All Souls (24 page)

I sent nothing, although I fully intended to. The truth is that I tried to forget about his death the moment I learned of it and, to some extent, I succeeded because it's not so hard to forget such a thing when the dead person is far away and had already begun to recede into the past even when he was alive. The last time I saw him, his health was average to poor. Kind as ever, he'd offered to give me and my huge suitcases full of books a lift to the station from where I would go to London, then on to Paris by train and hovercraft and by another train south to
Madrid. But the night before my departure he felt worse and called to tell me that he had best spend the next day at home. So I paused in my preparations for leaving and went over to his college to say goodbye. Although it was late June and pleasantly warm, he received me lying on a sofa and covered by a blanket, like Saskia; the check blanket over his legs had replaced the dark cataract of his gown, which hung, black and immensely long, behind his door, as mine does in my house in Madrid. He had lost part of his aesthetic disguise. The television was on, an opera with the sound turned down. He said he felt cold, a bit feverish. I can't remember what we talked about now, I've forgotten as one does forget things to which at the time one gives no importance, the things that don't seem interesting because they're done with no awareness of the fact that what one says or does - or what one sees - has meaning and weight. And at the time that farewell had neither meaning nor weight, or at least not much, perhaps because I wanted to think that Rylands was being excessively gloomy in his predictions (Cromer-Blake did in fact seem quite nonchalant) and my thoughts were more on my leaving, on what awaited me (in the future, in all that is flat and diaphanous) than on what I was leaving behind (in the past, in all that is rough, rugged, and opaque). All I remember is that, while he cast occasional glances at a clamorously silent
Falstaff,
his customary pallor was even deathlier than usual, but that was not remarkable: at exam time dons always looks extra pale. That night he was almost the colour of his prematurely grey hair, which was less and less grey now and more and more white. I didn't stay long, it was late. I had to finish my packing and he perhaps wanted to listen to
Falstaff.

The last entries in the diaries now in my possession are extremely brief and half-hearted, just two or three lines on the days he managed to write something, which was not, by any means, every day. The third of September, for example, reads:

'Today is my birthday. I've managed to reach thirty-eight. I'm no longer young. Clare gave me a woollen jumper she knitted herself. B nothing, he forgot." And three days later, on the sixth, the entry is even shorter: "B wants to go and live in London. My native city, how absurd. It seems a long way away, although in fact it's only an hour." Then there's nothing until the twelfth, on which he writes: "Today I started re-reading
Don Quixote,
I hope I have time to finish it between this week and the next. Perhaps I should re-read the second part first." And later, on the fourteenth: "Only seven days till the end of summer. I'm tired, tired of not being well and of the summer." And on the twentieth he mentions me: 'Today is our dear Spaniard's birthday. He's thirty-four, so he's not so young any more either. I called him in Madrid, but he was out." (And it's true that I wasn't at home that day, nor even in Madrid, but in Sanlúcar de Barrameda with Luisa, who is now my wife, and whom I'd met in Madrid a month before.) The next entry is on the twenty-ninth and seems to have been copied from a diary or calendar because all it says is: "St Michael and All Angels. Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity (eighteenth after Pentecost). First day of term. The sun rises at 07.02 and sets at 18.47. Full moon at 00.08." Then there's nothing more until the seventh of October, when he writes: "Moon's last quarter at 05.04. Toby phoned. I made an excuse to put him off coming to see me. Poor old man, he understands nothing." And on the fourteenth: "New moon at 04.33. Michaelmas begins today as do the classes I won't be able to give. Dewar and Kavanagh have been kind enough to offer to fill in for me until I'm better." The last entry is on the seventeenth and reads: 'St Etheldred, Queen of Northumbria, reluctant to the last, the silly woman. I'm sure that in a few years' time this illness will be curable, nothing much to worry about. God, I'm fed up." He died on the nineteenth, the twentieth Sunday after Trinity (twenty-first after Pentecost) and St Frideswide's day (at least in Oxford). The sun rose at 07.38 and set at 18.01 and there was a crescent moon at 20.13. Cromer-Blake saw the rising and the setting but not the crescent moon.

