All Souls Read online

  There was scarcely anyone else in the museum, only the odd impatient or lost visitor peering into a room only to leave again without looking at anything and the lethargic keepers on their chairs like Andalusian neighbours sitting deep in thought in their patios after their siesta, just them and the family group spanning three generations and a solitary man, a foreigner, who no longer perhaps seemed so foreign after his not over-long stay in Oxford - or perhaps had the gait of an Englishman but the eyes of a southerner — and who mechanically, always some steps behind, looked at everything they had looked at and, possibly, as quickly forgotten. The foreign chap with the look (albeit imperfect) of an Oxford don followed them out of the museum, and walked behind them through the red-grey streets and went into the same restaurant they did - it was still early but hunger can come on children at any time and they lunch promptly -and sat down alone at a table opposite them, in direct line with that of the father, the daughter and the daughter's son, keeping his fingers crossed that no one would sit at the empty table between him and them and thus block his view of the three identical faces; he was determined now to see them and observe them.

  The child Eric sat down opposite his mother, still with his back to me, and the grandfather sat to her left, an arrangement doubtless chosen because Clare intended to continue addressing herself principally to her son (she ignored the ex-diplomat Newton, showed him no respect, or mistreated him by simply not treating with him at all). I could hear their conversation more clearly now, although in fact, apart from the odd isolated comment, they didn't talk that much while they studied the menu, or even afterwards, while they ate. "I'm going to have sausages." I heard the boy's voice for the first time. "I don't think it's a good idea to have sausages here, Eric," Clare said to him, "they won't be any better than the ones you have at home, but other things might be. Why don't you have asparagus to start with? You liked it that time you had it at your aunt's house. We hardly ever have asparagus at home, and I'm sure you don't often get it at school." "I don't feel like eating asparagus. Unless I can eat it with my fingers, can I?" I saw Clare Bayes give him a look of mock disapproval and heard her say with a pretend drawl of hesitancy: "I suppose so." "Well, I'm going to have asparagus served with scrambled eggs," interposed the ex-diplomat; "wouldn't you prefer to eat it like that, Eric? It has salmon in it too. Do you like salmon?" "I don't know," said Eric, and went back to studying the menu. The retired diplomat ordered white wine and Clare Bayes ordered water. And then, when they were already on their first course and I was still waiting for mine (asparagus with scrambled eggs and salmon) to arrive, Clare asked her son: "What did you like best at the museum, Eric? What would you take home with you if you could?" The coins," said Eric, "and the statues. The Chinese statues, the painted ones. There's a boy at school who collects coins, but you can't collect statues, can you?" "It would be a bit expensive," said the diplomat, with a senile grin revealing teeth just like Clare's (but more translucent and possibly capped like Mrs Alabaster's or false like Toby Rylands'), "and there are far fewer of them." "I'll collect coins then; why don't you each give me one to start my collection now?" said Eric, and Clare and her father each took out a coin, he from his jacket pocket, she after much searching in the handbag she used to leave thrown down anyhow (sometimes even spilling the contents) in my bedroom or in the rooms of hotels in London or Reading, and I remembered the coin I'd thrown to some children who weren't Eric (he wasn't ill then and he was away at school) on Guy Fawkes' Day on the fifth of November last year from the window of her study in All Souls, in Catte Street, across from the Radcliffe Camera, nine months after we'd first met. That was seven months ago, and now all that had changed was that nothing had changed: I'd known Clare for a long time and nothing had ever changed, except that just now I wasn't allowed to see her and would soon have to say goodbye. I wouldn't have minded giving the boy a coin too. "But don't go and spend it," warned his grandfather, "if you show me you're capable of saving them and starting a real collection, I'll bring you some from Italy and Egypt and India that I've got in London." And turning to his daughter, he added: "I think there are still some at home. We travelled such a lot then, didn't we, Clare? But my travelling days are long since over." Clare didn't reply, though, and concentrated on her own plate of asparagus with scrambled eggs and salmon. They were finishing their second course just as I was starting mine when Clare said: "It's back to Bristol on Sunday. Has it been very boring being here with me all this time?" "No," said the boy (who was certainly too young to know anything of coquetry) and, since he said nothing more but just went on eating his sausages, I thought again that Clare's question must be intended for me and I answered in my thoughts: "Yes, it's been very boring here all this time without her."

