All Souls (15 page)

"D'you want some gum?"

"No, thanks," I said, and only after I'd said it, did I realise that it might not be the most appropriate of answers in a place so steeped in the seventies.

For a while she said nothing more. She remained rather pensive, her chewing gum stationary somewhere on her palate or gums. Then she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

"I'm only chewing it in case we kiss. But if you like I'll take it out now."

(I still had time to notice the strong taste of mint in that round, absorbent mouth.) (Mine no doubt tasted of tobacco.)

When I left the disco with her an hour later I met with two gazes, one multiple and the other singular, although I can't be sure of the latter. Several dandies whom I was already beginning to know by sight were regarding me critically, or rather classifying me as deserving of great scorn for my choice of companion; and a few yards ahead, at the very door of the discotheque, I think I passed (she was just going in and if it was her I think I received from her no more than a lightning glance) the girl from Didcot station who was later also, though more briefly, the girl from Broad Street — near Trinity and Blackwell's - who was walking along one windy afternoon with a friend who would not let her stop. As on that second occasion (if it
was
her on this third occasion: it was over a year since I'd seen her, and I'd seen so little of her before) I only realised it was her - or thought I did - once we'd turned our backs on each other. I turned round, as I had the time before, but she did not, not on this occasion when I cannot be sure it was her. I just saw her back disappearing into the discotheque along with the man accompanying her, whose presence I had not even noticed when face to face, or at most for a second, with the two of us men walking along and trying perhaps to avoid bumping into each other. From behind he looked like Edward Bayes. But that was impossible: Edward Bayes would be seated at the foot of the child Eric's bed, reading him a story that Clare Bayes would have stayed behind to hear. It was too late now to confirm anything or to go back; as on that other occasion in Broad Street someone was tugging at a sleeve, only this time it was mine. It wasn't windy outside this time, but Muriel, who was already out in the street, was growing impatient.

