Out of This World

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I remember, in ’69, three years before he died, when I was home for a brief while in the summer, how we sat up together all night watching those first moon-men take their first, shy steps on the moon. I didn’t think he’d care. Didn’t think he’d give a toss about that old dream come true. But he watched those pictures as if it were all some solemn duty he couldn’t neglect. He’d turned seventy that previous winter. Talked about ‘three score and ten’. And some time that night he leant across to chink his whisky glass against mine and said, without sarcasm, ‘I’ve lived to see men land on the moon.’ As if he truly found the fact momentous, as if he were proud that his life spanned the full, galloping gamut of the twentieth century.

We were close that night. We talked. We talked! He said it was time he was getting out. Getting out of Irving’s way. And he’d never said it like that before, as if it wasn’t just some tired, insincere prevarication but he really wanted his release. It wasn’t home any more, he said, it was headquarters. And it was true, he’d had barbed wire strung from angled posts all along the boundary wall, new alarms wired up. Though that was nothing to what Irving would have in three years’ time. To what Irving has now. And those jokes I used to make — the ‘Arsenal’, the ‘Fortress’ — they weren’t jokes I could make any more. Though I’d never exactly meant them to be funny.

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