All Souls Page 13

  "Tell me you want me," said Muriel, for a moment separating her round, absorbent mouth from mine.

  I heard the bells of the neighbouring church of St Aloysius (or those of St Giles'?) still awake or perhaps they never sleep. There was no need to look at the clock on the bedside table, no need to hurry or start to worry about where I'd hidden her high heels and where her scattered clothes had been left around the room. It was darkest night. "I want you," I said. "I want you," I thought, and stopped thinking once I had thought it.

  DURING MY TWO YEARS in Oxford, I think the only real friend I made was Cromer-Blake. I found many of the dons insufferable (the economist Halliwell was but a pale example, and I remember with particular pain Dr Leigh-Justice, our department's expert on the Indies, a punctilious, monkish type with an abdomen broader than his chest and a habit of wearing trousers that were too tight and too short, so that every time he sat down, he revealed a vast expanse of calf, and with whom I had to give the most horribly prim, methodical classes) and, as I mentioned before, I often put myself in Edward Bayes' place and came to appreciate the good humour and nonchalance of the reviled and determinedly frivolous Kavanagh (reviled because he was easy-going and Irish and wrote novels), and to respond — in equal measure, although he would never have known it, since I was even more reserved than he was and never revealed my feelings - to the affection shown me, perhaps despite himself and without realising it, by Alec Dewar, the Inquisitor, a.k.a. the Butcher or the Ripper. And above all I came to admire the literary scholar, Professor Emeritus (he was almost emeritus in my first year and definitively so in my second) Toby Rylands, whose friendship Cromer-Blake had rather rashly recommended to me. For one couldn't exactly have a friendship with Toby Rylands, not because he wasn't welcoming and kind or pleased to receive anyone who came to see him, but because he was too wise and truthful a man (I mean that what he said always had the ring of truth), and it wasn't easy to feel anything for him other than open admiration mingled perhaps with a little fear (what the English call "awe").

  I used to visit him at his home in a leafy suburb east of the city, outside of the university area proper, a luxurious house (he was a man of private means, not dependent on any academic usufruct) with an extensive garden that sloped down to one of the wildest and most magical parts of the River Cherwell as it flows through Oxford and its outskirts. I used to go there on Sundays, the day of the week that - especially in my second year there when he was retired - must have cost him, like me, the greatest effort and most taxed his enthusiasm if he was to get through it all and thus move on into the next day (like the beggars he was killing time). He was a very big man, really massively built, who still had a full head of hair: his statuesque head was crowned with wavy, white locks like whipped cream. He dressed well though, with more affectation than elegance (bow ties and yellow sweaters, rather in the American style, or the way undergraduates used to dress) and he was regarded as a future - indeed almost extant - never to be forgotten glory of the university, for in Oxford, as in all places where people perpetuate themselves by some form of endogeny, individuals only achieve glory when they begin to relinquish their posts and become passive beings about to be shuffled off to make room for their legatees. He and Ellmann, Wind and Gombrich, Berlin and Haskell, are or were all destined to end up as members of the same race: the retrospectively desired. Toby Rylands had received every conceivable honour and now lived a solitary life. Other honours, ever less sincere, arrived by every post; he tended his garden; he fed the swans that spent certain seasons on his stretch of the river; and he wrote another essay on A Sentimental Journey. He didn't much like talking about his past life, about his little-known origins (it was said that he hadn't always been English but South African, but if that were true he retained not a trace of an accent), nor about his youth, and still less about the dim distant past of his supposed activities - as was whispered in Oxford — with MI5, a department of Britain's famous Secret Service. Though probably true, the link between that particular government department, so familiar from novels and films, and the two principal English universities is too much of a cliche to be very interesting. The juiciest stories told by his acolytes, disciples and ex-subordinates were, in fact, those to do with his war activities: it seems he was never at the front (at any front), but was engaged instead on strange, confused missions (always involving huge sums of money), vaguely related to espionage or the pursuit of politically neutral figures in places as far from the heart of the conflict as Martinique, Haiti, Brazil and the islands of Tristan da Cunha. I never learned much about his past; very few people did, I imagine. His most impressive feature were his slightly slanting eyes, each a different colour: his right eye the colour of olive oil and his left that of pale ashes, so that if you looked at him from the right you saw a keen expression with a hint of cruelty — the eye of an eagle or perhaps a cat - while if you looked at him from the left the expression was grave, meditative and honest, as only that of northern races can be - the eye of a dog or perhaps a horse, which of all animals seem the most honest; and if you looked at him from the front, then you encountered two gazes, or rather two colours with but a single gaze which was simultaneously cruel and honest, meditative and keen. From a distance the olive-oil colour predominated (and assimilated the other colour) and when on certain Sunday mornings the sun shone directly into his eyes, illuminating them, the density of the iris dissolved and the tone lightened to become the colour of the sherry in the glass he sometimes had in his hand. As for his laugh, that was certainly Toby Rylands' most diabolical feature: his lips barely moved, or rather only enough - though exclusively on the horizontal plane - so that beneath his fleshy, purple upper lip some small, slightly pointed but very even teeth appeared, possibly some private dentist's excellent copy of those lost with the advancing years. But it was the audible rather than the visual aspect of that short, dry laugh that lent it its demoniacal quality because it resembled none of the more usual written onomatopoeic forms of laughter, all of which depend on the aspiration of the consonant (for example, 'ha, ha, ha" or "heh, heh, heh" or "hee, hee, hee" or even, in other languages, "ah, ah, ah"). When he laughed, the consonant was indubitably plosive, the clearest of alveolar English "t"s. "Ta, ta, ta", that was what Professor Toby Rylands' spine-chilling laugh sounded like. "Ta, ta, ta. Ta, ta, ta."

