THAT FEELS A LONG TIME AGO, NOW. Jane and I have been separated since our terrible argument last Christmas. Then, in May, at Father’s funeral, she led me to believe that there was some hope. I remember very clearly her words: “I want you to prove to me over the next few months that you can be honest with me, honest about absolutely everything, from the highest matter to the lowest.” But she has not kept her side of the bargain, because she never phones me or sees me. So I have good days and bad days. This week I have been in despair. I can’t work on the Ph.D.; I can’t seem even to work on the BAG. Empty days. Generally, I go to bed with the best intentions, and I am optimistic that something will work itself out. At night, I sit in bed surrounded by many books as if by a flotsammed sea: I believe in stocking the unconscious for its nightly winter. But nothing is right after that. First, because it is September and still quite hot, I must have the bedroom window open, and insects come in. And I have to kill them. I cannot sleep with an insect nearby; I have a phobia that it will land on my face as I sleep. As soon as it announces itself I leap from my bed. I have spent a good deal of the nights this summer squashing insects against the wall: mosquitoes fluffing along the walls with dizzy legs, flies with their cloudy wings and that disgusting way in which they stick to the wall and cudgel their front legs at me, beetles as greasy and shiny as coffee beans, and wasps, many many wasps, so
menacing and yet so oddly slow and easy to kill. All of them must be exterminated.
And then I find that I can’t sleep, and the “neutralizing” technique which has helped my insomnia in the past proves useless at the moment. The traffic is only really silent in the early morning. Didn’t Heine say that Germany kept him awake? Well, London keeps me awake all right. So I abandon sleep and get up early. “Man’s first duty on rising—to blush for himself,” says a favourite philosopher of mine. I don’t blush; I look at my dark morning beard in the mirror of the mouldy bathroom and smile because of something silly Max said to me when we were both seventeen and first beginning to shave. Max told me then, in a voice as masculine as possible, that sometimes he shaved “three times in one session,” even if it made the skin sore, because this chased the stubble away for three times as long.
I look out of the window at the Finchley Road. At dawn it is finally quiet, for about an hour. A kind of grey caul hangs over the buildings. Far away, I can hear the distant glamour of London’s constant noise, the soft, dashing, marine thunder. Soon Mr. Rowan will come, with his shuttlecock of many keys, to open up downstairs; and then Theo will arrive at the Olympus, the Greek café opposite. The day is starting—but to what end? For what? I light a cigarette, get my coffee from the catarrhal machine, and look at the shelves in the hope that somewhere is the book that might redeem my life. Perhaps it will be Spinoza the heretic, or Leibniz the justifier, or Hume the sceptic, or Schopenhauer the true Freudian, or simply Plato the first? And then I get out the papers of my Ph.D … .
Today was typical. I spent an hour reading some of my favourite Psalms, went back to bed to sleep, got up again, spent another hour looking vaguely at my books while wondering if Jane might phone. Then I had to collect my dole cheque; the office is a good way up the Finchley Road. After that it was lunchtime, and I dropped into the Olympus to eat, and to say hello to Theo, the waiter there. I love to ask him, with the seasoned privilege of the regular, “What’s good today?” even though the menu never changes. Theo’s thick, unruly eyebrows are like bunches of tobacco. He and I agree about religion. He hates Greece, hates the Orthodox Church.
“All those icons make me feel I’m being watched,” he complained to me today.
“Well, that’s the point, you are being watched.”
“Yeah, that is just what I say.”
Theo deliberately encourages new patrons into arguments about the Elgin Marbles, so that he can surprise them by arguing for their retention in the British Museum. “Leave them where the air is good and they have a hundredpercent experts who know what to do! Athens air is like this café, for crazy’s sake.”
After lunch I went for a long walk down Adelaide Road, through the curling backstreets to Primrose Hill, where there are little squares that suddenly appear, holidays from the city. Right now, because it is the end of summer, the pavements are clingy with mashed blossom. The trees made me think of Sundershall, which is so much in my mind at present. Sundershall is surrounded by a theatre of hills, and one of these hills is covered with trees, the most beautiful trees. In winter, they are rather terrifying: when their branches are bare and
gnarled, they look inverted, as if their own roots are waving in the air. In summer, they exuberate into green, each leaf a delegate sent out by life, and the English oaks swell so that their broad stems seem only pedestals to the caught heaviness above them …