  And during the whole of lunch in that restaurant slowly filling with people, and because Eric was only young and therefore short, his lack of height gave me a view of the whole of his mother's face above the back of his head - Clare was immediately opposite me and facing me, but never once looked at me - and to the left I had a clear view of the grandfather's face; and with them sitting down and me sitting down - and though she never looked at me once - I could see them better than at any point, either standing still or moving around, in the foyer of the museum or in any of its rooms. And by the end of the lunch I was just getting used to the astonishing likeness - to the extraordinary similarity between father and daughter and to the back of the grandson's head concealing his likeness — when, without finishing his dessert and having asked permission to do so (he was a polite boy), Eric got up, turned round and walked by me on his way to the toilets. It took him only a few steps — four or five — to pass me, but during the short time those four or five steps lasted - one, two, three, four, five - I enjoyed a close, clear and simultaneous view of the three identical faces, that of the grandfather and mother sitting down and that of the son as he walked by me. The boy looked straight at me as he passed, as he had done when he turned round in the museum foyer, and doubtless again associated me with the person with whom he should inevitably associate me (but he would say nothing because he was too polite and timid); and as his mother and his grandfather followed with their respective gazes the trajectory of that of their son and grandson, both rested their unveiled eyes on me (she for the first time since we'd entered the restaurant, he for the first time in his life), and for some moments the three of them, all at the same time, regarded me with their unveiled eyes (at least I think they did because I didn't actually see it, my eyes being fixed only on Eric who was taking his four or five steps in my direction). It was only a matter of a few seconds (the time such steps take when made by a child, for children have no concept of walking slowly), but it was long enough for me to see (as I had not had the chance to in the museum foyer) something in the boy which then (but not in the museum foyer) acquired a name: in the child Eric's deep blue eyes I glimpsed the slow downhill feeling that we all experience sooner or later. "It doesn't depend on age really," Toby Rylands had said (and he'd said it before the last term had ended, before Easter Week, and before the summer term had begun and Eric had fallen ill and been brought back to Oxford ahead of time. "Some people experience it even when they're children; some children already have a sense of it." That's what he'd said, exactly that, and that was precisely what I saw then, in the time it took for him to walk past me - a child already conscious of that feeling; but I saw it not only in the boy's face but also - by assimilation, by kinship, because of their similarity, their astonishing, indeed alarming, likeness - in the faces of the old man and of the woman I knew so well (and in whom I had never recognised it or seen it before) and whom I had kissed and who had kissed me so very often. In those three people, every feature and characteristic, as I said before, had been passed on without the slightest detail being kept back, including that downhill feeling, "the slow downhill feeling we all experience sooner or later", I thought and remembered and thought again. "Kiss the child and you kiss the old man," I thought. "I've kissed and b
een kissed by the boy and by the old man, and that's an example of two ideas which, according to Alan Marriott, may or may not ever become associated, but once they do, they instil horror and provoke fear: the idea of the boy and the idea of the kiss, the idea of the kiss and the idea of the old man, the idea of the boy and the idea of the old man. The old man's horrifying other half is the boy, the boy's is the old man, that of the kiss the child, and that of the child the kiss, that of the kiss the old man and that of the old man the kiss, my kiss (there are three ideas involved, plus that of Clare, who hovers in the middle), the kiss given by interposing people but not by an interposing face, for the face is the same even though age and sex may vary through the different incarnations, representations, figurations or manifestations. The kiss of all three is the kiss given by someone who has experienced that slow downhill feeling familiar to the demoniacal - the awesome - Rylands and to the ailing Cromer-Blake but not to me (the feeling that Rylands has known for forty years and Cromer-Blake since who knows when, the feeling known too to the beggars and to Saskia beneath her blanket but unknown to me). It is the kiss of one who, in Rylands' words, has spent years letting death approach, or of one who, to use Rylands' words again, knows that a day will dawn when he will no longer be able to fantasise about things still to come. It's only natural that the ex-diplomat Newton should know it, and it's also understandable that Clare Bayes née Newton, should too, but the fact is that the child Eric, Eric Bayes, at the age of only nine or eight or seven, also knows it. In the deep blue eyes they all shared, I saw, the first time I ever saw them, the blue waters of that river gleaming brightly in the blackness, the River Yamuna or Jumna, and the long bridge of crisscrossing iron girders, and the mail train that comes from Mor-adabad with its rickety many-coloured carriages and the diplomat father, silent (and melancholic and not old then) who watches his daughter watching as he stands, dressed for supper, with a glass in his hand, and a nanny who whispers in the ear of the young Clare (Clare Newton as she was then) or sings some trifling song; and perhaps it's the reflection of those blue or rather black waters (since it was night) that carries with it the slow downhill feeling, the feeling of being burdened down, of vertigo, of falling, gravidity and weight, of false plumpness and despair. That feeling was already in the gaze seen and observed for a whole minute across another table, a high table, nine plus seven months ago and yet it was not in mine, also seen and also observed for the same minute those nine plus seven months ago, and which reflected the image of four children walking with an old maidservant along calle de Génova, calle de Covarrubias or calle de Miguel Ángel. I feel deeply troubled, yet my sense of unease has never lacked coherence or logic, it is light, logical, coherent and transient, but now it's greater than ever because I'm thinking all this, thinking about the child and the old man and the kiss and the river, the wide River Yamuna or Jumna that crosses Delhi, and about the River Cherwell on whose banks Rylands lives and in whose waters he sees an image of the passing of time, and the Rivers Evenlode and Windrush between which lies Wychwood Forest or what was a forest, and the River Avon near where Eric goes to school, and the River Guadalquivir that flows out into the sea at Sanlúcar, and the River Isis, the nearest to me, and into which I may well need to vomit. How wearying it is, this permanent state of unease, how wearisome and tedious it is to think these troubled thoughts and because of that to think so much, such ravings always have their origin in thoughts that rhyme and sway and have their own arbitrary punctuation; I must stop thinking and start talking instead, just to have a rest from these thoughts that struggle to make connections and associations and make too many, I must talk to Rylands or Cromer-Blake or Kavanagh or the Ripper or to Muriel (except I didn't get her phone number). I must talk to Clare and put my proposals to her: that we shouldn't say goodbye, shouldn't go our separate ways, that she should let me participate in that downhill feeling they all share and of which I as yet know nothing, or perhaps more simply, to which I have not been a witness."

