Clapham omnibus

four years ago I went to the Horniman Museum in Lewisham one hot August afternoon. Afterwards, I sat in the museum's garden, and wondered how much time I had left. I was 41, out-of-condition, out-of-sorts, unemployed and unattached.

The museum is on a hill, with views over London which are called commanding. I sat on a bench feeling a miserable failure-both privately and professionally-added to which I had pains all over my body. But on a whim I walked up the hill, and on another park bench I surrendered myself and my body to the sun and south London below. Suddenly I felt whole again. Do you sometimes feel like this, that you have no idea whether large tracts of your life are pleasure or pain?

Then I thought about those who need no longer wonder this: my personal dead. Like in the Henry James story, The Altar of the Dead, except that I was not going to erect any altars to them. I am sometimes considered a nice person, but I lack pity. I don't believe we care for others; only intermittently do we wish them well at all. We are, after all, the only species that systematically kills its own kind.



My personal dead were all roughly of my own age-one thinks less about the older ones. Most of them had died within a short time, in a sudden sweep of death's scythe. The son of my parents' friends, the diabetic, who had died alone in an empty house. The strange, vivid girl met at a snowbound party, dead three months later of a brain haemorrhage. The half-friend half-enemy from school pushed off a roof in Los Angeles. The Aids deaths. The... I didn't remember the rest.

Except one. He was called Martin, and he was more significant. I was worried that I did not feel his loss, because he had been my friend.

But is that true? I had known him more than 20 years. We had met at Oxford. He was a Northern Irish Catholic; brilliant, a sexual conqueror. He could destroy me with a word, but honoured me with his friendship. But for some reason that I never quite fathomed, at the age of 25, his life stopped. The rest, until his blood pressure killed him at 43, was epilogue. He lived on the dole in a tiny stinking room in Oxford, attending Mass most days, drinking, smoking, and having sex until he grew too infirm.

Over many years I used to visit him, always at the end of a stay in Oxford. In the early evening, having eaten some overpriced meal, I would approach his Jericho street room. I would hear his limping step coming to the door (thugs had thrown him down some stairs), and he would greet me with great pleasure and without surprise. We would enter his terrible room, and I would sit briefly on his bed, which was always wet. Then off to the pub, where I would buy him drinks and lend him money, and we would recall the youth we had shared. Sooner than he wished, I would catch the train or the coach to London.

I parted from him the last time on the corner of a street; it was dark and the wind was blowing, and we had kissed each other tenderly. It was two years before I returned to Oxford, and by that time he was a year dead. I never found out whether it was heart attack or stroke that finally did for him. Apparently he went out like a light. He died in his room.

I suppose it was the poetry of his situation that appealed to my writer's imagination-as with the elderly author immobile in a nursing home, whom I have been visiting. Then there were the nine neighbours on the Clapham estate who died during the course of 1999. In that case, I liked the symmetry of the numbers.

(When I first came to the estate, people walked through the square with heads bowed, as hurriedly as possible. Yet the flats are beautiful, built by the well-known architect Louis de Soissons in the 1920s and not originally council flats. If it wasn't for the washing on the lines, it would look like an Oxford quad.)

The sun which had lifted my spirits on the Horniman park bench was gone, and it was building towards a storm. I walked the streets of Dulwich, taking a sad pleasure in the dark Victorian villas, the rocking-horse glimpsed through a window, the path through the woods and down into the leafy bower of Sydenham Hill station.

Two Japanese girls were on the platform, and to get away from their chattering I went to sit on another bench, outside the canopy. But then it really began to rain, and some rough London youths turned up, so I went back near the Japanese, and their voices competed with the crash of rain on the roof.

Eventually I got back to my messy, dusty rooms where I try to write. In the act of writing, you are offered a temporary release, but like any fix it does not last. To me the most moving story about any writer is that of TS Eliot, who spent a whole lifetime writing through endless misery, and then found the beautiful Valerie and never wrote another line. We wouldn't be without Prufrock and The Waste Land, but what would his life have been if he had not met her? n