* * * *
The change in his appearance after twenty years had actually frightened me. I suppose you think I mean that he looked older. But he didn't! He looked younger. And it suddenly taught me something about the passage of time.I suppose old Betterton would be about sixty-five now, so that when I last saw him he'd have been forty-five -- my age now. His hair was white now, and the day he buried Mother it was a kind of streaky grey, like a shaving-brush. And yet as soon as I saw him the first thing that struck me was that he looked younger. I'd thought of him as an old, old man, and after all he wasn't so very old. As a boy, it occurred to me, all people over forty ahd seemed to me just worn-out old wrecks, so old that there was hardly any difference between them. A man of forty-five had seemed to me older than this dodderer of sixty-five seemed now. And Christ! I was forty-five myself. It frightened me.
* * * *
If I'd had a mirror I'd have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don't have to tell me. But the thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back in my mouth, was that it doesn't matter. Even false teeth don't matter. I'm fat -- yes. I look like a bookie's unsuccessful brother -- yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me again unless she's paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don't care. I don't want the women, I don't even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive at that moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It's a feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it's like a flame.
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