Back at my house, on the second floor, she went back to
chewing gum for a while, combining it with the gin (a generous Spanish measure) that I served her in a glass with ice and tonic. I wasn't in the least drunk but she was somewhat drunk, or at least gave that impression (I don't know how much she'd had to drink before we were introduced). But it was only later, upstairs, on the third floor, when we were undressed and in my bed, that I really began to think about Clare and to miss her again or, rather (because it wasn't exactly that I missed her), to realise with surprise and some perplexity that this girl verging on plumpness, with her pleasant face and curly hair was not Clare. Fidelity (the name given to the constancy and exclusivity with which one particular sex organ penetrates or is penetrated by another particular sex organ, or abstains from being penetrated by or from penetrating others) is mainly the product of habit, as is its so-called opposite, infidelity (the name given to inconstancy and change, and the enjoyment of more than one sex organ: the literal promiscuity in which, as far as I knew, Cromer-Blake engaged, as too did Muriel and possibly Kavanagh and Professor del Diestro). When, over a period of time, one has become used to one mouth, other mouths seem incongruous, and present one with all kinds of difficulties: the teeth are either too big or too small, the lips too thin or too fleshy, the tongue moves at the wrong time or just lies there, rigid, as if it were flesh and bone not muscle; the smell of the more odorous regions (the groins, the sex, the armpits) is disconcerting as is the disparate intensity of the embrace, the anaesthetic contact of skin on skin, the sour sweat on thighs (due perhaps to remorse), the ill-fitting shapes, the unfamiliar colours that disturb the light in the room, the size and moistness of the orifice. One's hands cannot take in the different size of breasts that perhaps overflow or seem to withdraw from them or, when they grow hard, have a rather rough nipple that almost rasps when one licks it. The new body is not manageable (no new body is) and there is always a certain feeling of reserve or uncertainty about the order in which one should kiss different parts of the body or the force with which one should kiss or squeeze or bite and explore with one's fingers or about the effect it will have on the other if one stops and looks at those parts, withdraws all contact and simply devotes oneself to looking. "I have my cock in her mouth," I thought at a certain point, and I thought it in exactly those words which are the only appropriate ones when you are expressing in words or thoughts what you're doing with the thing they designate (when the designated object is active), even more so when one scarcely knows the other body and especially if the words refer to parts of one's own body and not to those of the other person, about which one is always more respectful and for which one would seek and use euphemisms, metaphors or more neutral terms. "I have my cock in her mouth or rather she has her mouth round my cock, since it was her mouth that sought it out. I have my cock in her mouth," I thought, "and it isn't like other times, all those other times in recent months. As I noticed the first time I kissed her, Muriel's mouth is absorbent but not as spacious and liquid as Clare's mouth. It lacks saliva and space. She has nice lips but they're a bit thin and immobile or, rather, not immobile exactly (for they're not, I'm very aware of them moving) but lacking in flexibility, rigid. (They're like taut ribbons.) While I have my cock in her mouth I can see her breasts, they are large and white with very dark nipples, unlike Clare's, whose breasts combine their two colours very subtly, like the transition from apricot to hazel. On my thighs (that gently squeeze her breasts, though not enough to hurt them) I notice the texture of those white breasts, and although this girl is very young, her breasts are soft, like new Plasticine that has been neither kneaded into shape nor hardened by use and by the prints left on it by the child who plays with it. I used to play with Plasticine a lot, but I don't know if the child Eric does. It's incomprehensible to me that I should have my cock in her mouth (who would have thought
it only three hours ago, when I was killing time before leaving here, shaving and keeping one eye on the evening light and she, perhaps, was standing in front of the bathroom mirror in her house or farm in Wychwood Forest, putting on her lipstick and thinking about a stranger, applying it to those lips now so bare of colour). It's far less comprehensible than the fact of placing my cock, as I very soon will, inside her vagina, for - or so one hopes — there will have been nothing else in her vagina in the last few hours whilst in her mouth there's been chewing gum and gin and tonic and ice and cigarette smoke and peanuts and my tongue and laughter and also words that I did not listen to. (The mouth is always full, abundance itself.) Now she doesn't drink or smoke or chew or laugh or speak, because my cock is in her mouth and that keeps it occupied, there's no room for anything else. I don't speak either, but I'm not occupied in doing anything, I'm thinking."

