All Souls Page 5

  "Quite amazing this business about your cider," I was saying. "And this peculiar tax of yours, was it really only in England?"

  "Yes, only in England," replied Halliwell enthusiastically.

  I saw that Clare had noticed my backwards movement (so she was paying me some attention) and that she had too had leaned back, although I don't know if she did so in order that one of her neighbours might bear the brunt of the blow or in order to remove her décolletage and face from the Warden's line of sight and see if that would rouse him out of his stupefaction and bring him to his senses. Instead the intriguer followed suit, leaning his gigantic torso forward (his left elbow sweeping across the table, the front of his gown trailing over his uneaten steak and dislodging the peas from his plate), and would not countenance the eclipse of the gratifying sight he was so determined to gaze on. At one point, his gaze irredeemably lost in her décolletage, the peer was simply not there and what had been until then - as I have described - intermittent, random, arrhythmic blows with the gavel, became a continuous, mechanical hammering, to which he was wholly oblivious. The effect of this on the table was now all too apparent, for, leaping amidst the accumulated remains of the contents of several plates, were not only crumbs, peas and mushrooms (which have a natural propensity to leap) but also bits of steamed potato, the bones of several lemon sole, great gobs of thick sauces, the spectacles belonging to the ugly professor from Leiden (even uglier without them) and pools of spilled wine of various hues. (Fortunately, the gowns, as well as serving the twin functions of concealment and aesthetics, also protect the elegant clothes worn at high table from the unconscionable, seemingly infinite amounts of filth and debris generated.) The five servants, however, having reached some agreement, were now engaged in holding down the table at the other end - ruffling the hair of the literary scholar seated there - to ensure that the vibrations from the hammer blows and the weight of the Warden's monstrous body, now lying almost completely across the table, did no further damage. Gradually (although in fact it took only a matter of seconds) the refectory fell silent, or almost silent, for both the fervent Halliwell and the peevish Atwater were incapable of keeping their mouths shut for a moment and while the former continued drowning me in cider ("Even Viscount Pitt had to intervene in the affair! And Sterne mentioned the tax in one of his sermons!" he was exclaiming in rapturous tones), the latter, his thumbs tucked into his gown, continued to aim his exhortatory discourse at the Warden in the belief that the latter's fixed and bestial eyes were gazing on him, not on Clare's covered décolletage and face. Although at its wildest the hammering did not in fact last more than a minute, the situation (during that minute) became untenable. But since the only guests with unveiled eyes were not, given our lowly status in the hierarchy, in a position to take steps and the eyes of the other guests who did have that authority wore the aforementioned layer of gauze that prevented them from seeing that the peer had quite gone off the rails and that someone should either speak to him or relieve him at once of the presidency (Lord Rymer, however, as well as being Warden, was an influential politician known for holding lifelong grudges), the silence grew ever longer, broken only - apart from the gavel blows - by Halliwell's and the luminary Atwater's imperturbable murmurings and by the shrieks of the harpy to the Warden's right, who, although arrantly fawning and therefore incapable of bringing the man to his senses because of the concomitant risk of annoying him, could not help jumping at every gavel blow, so close to the battered gavel stand was her prominent and doubtless silicon-enhanced bosom.

  During that one eternal minute I had the chance to observe all the other guests within my field of vision: the literary scholar at the other end of the table was slapping at the stewards who, in their eagerness to hold the table steady, threatened to overwhelm him, tousling his hair and shoving the elbows of their ten firm arms in his ears; to his right Dr Wetenhall, another of the ladies present, could have done with a helping hand in her triple attempt to cover her ears, keep two (half-empty) bottles from rolling in the direction of the Warden and to hold on to her precarious wig (possibly new) that threatened to become dislodged; her other neighbour, the head of my department (Professor Kavanagh, an easy-going Irishman, whose main interest lay in the successful horror novels he wrote under a pen name, a man considered suspect by both colleagues and subordinates alike precisely because he was easy-going, Irish and wrote novels), seemed amused and indeed was adding his own ironic contribution to the din made by the Warden, by keeping time with a teaspoon on his wineglass, the way people do to introduce an after-dinner speech; to his right, were two members of the college (Brownjohn and Willis by name, two middle-aged men of science and possessed therefore of rather slow reflexes) who dared cast only sidelong glances at the Warden and were engaged in the attempted recapture of the fugitive spectacles belonging to their Dutch guest, who, although seated and quite safe where he was, had stretched out his arms the moment he lost his glasses (thus knocking over the few objects left upright in his part of the table) as if he feared he might stumble at any moment, like a blind man who's had his stick snatched from him; Dayanand, also a member of the college and a man of strong character, was one of the few present who could have put a stop to the Warden's banging, but the fact is that, whilst he made his feelings perfectly plain, he restricted himself to throwing the Warden lethal looks and flexing his fingers menacingly ("This Indian doctor will make him pay for this even if he has to wait another ten years to do so," I thought, "he's definitely not a man to be trifled with"); the luminary Atwater and the economist Halliwell had finally ceased their verbiage and the mere fact of being quiet seemed to have a more disconcerting effect on them than the Warden's pounding, which they'd probably not even noticed until that moment of clamorous silence; I've already described the quivering harpy, and as for Cromer-Blake, his face remained an enigma: rubbing his waxen chin, he seemed simply to be waiting with just the suggestion of a smile (that of a man on the point of bursting out laughing or perhaps of one storing up his wrath) as if, all too familiar with the Warden's habits, he already knew that the minute would last just that, a minute. The other four guests, including Edward Bayes seated to the left at the opposite end of the table, were concealed from view. But, after all this time and taking considerably longer than the original sixty seconds, I notice that in making that tour of the table then and now (from this city of Madrid to which I'm now returned), I've quite deliberately omitted any further mention of Clare.

