All Souls Page 14

  Toby Rylands drank a little more sherry and half-closed his eyes whose opposing colours, now that the sun shone full in his face, blended into one. He picked up an olive.

  "I don't know," I said. "I'm not sure you're right, Toby. It would never occur to me to think of you as being near death, as you put it, nor in anyway reminiscent of or like some kind of harbinger of death. You're not even that old, and you're in excellent health. You look wonderful. Last year your classes were packed out and if you hadn't been due for retirement this year they would have gone on being packed out. No burned-out old has-been could fill a lecture hall in Oxford. Maybe Cromer-Blake simply hasn't had time to come and see you."

  "Ta, ta, ta," Toby Rylands exploded into bitter laughter. Then he said: "I know what you're thinking, you think I'm just saying all this because of that, because I had to retire. You think that's why I suddenly see myself as being near death and other such nonsense just because I'm not doing anything and spend too much time thinking, alone in this garden by the river, that eternal image of the passing of time. Or at home . . . with the silent Mrs Berry. That's pure platitude and anyway I'm not inactive. I'm writing the best book ever on Laurence Sterne and his Sentimental Journey. You may say that doesn't matter much or matters only to a select few, and isn't much of a reason to feel that people still. .. expect something from me, but it matters to me. I love that book and it matters to me that it should be properly understood and that I should understand it as I study it one more time and explain it to you all: I expect something from myself, you see. No, it's got nothing to do with retirement, nothing at all. For years now I've watched the days pass with that slow downhill feeling we all experience sooner or later. It doesn't depend on age really, some people experience it even when they're children; some children already have a sense of it. I felt it early on, some forty years ago, and I've spent all these years letting death approach and it still frightens me. The worst thing about the approach of death isn't death itself and what it may or may not bring, it's the fact that one can no longer fantasise about things still to come. I've had what is commonly referred to as a full life, or at least that's how I regard it. I haven't had a wife or children, but I've had a life spent in the acquisition of knowledge and that was what mattered to me. I've always gone on finding out more than I knew before and it doesn't matter where you put that 'before', even if it's only today or tomorrow. But I've had a full life, too, in the sense that my life's been crammed with action and the unexpected. As you'll no doubt have heard, I was a spy, like so many of us here, because that, too, can form part of our duties; but I was never just a penpusher like that fellow Dewar in your department, indeed like most of them. I worked out in the field. I've been in India and in the Caribbean and in Russia and I've done things I could never tell anyone about now, because they would seem so ridiculous no one would believe me. I know only too well that what one can and cannot tell depends very much on the timing, because I've dedicated my life to identifying just that in literature and I've learned to identify it in life too. I shouldn't be telling you any of this now, but the fact is that in my life I've run mortal risks and betrayed men I had nothing against personally. I've saved a few people's lives too, but sent others to the firing squad or the gallows. I've lived in Africa, in the most unlikely places, in other eras, and I watched the suicide of the person I loved." Toby Rylands stopped short, as if he'd been led to make that last remark by his memory, not by his will (the will he held on to so hard but which was now no longer his alone); he recovered at once, doubtless because to continue was the best way of undoing it. "Oh, and battles, I've been a witness to those too. My head is full of bright, shining memories, frightening and thrilling, and anyone seeing all of them together, as I can, would think they were more than enough, that the simple remembering of so many fascinating facts and people would fill one's old age more intensely than most people's present. But it isn't like that, and even now, when it seems that nothing unexpected is ever going to happen to me again, I mean, nothing; when the life I lead here in my garden and my house with the all too predictable Mrs Berry seems designed to guarantee that nothing happens; when anything surprising or stimulating seems over and done with, out of the question, I can assure you that I do still want more: I want everything; and what gets me out of bed in the mornings continues to be the expectation of what might happen, all unannounced. I'm always expecting the unexpected, and I still fantasise about what might still be, as I did when I was sixteen and left Africa for the first time and absolutely anything was possible because when you know nothing there's room for all kinds of knowledge. I've been slowly wearing away at my ignorance and, as I said, I've always kept on learning. But that ignorance is still so vast that even today, at seventy, leading this quiet life, I still cherish the hope of being able to embrace everything and experience everything, the unknown and the known, yes, even things I've known before. There's as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can't accept that certain things won't repeat themselves. That's why I sometimes envy Will, the old porter at the Taylorian, who must be twenty years older than me and yet, now that he's let go of his will for good, he lives in a constant state of joy and anxiety travelling back and forth in time throughout his life, both enjoying great new surprises and repeating things he knew before. That's a way of not renouncing anything, even though he's unaware of it and even though his life spent in his porter's lodge has been anything but full from my point of view. But my point of view is irrelevant here, as is anyone else's. Knowing that some time one will have to give up everything, whatever that everything is, that's what's unbearable, for everyone, it's all we've ever known, all we've ever been used to. I can understand someone who regrets dying simply because they won't be able to read their favourite author's next book, or see a new film starring an actress they admire, or drink another glass of beer, or do today's crossword, or continue to follow a particular television series, or because they won't know who won this year's FA Cup. I can understand that perfectly well. It isn't only that anything still might happen, some unimaginable piece of news, a sudden turn-around in events, the most extraordinary experiences, discoveries, the world turned upside down .. . The other side of time, its dark back. It's also because so many things hold us here. There must be dozens of things holding Cromer-Blake here. As many as there must be for you or for me or for Mrs Berry." And Toby Rylands pointed towards the house. "Imagine it, poor chap. But it seems that when it comes to his final hour, I won't be one of those things."

