All Souls Read online

  That dark, bony, formal man, with the enormous mouth, pointed skull and high cheekbones of an Otto Dix portrait (and possessed of a child-like ferocity, by which I mean one that could only frighten those barely out of childhood, namely his students, who faithfully, year after year, passed on to the new crop of undergraduates his three bloodcurdling nicknames), no doubt took as much pleasure in the Russian language as he did in Spanish words of four or more syllables ("En-a-je-na-miento, tra-ga-sa-bles, sin-gla-du-ra, va-sa-lla-je"). He knew no other life than the university. He was just one more bachelor in the city of Oxford, another upholder of the old clerical tradition of that immutable, inhospitable place, preserved in syrup, in the words, already quoted, of one of my predecessors. (Another troubled spirit, like myself.) Dewar was a dead soul. He had, however, this other small, unusual life, and the day - one of the few days — he was called to London with great urgency because a swimmer, a pole vaulter, a cellist or a dancer (you can be sure those were his favourites) had asked for political asylum, forsaking for ever his or her troupe or orchestra or team, then he would abandon with glee the white noise of his rooms at Brasenose (his dead soul leaping into life again), and take the train through Didcot and Reading and Slough and Southall and arrive at Paddington where he would change on to a packed underground train that would take him to the heart of London. He must have felt he was the most important, most inscrutable, wisest man in the whole university: more important than both Vice Rector and Rector, more important than the Vice Chancellor and more inscrutable and wiser even than the Chancellor himself. That's why whenever I came across him with his thick glasses on, reading a newspaper in the Senior Common Room or in the library at the Taylorian or in the lounge at the Randolph Hotel immediately opposite, I imagined him, his pulse racing, engaged in avid scrutiny of the arts and sports pages to see if a Soviet ballet company or state orchestra or some team of Soviet athletes or chessplayers were coming to perform or compete in some corner of Great Britain, and when he saw them advertised or read reviews of their performances, he must have prayed to Hermes, the god of travellers and commerce, or thieves and orators, of disquiet and dreams, to arm with valour one of their number during the night and persuade him to dodge the security guards and make a bid for freedom.

  Dewar will find himself less and less in demand now, his days will pass routinely with no surprises, no phonecalls from London. And that's why - ever less attentive to the phone - he will not hesitate to use his white noise to banish and neutralise for ever all other sounds. I am no longer a solitary like him, nor one of the living dead, but for a time I thought I was.

  I SAW THE CHILD ERIC, Clare's son, only once and that was when the days of his unexpected stay in Oxford were coming to an end and my emotional instability was at its height (for if you have already been deprived of something for some time or - its real duration being of little importance — have experienced it as having gone on for a long time, as being perhaps endless, the fact that an end to it is now in sight pales into insignificance beside the continuing fact of your deprivation; I mean that the mere juxtaposition of these two things is not in itself enough for you to perceive as being at an end something which, though about to end, is still not yet over, and what prevails is the fear that by some ill luck - by some misfortune, the very opposite of what you have foreseen - that long-accumulated, patient present might yet go on for ever: you experience not relief but anxiety and feel only distrust for the future). And the time I saw the child Eric I also saw - again only once - his grandfather, that is, Clare's father, the old diplomat now retired and living in London, who thirty years before used to stand at the other end of the garden and watch his daughter, the young Clare, while she waited and in turn watched the trains crossing the iron bridge over the River Jumna. (In those days her silent father smelled of tobacco, alcohol and mint.)

