The History Man

they dwell on their amazement. Later on they go upstairs to bed together and, standing on opposite sides of the bed, undress together. They turn down the duvet; they switch on the spotlight over the bed; they touch each other, and make love together. The faces and bodies they have invented to populate their party come into the bedroom with them and join in the fun. Afterwards the light shines down on them, and Barbara says to Howard, 'I'm just afraid I'm losing some of my enjoyment.'

'Of this?' asks Howard, pressing her. 'No,' says Barbara, 'parties. The swinging Kirk scene.'

'You couldn't,' says Howard. 'Maybe I'm getting old,' says Barbara, 'all I see in my mind are dirty glasses.'

'I'll make it interesting for you,' says Howard. 'Oh, sure,' says Barbara, 'you're a great magician of the feelings, aren't you, Howard?'

'I try,' says Howard. 'Howard Kirk,' says Barbara, 'what we have instead of faith.'

The days go by, and the telephones ring, and then it is the morning of Monday 2 October, when things are really starting again: the first day of term, the day of the party. The Kirks rise up, early and together. They pull on their clothes; they tidy the bed; they go downstairs. The kitchen is done out in pine. The rain washes down the window; the room is in wet half-light. In the kitchen Anne Petty stands by the stove in a candlewick dressing-gown, cooking an egg. 'What gets you up so early?' she says. 'We're going shopping,' says Barbara, 'for the party.' Howard goes to the toaster, and presses bread into it; Barbara takes a carton of eggs from the refrigerator. Howard pushes down the button on the toaster; Barbara cracks eggs and drops them into the frying-pan. The children come in, and sit down at the places Anne has already laid for them. 'Cornflakes, yuk,' says Martin. 'Oh, Jesus,' says Barbara, looking in the sink, 'I didn't know we dirtied all those plates last night. How did we do that?'

'We ate,' says Howard, who sits down at the table, inspecting the outrages of the day in the morning's Guardian. Anne Petty looks up; she says, 'You want me to wash them up, Mrs Kirk?'

'Oh, would you really, Anne?' says Barbara, 'there's so much to do today.'

'Oh, yes, Mrs Kirk,' says Anne Petty. 'Eggs, again,' says Martin, as Barbara serves them, 'why do you always give us the same every day?'

'Because I'm busy,' says Barbara, 'and put your plates in the sink when you're through. Howard and I are going shopping.'

'But who's going to take us to school?' asks Celia. 'Oh, hell,' says Barbara, 'now what can we do about that?'

'Would you like me to take them to school?' asks Anne Petty, looking up. 'It would be marvellous,' says Barbara, 'but I hate to ask you. You're not here to do jobs. You're here because we like having you here.'

'Oh, I know that, Mrs Kirk,' says Anne, 'but I really do like helping you. I mean, you're both such busy people. I don't know how you do so much.'

'It takes a certain genius,' says Howard. 'I do hope you're staying on with us for a bit,' says Barbara. 'We'd love to have you, and I want to make one of my little shopping trips to London next weekend. So I'll need someone for the children.'

'Oh, I don't know,' says Anne Petty, looking embarrassed, 'next weekend?'

'She means no,' says Howard, looking up from the Guardian, 'the statement's equivocal, but the subtext says: 'Lay off, you're exploiting me.''

Anne Petty looks at him; she says, 'Oh, Dr Kirk, Kirks don't exploit anybody. Not the Kirks. It's just that I really don't see how I can.'

'Oh, everybody exploits somebody,' says Howard, 'in this social order, it's part of the human lot. But some know it, some don't. When Barbara gets anxious, she starts handing out tasks to people. You're right to resist.'

'I hand out tasks,' says Barbara, 'because I have them to do.'

'Please, look,' says Anne Petty, 'no one's exploiting anyone. Really. I'd love to stay, but my friends are coming back to the flat, and I've paid part-rent.' Barbara says: 'Oh, you're right, Howard. Everyone exploits someone. Notably you me.'

'What did I do?' asks Howard, innocently. 'Oh, God,' says Barbara, 'how his heart bleeds for victims. And he finds them all over. The only ones he can't see are the people he victimizes himself.'

'I'm sorry, Mrs Kirk, I really am,' says Anne Petty. 'You mustn't blame Anne,' says Howard, 'she has her own scene.'

