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which was the consequence of an accident that his aunt had had while bicycling to work at a biscuit factory near Tynemouth in 1938.
    Simon had heard the story many times before, but one could not deny that Nick recounted it with real wit: his aunt’s pride in her important position, her delight at finding herself a precedent, her Cuttings Book of all the newspaper reports on her case, made a good anecdote. Simon always enjoyed it twice over – once, because he was the only person there who really appreciated the technical details and significance of the case – and then all over again, maliciously, because again, he was the only person there who knew exactly what this particular aunt meant in Nick’s delicate social presentation of himself. Nick’s social background was simple enough to describe in real terms: his father was a dispensing chemist in a miserable working-class district in Gateshead, and as such had enjoyed considerable local prestige, being, comparatively, a man of substance and learning. His mother had been a dressmaker, and her four sisters, of whom the bicycling aunt was one, had all been factory workers. Nick, throughout grammar school, where Simon had first met him, had laboured endlessly to upgrade his own background: the aunts were concealed, rejected, utterly denied. The more affluent aspects of his home life were peddled mercilessly: he had done a good trade, Nick had, during the war, at primary school, with Horlicks tablets, soda bombs, vitamin sweets, and other such lures for
sweet-rationed youth. By the time he reached grammar school, he had stopped trading in sweets, officially, and started trading in his father’s interest in nuclear disarmament, an interest which his schoolfriends found amazingly avant-garde and chic, for a father. Then he arrived at Oxford, sized the situation up in a trice, dropped his emancipated father, and started to trade in his working-class aunts. They were invaluable to him. He flaunted them at debates, bandied them about at parties, flung them at insolent girls at balls, crushed friends with them over a quiet drink in the pub. They were never, of course, allowed near the place: they worked better from afar. Simon was the only person who had ever met any of them. He wondered, sometimes, how Nick could bear to know what Simon knew about him. Was it connivance? For there were things that Nick knew about Simon as well, perhaps.
    From industrial compensation, the conversation moved vaguely and generally on to the validity of cherished grievances: the North versus the South, workman and employer, Arabs and Israel, Northern Ireland, the rights of women. The journalist, who was sitting next to Diana, defended most ably the view that one canot endure more than what passes in one’s own lifetime, and that any claim to hereditary woe is a luxury: it was so much what Simon had once believed, and better put than he could have put it, that he listened with real interest. It was a good subject, the conversation was good, and yet at the back of his mind nagged the knowledge that he no longer thought it to be true, the line taken, and that people endure not one lifetime but many, layers and layers of evolved suffering handed down, worse than anything Freud had ever proposed in the way of predestination, and into his mind, as he tried, inadequately, to formulate something of this conviction, came a whole recollection so vivid that it startled him – his mother, standing next to him in church, looking down at him when she saw what the psalm for the day was, and saying to him crossly and primly and vehemently, her brow wrinkled with outrage, her hat bobbing insecurely as she bent to his low level – ‘Pay no attention to this psalm, it’s wicked, it’s ungodly, Simon. They shouldn’t sing it in this day and age, they shouldn’t really.’ The psalm was the 137th Psalm, about the waters of
Babylon, and its message was that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the