And then, a little later, still upstairs on the third floor of my pyramid house, still naked on my bed, I started thinking again and I thought: "With her I don't miss what I always miss when I go to bed with Clare, that is, that my cock has no eye, no vision, no gaze, that can see as it approaches or enters her vagina. I want neither to see it nor her. But I do see her. Although I like Muriel and she's helping me pass the night in the best possible way, I don't know her. I know she's not Clare but one of the plump girls from the discotheque near the Apollo Theatre. I have various ways of knowing this: her size and height (she's slightly shorter); her thighs, which do not separate quite enough (perhaps because of all that flesh; will the thighs of the even fatter girl Professor del Diestro was kissing be capable of separating at all? Perhaps the Professor is grappling with the problem even at this very moment); also her bones, which are scarcely detectable beneath their generous padding (I can feel her pubis but not her hipbones); and her sighs, which are timid and shamefaced (I'm a stranger and, when she half-opens
her eyes, she looks not at me but at the blank wall above the pillow on which I lean). But more than anything else I know it because of the different smell. It's not the smell of Clare Bayes nor even that of Oxford or London or Didcot station, but perhaps it's the smell of Wychwood Forest, of the Rivers Windrush and Evenlode, between which Muriel lives and grew up, as Clare Bayes lived and grew up by the River Yamuna or Jumna with its trifling songs, its rudimentary barges and its iron bridge from which unhappy lovers threw themselves. She's panting now but she's thinking too. She's thinking perhaps about how I smell, and thinking it's a foreign smell, the smell of a Continental, a passionate (reputedly), hot-blooded southerner. My blood can be hot or lukewarm or cold. How must I smell to her? The English don't use much cologne and I do, Trussardi, and that might be the biggest difference, a complete novelty; maybe the Italian cologne I always bring back with me from Madrid is the only thing she can sense as regards smells. She may not like it, she may love it, the only way I can find out is by asking, later, because now she's absorbed in herself (she's thinking only of herself). Perhaps she hasn't even noticed it, perhaps she can't smell a thing, she doesn't seem to have a cold, though there are a lot of colds about in this English spring, this furtive winter, not to mention allergies to pollen, hay fever they call it, young people are the main sufferers, although Clare - who is not so young any more - also gets it. Last spring she sneezed several times whilst lying in the very place now occupied by this girl from Wychwood Forest, a forest that no longer exists, apart from a few remnants, it was cut down and flattened last century, but it's difficult to give up a name, names tell you a lot. Muriel doesn't look as if she's about to sneeze, if she did, given our relative positions, I'd get the full blast of it and it would really shake me, I would notice a violent thrust that is absent now. Perhaps she's getting tired, she did have quite a lot to drink. The room was cold when I left the house but now it's hot
because Muriel's body is hot, whilst Clare's body is only lukewarm and that of the girl on the train from London might well have been cold, to judge by her appearance. I think I saw her but it doesn't matter to me now, I haven't thought of her for over a year and for over a year now I've thought about Clare nearly all the time, although we've never seen each other with the urgency of people with plans for a future together. But if I'd waited tonight - if I hadn't met the smiling Jessie and Professor del Diestro — perhaps I would have ended up leaving the discotheque with that girl from the London train and — though not yet, because it would only have happened later, but soon enough — she would be here (if it was her, even if it wasn't her), in place of Clare and in place of this plump girl Muriel -who is neither fat nor a tart - who says she lives between the Rivers Windrush and Evenlode in what was Wychwood Forest. She's the one here, on my bed, on top of me — hiding or containing my cock — because Clare won't see me in these weeks she's reserved for the child Eric who's come home ill, and because it was her and no one else - it was her and not the girl from Didcot station - who was chewing gum in case we kissed. And she was right to do so because we're kissing now."

"Tell me you want me," said Muriel, for a moment separating her round, absorbent mouth from mine.

I heard the bells of the neighbouring church of St Aloysius (or those of St Giles'?) still awake or perhaps they never sleep. There was no need to look at the clock on the bedside table, no need to hurry or start to worry about where I'd hidden her high heels and where her scattered clothes had been left around the room. It was darkest night. "I want you," I said. "I want you," I thought, and stopped thinking once I had thought it.

DURING
MY
TWO
YEARS
in Oxford, I think the only real friend I made was Cromer-Blake. I found many of the dons insufferable (the economist Halliwell was but a pale example, and I remember with particular pain Dr Leigh-Justice, our department's expert on the Indies, a punctilious, monkish type with an abdomen broader than his chest and a habit of wearing trousers that were too tight and too short, so that every time he sat down, he revealed a vast expanse of calf, and with whom I had to give the most horribly prim, methodical classes) and, as I mentioned before, I often put myself in Edward Bayes' place and came to appreciate the good humour and nonchalance of the reviled and determinedly frivolous Kavanagh (reviled because he was easy-going and Irish and wrote novels), and to respond — in equal measure, although he would never have known it, since I was even more reserved than he was and never revealed my feelings - to the affection shown me, perhaps despite himself and without realising it, by Alec Dewar, the Inquisitor, a.k.a. the Butcher or the Ripper. And above all I came to admire the literary scholar, Professor Emeritus (he was almost emeritus in my first year and definitively so in my second) Toby Rylands, whose friendship Cromer-Blake had rather rashly recommended to me. For one couldn't exactly have a friendship with Toby Rylands, not because he wasn't welcoming and kind or pleased to receive anyone who came to see him, but because he was too wise and truthful a man (I mean that what he said always had the ring of truth), and it wasn't easy to feel anything for him
other than open admiration mingled perhaps with a little fear (what the English call "awe").

