'He wasn't a friend,' says Howard, 'we hardly knew him.'
'He came to a party,' says Barbara. Howard, driving down the hill, turns and looks at her. 'Look,' he says, 'he came to a party. He was on drugs. He and Rosemary were getting into some crazy magical thing together, the kind of thing that hippies switch into when the trips turn sour. He never talked. We don't know what his problems were. We don't know what seemed absurd to him. We don't know where he and Rosemary were going.'
'Do you remember when our sort of people didn't think life was silly?' asks Barbara, 'when things were all wide open and free, and we were all doing something and the revolution was next week? And we were under thirty, and we could trust us?'
'It's still like that,' says Howard, 'people always dropped in and out.'
'Is it really like that?' asks Barbara, 'Don't you think people have got tired? Found a curse in what they were doing?' Howard says: 'A boy dies and you turn it into a metaphor for the times.' Barbara says: 'Howard, you have always turned everything into a metaphor for the times. You've always said that the times are where we are; there's no other place. You've lived off the flavours and fashions of the mind. So has this boy, who came to one of our parties, and had a blue tattoo, and put a rope round his neck in a shed. Is he real, or isn't he?'
'Barbara, you're just feeling depressive,' says Howard, 'take a Valium.'
'Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That's your problem-solving system.' says Barbara. 'Always a bright, radical solution. Revolt as therapy. But haven't we tried all that? And don't you find a certain gloom in the record?' Howard turns and looks at Barbara, inspecting this heresy. He says: 'There may be a fashion for failure and negation now. But we don't have to go along with it.'
'Why not?' asks Barbara, 'after all, you've gone along with every other fashion, Howard.' Howard takes the turn into the terrace; the bottles shake in the back of the van. He says: 'I don't understand your sourness, Barbara. You just need some action.'
'I'm sure you'll find a way of giving me that,' says Barbara, 'the trouble is, I've had most of the action I can take, from you.' Howard stops the van; he puts his hand on Barbara's thigh. He says: 'You just got switched off, kid. Everything's still happening. You'll feel good again,-once it all starts.'
'I don't think you understand what I'm telling you,' says Barbara, 'I'm telling you that your gay belief in things happening doesn't make me feel better any more. Christ, Howard, how did we come to be like this?'
'Like which?' asked Howard. 'Depending on things happening, like this,' says Barbara, 'putting on shows like this.'
'I can explain,' says Howard. 'I'm sure you can,' says Barbara, 'but don't. Are you going straight off to the university?'
'I have to,' says Howard, 'to start the term.'
'To start the trouble,' says Barbara. 'To start the term,' says Howard. 'Well, I want you to help me unload all this stuff, before you go.'
'Of course,' says Howard, 'you take the food in. I'll bring the wine.' And so the Kirks get out, and go round to the back of the van, and unload what is there. They carry it, together, the bread, the cheese and the sausages, the glasses and the big red bottles in their cases, into the house, into the pine kitchen. They spread it on the table, an impressive array of commodities, ready and waiting for the party in the evening. 'I want you back by four, to help me with all this fun we're brewing,' says Barbara. 'Yes, I'll try,' says Howard. He looks at the wine; he goes out back to the van. Then he gets in, and drives off, through the town, towards the university.
