Could a person really be cynical about everything in the world and still expect to have friends? — Richard Yates

We had a few beers and laughed more than we meant to and punched each other's arms; in the end, out on the sidewalk again, I think we shook hands about three times in saying goodbye. Just before turning away he said "Listen, though: don't look back too much, okay? You can drive yourself crazy that way."

There would probably always be kids like Grove in prep schools: you would find only irritation in trying to help them, or to like them, and you could probably never bring yourself to call them by their first names until ten years later, when they came back to visit the school with their wives.

He couldn't help pondering how he would feel if his own father were to die. It was unthinkable: Jock MacKenzie was in the very prime of life, a laughing, sailing, golf- and tennis-playing man who could still defeat his son at arm-wrestling any time he felt like it, and often did. Still, there were heart attacks; there were strokes; there was cancer. Nobody lived forever.

Jock MacKenzie's anger could be terrible, but in his gentle moods there was no finer companion in the world. Every worthwhile thing Steve knew, it seemed, was something he had learned from his father. As a condition of receiving a car on his sixteenth birthday, Steve had been made to memorise the whole of Kipling's "If", which later helped him earn the only "A" he'd ever had in Pop Driscoll's course; and certain lines of that poem, remembered now as they sounded in his father's voice , were enough to fill his eyes with tears.

This Sunday, he promised himself, he would call home and have a good long talk with the old man.

"When you're talking, Steve", Jock MacKenzie had told him once, "and I don't care who it's to or what it's about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence."