled marriages; they have so much more to talk about, hot as they are from the intricate politics of families which are Flora’s specialist field of study. Flora has a service apartment in a suburb of Watermouth, a clean and simple place, for she is often away. And here Howard and Flora lie in bed for hours, if they can spare long hours, fondling each other intimately, considerably satisfying each other, without too great commitment, but above all talking things over.

And there is much to talk over. ‘What do you fear from her?’ asks Flora, her big weight lying on top of Howard, her breasts before his face. ‘I think,’ says Howard, ‘we compete too closely in the same area. It makes sense. Her role’s still bound too tightly to mine; that traps her growth, so she feels compelled to undermine me. Destroy me from within.’ ‘Are you comfortable there?’ says Flora, ‘I’m not squashing you?’ ‘No,’ says Howard. ‘Destroy you how?’ asks Flora. ‘She has to find a weak core in me,’ says Howard. ‘She wants to convince herself that I’m false and fake.’ ‘You have a lovely chest, Howard,’ says Flora. ‘So do you, Flora,’ says Howard. ‘Are you false and fake?’ asks Flora. ‘I don’t think so,’ says Howard, ‘not more than anyone else. I just have a passion to make things happen. To get some order into the chaos. Which she sees as a trendy radicalism.’ ‘Oh, Howard,’ says Flora, ‘she’s cleverer than I thought. Is she having affairs?’ ‘I think so,’ says Howard. ‘Can you move, you’re hurting me?’ Flora tumbles off him and lies by his side; they rest there, faces upward toward the ceiling, in her white apartment. ‘Don’t you know?’ asks Flora. ‘Don’t you bother to find out?’ ‘No,’ says Howard. ‘You have no proper curiosity,’ says Flora. ‘There’s a living psychology there, and you’re not interested. No wonder she wants to destroy you.’ ‘We believe in going our own way,’ says Howard. ‘Cover yourself up with the sheet,’ says Flora, ‘you’re sweating. That’s how people catch colds. Anyway, you stay together.’ ‘Yes, we stay together, but we distrust one another.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ says Flora, turning on her side to look at him, so that her big right breast dips against his body, and wearing a puzzled expression on her face, ‘but isn’t that a definition of marriage?’

Flora has a comfortable room, a soft bed, a telephone beside it, and an ashtray, where a cigarette has burned away, while they have been busy. Howard looks at the ceiling; he says: ‘You think we shouldn’t be married? Did you come?’ ‘I always come,’ says Flora. ‘No, I didn’t say that. It’s an institution of multiple utility. I myself prefer unconditioned fornication, but that’s just my particular choice within the options. Marriages can be very interesting. I think a lot of life gets worked out within that most improbable relationship.’ ‘I suppose Barbara and I really belong to the marriage generation, despite ourselves,’ says Howard. ‘If we’d been five years younger, we’d just have shacked up together. Taken the best of it, and then cut loose.’ ‘But why don’t you cut loose?’ asks Flora. ‘Explain to me.’ ‘I’m not quite sure,’ says Howard, ‘I think we both still have expectations. We feel there’s something yet to achieve. Somewhere else to go.’ ‘You’ve a spot on your back, Howard,’ says Flora. ‘Turn over and let me squeeze it. Where to go?’ ‘Your nails are sharp,’ says Howard. ‘I don’t know. There’s still a psychic tie.’ ‘You haven’t quite finished defeating each other,’ says Flora, ‘is that it?’ ‘The battle means something,’ says Howard, ‘it keeps us alive.’ ‘Well, you thrive,’ says Flora. ‘Does Barbara?’ ‘She’s a bit depressed,’ says Howard, ‘but that’s just the price of a dull summer. She needs a bit of action.’ ‘Oh, well,’ says Flora, ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to fix that. Okay, Howard, out you get. Time to go home to matrimony.’ Howard gets out of the big bed; he goes to the chair on which his clothes are neatly laid, picks up his shorts, and puts them on. He says: ‘Shall I see you again soon?’ For he is never quite sure of Flora, never quite sure whether he is having an affair with her, or a treatment, with inclusive intimacies, which could be terminated abruptly at any moment, with the patient deemed fully recovered and fit to return to normal married life. ‘Oh, well,’ says Flora, reaching with a heave of her large naked self, to the bedside table, from which she picks up her diary, a pencil, and her glasses, ‘I’m awfully busy just now, with the start of term. I hope it’s going to be a quiet term for once.’ ‘Oh, Flora,’ says Howard, ‘where’s your radical passion? What’s life without confrontation?’

Flora puts on her glasses; she stares at Howard through them. ‘I hope you’re not brewing trouble for us, Howard,’ she says. ‘Would I?’ asks Howard, innocently. ‘I thought you just explained it was your way of keeping your marriage alive,’ says Flora. ‘That, and coming here.’ ‘When can I come here next?’ asks Howard, pulling on his socks. Flora opens her diary; she flicks through the pages, as fully written over as the pages in that other diary which stands by the Kirks’ telephone, in the hall that Howard must in a minute get back to. ‘I’m sorry, Howard,’ she says, looking at its busy pages, ‘I’m afraid we’ll just have to leave it open. I seem to be hopping about all over the place for a bit.’ ‘Oh, Flora,’ says Howard, ‘first things first.’ ‘That’s what I’m doing,’ says Flora. ‘Never mind, Howard. It will give you a chance to make some things happen. And then you’ll have something more interesting to tell me next time.’ ‘Well, there’s one evening you’ve got to keep free,’ says Howard. ‘Next Monday. Come to a party.’ ‘That’s the first day of term,’ says Flora, looking in her diary. ‘You do pick awkward days.’ ‘It’s the perfect day,’ says Howard. ‘New starts all round. A beginning-again party.’ ‘You never learn, do you?’ says Flora. ‘There are very few new beginnings. Only more of the same.’ ‘I don’t believe you,’ says Howard, ‘being a radical. There’ll be plenty of interesting things happening there.’ ‘I’m sure,’ says Flora. ‘What time?’ ‘About eight,’ says Howard. ‘An informal party. If you see what I mean.’ ‘Oh, I think so,’ says Flora. ‘Well, I’ll see, I may have to go to London. I’ll come if I can, I won’t if I can’t. Can we leave it like that?’ Howard puts on his jacket. ‘Oh, come,’ says Howard, ‘however late. We’ll be going on most of the night.’ ‘Well, I’ll try,’ says Flora, and, naked except for her glasses, she takes her little silver pencil, and writes, amid the scribble that fills the entry at the top of the page for the new and coming week, ‘Party at Howard’s’, and adds a question mark. Howard leans over Flora; he kisses her forehead; ‘Thanks,’ he says. Flora swings her big bulk off the bed; she says, ‘I’m going to the bathroom. Can you find your own way out?’ ‘I always have,’ says Howard. ‘Now don’t count on me,’ says Flora. ‘I do,’ says Howard. ‘Don’t,’ says Flora, ‘I refuse to be counted on. We’re not married, you know.’ ‘I know,’ says Howard, ‘but what kind of party will it be if you don’t come?’ ‘Much the same,’ says Flora, ‘you’ll find a way of making something happen to you, won’t you?’ ‘You have a cynical view of me, Flora,’ says Howard. ‘I just know you,’ says Flora, ‘have a novel Monday.’ Howard goes out of the bedroom, and across Flora’s dark living room, and down the stairs of the apartment block. The minivan is parked discreetly under the trees; he gets in, and drives down the marked roads into the city centre.