I used to visit him at his home in a leafy suburb east of the city, outside of the university area proper, a luxurious house (he was a man of private means, not dependent on any academic usufruct) with an extensive garden that sloped down to one of the wildest and most magical parts of the River Cherwell as it flows through Oxford and its outskirts. I used to go there on Sundays, the day of the week that - especially in my second year there when he was retired - must have cost him, like me, the greatest effort and most taxed his enthusiasm if he was to get through it all and thus move on into the next day (like the beggars he was killing time). He was a very big man, really massively built, who still had a full head of hair: his statuesque head was crowned with wavy, white locks like whipped cream. He dressed well though, with more affectation than elegance (bow ties and yellow sweaters, rather in the American style, or the way undergraduates used to dress) and he was regarded as a future - indeed almost extant - never to be forgotten glory of the university, for in Oxford, as in all places where people perpetuate themselves by some form of endogeny, individuals only achieve glory when they begin to relinquish their posts and become passive beings about to be shuffled off to make room for their legatees. He and Ellmann, Wind and Gombrich, Berlin and Haskell, are or were all destined to end up as members of the same race: the retrospectively desired. Toby Rylands had received every conceivable honour and now lived a solitary life. Other honours, ever less sincere, arrived by every post; he tended his garden; he fed the swans that spent certain seasons on his stretch of the river; and he wrote another essay on
A Sentimental Journey.
He didn't much like talking about his past life, about his little-known origins (it was said that he hadn't always been English but South African, but if that were true he retained not a trace of an accent), nor about his youth, and still less about the dim distant past of his supposed activities - as was whispered in Oxford — with MI5, a department of Britain's famous Secret Service. Though probably true, the link between that particular government department, so familiar from novels and films, and the two principal English universities is too much of a cliche to be very interesting. The juiciest stories told by his acolytes, disciples and ex-subordinates were, in fact, those to do with his war activities: it seems he was never at the front (at any front), but was engaged instead on strange, confused missions (always involving huge sums of money), vaguely related to espionage or the pursuit of politically neutral figures in places as far from the heart of the conflict as Martinique, Haiti, Brazil and the islands of Tristan da Cunha. I never learned much about his past; very few people did, I imagine. His most impressive feature were his slightly slanting eyes, each a different colour: his right eye the colour of olive oil and his left that of pale ashes, so that if you looked at him from the right you saw a keen expression with a hint of cruelty — the eye of an eagle or perhaps a cat - while if you looked at him from the left the expression was grave, meditative and honest, as only that of northern races can be - the eye of a dog or perhaps a horse, which of all animals seem the most honest; and if you looked at him from the front, then you encountered two gazes, or rather two colours with but a single gaze which was simultaneously cruel and honest, meditative and keen. From a distance the olive-oil colour predominated (and assimilated the other colour) and when on certain Sunday mornings the sun shone directly into his eyes, illuminating them, the density of the iris dissolved and the tone lightened to become the colour of the sherry in the glass he sometimes had in his hand. As for his laugh, that was certainly Toby Rylands' most diabolical feature: his lips barely moved, or rather only enough - though exclusively on the horizontal plane - so that beneath his fleshy, purple upper lip some small, slightly pointed but very even teeth appeared, possibly some private dentist's excellent copy of those lost with the advancing years. But it was the audible rather than the visual aspect of that short, dry laugh that lent it its demoniacal quality because it resembled none of the more usual written onomatopoeic forms of laughter, all of which depend on the aspiration of the consonant (for example, 'ha, ha, ha" or "heh, heh, heh" or "hee, hee, hee" or even, in other languages, "ah, ah, ah"). When he laughed, the consonant was indubitably plosive, the clearest of alveolar English "t"s. "Ta, ta, ta", that was what Professor Toby Rylands' spine-chilling laugh sounded like. "Ta, ta, ta. Ta, ta, ta."