Of the poor old man's death I know less or almost nothing, because there was no Cromer-Blake to tell me about it, no one even to say: "How immensely sad." It was Kavanagh, more dynamic and more modern than Rylands, who undertook to phone me in Madrid two months ago to tell me about it, no express letters or addresses for donations for him. It was he, too, who sent me the diaries of the first of the men to die. But I know that Rylands, unlike Cromer-Blake, didn't know about his death beforehand, if such a phrase has any meaning. I mean that he hadn't been ill before. He wasn't in hospital, but at home, his heart just suddenly stopped, that's all. I don't know what time or where he was found or what he was doing. Maybe Mrs Berry called him in to have lunch and, when he didn't appear in the kitchen, perhaps she sensed what had happened and cautiously walked down to the banks of the Cherwell where Rylands would be sitting in his upholstered chair so as to make the most of the autumn sun. Or perhaps she didn't even approach him, the all too predictable Mrs Berry, and it was enough for her to see from the window the huge convex torso sprawled in the chair. The sherry glass fallen on the grass. The eyes bereft of all authority and colour. The yellow sweater all twisted. I don't know, it doesn't matter, it isn't immensely sad.

Not much time has passed since I left Oxford, but it all seems very far away now. Too many things have changed or begun or ceased to be since then (now the things I think about and look forward to are my wife Luisa and my new son and the ambitious plans proposed by the go-getting Estévez). Rylands never did publish a book on
A Sentimental Journey
and it seems that no trace was ever found amongst his papers of a manuscript bearing any resemblance to the text he spoke to me about that Sunday
at the end of the Hilary term. In fact no writings from his latter years have been found at all, at least nothing unpublished. Either he destroyed them, or else they never existed and he spent the years following his retirement without writing a line, inert, watching the river, that eternal image of the passing of time, and the occasional television programme, calling to his rebellious swans and throwing crumbs to his grateful ducks, with honours (ever less sincere) still arriving by every post. That Sunday, on which he seemed to speak so many truths, he must have lied about his book. Maybe he lied about everything, I don't know, it doesn't matter. My life flows along different channels now. I'm not, I think, the same person who spent those two years in Oxford. I'm not troubled now, and my sense of unease then was never really that serious, it was slight and transient, coherent and logical, as I said, the kind of malaise that does not keep us from our work, or from behaving sensibly, or being polite, or dealing with other people as if in fact nothing were happening to us; the kind of malaise that doubtless passes unnoticed by everyone except the person feeling it, a malaise we all experience from time to time. It all seems very far away, and my strongest link, now that Cromer-Blake and Rylands have both died and there's no way I could keep up a correspondence with Kavanagh and Dewar, is the subscription to the Machen Society that I continue to send from my native city and in exchange for which, plus a supplement, I continue every few months to receive the occasional meticulous, obsessive publication on Machen and his circle, amongst whom Gawsworth is sometimes mentioned though with no further details about his life. Even if more details were given, I wouldn't want to know about them; that's why I've never bought any of the extremely scarce titles written by the king without a kingdom that I've seen offered, at very inflated prices, in the exotic catalogues I still have sent to me from my rare and antiquarian booksellers in Oxford and London (though never
Above the River,
the book
he published when he was nineteen, the one that Alan Marriott was interested in). I suppose it's Marriott who puts the pamphlets from the Machen Company into their envelopes and sends them off, but I can't be sure, for there's never any note appended to those remittances franked always in different towns (Chippenham, Lymington, Scarborough; he certainly seems to get around). I saw Marriott again a couple of times during my second year in Oxford, in the distance, dragging his lame dog along with him, but I didn't approach to say hello and neither did he. What's certain is that he never sought me out again after those few days when he followed and found me everywhere and after his one visit. Perhaps all he really wanted was to acquire a new member for the Machen Company, even though I wasn't anyone eminent, and to secure my subscription.