  When Eric returned from the toilet, I heard only his rapid steps and felt the brush of air past me, but by then I wasn't looking at anyone and was hurriedly paying the bill before they'd even removed my plate of half-eaten sausages; I'd declined dessert knowing that if I didn't have time to reach home and the rubbish bin, at least the Isis wasn't too far away.

  THE VERY NEXT DAY I decided to ask the advice of Cromer-Blake, my best and only friend, about the proposals I intended putting to Clare Bayes, since we tend to try out our rhetorical skills on friends before submitting those skills to the real test, and make our friends early participants in any plans we don't completely trust (so that those friends may lessen the pain of failure), expecting to wring from them the encouragement and response we hope to win later and which we may well not receive when the plan proper is put into action.

  I didn't bother to phone before going to see him, I just dropped by his college after my morning class, as I had so many times before, assuming that he'd be in his rooms. If the worst came to the worst, and he was giving a tutorial, then I'd just wait outside the door for it to finish. On the stairs on my way up to his rooms — on the third floor like mine - I heard his voice and presumed he was indeed lecturing some undergraduate, who would be sitting dozing on the sofa opposite Cromer-Blake, pretending to concur with the latter's disquisitions on Tirano Banderas or Automoribundia. That's why I did not at first rap on the door with my knuckles, not because I wanted to hear what he was saying or talking about. I listened only in order to confirm that he was busy and to make an on-the-spot calculation as to whether it was convenient or worth my while waiting — outside the door, as I say - until the end of the tutorial or whether I should instead quickly open the door and tell him I needed to talk to him urgently and would return shortly, then take myself off for a stroll. But, when I was already outside his door, the first clear words I heard (the first to rise above a murmur) stopped me in my tracks for long enough, a matter of seconds, so that (once those seconds had passed: one, two, three, four, five) it was already too late to make any further move either into the room or back down the stairs.