  It happened in the museum, that is, in the town's main museum, the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, a building that at the end of the seventeenth century housed the kingdom's first public exhibition of natural and historical curiosities (or rather the museum did, not the actual building, which did not become a home to them until two centuries later). I didn't visit the museum often, for the curiosities are of the kind that need to be seen only once, but that day in the fifth week of my second, solitary Trinity term, I had walked the twenty or so paces from the Taylorian (the institute and the museum are adjacent, forming a right angle, so that they seem almost to be the wing and main body of the same building) in order to have a look in the Ashmolean library at the drawings of Spanish cities, not on public display, made in the mid-sixteenth century by the Flemish artist Anton van den Wyngaerde or Antonio de las Vinas, topographer and court painter to Philip II, commissioned to this end by one of my brothers, a historian of architecture in Madrid (that is I walked those twenty or so paces in order to go and see them on my brother's behalf, it was not he who commissioned Van den Wyngaerde to make the drawings, they were commissioned by the person probably known in Oxford at the time as the Demon of the South). A friendly librarian with reddish hair had allowed me to study and measure them and to note down details of the views (executed in pen and ink, sepia and watercolour) and I was leaving the museum with the odd sensation of having seen with extraordinary clarity the Golden Age skylines - or vistas seen obliquely from above - of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Malaga, Tarragona, Gibraltar, Segovia, the Albufera Lake and the port of Valencia, that is, the lost face of our southern cities, of my cities, almost forgotten, to which I would soon be able to return if I so wished: as soon as the Trinity term drew to a close and with it the academic year, just over three more weeks to go. As I say, on leaving the museum I was preoccupied by that odd sensation and by a sudden awareness of how short a time remained — objectively speaking — before I left Oxford and returned to Madrid (even though I was not going back to Madrid to stay), when at the entrance (or in the revolving door) I passed three people who were just coming in: the father, the daughter and the latter's son, that is, my lover with her son and her father. As had already happened twice with another woman in Oxford —and the second, if questionable, occasion was still very recent — I didn't realise it was Clare until I was outside the museum and they were inside, separated from me by a door. But it was so instantaneous (the realisation I mean: perhaps her companions prevented me noticing it was Clare since I always thought of her as being either alone or with her husband, or perhaps it was the revolving door, or the vivid memory of Sanlúcar as seen by Van den Wyngaerde) that I had time to go back in and see them in the foyer, where they were engaged in looking at the postcards and slides sold there.

  I had no way of knowing that the old gentleman holding her arm was her father, the diplomat Mr Newton (Clare Newton -Clare Newton! — that was Clare's name before she married), since I had never seen him, not even in a photograph. But I knew who he was at once. I knew because of their astonishing (perhaps even horrifying) likeness. That man, completely bald and slightly stooped, with his wrinkled skin and pouched eyes, and resting the remnants of his distinguished air on a walking stick, had the same face - exactly - that I knew so well. That old man of cadaverous aspect was Clare Bayes, as she might have been in a bad dream in which, whilst still retaining her own identity, she appeared in the guise of a decrepit old man. Half-hidden behind a column, I observed them from a distance - both adults were facing me, but the child still had his back to me - and, while it was likely that she had also failed to notice me when we passed on the way in, now she did see me - my head and torso emerging from behind the column which I was using less as a hiding place than as some form of protection - and, when her companions weren't looking at her or in my direction (they were looking at the slides), she made a gesture with her right hand for me to go away, to leave, to disappear. But it was then that the child, her son Eric, as if he had eyes in the back of his head or somehow knew that was the precise moment he should look - or perhaps he heard the clink of her numerous bracelets as her hand made that brie
f, clandestine, proscriptive gesture - half turned round for a moment and saw me and looked at me, and doubtless associated me with his mother. And when the boy turned round and stopped looking at the slides and the postcards and stopped listening to what his grandfather was saying to him (it was only a matter of seconds), when he intercepted our looks and I saw his face at last, what I saw was the same, identical face for the third time, Clare's face that I knew so intimately and that I had kissed and whose lips had kissed me so many times. That face, I thought, was the same face that long before had been the face of her diplomat father and then, as yet only briefly, that of the child Eric, Eric Bayes. They were one and the same face, the face whose lips had kissed me in one of its incarnations, representations, figurations or manifestations, for I've never seen such a perfect, precise, exclusive likeness. Those three people had transmitted their features, rejecting all others (those of a mother and a father, those of the first Clare Newton and those of Edward Bayes), and had surrendered them up entirely, unstintingly and freely, I mean without keeping back one single detail for themselves; and unlike most such capricious, unexpected likenesses, in which one or several or many but never all the features are reproduced, or the inherited characteristics are changed (changed by the passing of unpredictable time and by intransigent age), in this instance, in each of the three cases, the transmission had been complete and unaltered: the same deep blue eyes, the same thick, curled eyelashes, the same short, straight nose, the same strong, cleft chin, the pale cheeks, hard forehead, heavy eyelids, faded lips. But for the moment I could see no more, for the child Eric had turned round again and had his back to me, and after Mr Newton had bought a folio-size reproduction - a reduction or an enlargement: a likeness - of some picture or object I couldn't make out, the three moved off towards the rooms inside, this time without Clare looking round at me, on the contrary, she seemed bent on pretending that she hadn't seen me and on trying to ignore me (she'd realised I had no intention of obeying or paying any heed to her furtive hands shooing me away). I let a few seconds pass, then set off after them, determined to visit all the rooms they visited. "So they've brought young Eric to see the museum," I was thinking without wanting to (I wanted to think about the likeness, or perhaps it was the other way round, perhaps I thought this because I preferred not to think about the likeness). "Clare's often told me how old he is, what was it now? Eight, nine years old? Judging by his height he looks like a boy of about nine, but he might be tall for his age, both his parents and his grandfather are tall, he might be only eight or seven, possibly even less. It's no age to be going round museums, I wouldn't bring my seven-year-old son to the Ashmolean, even if he was fed up and bored with being at home ill." That's what I was thinking and then I thought: "He looks fine now. He'll leave Oxford soon. But so will I, I'll be leaving very soon, and now I'm not so sure I want to."

