FIFTH INTERVAL

They were the children of the Golden Age (1948?–73), elsewhere known as Il Miracolo Economico, La Trente Glorieuses, Der Wirtschaftswunder. The Golden Age, when they never had it so good.

What you could hear in the background, during this period, was progress music. The sort of music you heard, for instance, in Cliff Richard’s The Young Ones (1961). We don’t mean the songs. We’re thinking of that long sequence when, with a tap-tap here and a knock-knock there, and to the sound of progress music, the young ones transform a derelict building into a thriving community centre—a youth club, for the young ones.

In the Golden Age progress music was heard in the background by nearly everybody. The first phone, the first car, the first house, the first summer holiday, the first TV—all to progress music. Then the arrival of sexual intercourse, in 1966, and the full ascendancy of the children of the Golden Age.

In the First World, now, the greying of the globe, as demographers put it, will constitute the most significant population shift in history. The Golden Age turned into the Silver Tsunami, the Sixties Crowd became the sixties crowd, and the young ones, now, were all old ones.

“With the sole exception,” he told his wife, “of Cliff Richard. He’s still a young one.”

.    .    .

“I used to have a birthday suit,” he continued. “But something’s gone wrong with it. It doesn’t fit any more. And it’s all worn out. I could take it to Jeeves’s, I suppose. But this needs to go to the invisible menders.”

“See the doctor again,” she said. “See the one you quite liked at St. Mary’s.”

“Great. From Club Med to Club Med.”

The first Club Med, or Club Mediterranean, was the name of the network of attractive resorts that dedicated itself to those between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The second Club Med, or Club Medico, was the name of the hospital cafeteria at St. Mary’s. There were no age restrictions at the second Club Med, though it did seem to cater to a more mature clientele. He said,

“I didn’t tell you. Last time I went, the guy said I might have CFS. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Uh, myalgic encephalo … encephalomyelitis. Or ME. A virus in the cerebellum. But apparently I don’t. Anyway. You know, Pulc, I think I’m getting better.” He hadn’t called her that for some time (a diminutive of Pulchritude). “It was just psychological.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Not sure. Touch wood. And it is depressing. Think. From the Me Decade to the ME Decade. From Club Med to Club Med. Great.”

• • •

We come to item four in the revolutionary manifesto, and, yes, this was the one that caused most of the grief.

… In the seventeenth century, it is said, there was a dissociation of sensibility. The poets could no longer think and feel at the same time. Shakespeare could do it, the Metaphysicals could do it; they could write brainily about feeling and sex. But it went. The poets could no longer naturally think and feel at the same time.

All we are saying is that something analogous happened while the children of the Golden Age were becoming men and women. Feeling was already separated from thought. And then feeling was separated from sex.

So the position of feeling found itself (again) shifted. This was the one that almost did for him, and for scores of thousands—perhaps tens of millions—of others.

• • •

When the end came, and closed the eyes that had loved themselves too much, the glassy youth entered the Land of the Dead.

A shadowsmear: that was all. That was all the mirroring water was ever going to give him—a shadowsmear.

The nymphs of the forests and fountains cropped their hair and wailed. And Echo, or Echo’s ghost, or Echo’s echo, echoed his last words: Farewell, farewell. Alas, alas, alas. No one found his body. What they found was a flower: a yellow heart in a ruff of white petals.

We are given to understand that the dissolution—the fading, the shrivelling—of the glassy youth was completed in the course of a day and a night. In this he differed from his children, the children of the Golden Age.

• • •

Silvia said she’d be dropping in to show them her new uniform. Her new uniform—as a feminist. And Keith prepared himself for a surprise, because Silvia was like that. In the kitchen, with a torpid flourish, she removed her woollen overcoat (it was May 15, 2003), and said torpidly,

“It’s a joke, isn’t it.” She was wearing a white miniskirt daubed with the red cross of St. George, a halter top with HOOKER stamped across the chest—plus several items of (detachable) jewellery in her navel, in her lower lip, and in both nostrils. “I give it six months. But it’s a joke.”

“I hope that washes off.”

“Come on, Mum, of course it washes off. D’you think I want a nest of snakes all over my hips when I’m ninety? I’m going on a strip-club crawl. With the sisters. We’re all got up like this. I hope you’re proud.”

Before she left, she asked Keith something—how he learnt about the birds and the bees.

“Uh, in stages. And different versions. A shitty little kid at school who scared the life out of me. Then Nicholas. Then a biology class. While we were dissecting a worm.”

“And you know how I got my sex education? How Nat and Gus got theirs? How Isabel and Chloe’ll get theirs? We’re porny.”

He said, “Can’t we improve on porny, Silvia? … How about pornoid?”

“All right. Pornoid. Yeah, that’s good. It’s more like paranoid. And when you’re with a new guy, that’s what you are. You’re paranoid about how pornoid he’s going to be. You know, Pop, we’re the spiders of the Web. We got everything we know from the infinity of filth. He’s better, Mum, don’t you think? Pop’s a bit better.”

He used to admire them, but Keith was no longer sure how he felt about spiders. Spiders ate flies; and flies ate shit. And if, in any sense, you were what you ate—if you were what you consumed every day—then what were spiders?

And yet spiders were alive and flies were not, somehow. And Keith still thought that killing a fly was a creative act—because a fly was a fleck of death. Little skull and crossbones, little jolly roger. Armoured survivalist with gas-mask face: but not here in London, perhaps, in the twenty-first century. There was only one instance so far—when the fly snarled up at him from a patch of birdshit on the garden paving, and applied its suckers, and stood its ground, and just snarled up at him through the spray.

Silvia left. Husband and wife processed their young daughters, and Keith, prolonging his experiment with fiftyfifty, helped assemble a modest dinner—salad, spaghetti bolognese, red wine.

He said, “I don’t want to think about me any more.” About my self: two words. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it? And it’s physically easier too.”

“How?”

Well, I could put it this way. Two months ago, Pulc, waking, and then getting up, was a Russian novel. One month ago, it was an American novel. And now it’s only an English novel. An English novel of about 1970—concerning itself with the ups and downs of the middle classes, and never any longer than two hundred and twenty-five pages.

“That’s progress. And beauty is returning. Thanks to you. As always.”

• • •

Sex is bad enough, as a subject, and the self is pretty glutinous too. The I, the io, the yo, the je, the Ich. The Ich: Freud’s preferred term for the ego, for the I. Sex is bad enough (but someone’s got to do it); and then there’s the Ich. And what does that sound like—Ich, the Ich?