Lion Heart Read Online Free

chicken – a local favourite – all over the place.
    With the help of a headlamp bought for a camping trip to Brittany with Emily – it went badly – I grill the five remaining Norman sausages, wrap each one roughly in white bread slathered with ketchup, and eat them fast, as if I have something pressing to do. If anyone, a logician for example, were looking down from the surrounding high-rises and saw a man with a headlamp eating sausages at high speed in the lea of a Welsh chapel he might make some misleading deductions.
    There is a damp and unstable cardboard box of my father’s papers, which I was planning to burn, but now I change my mind: the fire is too low to burn damp cardboard, and anyway I should read them one day. The fox appears again and fixes me with its wised-up, nothing-to-do-with-me-mate , stare. I throw some bread in its direction. The fox emerges into the light just long enough to assess, and promptly reject, slices of Mighty White with ketchup. In this weakly flickering light the fox’s pelt has a ghostly aura for a moment, before it vanishes into the charged night.
    Now I have a sense that I am a character in a Pinter play: deluded, losing my grip and prey to forces I don’t understand. Pinter went to school not far from here, at Hackney Downs. Maybe really to understand London – what could that mean? – you have to live in a liminal place like Hackney. Michael Caine is another former pupil, I think. Pinter and Caine, of Jewish immigrant stock. The rot set in when the school went comprehensive; boys with attitude were decanted there, academic standards plummeted, staff became unhinged, developed sore backs, took sick leave, school closed. No more four-eyed Jewish professors, playwrights and actors.
    I’m thirty-three next birthday. Emily has left me. I miss my father. Both of them gave me pain, but now I am dying of loneliness. For my peace of mind I reassure myself: it’s not loneliness in the sense of having no one to talk to – I have friends – it’s the loneliness of feeling less and less qualified to live in this world. It’s anomie , which has redeeming associations with the artistic.
    The dense air pressing on the garden, the spavined chapel, the rising symphony from the streets of rap, of police sirens, of violent domestic argument, of football chants – as if anybody gives a fuck about which team the morons support – of breaking glass, of cars trembling with bass – all this adds to the sense of being disconnected because it speaks of some sort of human involvement which doesn’t involve me: here I am licking the last of the ketchup off my fingers. I turn the headlamp off.
     
    My grandfather, a Harley Street urologist, sent my father to Winchester. But my father considered Pangbourne College more than adequate for me. Alaric Leofranc Cathar ( née Carter), the intimate of Richard the Lionheart, saw himself as the only licensed intellectual in the family. His short stay at Oxford confirmed it. Until 1972 Pangbourne College was the Nautical College, preparing boys for life in the Merchant Navy. When I arrived there many years later the whiff of rum, sodomy and the lash still hung in the air. In my time the older boys practised ‘bog-washing’, which involved pushing the heads of uppity younger boys down the lavatory and pulling the chain. Another jape was called ‘divisional scrubs’ and involved younger boys being covered in shoe polish and then showered. Personal space was very low in the college’s hierarchy of values. Perhaps it was originally thought necessary to prepare pupils for the close and intimate cohabitation of naval life.
    At the end of my first term, my father asked me, with that old roué’s pointless smile on his threaded face, his hair flapping winningly over his brow and coursing in two wavelets back over his ears, how school had been. I said, ‘Oh, fucking marvellous, I have learned how to wash the inside of a lavatory with my head. Thank you,