I can’t gainsay that – well, most of it. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to taunt me with timidity if I were a younger man, or if you, by God, had only done your duty in the adventure stakes when you were a younger man. Always late for everything, even the funerals. Dragging your feet at celebrations, never taking part in the demos, staying away from Degree Conferrings, telling everyone how you hated dinner parties, failing even to get yourself a suit, writing and telling the Master of Trinity that you couldn’t judge the public speaking if they required you to wear a black tie, because you’d given up uniforms in 1945. All that feckless stuff. And making your adventurous dashes always too late – a regular Inspector Clouseau. Buying a house at the peak of the market, taking out a mortgage the month the interest rates went up, borrowing at worst rates, getting your book together after the publishers had got their list out. And so on, and so on. The dashing worrier. The belly-flopping poet. You were late for your sixtieth birthday. Well, I’m not going to be late for my seventy-first.

I see you’re rewriting again. I swear to God, if you were given three months to live, you’d say ‘I think I’ll just re-write that little piece on death’. And muck it up, again. Dream of the perfect lyric. The lyric as metonym (or Sacrament, if anyone still talks that way) for society’s basic workings. Song as the still point of human companionship. Rewriting proves you’re fallible. Proves you’re still alive. Makes people believe you’re a believer in the Protestant thing ethic. All the time, you believe in the gesture ethic, the world passing in the fine style of spring.

Anyway, you walk down by the billabong: Fred Williams’s billabong, as you used to let me call it. The musk still comes from it like a glow, from the little island, the feet of the gumtrees, the mud and the lily-pads and sticky water. How muddy life is, you think. Birds will come back to anything, if they’re allowed. Still the same curves in the river. Who cares if I am dying if the banks are green. You always thought in that way, sentimental, shiny-nosed. I mean I thought ... was thought. Thought and was thought.

I write the same poem, over and over, as you well know. You incited those critics, you know, you told them what to write. Modestly you admitted to this influence and that, praised contemporaries, volunteered information about your bloody faults. They took you at your word. Why didn’t you show more ego, more naked self-interest, speak about your hatred of tall people, claim to have been forced out of the fighter pilot course by whatsitsname. Con them. There is no such thing as small fame. Losers are losers, not disguised winners. You always were a loser, you talked yourself into being it. Probably because you believed in small cooperative units, the team-ethic.

Teams, yes. Well, I see you’re watching the sports as much as ever. Sports on television, racing, schools’ athletics. Why is that? Do you identify with the winners? The triers? The losers? Not the losers, no, not even you would go that far. Why then? For images of gallantry, images of the lost paradise of sheer action? Yes, I can see that would have to be part of it – innocence, the style ethic again, the rhythm of the even pressure. I suppose I have that, too, I suppose we always had it. But now that you’re positively feeble, how far back do you have to look before you can feel it? I know what growing old is like, I have been through that, but I can’t imagine the next ten years. I can’t see those athletes with your unfocussed eyes, with your dissembled musculature. The gap between us is as big as between any two people. You have aged just enough to abolish me.

But, if I remember, you believed in some things that I still believe in (Is belief the word? It seems I remember that you always had trouble with that word: what is it to believe? You used to say. Is there an interior state corresponding to that word? Is belief perceiving? What is it? Far better to say you think God than that you believe in him. And so on; you were very tempestuous in your impotence, mate. Now, thank God, I simply protest and accept.) You affirmed a rhythm in all things: the rhythm in the eye as well as the rhythm of the eye; the rhythm of the running on the rhythm of the dunes. I could never abandon or forget that. · The rhythm of the car on the rhythm of the road unwinding; the crossing rhythm of the child’s voices in the back seat; the rhythm of the sunset driving the clouds crossways. To get up, take the stick in your right hand (and say after me: the truth that I shall seek shall be the truth, the whole truth ...) and set off, left side, right side, to the rhythm of the paddock. Even marching had its point. At least if you could do it, you could vary it. Every little helps.

Rhythm, yes. But not being able to run. To see the bus fart away from the kerb, and know it would be dangerous (or, worse, ridiculous) for you to run the ten steps after it. There is the rhythm of doing and that of wanting. At my age you assemble your energies, your rhythms, into that of aspiring. Not being too poetic for you, am I? Or poesic? Good word, that. Philip Martin and I used to speak of peots: pee-ots.

It is as impossible to avoid religion as it is to avoid morals, if I may quote Henry James. You can’t avoid the rhythms of the universe about your feet. What do you feel or think of when the mind tires? Here is the rhythm of the storm; here is distance, sheer distance, the sparkle of distance.

Surely you haven’t forgotten what it was like when they told you your heart would always be weak? How you nearly howled with despair? Never to play football again, or tennis, never to run properly. It was the worst break of your life, and now you talk as if you had forgotten it.

Forgotten? No I’ve forgotten nothing of that. It was from that moment that my real aggressive timidity began – my physical timidity, I mean, the excessive care you develop when you realise your body’s no protection but a being which needs to be protected. It was the great split of my life, the loss of youth before I had achieved it. I could run, I could hop, I could skip, First Reader. It didn’t last long.

One thing at least I’m free of is authority at close quarters, the pannikin bosses, the fellows who hadn’t read their own regulations, the ones who left it to subordinates to deal with furiosi like you. The cunning ones, the ones who told you, actually told you, how good they were at manipulating situations, the ones to whom you said ‘No, don’t do that. Very unwise.’ The ones who wouldn’t follow the rules of debate, or behaved petulantly, or … The Deputy Vice-whatsits and Assistant Dictators. And their aides, whom in some cases you had witnessed trying to get a pass in your subject. I don’t have to put up with any of them anymore. Sorry for calling you a furioso, by the way. You used to do your block, and people thought you were too combative, but in fact you held back too much. You suffered from diffidence, scrupulosity. There’s nothing like a boy of a poor family given a Jesuit education. They’re very faithful but uncomfortable colleagues. Really unhappy about power. Like you.

Yes, all my life I felt obliged to shut up when I wanted to speak out. But you can’t let down colleagues whom you have voted for, even when they let you down. All the same, self-censoring is about as painful as putting your eyes in a sandpit; it always serves someone else’s self-interest. The problem is structural. There should be forums where the truth can be spoken frankly, and there should be conversations of frank speaking which we can follow without risking that academic trap, one-upping. I always gave authority its due, always analysed it critically, and spent much of my time staying away from it. I couldn’t manage that, though. Conscience was inked on me like a list on the back of my hand. I remember one chair who used to discuss his problems with me and then announce the hard solutions as coming from me (‘Vin thinks we should …’). I never broke his cover. What do you think: was that decency or cowardice? Or lack of social skills? Should write a play about it.

On authority: have you joined all those men who say they are feminists, they empathise with women? Meminists, I call them. They’re probably in the majority now.

Ah no. We’ve always had that sort of thing, you know. It used to be called ‘being good with women’. I don’t know about empathy, but there are certainly lots of men making scones. Being good with scones. I’ll try to keep on puzzling at it.