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the most glowing terms. But it goes against him with senior members of the college that he doesn’t drink with them, spends too much time in the restricted section of the library – not reading a great deal, according to Rozenwyn Feigenblat, our librarian, just staring into space the minute he is a page or two into what he does read, as though wondering what he came here for – and is rarely heard to apologise. I don’t, of course, mean for reading books, I mean for anything – an act of carelessness or forgetting, a brusqueness, a contradiction. The reason he gives is that as he lives on his own, works in isolation, and so rarely has occasion to lose his temper, he has nothing to apologise for. Not an argument well calculated to win him friends in the common room, because the truth is none of us really think we have anything to apologise for. But the way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction. And generally – if not individually – the habit of delivering brisk, catch-all apologies is much to be preferred to morbid memory which embalms the past in the Proustian fluids of the maudlin. (Though Proust is no longer read, we still retain the adjective.) My authority for this is the media philosopher Valerian Grossenberger, author of Seven Reasons To Say Sorry , whose series of daily lectures for National Radio some years ago can be said to have changed the way we all think. Modern societies had spent too much time, according to Grossenberger, rubbing the twin itches of recollection and penance. In the bad old days, ‘never forget’ was a guiding maxim – you couldn’t move, I’ve heard tell, for obelisks and mausoleums and other inordinately uglymonuments exhorting memory – but this led first to wholesale neuroticism and impotence and then, as was surely inevitable, to the great falling-out, if there was one. Rather than go on perpetuating the neurasthenic concept of victimisation, Grossenberger argued, the never-forgetters would have done better carving ‘I Forgive You’ on their stones. In return for which, we might have forgiven them. But that chance came and went. And now who, today, is going to forgive whom for what? Only by having everyone say sorry, without reference to what they are saying sorry for, can the concept of blame be eradicated, and guilt at last be anaesthetised.
    Saying sorry, Grossenberger concluded, when he came to address the Bethesda Academy recently – an old man now, but still possessed of his silky powers of reasoning – releases us all from a recriminatory past into an unimpeachable future. We stood and applauded that, not least as it struck us that he was delivering a last eulogy to his own distinguished, emollient career. But if you ask me whether Kevern Cohen stood along with the rest of us, I have to say I don’t recall his being present.
    I make nothing of it. He might indeed be a man who is so equable of temper that the idea of apology mystifies him. Or he might not yet have got past the ‘never forget’ stage in his own life. Let us hope that the latter is not the case and agree simply that he’s a queer one. ‘I find him weird,’ my wife said only the other day, after we’d had him over for dinner. ‘With those droopy eyes and all that hand washing and tap checking. It’s like having What’s-he-called over.’
    ‘Lady Macbeth?’
    ‘I said he .’
    ‘Pontius Pilate?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘As in that fine Dürer—’
    ‘Spare me the lecture, Phinny. Him, yes. But if he’s like this in our house, what must he be like in his own?’
    ‘Pontius Pilate?’
    ‘Kevern, you fool.’
    ‘Worse, I don’t doubt. Much worse.’
    ‘What I don’t understand is how he knows when to stop. While he was helping with the washing-up he kept wandering over to the stove to make sure the gas was off. “I’ve checked that,” I told him, but he said he feared he might have brushed against the taps when he was drying up and it was better to be safe