  There's a verb in English which can only be translated into Spanish by a gloss, that verb is "eavesdrop" which means (and this is the gloss) to listen indiscreetly, secretly, furtively, to listen deliberately, not by chance or unwillingly (for that you'd use the verb "overhear"), and the verb itself contains two separate words, "eaves" which means "the edge of a roof projecting out beyond the wall of a house" and "drop", which can mean several things but basically has to do with liquid dropping (the listener places himself at a certain minimal distance from the house: he stands at the spot where the water would normally run off the eaves after a shower of rain, and from there listens in to what is said inside). Vladimir Vladimirovich, he of the former British colonies, once pondered on the device of "eavesdropping" in the nineteenth-century novel, and more specifically in A Hero of our Time, and although Nabokov was at Cambridge, not Oxford, I'm sure that during his time there in the 1920s he would have had ample opportunity to make the same discovery I made in my time at Oxford, which is that eavesdropping was and is not only a practice in active use in both places, but still the best (admittedly primitive) means of obtaining the information one needs in order to avoid becoming the kind of outsider who neither possesses nor transmits any. In Oxford (and in Cambridge too, I imagine), eavesdropping becomes exactly what Nabokov describes in the Lermontov novel mentioned above: "the barely noticeable routine of fate". I had seen circumspect, sententious dons actually down on one knee before a keyhole in a corridor in the Taylorian (getting their trousers dusty in the process), or sprawled on a carpet in one of the colleges (literally prostrating themselves, their gown like a spreading ink stain) with one ear glued to the crack beneath the door, or keeping watch with a spyglass (made in Japan) from some Gothic window; not to mention neglecting their own conversational partners in the lounge at the Randolph in order to catch some sentence unleashed from another corner, or else imprude
ntly craning their neck at high table (or afterwards, more likely, once their napkins were irredeemably soiled). But I had never done this, I had never stood beneath the eaves. I did so then for the first time, and when I did (only momentarily and almost at the end of my stay there) I felt somehow more integrated; although I think the first clear words that reached my ears from Cromer-Blake's apparently bloodless lips were, strictly speaking, merely overheard. What happened afterwards, however, was eavesdropping pure and simple.

  "Come on, please, be nice, come to bed with me," those were the first distinct words I overheard Cromer-Blake saying; and in the following seconds, during which I remained stock still, my friend added: "Just this once, just one more time, please, I implore you, it will be the last time." The voice that answered was young, younger, rather unpleasant, rather cracked, as if the young man's voice had not yet completely broken, which was odd because although he was young he was not so young that his voice would not yet have stabilised. And that countertenor voice replied without irritation, patiently, trustingly, like an old friend: "Don't go on about it, I've already said no, and that's that. Anyway, Dayanand says you're ill and you shouldn't overdo things, he says it's dangerous, for me too. That's what he says." His diction was rather crude, not so very different from the way Muriel spoke, or the mechanic Bruce (except that it wasn't Bruce, who had a much deeper voice), the diction of someone who would say things like: "abaht", "fings", "nuffink", "nah" (but then, nowadays, that's not unknown amongst certain television presenters either). And because of that, because of the plebeian accent, I knew at once that it couldn't be an undergraduate (it had crossed my mind that it might be young Bottomley), and anyway Cromer-Blake would never do anything so foolish, even if he were in love and desperate: nothing was taken more seriously in Oxford than an accusation of sexual harassment, or, even worse (and equally possible), of gross moral turpitude, another (anglicised) Latinism, an exquisite euphemism for, in plain language, penetration. "Ah, Dayanand says so does he, our omniscient doctor," remarked Cromer-Blake (almost to himself) recovering the ironic tone that was so much more characteristic of him than pleading; it made me uncomfortable to hear him plead. "Dayanand knows nothing about my health, he's just saying that to take you away from me, to eliminate me, it's ages since he last saw me as a patient; that's about as valid as if I were to tell you now that it's him who's ill. To call someone ill is always a way of discrediting them. It's a way of getting rid of people. I've been a little unwell, but I'm fine now, I'm cured. Do I look like a sick man?" I'd seen Cromer-Blake two or three days before and he looked good, as I imagined he would at that moment, on the other side of the door. I wondered if the young man who was speaking could be the "Jack" whose name Cromer-Blake had let slip months before, just after I saw Clare for the first time (saw her face and her tasteful décolletage); and I waited to hear a name in his - in Cromer-Blake's - mouth that would clarify this for me, but I can categorically state that during my period of eavesdropping no name was uttered.