'I'm not blaming Anne,' says Barbara, 'I'm blaming you. You're trying to stop my trip to London. You don't want me to have a weekend in London.'

'You'll have your weekend,' says Howard, 'Leave it to me. I'll fix it. Someone will look after the kids.'

'Who?' asks Celia, 'Anyone nice?'

'Someone Howard likes,' says Barbara. 'Doesn't Howard like Anne?' asks Martin. 'Of course I do,' says Howard. 'Get your coat on. I'm going to fetch the van.'

'It's just I have to move back to the flat with these friends,' says Anne Petty, as Howard walks across the kitchen. 'Of course you do,' says Howard, in the doorway. 'Bring them to the party.' Howard goes out into the hall, and puts on a long leather coat from the peg, and a neat blue denim cap. The conversation continues behind him in the kitchen. He walks down the hall, opens the front door, and steps out. He stands in the wet light. The terrace is puddled, the rain pours down, the city is loud. He pulls the door to behind him, on the domestic social annex, which shrills behind him; he walks out onto the urban stage, the busy movingness of city life, the place where, as every good sociologist knows, the cake of custom crumbles, traditional role-ascriptions break, the bonds of kinship weaken, where the public life that determines the private one is led.

He walks along the terrace, with its cracked pavement stones, its scatter of broken glass; the rain soaks his hair, and begins to stipple the leather of his coat. The terrace curves around him; once an exact and elegant half- circle, the curious dentistry of demolition has attacked it, pulling out house after house from the curve as they have become empty. Most of those that still stand are unoccupied, with broken roofs and vacant, part-boarded windows, plastered with posters for political parties, pop groups, transcendental meditators, or rather surreptitiously occupied, for they are visited by a strange, secret, drifting population of transients. But, though there are few residents, the terrace has been metered for parking; the Kirks have to keep their minivan some streets away, in a square up the hill. A police car heehaws on the urban motorway being sliced through the demolition; buses grind below him, on the promenade. An air-force jet flies in off the sea, its line of flight an upward curve that brings it into sudden visibility over the jagged tops of the houses across the terrace from the Kirks' tall, thin house. He turns the corner; he walks up the hill. The long latticed metal of a construction crane swings into his eyeline, dangling a concrete beam. Up the hill he goes, past the remnants of the old order, the scraps of traditional Watermouth falling beneath the claims of the modern city. There are small shops-a newsagent with a window display of The Naked Ape, a greengrocer with a few crates of vegetables standing outside under a leaky canvas awning, a family butcher with a notice saying 'We keep our meat on ice in hot weather'. There are small back-to-back houses, whose doors open directly onto the street; the bulldozers soon will reach them. Higher on the hill grow the new concrete towers. Before he reaches them Howard turns to the left, into a square of small houses, mostly flats and private hotels. His old blue minivan stands in a line of cars beside the kerb, under a sodium streetlamp. He unlocks the driver's door; he gets in; he turns the ignition twice to fire the engine. He drives the van back and forth, to clear the space. Then he drives out of the square, down through the busy traffic of the hill, and back into the terrace.

On the pavement, outside their tall terrace house, set in its broken curve, Barbara is already standing, waiting for him to come. She wears a white, pinch-waist, full-length raincoat; she carries two red canvas bags, Swiss, from Habitat. He leans over to open the passenger door; she reaches into the van to put the bags into the back. 'You must be feeling very good,' she says, getting into the seat beside Howard, 'everything's starting for you, so you're feeling very good.' Howard lets out the clutch; he turns the van, back and forth, in the terrace. 'I'm fine,' says Howard, driving to the end of the terrace, turning up the hill. 'Shouldn't I be?' Barbara pulls on her seatbelt; she says, 'I can tell when you're feeling good because you always want to make me feel bad.' Howard follows the arrows and the directional marks, the lefts, the rights, the no entries, that lead him up the hill and towards the new shopping precinct. 'I don't want you to feel bad,' says Howard. There is a turn to the left, barred by a red arm; it is the entrance to the high multi-storey car park on the edge of the precinct. 'Well, I do feel bad,' says Barbara. Howard makes the turn; he stops the van in front of the arm; he takes a ticket from the automatic machine. 'You know what you need?' he says; the arm rises, and Howard drives forward. 'Yes,' says Barbara, 'I know exactly what