  The three figures stopped every now and then, before a Greek statue, a Reynolds portrait, a piece of Chinese porcelain or some Roman coins. They looked at everything. I drew nearer then moved away, always keeping a few respectful yards between me and them, according to the length of the rooms and according to my capacity for feigned concentration on each of the objects I stopped to contemplate; and that's why - though also because they were speaking very quietly, as people do in British, though not in Spanish, museums — I could hear nothing of what they said. As I was always following, following scrupulously in their footsteps, each time they moved on after they had stopped to look at something, I saw them only from behind or in semi-profile, or rather quarter face. I never got a good view of them, and I think I preferred it like that, preferred not to be confronted once more by those three identical faces. Clare held the child Eric's hand, while her father, leaning on his walking stick, was always trailing slightly behind as if she were not prepared to wait for him or to adjust her and her son's pace to the slower and more awkward step of the ex-diplomat Mr Newton (as if the visit to the museum were a treat intended for her and the boy, not for the grandfather, who had perhaps insisted on accompanying them without having been invited and was just an appendage, perhaps even an intruder: he brought up the rear, the way nannies did when the mothers were present and took charge of the children, in the days when there were nannies). It wasn't the grandfather either who did the talking, Clare talked most, though always to the boy, and now and again I heard snippets of her comments.

  In front of the Alfred Jewel (a ninth-century cloisonné enamel, the pride of the Ashmolean) I heard her read out loud (like any father or mother) the Anglo-Saxon inscription cut into the band of gold filigree that encircles the supposed portrait of Alfred the Great: "Look, Eric, here it says Aelfred mec heht gewyrcan which means 'Alfred ordered me to be made'. See? It's the jewel itself saying that, it's the jewel speaking and telling us how it came to be made. It's said the same thing now for eleven centuries, and will go on saying the same thing for ever." The child Eric said nothing.

  Later, on the upper floor, before a rapid or unfinished sketch by Rembrandt depicting the painter's wife, Saskia, asleep in bed (only she isn't really in bed, but rather dressed or in a dressing gown and covered with a blanket, as if she were a convalescent), I heard Clare say to her son: "She looks like you in bed all these weeks, don't you think? Except you had the television to watch," and she stroked the back of his neck, setting her bracelets jingling again. Then she added, still looking at Saskia and no doubt ignorant of the fact that Saskia had died when she was younger even than herself and never had the chance to grow old (mistaking Saskia's possible illness for old age): "That's what I'll be like when I'm old." And young Eric said nothing or at least nothing I managed to catch (Eric seemed a polite, timid child, and if he spoke, he did so too quietly to be heard).

