Authors: William Boyd
Fascination (2 page)
‘What do you think?’ I asked. This guy did not frighten me, I had decided.
‘There were fifteen errors of transcription in your first quoted passage,’ he said. ‘I didn’t read on.’
‘It’s only a draft, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Even a second-rate examiner will refer you for that kind of carelessness,’ he said, reasonably. ‘You don’t want get into bad habits. Bring it back when you’ve checked everything.’ He smiled. ‘What made you so interested in mid-nineteenth-century mining legislation? Pretty arcane subject – even for an Oxford doctorate.’
Its very arcanity, you fool, I wanted to reply, but instead I chose a lie, hoping it might cancel the Abbey Meade blunder. ‘My father was a miner,’ I said.
‘Good God, so was mine,’ he said. ‘Tin. Cornwall.’
‘Coal. Lanarkshire.’
INTERVIEWER
: You don’t seem embittered, even bothered, by the attack in
The Times
by Sir Alexander Cardman.
ME
: It’s a matter of complete indifference. Wasn’t it Nabokov who said the best response to hostile criticism is to yawn and forget? I yawned. I forgot.
INTERVIEWER
: It seems unduly personal, especially when your book has been so widely acclaimed –
ME
: I think people on the outside never fully realize the role envy plays in literary and cultural debate in this country.
Prentice is wearing his track suit and trainers: he likes to go jogging at the end of a day’s dentistry. I offer him a glass of wine which he, surprisingly, accepts.
‘South African Chardonnay,’ I tell him. ‘Your neck of the woods.’
Prentice actually comes from Zimbabwe. He has had his gingeryblond hair closely cut, I notice, which makes him look burlier, even fitter, if that were possible. He is always very specific about not being identified as South African, is Mr Prentist, the dentist.
‘I prefer Californian,’ he says.
‘What can I do for you, Mr Prentist?’
‘Prentice.’
‘Sorry.’
He smiles, showing his small immaculate teeth. ‘Bad news,’ he says. ‘I have to put the rent up. From next month.’ He mentions a preposterous figure.
‘That’s a – ’ I calculate, trying to keep the rage out of my voice, ‘– a 120 per cent rise.’
‘The going rate for two-bedroom flats on the Woodstock Road, so an estate agent informs me.’
‘You cannot call that broom cupboard where I work a second bedroom.’
‘Market forces,’ he says, sipping, then nodding. ‘This is actually an excellent wine.’
Felicia is unnaturally blonde, has a tendency to plumpness and is devoted to me. I taught her for a term when she was at Somerville. We had an affair, for some reason. She went to work for a bank in the City. She came back to Oxford three years ago. I think, now, that she came deliberately to seek me out. She makes twenty times more money a year than I do.
My as yet unfinished novel. Five years in the writing. Which today I have decided to re-title:
Morbid Anatomy
.
INTERVIEWER
: Why did you resign the Trevelyan Chair of Modern History?
ME
: I did not approve of the new syllabus.
INTERVIEWER
: It had nothing to do with internecine strife within the History Faculty, professional jealousies?
ME
: As far as I was concerned it was purely a matter of principle. It was my duty.
Gianluca looks at me – his sightless eyes are directed at me. I read on, hastily: ‘“Meanwhile Shomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye” – ah, notice that glorious Conradian cliché –’
‘Why is Heyst so passive?’ Gianluca asks. ‘He’s like he’s
stagnante
…’
‘Same word,’ I say, wondering why, indeed. ‘Well, he’s a bit of a drifter, isn’t he, Heyst?’
Gianluca types – I suppose – ‘Heyst = drifter’ into his Braille notebook.
‘Going with the flow,’ I improvise. We have reached page 67. I don’t think I have ever paid so much attention to a text, and yet I can remember almost nothing. Each day it’s as if I’m starting on page 1 again.
‘He meant to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf drifting in the wind currents.’
Mrs Warmleigh has left her Hoover on the stairs. I go to look for her and ask her to move it, as Gianluca is due.
‘The blind boy? He’s amazing that one, the way he comes and goes. Fantastic, it is, bless him.’
I concur, wearily. Mrs Warmleigh has a warty, smiley face and, oddly for the cleaning lady in a dentist’s, many pronounced gaps in
her famous smile. ‘Warmleigh by name, warmly by nature,’ she says, at least two or three times a week.
‘You’d look at him,’ she goes on, ‘and you could swear he could see. Amazing.’
A nasty little sliver of suspicion enters my mind.
Felicia started talking about children on the day of her twenty-eighth birthday. We had been ‘going out’ for two years by then. I asked her why she chose to live in Oxford with its tiresome, lengthy commute to London when, on her salary, she could have lived in town, conveniently and comfortably. ‘I was always happy in Oxford,’ she said. ‘And besides, you’re here.’ The logic doesn’t hold up. She came back to Oxford, bought her little house in Osney Meade and then we met up again and, as these things will, resumed our affair. There is a character in
Morbid Anatomy
loosely, very loosely, based on Felicia. I think she dies in a plane crash.
This is vaguely shaming but I know I have to do it. Gianluca leaves and thirty seconds later I am out the door following him. I watch him for a while and, as he waits at the pedestrian crossing, I use a gap in the traffic to overtake him. I jog ahead up through the Summertown shops until I have a hundred yard start on him and, hidden in a doorway, I watch his progress, steady and sure, towards me. It is true, as Mrs Warmleigh had observed, without the white stick there would be nothing in Gianluca’s stride or progress to tell you he was blind. Is it a sad subterfuge, some mental problem, I find myself wondering – wondering with slowly stirring anger, rather than commiseration, as I’m a significant victim of this subterfuge? Or is he merely partially sighted and playing it up for more sympathy?
I let him go by. ‘Oi, mate,’ I disguise my voice with a bit of Oxford demotic. ‘You drop vis money.’
He turns. ‘Excuse me?’
My empty palm proffers an invisible ten-pound note.
He steps towards me his eyes moving. ‘Some money?’ he digs in his pocket, producing a wallet. He
is
blind, all right, blind as a stone, stone-blind, bat-blind, and a small pelt of self-loathing covers me for an instant. ‘I dropped money?’ he says, fumbling with his wallet’s zip.
‘Gianluca?’ a girl’s voice calls. We both turn.
‘Gianluca,’ I say. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Edward,’ he says with relief, ‘I thought someone talking to me.’
The girl is up to us now and she takes his arm. She’s small with wiry brown hair and a mischievous look to her face, half laughing, half smirking. She wears black and she’s smoking.