  In fact one might say that during that one minute nobody really noticed — I mean, really looked at - the Warden: some guests threw him occasional stealthy, apprehensive glances but did not, as I've explained, actually see him; others were too concerned with maintaining some semblance of composure and with struggling to prevent the bottles, spectacles and stray wineglasses shaken by the gavel blows from rolling on to the floor; a third faction took advantage of the moment to exchange looks or, which comes to the same thing, to look directly at each other, their eyes for once unveiled. The first group included the harpy, the author of horror novels Kavanagh, the luminary of the social sciences Atwater, the cider economist Halliwell, the last two, as college members, hesitating perhaps (although only slightly) over whether to intervene and disarm the Warden or just to sit back and let someone else run the risk of being pounded to a pulp for their boldness, or more likely - later on - being avenged for it. The second group included the literary scholar or by then (almost) Professor Emeritus Toby Rylands, the scientists Brownjohn and Willis, the bewigged Dr Wetenhall and the hideous mineralogist still plunged into darkness. And amongst the third group, as far as I could ascertain during the final seconds of that minute, were Dayanand and Cromer-Blake, Clare Bayes and myself and possibly, or rather certainly, her husband. The attenuated gaze (merely distrustful or severe) that Dayanand had directed at me from time to time throughout the meal and that he now directed in its full intensity at the Warden was suddenly turned, unchanged, on his friend Cromer-Blake: that is, Dayanand, still
flexing his fingers in the gesture of an exasperated man barely able to contain himself, cast Cromer-Blake one of those looks I earlier termed "lethal", and Cromer-Blake, feeling the Indian doctor's burning gaze upon him, in turn raised his eyes to meet it and, although I could not see very well, since I had a side view and could therefore see only his right eye, I noticed that what had been the beginnings of a smile hardened into a tight line I had seen before on those thin, apparently bloodless lips.