  On the day I remember best and the day on which he seemed most prodigal with truths, he laughed only at the start of our conversation, while we were talking about my colleagues, who were no longer quite his colleagues, and he was recounting to me through hints and insinuations some humorous diplomatic or university anecdote, never touching on the war or on espionage. By then (Hilary term of my second year, so it was between January and March, in fact it was the end of March, just before Clare decided to turn her back on me for four weeks) we all knew that Cromer-Blake was ill and, we supposed, seriously so. He'd still said nothing to us about it (he'd been vague, not to say evasive), not to me, to Clare, to Ted, to his brother Roger who lived in London, not even to his revered Rylands, though perhaps to Bruce, the person closest to him for some years, with whom he maintained what used to be called (especially in French) a loving friendship, in which there was neither progress nor withdrawal, neither exclusivity nor constancy. (Bruce was a mechanic from Vauxhall and had no dealings with us: Bruce was his other world.) But Cromer-Blake's visits to the hospital in London - his admissions to hospital were sporadic, each stay there shorter than the last - and the worrying mutability of his appearance - you were as likely to find him back to his normal weight, his skin glowing, as emaciated and ashen - made us worry with that unspoken concern, very common in England or at least more common there than elsewhere, which has at its root a degree of stoicism and also - in contrast - the optimistic belief that things only exist if you talk about them or, which comes to the same thing, that they don't prosper and will ultimately dissolve into nothing if you deny them verbal existence. None of the people close to Cromer-Blake talked about him (abou
t his now visible illness) behind his back, and in his presence we limited ourselves, if he looked well, to forgetting immediately how he'd looked before - as something we gaily condemned to the realm of what has been - and, when he looked bad, to recalling how he looked before that - silently and intensely longing for the return of what once was.

  Cromer-Blake was one of Toby Rylands' dearest and most enduring friends - the loyal scion, the pupil who had not withdrawn once he reached maturity - and for that very reason Rylands was the last person I would have expected to mention the nameless disease, whatever it was. That's why that Sunday, when the two of us were standing in his garden at the river's edge, watching the waters flowing easily by without the illusory resistance put up by the vegetation that in other seasons seemed to push against it as it passed and contributed greatly to the sylvan look of that part of the river, I was surprised when he mentioned Cromer-Blake and his health or lack of it. He was throwing pieces of stale bread into the water to see if the swans who occasionally lived around there would appear.

  "They're not coming out today," he said. "They may well have moved on; they spend the whole year going up and down the river. Sometimes when they disappear for weeks on end, they've actually only been a few yards away downstream. It's odd, though, because I saw them yesterday. This is one of their favourite haunts because of the royal treatment they get here. But then there's always got to be a first day for their disappearances. Otherwise, they wouldn't be disappearances, would they?" And he continued throwing crumbs, smaller now, into the cinnamon-coloured water. "But it doesn't matter, some ducks have arrived instead, look, there's one of them looking for food. And another, and another. They're so greedy, they don't turn their noses up at anything." And then almost without a pause, he added: "Have you seen Cromer-Blake lately?"

  "Yes," I said, "two or three days ago. I had coffee with him in his rooms."

  The literary scholar was standing on my left, so I caught the keen gaze of his olive-oil eye, which, seen from the side, looked larger than the grey eye. It was some moments before he spoke again.

  "How did he look?"

  "Very well. He looks much better since he got back from Italy. I suppose you know he took a week's leave. I covered some of his classes for him. He needed a rest, to get away from here. It seems to have done him good."

  "So, it did him good, eh?" And the eye shifted fleetingly to the right (towards me) then immediately back again to the ducks. "I knew he'd taken some leave and that he was in Tuscany, but I only found out from others. He hasn't come to see me once since he came back, what, two or three weeks ago now. He hasn't called either." He fell silent, then turned to look me full in the face, as if that were necessary in order to speak of deeply held feelings or to confess to weaknesses. "I find that strange and, I don't see why I shouldn't admit it, it hurts me too. I thought it might be because he looks ill. But you say he looks well. That's what you said, isn't it?"