It was purely by chance that I ended up leaving Oxford on my own. I have no complaints: Cromer-Blake couldn't take me in his car and it was too late by then to ask another colleague. I'd said my goodbyes at a small party three days before and, besides, I was leaving very early the next morning. I called a taxi, gave one last look at my final bag of rubbish, my final task completed, then tied it up and put it out; I left my three-storey pyramid and locked it up, dropping the keys through the letterbox (they fell on to the carpet without so much as a clink); I got on the train without waving goodbye to anyone. At Didcot station, where the train stopped for a minute, I looked sleepily out of the window and, on the opposite platform (the one for Oxford-bound passengers), I caught sight of Edward Bayes laughing and embracing a woman who, in the reciprocity of her embrace, had her back turned to me. She was blonde, with short hair and had a cigarette in her hand; her ankles were made fragile (perfect perhaps) by her loving pose. It wasn't Clare, of course, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the girl from Didcot station either, even though she was at Didcot station. I don't think I could have said so with certainty even if I'd seen
her face — had she turned round — because by then it was as vague and confused with other faces as it is now in my memory. I wasn't surprised, it just seemed like something that no longer concerned me (as if I wasn't really present at it, as if I watched it through a veil), and the only thought that did occur to me was that perhaps in the 1950s Terry Armstrong was married too. I think that's why I didn't worry about Clare, feeling sure as I was and am now that she and her husband would always stay together. And putting myself in his place (in her husband's place), as I had on several other occasions, I simply thought (feeling half-dead from lack of sleep): "I just hope they don't meet Rook when they get on the train. That would give them a fright and put an end to the laughter, because this is no hour to be going back to Oxford." The sun had risen at 04.46 and would not set until 21.26, and I'm not sure if there was a moon or not. At any rate I would not again be witness to that warm suspended light nor hear the bells pealing out inconsiderately as evening fell.

The light changes gradually here in Madrid and now I too sometimes have something to push or drag along: my new son's pram through the advancing dusk in the Retiro Park. That's why now I'm more like Clare Bayes holding her son Eric's hand, and Marriott dragging his dog along, and Jane, the
gypsy
flowerseller, who dragged her merchandise along the pavement without her husband ever once getting out to help her, and like that old beggar who lugged around with him the barrel organ he'd salvaged from a dockside bonfire in Liverpool and played in the streets of Oxford. And like Gawsworth, who pushed his Victorian pram full of beer bottles along Shaftesbury Avenue, before disappearing into the dusk at a leisurely pace; and yet I'm less like him now, because life has caught up with me, closed in on me and left me with this child about whom I sometimes forget and of whom I as yet know nothing, not even whether he looks more like me or like his mother whom I still kiss so
very often. I'm no longer like Dewar or Rylands or Cromer-Blake who never pushed or dragged anything along. Cromer-Blake and Rylands are dead anyway, which makes any resemblance I might have with them even less marked; they no longer fantasise about things still to come, whilst I still do: about the go-getting Estévez, about my wife Luisa and about the new child who in the normal course of events will survive us all, including the child Eric. The others are still alive. Clare, who will have another lover by now and with whom I do not correspond, is alive. Dayanand, the Indian doctor, is alive, although not it seems for much longer. Kavanagh, who occasionally comes to Madrid and reports to me about the static city preserved in syrup and brings me news of the water there, he's still alive. Dewar, who no doubt declaims in three languages in the privacy of his rooms with his white noise playing in the background, continues his living death and will have forgotten all about me by now. Will, the ancient porter with the limpid gaze (the like of which does not exist in Madrid), is still alive, probably still raising his hand when he says good morning, and confusing his time with my time and perhaps now calling someone else by my name (because in his eyes I have not left, because for him all souls are still alive), although, as far as I know, no Mr Branshaw has yet made an appearance in the Taylorian. And Muriel, I suppose, lives on between her two rivers, in what was Wychwood Forest, in what
was
a forest. I have before me a few coins I didn't spend at the time (I hear them clink in the metal box that contains only them and a single pair of earrings). I could have left the coins for the child Eric, who is also alive and growing and must be due to come back from Bristol about now for his holidays. But maybe one day this new child of mine will also want to collect them.