I saw the stranger’s eye almost close and the fine hairs of the lashes suspended trembling. Perhaps it was because it was magnified by the glasses that I saw it so clearly and for what seemed such a long time. Under the heavy white flesh of the lid, there was a line of white as if the eyeball had rolled up. At the last moment, a faint smile acknowledged me. Fixed on every muscular fold and tightening, I did not miss a detail but had no idea what any of it meant. Meeting him at another time, another place, I would have thought his smile was too . . . friendly. I have always been suspicious of people who wanted to be nice to me.

Confused by his smile, I let him go by, yet if I had doubted what I had seen I only had to look again over the parapet. Instead, I followed him. He did not look back. Our shadows moved along the blank wall of the factory. The ground beat up under my feet too painfully for me to hurry. His shadow ducked and beckoned ahead of me, but when I came to the corner the narrow side street was empty. There were half a dozen cars parked. He was not in any of them. A door opened on to a yard and I crossed and looked inside the factory. It was abandoned, derelict, a vacancy of echoing concrete. I began to shake, but that was only because it was so cold out of the sun.

Back on the bridge, a man was leaning against the parapet looking down at the river. He wasn’t old, maybe about fifty, but he looked as if he had all the time in the world and nothing to fill it. As I came near, he took a pipe from his mouth and with a fat plop of pursed lips spat over the side. The stream of brown juice splashed on the wood of a pier built out from the wall. There was nothing else on it, not even a stain of red on the planks as far as I could see. It was hard to be sure though because of the strangeness of the light.

The issue settled like strings of clover honey in the frying water. Saul had slain his thousands and David his ten thousands but I gave myself the name mass-murderer, true man of the twentieth century. It was not something I usually did in the bath. Desperate ills, unusual remedies. At least to my credit sex had been the last thing on my mind.

The door handle shook above my head. Miracle that I had been left in peace so long. Everybody would be out eating. The couple that ran the place lived on the bottom floor and let out the other two and the attic where Muldoon roosted. They only provided breakfast, or rather he did before he went to work. Heavy food, but plenty of it, fried eggs, bacon, sausages, fried pancakes, seas of strong tea: more a labourer’s feed than a student’s. He was from Coleraine in Northern Ireland and apparently they ate that way there. His name was Kennedy, a melancholy man looking older than his wife, who was blonde, very small made, with a bright silly face that got unexpectedly shrewd if you claimed an overcharge on the electric. In the house they called her Jackie, which she seemed to like, taking the joke as a compliment. He worked as a clerk in a bookie’s so he was in and out of the house at odd times.

After a pause, the handle rattled, cracking on the release like a frosty morning rifle behind the farm at home. I didn’t feel like struggling out for Willie Clarke or foxy-faced Muldoon the failed seminarist, who had jumped over the wall into personnel in Marks or somewhere; and if it was Kilpatrick I’d hang on till he gave up, not wanting to find myself in a fight. By this time, though, he’d have been kicking the door. I stirred the water with my hand and ran in more hot.

At the sound of the water, the door was shaken violently.

‘All right. I’m coming!’

I lay back comfortably. Although in so long, I hadn’t soaped and so the water was clear. The settled honey wove in the hair above my left ankle. I lifted my leg out of the water and rolled hard rubbery pellets of life between my thumb and forefinger. It was tough stuff, tenacious and remarkably abundant. I thought about the people I knew, and wondered why, with so much choice, chance should make such a hash of things.

‘Would you mind hurrying, please?’

Not Kilpatrick or Muldoon. It was Jackie Kennedy and her sharp Belfast tone broke on a sweet note of desperation. There was a lavatory as well as a bath and toilet basin in here but the need hadn’t occurred to me since there was another downstairs. Now I wondered about a plumbing crisis.

Not knowing what to say, I yanked the plug with my big toe and landed myself flailing as the water circled away.

I opened the door with my shirt squeaking on my sides. To my surprise she didn’t explode in, bundle me out and, slamming the door, enter on the movements of Handel’s Water Music. Instead, as I edged awkwardly round, resisting the temptation to gesture her in, she, cold-bloodedly enough, turned with me.

‘You’re a hell of a man,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t you know it’s weakening?’

‘—?’ I said, or even, ‘—?!’ while my left ankle hid behind the right.

‘Ba-athing. You must have been in near an hour and you look not much cleaner. Apart from being as red as a boiled lobster.’

Random Flahertyisms from ‘Man of Aran’ flickered on memory’s back projection screen – certainly we had never seen lobsters as a delicacy on the à la carte here; fried pancakes now . . .

‘In Belgium,’ I said, ‘they charge you for the water you use.’

‘Dirty devils!’ she exclaimed, making past me at last and closing the door in my face. I hesitated and heard noises of her settling down, muttering with fearful clarity, ‘In Belgium, for God’s sake!’

That nettle prick of foolishness must have been what brought Jackie Kennedy back to my mind hours later when Professor Gracemount tilted forward and asked Margaret Briody in his gentle malevolent fashion, ‘Ah . . . ah, yes . . . would you care for cheese?’ I was, you see, empathising with her – though her seeming foolish was not in my opinion his prime intention. At that time, I was a great admirer of the Professor’s and saw the offered platter of cheese as an admirably civilised attempt to take her out of the line of combat. In any case, Miss Briody blinking her violet eyes was not it seemed violable by embarrassment.

We had come to the Professor’s from an uncomfortable room at the University where we had been listening to a talk on the Modern American Novel. Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan – all the great names were there. When the speaker had answered the last question, the chairman said something and people applauded.

‘The only American novel worth reading post-1945,’ I said then to Margaret Briody, ‘is Across the River and into the Trees.’

I was trying to catch her interest. Those were the first words I ever addressed to her. By a happy chance, she had been seated next to me, and for more than an hour I had been deluding myself I could feel her warmth spread between us and lap around my thigh.

Only moving around unobtrusively had kept me comfortable.

She looked at me seriously as if she were judging what I had said against some long perspective.

‘I’m sure that can’t be so,’ she said, an atavistic music of peat water rippling under her Glasgow articulation. (God protect you from a teachers’ training college, prayed I in passing, and the inanities of a speech department.) ‘Although to be honest, I’ve never read any Faulkner,’ and as I wasted the moment on loving astonishment at her ignorance, she turned to some chatterer on her other side.

The lecturer, a Liverpool voice with American back vowels as souvenirs of all those sabbatical leaves, was crying, ‘Drinkies time, Dennis? Hell, I could certainly use a drink. We leaving for your place now, Dennis?’

‘The Professor’s actually. But yes now, we’re going now, Jerry,’ and a set towards the door began as Dennis Harland, lecturer in Old English, six feet topped by a narrow skull and the blue eyes of a Midshipman Ready – if not Old certainly standard English – stopped in front of me. ‘Would you care to? A chance to talk over all Jerry’s given us to think about. At the Professor’s.’