Patricia would never have done it, of course. Left alone, she would have stayed the head of the household, at the wheel of the car, managing her good life as she’d planned to manage theirs together which by now would have included winter holidays in the desert, cruises to South America.

‘I sometimes think you could be satisfied with a subscription to the National Geographic,’ Patricia said to him, but fondly.

The world he had never seen had tainted David’s taste for travel, worn away what wonder he might have felt, for every landscape had come to him as a background for death and disaster, which he had broadcast night after night, year after year, on the evening news. There wasn’t a place on the globe to which he couldn’t assign flood, earthquake, explosion, assassination. Other people thought that record of ‘Beyond the Fringe’ was funny: ‘This is Alva Ladell, bringing you news of fresh disasters.’ David Crown came to hate most those stupid human interest stories at the end of the broadcast, hypocritical sops to the nightmares he had been helping to create. It was a very odd way to have spent his life—in a sound-proof box. Nearly everyone else he knew of in his own generation had taken part, placed the world catastrophe inside their personal experience and learned over the years to contain it. His disqualifying eyesight had spared and deprived him. None of his memories were his own, words rather, falling on him as impersonally as acid rain.

A bus on its way to town in West Point Grey at 8 p.m. is nearly empty, a student or two who have stayed late at the university library, a couple of old men like himself, incompetent to drive. The bus driver still wanted to see his Pharmicare card for the reduced fare. Everyone said David didn’t look his age.

If David had been an actor, as he’d wanted to be, he could have made the move to television in the fifties. As a newsman, he simply didn’t do. He sounded sincere enough on radio, but he looked like an actor. The men chosen were avuncular, square-jawed, dependable-looking fellows.

‘You’re too seductive, darling,’ Patricia had said, and, though she would have liked the money, she claimed she was glad she had to share only his voice so that they could still be private people in the public world.

One of his fellow stay-behinds in radio had said to him, ‘The guy who never has doesn’t have to be a has-been.’