  Professor Rylands fell silent. He zipped up his windcheater still further, concealing the upper part of his yellow sweater completely - though not the part below the jacket, where a band of yellow was still visible - and put two olives into his mouth at once. "You wouldn't like me to have a word with him, would you?" "Absolutely not." And his eyes, one the colour of olive oil and the other of pale ashes, the eye of the eagle and the eye of the horse, flashed me an imperious look. The literary scholar finished his second glass of sherry and, patting his enormous, convex chest, got up and took a few steps towards the river. He picked up the wicker basket he'd thrown on to the grass and, carrying it on his arm, like a wandering seller of yore who's sold all his merchandise, turned towards the house and shouted: "Mrs Berry! Mrs Berry!" And when Mrs Berry appeared at the window of the kitchen, where she would already be preparing a light lunch for which I would not stay, he said to her, raising his voice as I would later at the discotheque in order to speak to Muriel from Wychwood Forest: "Mrs Berry, would you be so kind as to bring me some biscuits, some stale ones!" Then he turned and looked at me (no longer imperious) and shook the basket in the air, laughing: "Ta, ta, ta. Let's see if that will tempt those lazy swans out of hiding."

  EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS to us, everything that we say or hear, everything we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partly responsible) must find a
recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone - though not necessarily always to the same person - and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping one afternoon might scrutinise, set aside and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once although, as Rylands had determined, with all the weight of literary authority behind him, it must be told when the time is right or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognise that right moment or deliberately let it pass, there will never again be another. That moment presents itself sometimes (usually) in an immediate unequivocal and urgent manner, but equally often, as is the case with the greatest secrets, it presents itself only dimly and only after decades have passed. But no secret can or should be kept from everybody for ever; once in its life, once in the lifetime of that secret, it is obliged to find at least one recipient.

  That's why some people reappear in our lives.

  That's why we always condemn ourselves by what we say. Not by what we do.

  I knew that if the little time left to Cromer-Blake allowed, I would end up telling him what Toby Rylands' imperious look had forbidden me to, although it could not, strictly speaking, be considered a secret. But since at that point it was clear that I should keep silent (at least for the time being) and that those particular words would take some while to reach the ears of their chosen and most vital recipient, I immediately, albeit temporarily, forgot everything that Rylands had said about Cromer-Blake and his prolonged absence from the house by the Cherwell (by that I mean that I didn't agonise about it or keep turning it over in my mind). On the other hand, I couldn't forget those hints - not to say statements: the most explicit I'd heard him make - about his own past. But as regards those, the most I could do was communicate them to Cromer-Blake, to Clare, to the two principal figures in my life in the city of Oxford (paternal and maternal, fraternal and desired, respectively) apart from Rylands himself (who was the third figure, that of teacher, and the one most resigned to his role). I say "the most I could do" because whilst they could share and be the external recipient of those revelations, neither they nor anyone else (think of all the dead that must haunt Toby Rylands' clear shining recollections) could clarify them or fill in the details of that story of betrayal and espionage, of obscure origins and of battles, of men whom Rylands had either condemned or saved, still less the story of the person he had loved and who, even while being loved, had committed suicide before his eyes - although immediately I began to doubt what he had said, to doubt my own ability to understand English, to think that I must have misheard and misunderstood.

  The first chance I had, I talked to Cromer-Blake about it but, since he paid the story scant attention, he seemed to be in agreement with Rylands as regards consigning it all to the past and to oblivion. He just didn't seem interested. (Perhaps he really was no longer the person we thought he was or the person he used to be, because, as I've said before and as he himself said, Cromer-Blake reacted to everything with either irony or fury, but never with a total lack of curiosity, never with indifference.) He merely asked distractedly and sceptically (and there is no greater proof of indifference than scepticism): "Are you sure that's what he said?" "I think so," I said, "although now I'm not so sure. But I couldn't have invented it, it just wouldn't even occur to me to invent a story like that." And he said: "Who knows, maybe it happened during the war, maybe a friend of his, a soldier, got so frightened before a battle that he preferred to put an end to the uncertainty once and for all by shooting himself. It happened a lot, even more so in the trenches in the First World War, which were full of adolescents, hardly more than children some of them." "Is Rylands homosexual, then?" I asked. "Oh, I couldn't really say, he's been on his own for as long as I've known him and, anyway, he'd never talk about such ungentlemanly things. He seems more asexual than anything else." But that seemed to me to contradict something he'd said one night after high table when the port was flowing. "Anyway, you should know by now that, unless I'm told otherwise, when people talk about those they love or desire, I just automatically assume they mean men. Perhaps he said it to shock you. He talks very little about his past, but he likes it to be known that it was very intense. I wouldn't give any importance to the remark, always assuming that is what he said, of course." And he went on to ask me about my relationship with Clare, of which at the time - at the end of Hilary term in my second and last year – there remained, in principle at least, a further term of life and to which he'd become so used that, when he was in the mood, he acted as confidant to us both. At that time - like a gossipy midwife — he showed an all-consuming interest in other people's sexual or romantic relationships (as if he himself had renounced all such things), a passion for the present moment and for the most everyday of problems, as if the future no longer counted (as neither, it seemed, did the past). "Anyway who cares what happened forty years ago?" And spreading his hands eloquently, he crossed his long legs and adopted the pose (his gown like a fall of black water) that was the mainstay of the aesthetic disguise of his appearance. That was all he had to say about the revelation for which I had chosen him as recipient.