  Then I looked straight into Clare's face and, though I didn't know her, I saw her as if she were someone who already belonged to my past. I mean like someone who no longer belonged to my present life, like someone we once found enormously interesting but who has ceased to interest us or has died, like someone who was or whom one day, long ago now, we condemned to having been, perhaps because that someone condemned us to the same fate long before. As is often the case with evening wear in England, the low-cut dress visible beneath her gown (the indirect cause of all that fuss) seemed to belong to another era. Even her face was somewhat old-fashioned, with its full lips and unusually high cheekbones. But that wasn't the reason. It was that she was looking at me too, and she was looking at me as if she knew me of old, almost as if she were one of those faithful but ancillary figures from our childhood who, later on, are never able to see us as the detestable adults we've become but instead, fortunately for us, will only ever see us as the children we were, their inert gaze distorted by memory. That providential handicap is more frequent in women than in men, insofar as for men children are just irritating rough drafts of adults, while for women they're perfect beings destined to become battered and coarsened, and so their retina struggles to retain the image of that transient deity condemned to lose his godliness and, when they haven't known a man as a child, they pour all the effort involved in getting to know someone into imagining the child whom they can know now only from photographs or from the traces of the child that remain in the sleeping image of the grown man, or even perhaps of the old man, or from the idly told tales the usurper will have ventured to confide to them in bed, the only place men willingly recall out loud things from the distant past. That was how Clare looked at me, as if she knew all about my childhood in Madrid and had witnessed in my own language my games with my brothers, my night-time fears and the inevitable after-school fights. And her seeing me like that made me see her in a similar way. I found out later - once I knew all about her - that in those final seconds of a minute that only truly exists now, scenes from her childhood in India had flashed upon my mind, and I saw the pensive look of the girl with little to occupy her in those southern cities, who watched the passing of a river and was watched over in turn by the dark voices of smiling servants. I didn't know I was seeing that (and perhaps I'm mistaken or lying or simply didn't see it and should not, therefore, speak of it), but I have to say that through those deep blue eyes flowed a river gleaming brightly in the blackness, the River Yamuna or Jumna that crosses Delhi, dotted with the rudimentary barges that carry on its current cereals, cotton, wood and stone, a river that is lulled from its own shores by trifling songs, its surface dimpled by the pebbles that fall from its banks as it leaves the city behind, just as perhaps my eyes were full of images of Madrid, of calle de Génova, calle de Covarrubias, calle de Miguel Ángel, streets that she had never walked or seen: perhaps the image of four children walking down those streets accompanied by an old maidservant. And there too would be the huge railway bridge that crosses the River Yamuna where it passes through the city, always there in the distance, and from which, according to tales told by her nanny when they were alone together, tales told in a voice full of mystery, many a pair of unhappy lovers had thrown themselves: the wide river of blue water broken by the long bridge of crisscrossing iron girders, deserted for the most part, in darkness, idle and shadowy, just like one of those faithful but ancillary figures from our childhood who grow dim then blaze into life again later, just for a moment, when they are called, only to be instantly plunged back into the gloom of their obscure, commutable existences, having done their brief duty or revealed the secret suddenly demanded of them. And thus they exist only in order that through them, whenever necessary, the child may once more emerge. The little English girl is looking now at the black iron bridge and waiting for a train to cross it, to see the train lit up and reflected in the water, one of those brightly coloured trains, full of light and distant noise that from time to time cross the River Yamuna, the River Jumna that she looks patiently out at from her house high above it while her nanny whispers to her and her diplomat father, in evening dress ready for dinner and with a glass in one hand, watches from behind, from the other end of the garden. It's getting close to the girl's bedtime, but before she goes one more train must pass, just one more, because the fresh image of the passing train and of the river illuminated by its windows (the men on the barges look up at it and grow dizzy) helps her to go to sleep and to come to terms with the idea of spending another day in a city to which she does not belong and which she will only perceive as hers once she has left it and when her only chance to recall it out loud will be with her son or her lover. The three of them wait, the girl, the nanny and the melancholy father, until the mail train from Moradabad that always arrives incalculably late has steamed across the iron bridge, filling its entire length with rickety multi-coloured carriages just distinguishable beneath the sliver of moon; and then, once the swaying lantern on the last carriage is out of sight and she has said goodbye to it, a goodbye that was never spoken in expectation of any response, Clare Bayes gets up, puts on her shoes, stands on tiptoe to kiss her silent father, who smells of tobacco and alcohol and mint, and then disappears at last into the house holding the hand of the nanny who will perhaps sing her to sleep with some trifling song. That was how Clare looked at me and how I looked at her as if we were each the other's vigilant, compassionate eyes, the eyes that look out at us from the past and no longer matter because they've known for a long time how they're obliged to see us: perhaps we looked at each other as if we were each the other's older brother or sister. And although I didn't know her, I knew that I would and that one day I would lie with her on a bed and tell her all the insignificant details - about calle de Génova, calle de Covarrubias and calle de Miguel Ángel - that I confided to her throughout all those months of turbulent, intermittent meetings in my pyramid house in Oxford and in her house, in those dreary hotels in London and Reading and in one hotel in Brighton.

  She looked away. Suddenly, the Warden seemed to wake from his lewd reverie; he waved the gavel energetically and, finding himself the centre of an immense silence (there was not even a murmur now and all the students at the lower tables, having done what justice they could to their miserable suppers, had fled some time before, taking with them the odd knife as compensation), made a vague, scornful gesture then pointed the handle of the gavel at us:

  'What's up with you lot? Haven't you got anything to say to each other or has the cat got your tongues?" And standing up, he pushed away the plate of steak (untouched and bereft of peas) with one grotesque thrust of his hips, uttered some crude Latin phrase without the least pretence now at correct pronunciation, dealt the battered gavel stand one last, furious blow and let out a euphoric cry: "Dessert!"