All Souls Page 3

  Clare had few scruples, but then no one who knew her would ever have expected anything else, for her charm lay in large measure precisely in her lack of consideration both for other people and for herself. She often made me laugh, the talent I most appreciate in others, but I know that my fondness for her, and hers for me, was never long-lived or solid enough to prove dangerous (for I was not Edward Bayes, nor was I ever in any danger of supplanting him). It has always seemed to me overly ingenuous to think that because someone loves us - that is, because independently of us that person has made a decision temporarily to love us and only afterwards informed us of the fact - their treatment of us will be any different from the treatment they mete out to others, as if, immediately subsequent upon that other person's independent decision and declaration, we were not certain to be relegated to join those others, as if, in fact, as well as being ourselves, we had not always been "the others". The last thing in the world I would have wanted - at least during those fragile days I lived in Oxford, with only a very uncertain sense of my own identity — would have been to have Clare treat me as she treated Edward Bayes or her father or even the ironic Cromer-Blake, who was simultaneously paternal and filial towards her, while her father was simply paternal and her husband purely marital. I suppose my relationship with her was preeminently fraternal, as has tended to be the case with women I've known well, doubtless because I had no sisters and felt the poorer for it. Although our meetings were never that frequent I did have the opportunity to observe Clare at close quarters and, without wishing to speak ill of her or - let's say - speak of things that others, on hearing them from my lips, might consider derogatory, I put myself often enough in the shoes of the others - in the shoes of her father, of Edward Bayes and even of Cromer-Blake - to know without a doubt that she showed none of them the least consideration. I put myself above all in the shoes of Edward Bayes and I remember on one fifth of November, nine months after we'd met - I remember the date because it was Guy Fawkes Day and from Clare's study window, in All Souls, in Catte Street, across from the old Bodleian Library and the Radcliffe Camera, I could see some little boys begging pennies for the guy they'd made for the occasion out of rags, string and old clothes to represent the executed plotter Guy Fawkes, who is burnt that night on bonfires throughout the land - when I put myself so successfully in his place (in the place allotted to him, but perhaps never filled) that Clare confused me with him.