  As for Clare, I told her (in full) about my talk with Rylands. But she seemed interested mainly, or rather exclusively, in the latter's sadness at Cromer-Blake's prolonged absence, and it was only by pleading with her that I managed to dissuade her from intervening in the matter, as she intended, and to convince her not to tell the truant pupil of his master's complaints. At that time her son Eric was safe and well in Bristol and, true to her expansive self, she was still interested in everything, still lingering in the present moment. However, when I brought the conversation round to Rylands' past and to that highly melodramatic episode involving one particular death with but a single witness, her whole expression changed (in fact, she grimaced) and she grew impatient, as if she were no longer prepared to talk or even hear me talk about it. Perhaps the most surprising thing, though, was that she didn't seem particularly shocked or surprised by the revelation Rylands had made to me only half voluntarily. She seemed rather annoyed.

  "Who knows," she said, just as Cromer-Blake had said that same morning, "maybe it's true." We were at my house, upstairs, that is, in my bed, when it was still exclusively my place and hers. As so often happened there, due to the poor heating and our haste, we were both still fully clothed, talking hurriedly before she left to walk back to her house - beneath the fickle, mellow moon, her face to the wind - her cheeks still rather too flushed for our safety and my liking. We talked hurriedly because it gave us the illusion of time slowing down, of having fitted more into the brief time available to us and not just passionate outpourings, which no longer (nor had they for a long time) sufficed, for they were no longer the only thing we found interesting about each other. So she said: "Who knows, maybe it's true," and tried to change the subject. But I persisted: "Who would know about it? I'd like to find out more about that story of Toby's but I daren't ask him." "What difference does it make to you?" she said. "Perhaps he was in love with some woman who was very ill and in so much pain that she took her own life. That sort of thing doesn't just happen in films, you know." "So Toby Rylands is heterosexual?" I asked. "Oh, I don't know, I suppose so," she said, "I just assume that all men are unless, like Cromer-Blake, they tell me otherwise. Why shouldn't he be? Just because he's never married? I've never heard anyone say he wasn't." "Well, no, neither have I," I replied, adding: "But if the story's true and whatever the facts of the matter are, doesn't it strike you as terrible and worth finding out about?" It was then that she grew impatient and pulled a face and looked annoyed. She lit a cigarette so carelessly and irritably that a spark fell on to one leg (as usual when she didn't take her skirt off, she was sitting with it pulled up to reveal her tights, her strong, slim legs and her shoeless feet); she swore and got up from the bed, rubbing her
leg. She took three steps across the room to the window, looked out mechanically - gazing out perhaps at the church of St Aloysius and the wind in the streets - then walked another five steps to the opposite wall, leaned one hand on it, jangling her many bracelets, tapped her cigarette from which no ash fell - it had already fallen on to the carpet - and said: "Yes, of course it strikes me as terrible, and that's exactly why I don't want to find out any more about it, or talk about it, far less try to imagine what horrors might have happened to Toby in some foreign land thirty years back. Who cares what happened so far away, all that time ago?" "Forty years," I said, "I got the impression that he was talking about something that happened forty years ago. And he didn't say anything about it being in a foreign country, although it might well have been." "A lot of things happened thirty years ago, too, you know," said Clare Bayes, inhaling and exhaling her first puff of smoke, for until that moment she'd simply held the lit cigarette in her hand, gesturing with it but not actually smoking it, "and twenty years ago, and ten years ago, and even yesterday, here and in other countries, horrible things have always happened, I don't see why we have to talk about them now, nor why we should try to find out about those we had the good fortune not to know about, about those things we didn't witness and that we had nothing to do with. What we've seen with our own eyes is quite enough, don't you think?" And she began to gather up her files and bags and to put on her jacket to go, even though the bells of Oxford had last intervened only a short time before to tell us that we still had another quarter of an hour and even though the alarm clock on the bedside table had not yet gone off. There were no long drawn-out farewells on this occasion (no grief for the ending of time) despite the fact that the Easter holidays were about to begin and we wouldn't see each other now until term started again. That was the day she left behind the pair of earrings I still have in my possession.