II
The Kirks are, indeed, new people. But where some new people are born new people, natural intimates of change and history, the Kirks arrived at that condition the harder way, by effort, mobility, and harsh experience; and, if you are interested in how to know them, and feel about them, then this, as Howard will explain to you, is a most important fact to possess about them. The Kirks are now full citizens of life; they claim historical rights; they have not always been in a position to claim them. For they were not born into the bourgeoisie, with its sense of access and command, and they did not grow up here, in this bright sea-coast city, with its pier and beach, its respectable residences and easy contact with London, its contact with style and wealth. The Kirks, both of them, grew up, in a grimmer, tighter north, in respectable upper working-class cum lower middle-class backgrounds (Howard will gloss this social location for you, and explain its essential ambiguity); and, when they first met each other, and married, some twelve years ago, they were very different people from the Kirks of today: a timid, withdrawn pair, on whom life had sat onerously. Howard was that conventional product of his circumstances and his time, the fifties: the scholarship boy, serious and severe, well-read in the grammar-school library, bad at games and humanity, who had got in to Leeds University, in 1957, by pure academic effort-a draining effort that had, in fact, left him for a time pallid in features and in mind. Barbara was inherently brighter, as she had to be, since girls from that background were not pushed hard academically; and she made it to university from her girls' grammar school, not, like Howard, through strong motive, but through the encouragement and advice of a sympathetic, socialistic teacher of English, who had mocked her sentimental domestic ambitions. Even at university they had both remained timid people, unpolitical figures in an unpolitical, unaggressive setting. Howard's clothes then always managed to look old, even when they were new; he was very thin, very bleak, and had nothing to say. He was reading sociology, then still a far from popular or prestigious subject, indeed a subject most of the people he knew thought very weighty, Germanic, and dull. He had dark yellow nicotined fingers, from smoking Park Drives, his one indulgence or, as he called it then, with a word he has dropped, his vice; and his hair was cut, very short, when he went home, irregularly, at weekends.
Over this time he was interested in society only in theory. He rarely went out, or met people, or looked around him, or acquired anything other than an abstract grasp of the social forces about which he wrote his essays. He worked very hard, and ate his meals with the backstreet family with whom he had digs. He had never at that time been into a restaurant, and almost never into a pub; his family was Wesleyan and temperance. In the third year he met Barbara, or rather Barbara met him; after several weeks, with her taking the initiative, she started sleeping with him, at the flat she shared with three other girls; and she discovered, what she already suspected, that he had never been into a girl either. They grew attached to each other in that third year; though Howard was determined that personal matters should not interrupt his revision for finals. He sat at night with her in the flat, reading over texts, in extended silence, until at last they withdrew into the bedroom with a hot water bottle and a welcome cup of cocoa. 'All we did was huddle together for warmth,' says Howard, in subsequent explanation. 'It was never a relationship.' But, relationship or not, it was hard to break it. In the summer of 1960, they both graduated, Howard getting a first, and Barbara, who had not taken much interest in her English course, and spent more time over Howard's revision than her own, a lower second. Now their course was at an end, they found it hard to separate, to go their different ways. As a result they committed themselves to an institution which, as Howard nowadays explains, is society's technique for permanentizing the inherent contingency of relationships, in the interests of political stability: that is to say, they got married. It was a church wedding, or rather a chapel one, with many relatives and friends, a formal procedure designed to please both their families, to whom they both felt very attached. They had a honeymoon in Rhyl, taking the diesel train and staying in a boarding house; then they returned to Leeds, because Howard was to begin work on his thesis. He was now, on the strength of his good first, a research student, with an SSRC grant, which seemed ample to support them both. So he set to work on his project, a fairly routine sociology-of-religion study of Christadelphianism in Wakefield, a topic he had picked because when younger he had felt a spiritual fascination with the denomination, a fascination he now proceeded to convert into a sociological concern. As for Barbara, she became, of course, a housewife, or rather, as she put it, a flatwife.
For they now began living in a succession of bedsitters and small flats, with old high-level beds with heads and feet, and Victorian lavatories called 'Cascade', and moquette furniture, always looking out over rotting gardens. The gardens, the houses backing onto them, the back streets, the corner shop, the picture-house, the bus routes into the city centre, formed the main horizon and track of their lives, the limit and circumscription of their world. They took some pleasure in being married, because it gave them a sense of being 'responsible'; and they reported home, frequently, to both their families as a contented couple. But in fact, after the first few months together, when the sexual thrill, never very intense, had begun to wear off somewhat, and they looked around themselves, they rather quickly started to be irritated with one another, depressed by their circumstances, harassed by the simplest