  The four of us, Bayes, Cromer-Blake, Clare and myself, had arranged to meet there in order to go out to lunch and I had been the first to arrive at Catte Street, deliberately getting there twenty minutes early. The previous night Clare and I had stayed on far too late at a hotel in Reading and, contrary to our custom when we visited Oxford's neighbouring town, had travelled back on the same train (when Edward Bayes was away we took Clare's car and when he wasn't we always travelled on different trains, there and back, to London or to Reading). Anyway, we'd arrived at Oxford station and walked together beneath a fickle, mellow moon, our faces to the wind, until on a corner still some distance from our respective houses, we went our separate ways. During the train journey we'd also sat next to each other since, being friends in the eyes of the world, not to have done so would have struck anyone seeing us as even odder. A member of the Russian department called Rook had certainly seen us. He was dozing, slumped in the first-class carriage we had initially got into because, from the platform, it had appeared to be empty. He saw us and we saw him when we were already advancing down the corridor, laughing in a compromising or overly frank and unEnglish manner and he, with what one presumed to be a nod of his sunken head, addressed Clare first with a "Mrs Bayes" and then - doubtless because he didn't know how to pronounce my name, or because he found it difficult to remember — bade me a simple "Good evening". We walked on to find a seat as far away as possible from him, but even there dared utter nothing but the briefest of noncommittal phrases in the lowest of voices. Afterwards, when we walked the streets of Oxford, for the first time together and alone, beneath the fickle, mellow moon, our faces to the wind, we heard his footsteps a little way behind, echoing the rhythm of our steps, or at least we thought they were his and not just the echo of our own. We neither turned round nor exchanged a word until the moment came for us to part and then we simply said "Goodbye" without even stopping or looking at each other (such is the sadness of secrecy). I heard nothing after that except, for an instant, Clare's footsteps hurrying away; I doubt she heard my own weary steps. Rook was famous because for the past twelve years he'd been engaged on a new translation of Anna Karenina and because, during an academic year spent in America, he'd met and become friendly with Nabokov. His translation — though no one, not even his publisher, had as yet seen a line of it - was to be both definitive and incomparable, beginning with a fundamental innovation in the title, for, according to both Rook and Nabokov - to whom he always referred as "Vladimir Vladimiro-vich" to indicate his familiarity both with the man and with Russian patronymics — the correct tide was Karenin not Karenina, since Anna was neither ballerina, singer or actress, the only women, however authentically Russian, whose family name it would be admissible to feminise in a text in English or in any other Western language. He and I had met on more than one occasion in the Senior Common Room in the Taylorian where, drinking cups of anaemic coffee and casting the occasional lazy, loathing glance at the scholarly contents of our respective briefcases, we lounged around pretending to be putting the finishing touches to our lesson preparation. Rook - a man with a massive head perched on a slender body - was always only too ready to talk about Nabokov or to enlighten me about Lermontov or Gogol, but his personal life was a closed book to the other members of the Oxford congregation. For that reason one could quite happily attribute to him any habit or characteristic one liked, and the reputation he had was of being a dreadful gossip. In fact in Oxford that is of no great significance. What would be extraordinary would be for someone not to have such a reputation: anyone who's not a scandalmonger or, at the very least, malicious is doomed to live as marginal and discredited an existence as someone unfortunate enough to have graduated from a university other than Cambridge or Oxford itself, and such a person has no chance of adapting because he will never be accepted. In Oxford the only thing anyone is truly interested in is money, followed some way behind by information, which can always be useful as a means of acquiring money. The information obtained can be important or superfluous, useful or trivial, political or economic, diplomatic or epistemological, psychological or genealogical, familiar or ancillary, historical or sexual, social or professional, anthropological or methodological, phenomenological, technological or straightforwardly phallic, it doesn't matter; but anyone wishing to survive there must have (or must obtain without delay) some sort of transmissible data. Giving information about something is, moreover, the only way of not having to give out information about oneself, and thus, the more misanthropic, independent, solitary or mysterious the Oxonian in question, the more information about other people one would expect him to provide in order to excuse his own reserve and gain the right to remain silent about his own private life. The more one knows and tells about other people, the greater one's dispensation not to reveal anything about oneself. Consequently the whole of Oxford is fully and continuously engaged in concealing and suppressing itself whilst at the same time trying to winkle out as much information as possible about other people, and from there comes the tradition - true — and the myth - also true - of the high quality, great efficiency and virtuosity of the dons and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to the dirtier work involved in spying and of their continued employment by both British and Soviet governments who vie for their services as prestigious agents -single, double and triple (Oxonians have sharper ears, Cantabrigians fewer scruples). However, the effect of this is that the aforementioned right to remain silent about one's private life is reduced literally to just that, that is, to saving oneself the humiliation and embarrassment of having to own u
p and make it public knowledge oneself, since, given the universal need to supply information about other people in order not to have to divulge anything about oneself, the very information that one avoids giving, others (a whole host of them) covet, spy out, pursue, track down, obtain and end up broadcasting in order, in turn, to avoid having to reveal any information about themselves. Some weak spirits (only a few) give it up as a bad job right from the start and, with a reprehensible lack of resistance and modesty, make a full public confession of their private affairs. Though frowned upon because of the frank, easygoing and heterodox attitude it reveals towards the game, this is permitted because it is seen as both unconditional surrender and abject submission. On the other hand, some virtuosi in the field manage, in spite of everything, to keep secret their habits, vices, tastes and practices (perhaps by dint of renouncing all habits, vices, tastes and practices), which does not, of course, prevent other people from inventing and attributing to them every vice they can think of; however, the variety and resultant contradictions in such incongruous and motley reports tend to make one distrust their veracity. Occasionally, though, such virtuosi (but they have to be real virtuosi) do get their own way and no one really knows any hard facts about them at all. Rook was without a doubt an eminent member of that class (such a consummate master of the art, you'd think he'd been trained by the Soviets). Apart from his absolute commitment to his monumental translation and his encounter with Vladimir Vladimirovich in Britain's former colonies, nothing was known about him (his personal life was a blank) and, on the other hand, one could take it for granted that anything he knew would, the instant he knew it, rapidly pass into the realm of popular knowledge.

  When I arrived twenty minutes early at her office in Catte Street, the morning after seeing Rook, crumpled and asleep, on the London train and imagining we'd heard his footsteps behind ours in the windy streets of the empty city, Clare was calmly reading the newspaper. (She opened the door to me, one finger keeping her place between the pages. She didn't kiss me.) Whilst she seemed to have slept well enough, I had barely slept a wink, so I had no option but to come straight to the point and ask her the question I'd asked myself again and again during that long, sleepless night ("Had she or had she not told Ted that she was in Reading last night?")