  Further on, in front of a Cantonese statue of gilded wood (in fact a copy from the last century) representing Marco Polo as a fat Chinaman with pale eyes, wearing an extravagant black hat with a narrow brim and low crown, shod in clogs of the same colour, his face adorned with equally black moustaches twisted back over his cheeks, I heard Clare say: "Oh look, Eric, it's Marco Polo, the Italian explorer. He first reached China in the thirteenth century when it was still very hard to get there and, since getting back was harder still, he stayed on and stayed there so long he ended up looking like a Chinaman, see? But he was really Italian, from Venice. Look, he's got blue eyes. No real Chinaman would have blue eyes." And Eric remained silent, or rather I didn't hear his response, only Clare's; annoyed at my disobedience and my spying, she was doubtless trying to speak as quietly as possible thus urging the boy to do likewise, as if— in keeping with her decision of the last four weeks - she didn't want me to participate even as an eavesdropper in her family world, especially not in the filial and paternal worlds - the world of blood ties — though I knew her husband and occasionally, as I have said, the three of us even lunched or dined together with Cromer-Blake. She just didn't want me to be there, and I began to think that when I did hear what she said, it was because she wanted me to, that it was not by chance that only certain phrases reached my ears, and that when Clare Bayes raised her voice, she did so on purpose in order to communicate something to me. And I thought: "She was referring to me when she said that about Marco Polo, her remarks were aimed at me, you don't talk to a seven- or eight-year-old child like that, at that age you're well on the way to adulthood. Unless, that is, Eric suffers from some form of infantilism and has to be treated as if he were younger than he is - or perhaps she's just made him more of a baby over the weeks he's been at home - or then again, maybe he really is younger than I think, I've come to realise that I'm as useless at judging children's ages as I am at judging how old adults are, and another thing I've realised is that, apart from the women I already know, like Clare herself, the more I desire women the less prepared I am to think about them, I desire them without thinking about them at all, that's how it was with Muriel and how it still is with the attractive waitresses at Brown's, and I don't know if that's indicative of anyt
hing - it's certainly a new development — apart from my general state of disequilibrium. I do think about Clare, indeed the less I see of her the more I think about her and try to imagine her, if not I wouldn't be here trailing round the Ashmolean having forgotten all about what brought me here in the first place: Van den Wyngaerde (I've got the notes I made in my pocket); and when she raised her voice to talk about the statue it was so that I should understand that someone who spends too much time in a place other than his homeland ends up belonging to neither place, ends up looking like a Chinaman with blue eyes, like the Marco Polo of this statue. But I haven't spent too much time here, I'm neither an exile nor an emigrant, and anyway I'll be leaving soon. Maybe this summer I'll go to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, I really liked that view of the bay, the castle, the principal church, the Duke's palace, the customs house, that view painted four centuries ago and that no longer exists nor ever existed, since the viewpoint adopted is a purely imaginary one, as perhaps my viewpoint on the city of Oxford is." And in my mind, I added: "She knows that too, that I'll be leaving soon, she's probably worked it out already, just a little over three weeks until the end of term, but despite that she continues to tell me - not with her hand or with a look, nor so casually as in the foyer, but with deliberate, winged words - that I should go away, leave, disappear now, without delay, from Oxford and from her life, where I haven't spent so very long. I could almost leave now, I've scarcely any classes left, perhaps the time has come, a little earlier than anticipated, I must talk to her and not just on the phone or hurriedly as we've always talked, always just about to part right from the very first moment, I must see her, we must make time to see each other unhurriedly, with no bells chiming out the hours, at least once, now that nothing holds me here."