All Souls (4 page)

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.

MY
GUIDE
AND
MENTOR
in the city of Oxford was Cromer-Blake and, four months after my arrival there, nine months before that same fifth of November, it was he who introduced me to Clare Bayes at one of the grandiloquent Oxford suppers known as high tables. These suppers take place once a week in the vast refectories of each of the different colleges. The table at which the diners and their guests sit is raised up on a platform and thus presides over the other tables (where the students dine with suspicious haste, fleeing as soon as they have finished, gradually abandoning the elevated guests to their solitude and thus avoiding the spectacle the latter end up making of themselves) and it is for this reason rather than because of any unusually high standard of cuisine or conversation that they are designated "high tables". The suppers are formal (in the Oxonian sense) and for members of the congregation the wearing of gowns is obligatory. The suppers do begin very formally, but the sheer length of the meal allows for the appearance and subsequent development of a serious deterioration in the manners, vocabulary, diction, expositional fluency, composure, sobriety, attire, courtesy and general behaviour of the guests, of whom there are usually about twenty. At first, though, solemnity reigns and everything is regulated down to the last detail. Half the guests are members of the host college and half from other colleges (plus the occasional outsider or foreigner who happens to be passing through), who have been invited by the former in the hope of subsequently being invited by the latter to
their
respective colleges (with the result that the composition of different high tables varies very little, the guests being nearly always the same, except that sometimes they dine at one college and at other times at another, some thus dining together ten or twelve times a year, often ending up on terms of such mutual detestation that they can scarcely bear the sight of each other). The guests have to gather first in an elegant little room next door to the refectory where they enjoy a swift glass of sherry and then, once everyone has arrived, proceed to the refectory (never at the stipulated seven o'clock sharp) two by two (each member accompanied by his or her guest) and strictly in accordance with college hierarchy. Having to remember instantaneously the seniority and titles often of twelve worthy and extremely touchy people is no easy task, so that even before going in to eat, the odd argument or outburst of bickering takes place, and there is some shoving, jostling and elbowing on the part of ambitious or forgetful members or fellows who attempt, so to speak, to torpedo protocol and jump the queue in order to gain in prestige. The students, who wait (hungrily) seated in the dining room, rise in a hypocritical show of respect to watch the entrance of the gowned dons and their chance and often bewildered companions from the outside world, who all duly place their hands on the back of the chair assigned to them. The Warden, that is the director or administrator of the college (often a bored member of the nobility), presides over the raised table which in turn presides over the other tables, so that he thus presides twice over, and demonstrates (even before the guests sit down) the most obvious duty of this double presidency, which is to deliver the unforgiving series of gavel blows interspersed with Latin phrases that keep any poor foreigners present in a state of permanent fear and trepidation throughout the meal. For the Warden has beside him a small gavel (together with a wooden stand affixed to the table to receive the blow, just like the one judges use) with which he inaugurates the meal, decides the timing and announces the arrival of the numerous
changes of wines and courses, and which serves him as a dangerous plaything when (as almost always happens) he grows weary of what's going on around him. Once he has said the first prayer (in his anglified Latin), with everyone in the refectory on their feet in a silence still redolent of incense, the first abrupt gavel blow and the consequent tinkle of fine crystal gives way to the din of eager dons and even more eager students as they sit down, shout, contend for the favours of stewards, hurl themselves, spoon in hand, on the soup or consommé set before them and close ruddy fists about their glasses of red wine. It is stipulated that each (elevated) college member should speak for seven minutes with the person to his right or left (this depends on the distribution of the couples at the head of the table), and then for five minutes to the person on his other side and so on alternately for the two hours that the first stage of high table lasts. It is, on the other hand, extremely ill-advised to address the person opposite, unless both guests have simultaneously fallen victim to an error of timing on the part of their neighbours and been left momentarily with no one to talk to, a most unfortunate, not to say vexatious, situation in which to find oneself in Oxford. Oxford dons are, therefore, expert at simultaneously talking, eating, drinking and keeping track of the time, the first three activities at extraordinary speed and the fourth with great precision, for, according to a sequence ordained by the Latin phrases and gavel blows of the capricious Warden, the stewards will speedily remove the plates and wineglasses of all the guests regardless of whether the former are scraped clean, empty, half full or even untouched. I hardly ate a thing at my first high tables, preoccupied as I was with counting the minutes and keeping up a pretence at conversation in strict symmetrically duodecimal time to my right and my left. Course after course, the stewards wrested from me both my untouched plate and my wineglass, the latter in fact empty, indeed drained to the lees, since, plunged as I was into chronological and conversational
despair, the only thing I did manage to do in between talking and clockwatching was to drink incontinently.