  "Of course not; anyway, he didn't ask me."

  "You're mad. That just makes it worse. If he doesn't know it already, he'll find out soon enough from Rook."

  "Not directly from Rook. They scarcely know each other."

  "In Oxford everyone scarcely knows everyone else, but that doesn't stop them talking to each other at all hours and leaping to the first interpretation of the facts that occurs to them. All it needs is for Rook to have met Ted this morning in a corridor or in the street. 'Oh, by the way, tell your wife I meant to offer to share my taxi with her last night. We were on the same train from Reading, but she got off so quickly I didn't have time to offer. I expect the Spanish gentleman took her home. Very polite, that Spanish chappie, we've had the odd chat before, he and I.' That's all it needs for you to be faced with a barrage of questions that I really don't know how you're going to answer."

  "What questions? Ted hardly ever asks questions. He waits until I tell him things. There's no need to get so worried."

  I was always the one who worried about her. I played my part and sometimes hers as well. Now I was playing all three, mine, hers and Edward Bayes', or rather the part that, according to her, Edward Bayes was not playing.

  "What do you mean 'what questions'? 'What were you up to in Reading last night with our Spanish friend? Where had you been? Why did you leave the station in such a hurry? Rook saw you both. Why didn't you tell me you were going to Reading? Why didn't you tell me you'd been in Reading? Rook saw you. Rook. Reading.'"

  "I'd get out of it somehow."

  "Get out of it now. Tell me how you'd answer those questions. They're simple, concrete, conjugal questions."

  As usual Clare was barefoot. She'd sat down behind her desk with the newspaper in her hand (her index finger still keeping the same place; I wondered what was so important about what she was reading that she didn't want to lose her place) and I was standing with my back to the window opposite her. From there I could see the tips of her toes, the dark tips (the toecaps so to speak) of her dark tights. They peeped out from beneath the desk, on the carpet. I would have liked to touch her dark feet, but Edward Bayes or Cromer-Blake could arrive at any moment. Clare was looking at me silhouetted against the light.

  In her other hand, she held a cigarette. The ashtray was some way from her.

  'Ted could arrive at any moment," I said, "and if he did meet Rook this morning, he might start questioning us both the minute he comes in that door. We'd better think up something first. I've spent the whole night thinking up answers. Perhaps you bumped into me in Reading. At Reading station? Why were you coming back so late? Why had you gone there? You couldn't have been shopping, there's nothing to buy in Reading."

  "You're a fool," Clare said to me. "Fortunately, though, you're not my husband. You're a fool with the mind of a detective, and being married to that kind of fool would make life impossible. That's why you'll never get married. A fool with the mind of a detective is an intelligent fool, a logical fool, the worst kind, because men's logic, far from compensating for their foolishness, only duplicates it, triplicates it, makes it dangerous. Ted's brand of foolishness isn't dangerous and that's why I can live with him, why I like living with him. He just takes it for granted, you don't yet. You're such a fool that you still believe in the possibility of not being one. You still struggle. He doesn't."

  "All men are fools."

  "We all are, I am too."

  She tapped ash off her cigarette with her forefinger but miscalculated so that it fell instead on the carpet, near her bare feet. I looked at her dark, desirable feet and looked at the ash, waiting for the moment when her feet would tread in it and become smeared with grey.

  "If you were Ted you wouldn't ask me those questions because you'd know that I could simply choose to answer them or not and that in the end it would come to the same thing; when you share your daily life with someone, you look for ways of living in peace with them. If I answered your questions I could lie to you (and you would have to accept the lie as the truth) or I could tell you the truth (and you might not be sure you wanted the truth). If I didn't answer your questions, you could keep insisting and I could get angry and argue with you and reproach you and still not answer, or even look at you perplexed and remain silent for days on end and still not answer until you got fed up with my reproachful gaze and with not hearing my voice. We always condemn ourselves by what we say, not by what we do, by what we say or by what we say we do, not by what others say or by what we actually have done. You can't force someone to answer, and if you were Ted or you were married, you'd know that. The world is full of unwitting bastard children who inherit the fortune or the poverty of those who did not engender them. Family resemblances notwithstanding, no man has ever known for certain that he was the father of his children. Between married couples, neither partner answers questions they don't want to answer, and so they ask each other very few. There are plenty of couples who don't talk to each other at all."

