“Dorothea Quirk,” he mused. “I’m not exactly sure I’ve heard of her.”
      Barb Salt gasped in amazement. She pulled a thick and well-thumbed hardback from her bag and handed it to Rod. The Enigma of an Onion, it said on the cover, Collected Poems 1965-1995 by Dorothea Quirk. Rod, who had not read a poem in earnest since 1975 felt an immediate urge to give it back. He flipped instead to the blurbs: “The warm, autumnal fruits of a magnificent career”; “Quirk is our female Frost. Cleave her to your bosom!”
      “Do these poems rhyme?” Rod joked, “I’m most keen on poems that rhyme.”
      “It’s mainly free verse,” she explained cheerily. “But there’s a fabulous sonnet sequence.”
      “Free verse? Isn’t that a bit like doing a crossword puzzle without the clues?”
      “Rod!” she pushed down her glasses and gazed at him. “I think you’re being controversial.”
      Rod swallowed. He was not used to being flirted with on the way to work, and he felt momentarily annoyed with Barb Salt for disturbing the dull regularity of his routine.
      “We need more discipline these days, not less,” he said.
      She laughed.
      “I’m quite serious.”
      “You sound like a real Puritan.”
      “Well you would know all about them.”
      Barb’s smile straightened.
      “No not really,” she replied. “We don’t burn too many witches in Minnesota.”
      He handed back the book. She nodded and returned it to her bag. They looked together but separately out of the right hand window at the brown hulk of Battersea power station and the black meccano-rubble of cranes and coal chutes between it and the Thames. The train was now sing-songing towards the Victoria railway bridge. Five more minutes and they would be there, Rod thought with some relief. No more Barb Salt. Just the usual rush to the Deaf Institute, fifty minutes of Screechy Scratchy Little Star and home again for sausage and Smash and a few hours of Radio Three. Perhaps he would practice. Perhaps he wouldn’t – he could already feel the lulling magnetism of his single bed, already imagine himself conceding to the soft-hard cuddle of his own gloom.
      The train’s rattle dropped an octave as they crossed the bridge. The darkening sky flickered like a home-movie between the lines of rust-proofed girder. It’s bound to rain, Rod thought, and almost as soon as he thought it several large, confirming drops spattered the window. A second or two later it was coming down hard, and there was nothing to be seen to their right but rain and more rain – long grey curtains of it swishing down the Thames. Not wishing to straighten his gaze and risk catching Barb Salt’s eye, Rod swivelled around quickly to his left instead. On that side, a few tracks over, another train was heading into Victoria – its yellow and blue livery hazed and glossed by wetness. As Rod watched, this other train bumped silently over some points and changed angles so instead of running in parallel the two trains now seemed set to collide.
      “I hope I didn’t offend you just now,” he said, “with my Puritan remark.”
      She paused a second or two before re-releasing her grin,
      “Of course not,” she hollered back, “but do you really think the world needs more discipline?”
      “Absolutely,” He felt buoyed by her forgiveness. “Excellence is only earned through struggle. You must know that – as a poet I mean.”
      “Oh I know the agonies of composition well enough – plunging one’s quill into the crimson inkpot of the heart, Dorothea calls it.”
      “Exactly, but how many people nowadays are prepared to do that? Precious bloody few I’ll tell you. If it’s too difficult we give up. As a nation we gave up years ago. We glory in our own crudeness and stupidity nowadays – we think it’s all one great big Larf.”

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