  "Yes, he was very bad in February and now, by comparison, I think he looks much better."

  With some difficulty, owing to his immense weight which was due entirely to his size and build, not to fat, Toby Rylands bent down to pick up more bread from the wicker basket he'd placed on the ground. Four more ducks had appeared.

  "I wonder when he'll stop coming here altogether. Which day will be the last time I'll see him, unless of course that day has already been and gone without my realising it, in February. That was the last time I saw him, in mid-February. Perhaps he doesn't intend coming here again. Just look at those ducks."

  I looked at the ducks. Then I said: "I don't know why you say that, Toby. You know perfectly well that no one enjoys your company more than Cromer-Blake does. I don't believe he'll ever stop coming to see you, not of his own free will anyway."

  Professor Rylands abruptly emptied the rest of the bread from the basket into the water, without bothering to break it up, crumbs and whole slices of bread floating together for a moment on the muddy waters of the Cherwell, then he threw the basket down - it remained upside down on the grass, like a peasant woman's hat, with the handle as the bow - and went back to the small table on which Mrs Berry, his housekeeper, had placed sherry and olives. Although it was only the end of March, it wasn't cold outside if you kept out of the wind. It was a Sunday of sunny spells interrupted by sparse cloud and the sun wasn't to be wasted, because it helped you to get through this day and move on into the next. Rylands was wearing one of his bow ties and a thick yellow sweater with a wool-lined windcheater on top; the sweater was longer than the windcheater and formed a band of yellow below the brown leather. He sat down on an upholstered chair and drank a glass of sherry. He downed it slowly in one, then refilled it.

  "Of his own free will," he said, "of his own free will. To whom does the will of a sick man belong? To the man or to the illness? When one is ill, just as when one is old or troubled, things are done half with one's own will and half with someone else's in exactly equal measure. What isn't always clear is who the part of the will that isn't ours belongs to. To the illness, to the doctors, to the medicine, to the sense of unease, to the passing years, to times long dead? To the person we no longer are and who carried off our will when he left? Cromer-Blake is no longer the person we think he is, or the person he used to be, he's not the same. And unless I'm very much mistaken, he will become less and less himself until he simply ceases to be altogether. Until he's neither one nor the other, not even some third or fourth party, but no one, no one."

  "I don't understand you, Toby," I said, hoping that the phrase in itself would dissuade him from continuing and that he would stop. Hoping that he would say something like "Let's drop the subject," or "Forget it," or "Pay no attention to me" or "It doesn't matter." But he said none of those things.

  "Don't you?" And Toby Rylands stroked his thick, white, well-combed hair, the way Cromer-Blake did (perhaps he'd copied the gesture from Toby Rylands), except that Rylands' hair was much whiter. "He must have been very blond once," I thought, just before he said what I (as a superstitious madrileño or an anglicised stoic) would have preferred him not to say: "Listen," he said, "listen to me. Cromer-Blake is going to die. I don't know what's wrong with him and he's not going to tell us, assuming that is that he knows for certain or hasn't managed to put it out of his mind, at least for short periods, through sheer irresponsibility and will power. I don't know what's wrong with him but I'm sure it's something very serious and I doubt that he'll last much longer. He was in a dreadful state when he came here last in February, he looked as good as dead to me. He looked like a dead man. You say he's better now, and you can't imagine how pleased I am to hear that; I only hope it lasts. But he's been better before only to get worse again shortly afterwards, and that last time I saw him he had the look of a condemned man. It broke my heart to see him like that and, when he dies, it will break even more, but it's best to get oneself used to the idea. Yet it hurts me that he doesn't come and see me because of that, while he still can. The reason he doesn't come has nothing to do with his appearance, I mean, whether he looks all right or at death's door; it isn't because he doesn't want to distress me, or because he doesn't want me to see him when he's really bad. I know the real reason he doesn't come and see me. Before, I was an old man (though I've looked like an old man for a long time now; you've only known me a year, but I've always looked older than my age), I was inoffensive, even useful, my digressions were instructive and my malicious comments and jokes amusing, and I still had things to teach him, even though I don't know much about your particular field, Spanish literature - I still don't understand why he didn't study English literature, so much more varied. But that isn't how he sees me any more, now I'm the mirror in which he's afraid he'll see himself reflected. His end is near and so is mine. I remind him of death because, of all his friends, I'm the one nearest to it. I'm the illness he's suffering from, I'm old age, I'm decay, my will has gone wandering off somewhere on its own, like his, only I've had time to get used to that, and getting used
to losing one's will means learning to hold on to it as long as possible, to delay its departure, to do as little harm as possible. He hasn't had that chance, and he can't be blamed for it. I shouldn't blame him for avoiding me, poor boy. Although you'd never know it, he must be utterly bewildered. He must be terrified. And unable to believe what's happening to him."