  'And what if, despite all you say, Ted chose to be like me today and he did ask those questions? What would you say if, when he came through that door, he submitted you to an interrogation ? What were you doing together in Reading last night? Where had you been? Did you go to bed together? Are you lovers? Do you sleep together? Since when?" "I'd say just what I said to you: you're a fool." She put down the newspaper and got up, stepping on the ash she'd continued to drop without noticing on to the carpet by her feet. She came over to where I was standing and I turned round and we both stood in silence looking out of the window: it was sunny and cloudy. Her breasts brushed against my back. The boys were on the steps of the Radcliffe Camera begging for pennies for their guy. I opened the window and threw them a coin, and
the clink of coin on stone made the four of them look round at us; but I'd already closed the window and they could only just make us out behind the glass. Clare stroked the back of my neck with her hand and my shoe with one of her bare feet. I imagined she would probably be thinking about her son. My shoe was smeared with grey.

  THIS is WHAT CROMER-BLAKE wrote in his diary for that fifth of November and which I transcribe today:

  What surprises me most is that the disease does not for the moment stop me taking an interest in other people's lives. I've decided to behave as if nothing were wrong with me and to say nothing to anyone except to B, and to him only if my worst fears are confirmed. This doesn't prove to have been that difficult, once the decision was made. But the strange thing isn't that I'm able to behave secretly and properly, it's my own unchanging interest in the world around me that's odd. Everything matters to me, everything touches me. In fact I don't have to pretend because I still can't persuade myself that this can or will happen to me. I can't get used to the idea that with things as they are I could end up dying, and that were that to happen (I cross my fingers) I would no longer be in a position to learn about the continuing saga of other people's lives. It's as if someone were to snatch from my hands a book I'm devouring with infinite curiosity. It's inconceivable. Although if that was all it was, it wouldn't be so bad, the worst thing is that there won't be any more books, life is the one and only codex.

  Life is still so medieval.

  Of course, nothing more is likely to happen to me, death will have happened to me, which is quite enough. I can't get used to the idea, and that's why I don't want to go back to the doctor just yet or to see Dayanand who, with his terrible clinical eye, must already suspect something about my state of health. And that's why what will no longer matter then, matters so much now: what will become of B (I can't imagine not being a witness to his life: death doesn't just rob us of our lives, but also of everyone else's), and of Dayanand himself, of Roger, Ted and Clare and of our dear Spaniard. I saw them today, they were together, fresh from an embrace, standing by the window, looking more amused than amorous and also a little melancholy, as if they regretted not being able to love each other more. It was lucky I arrived first, and not Ted. I don't know what they want, or what Clare wants, nor why they've made me their confidant and in a way their accessory. I'd rather be in the same state of blissful ignorance as Ted. The other day Clare came to see me in my office between classes; she was even more excitable than usual and desperate to talk to me. I gave her three minutes that stretched into six (an irritated young Bottomley was waiting outside, an arrogant, critical look on his face), during which time she talked of nothing in particular, nothing coherent, she just talked about Ted, it seemed he was the only thing in the world that mattered to her. She didn't call me later to continue the conversation, silence, nothing. Today, on the other hand, to my great surprise I noticed a foot, her foot, probing my right calf under the table. Clare's foot was stroking my calf. Luckily, we were in the Halifax where they have long tablecloths. I realised at once that what she was really after was the left leg of our Spanish friend seated next to me, so, fixing her with wide, slightly reproachful eyes, I discreetly took her foot and transported it to its true and desired resting place, the foreign knee. Then, of course, I took no further interest in things subterranean, in fact I swiftly renewed my conversation with Ted, fearful lest he realise what was going on down below. I found it both extremely embarrassing and extremely amusing, and felt guilty to feel that. I worry about all three of them and wonder how it will all end. We've got months ahead of us yet, we're only halfway through Michaelmas. But I can't help seeing the funny side of things, despite my years of friendship with Ted, my general concern about Clare and about my own health. At any rate, the first thing I told B about tonight was the case of the mistaken limbs as being the most important event of the day or the one that might best distract him from his discontents. I'm just the same as ever, veering between rage and laughter, whichever life provokes in me, with no medium term; they're my two complementary ways of relating to and being in the world. I'm either furious or merry or both things at once, battling it out inside me. I don't change. This illness ought to change me, ought to make me more reflective, less excitable. The illness, however, provokes neither fury nor merriment in me. If it develops, if it's confirmed (I cross my fingers again), I'll just observe myself. I feel frightened.