CHAPTER 11
Soon after Isobel had left to meet Mark Dobson, Eddie was at the station and waiting for the 3.36pm train to Bristol. Another month had passed, another Poets Night had arrived and it was still raining.
Having bought his ticket, Eddie pulled out his phone. “It’s Huggy,” he said giving the phone its third task of the day.
“Huggs my dear fellow. Are you on your way?”
Professor Melvyn Jefferson, sixty-one and head of the Department of Chemistry at Bristol University was one of those who only ever called Eddie by his nickname, except that Mel had shortened it to Huggs.
“At the station. Can you put me up tonight?”
“No problem. Your space beneath the grand piano awaits.”
“Good man. Only I’d appreciate your opinion on a few things.”
“What are friends for? How about a glass of Ribena at the Ship before it all kicks off?”
Things organised, Eddie boarded the train and sat, staring out of the window, reflecting on the last few weeks and his meetings with Mark Dobson and Isobel Johnson and his forty-year friendship with Mel Jefferson.
Mel and he had gone on many student demos together during those years of anti-establishment, anti-big business and pro-environment sit-ins and placard waving. It was the mid-seventies. Eddie was Huggy and Mel was ‘Sit-in Mel‘, otherwise known by students as S’mell.
He then reflected on the thirty-six years he’d lived in that same red-brick Victorian house in Oxford. Thirty-five years ago, after Melissa left him to a lifetime of bachelorhood, he’d decided the small, upstairs room that had been Melissa’s cat’s lavatory, would make a perfect home office and laboratory. Thirty-four years later it had become a dusty and untidy museum of books, journals, magazines, boxes, plastic bags and memorabilia, but the familiar clutter always gave him a warm feeling that he put down to every human’s need for a backbone of unchanging familiarity.
Despite that, he’d been meaning to tidy it for months. Even Eddie, with his unerring sense of knowing where things were, was beginning to scratch his head over where he’d put something.
“I am fastidious in my untidiness,” he’d tell students brave enough to mention the similar state of his office at the University. “This room offers a useful study of biological principles - an example of meticulous disorder, like a primeval soup from which evolution will ensure that organised life forms will, one day, rise to walk the earth.”