All Souls (14 page)
I
REPEATEDLY
ASKED
and ask myself these questions not out of compassion for Gawsworth, who was after all nothing but a man with a false name whom I never met and whose writings - which are all the visible remains I have of him, that and the photographs of him alive and dead - mean little to me, but out of a curiosity tinged with superstition, convinced as I came to be on certain endless evenings in that spring or Trinity term, that ultimately I would meet the same fate.
The English spring is a peculiarly distressing season to those already in distress for, as everyone knows, it is then that the days grow inordinately long but not in the way they can and do in Madrid or Barcelona at the approach and arrival of summer. Here in Madrid, as the days grow endless, the light undergoes continuous subtle changes and thus communicates the fact that time is moving on, whilst in England — and further north - for hours on end absolutely nothing changes. In Oxford the light remains the same from half past five, when the shops close and teachers and students return home and when the cessation of all visible activity first obliges you to notice it, until gone nine o'clock when the sun sets - as suddenly, apart from a lingering distant, ghostly glow, as if turned off by a switch — the signal for those who have determined on going out that night to rush impatiently into the streets. That same unchanging light, that accentuation of the static quality or stability of the place, makes you feel as if you yourself were at a standstill and even less a part of the world and the passing of time than, as I have explained before, one normally feels there. If, as was of
course my own case, dining in daylight hours was out of the question, then there is simply nothing to do during those motionless hours. And so you wait. And wait. Shut up in your house, watching television or listening to the radio, deprived even of the possibility of visiting bookshops where you could feel active, useful and safe, you wait for the longed-for night to fall, for that warm, suspended light to fade, for the weak wheel of the world to start rolling again and for the stillness to end. While the sun hangs paralysed in the sky, the dons are resting in their rooms at college or dining at high table and the students have closeted themselves at home in order to prepare for exams or to go out on the town as soon as they're sure night has come. During the long, fixed hours of those spring evenings in Oxford, the city belongs more than ever to the Gawsworths of the day. The city is theirs for the duration of that long, false, endless twilight, intruded upon only by the town's innumerable bells (the city's religious past) loudly calling the faithful to Evensong. The beggars have no homes to go to, no colleges to return to, nor are they ever guests at high table. I doubt if they rush to the churches either, when these latter call them. They continue to roam the streets, though finding them empty of passers-by in broad daylight so bewilders them that they slacken their pace and even stop for a moment to kick a can, stamp on a newspaper caught up by the breeze and thereby kill a little more of the time they've been killing ever since they woke.
I used to hide at home to wait for night to come, on Wednesdays trying to find a Spanish radio station that might be re-broadcasting an international match involving Real Madrid, constantly tempted to pick up the phone and call Clare Bayes at home, where she would be seated at the foot of the child Eric's bed to give him his supper, watching children's television with him or distracting him with some new game. I was sorely tempted every evening but in order not to succumb and in order to withstand the hours of sameness and inertia - the flat hours
and flat days — I would sometimes shave for a second time and get ready to go out into the streets, just like the livelier and more dissolute undergraduates and lecturers, to mingle with other people as night fell. Sometimes I dined at that pleasant restaurant Brown's, close by my pyramid house, with its attractive mini-skirted waitresses, and at others, just to recapture the feeling of being back on the Continent and not marooned on the islands, at one of the French restaurants in which the town abounds, or I would even force myself to make frequent appearances at the ghastly high tables I had not attended since the first months of my stay in Oxford, a year and a half ago now. I tried those of various colleges, some already known to me, others as yet unvisited, in the faint hope, too, of once more finding Clare Bayes amongst the hosts (at All Souls or Exeter, her husband's college) or amongst the guests (at Keble, Oriel, Balliol, Pembroke, Christ Church, each more tedious than the last: the high table at Christ Church being at once the most sumptuous and the most boring). But it was too much of an effort and did not suffice to banish the sense of numbness, or to escape my obsession with Gawsworth and his fate.
During those evenings, after about half past eight or nine o'clock, I started going to a discotheque near the Apollo Theatre, which, on the whole, was more popular amongst the people who worked in Oxford's factories and offices (for Oxford, unlike Cambridge, does have industries and workers and people who don't belong to the university) than amongst its gowned inhabitants of whom I was one. I say "on the whole" because I did get a few surprises there. Each night I found myself confronted by a scene straight out of the seventies, a very English seventies that had not impinged in the least on the outside world. It was all very provincial and domestic from the strident music (well, it was a discotheque) to the decor with its vaguely Moorish motifs, from the (green and pink) lights that played over the dance floor to the clothes of the dancers, which
could be dated with extraordinary accuracy. Nevertheless, to judge by the crowds that filled it every night, from who knows what bright evening hour onwards, the discotheque enjoyed enormous success. I remember there being an unusually high number of fat girls in miniskirts and permed hair: there were whole tables occupied solely by large groups of large girls (the term "fat tart" springs to mind) who sat in groups of six or seven, constantly elbowing one another and chewing gum, sunk into the sofas beneath their own weight and torpor, unashamedly displaying a row of vast thighs (in a state of constant friction) and even glimpses of their knickers. And then there were the young Oxfordshire dandies (from the local towns of Banbury and Charlbury, Witney and Eynsham) who gloried in the sort of cheap, loud taste in clothes one only finds in the south of England. It was clear that those rustic, effeminate young men hated the fat tarts and that the fat tarts hated the affected yokels. They never mixed but when they did meet in the queues for the toilets or found themselves dancing in the same spot in the crowd or on the dance floor, they'd exchange looks which were either scornful (on the part of the young men) or mocking (on the part of the young women) and shoot knowing glances at their sympathisers seated at the tables or standing at the bar, openly pointing out their risible adversary with an ostentatious wave of a thumb, thin or plump as the case might be. Although those two species were generally speaking the predominant clientele in the Moorish-style discotheque, it was not unusual to see students there (especially the more refined ones who are likelier to have a weakness and a taste for the plebeian) and even certain dons - the bachelors amongst them - disguised as youths. Most I knew only by sight, distantly enough to avoid the need to greet each other in such circumstances, but on my fourth night there I spotted my own boss Aidan Kavanagh, the author of the horror blockbusters, performing a wild, loose-jointed dance out of time with the music. I couldn't see very well — amongst all those bodies lit by that feverish light — and at first I thought with some alarm that his usually sober, anodyne clothes had given way to an eau de nil waistcoat and little else, but I realised immediately afterwards - with only a modicum of relief - that only his arms were in fact bare albeit to the shoulder: that is, he was as usual wearing a shirt and tie (apricot and bottle green respectively) beneath the eau de nil waistcoat, but it was a strange kind of shirt comprising only a shirt front. I wondered if he wore the same model to the faculty and determined to have a good look next time I met him in the Taylorian to ascertain whether or not his shirtsleeves were visible beneath his jacket cuffs. (As well as being a writer of horror novels under a pen name, he was also, after all, an international expert on my country's Golden Age.) Anyway, his disco wear did allow me to discover that he was extremely hirsute on his (upper) extremities, which were crowned within by dense jungles of underarm hair upon which I had no option but to gaze, since a combination of his frenzied dancing and the lack of space demanded that he keep his arms raised at all times. He saw me from a distance and, far from blushing and trying to hide, came over to me at the bar, still dancing, and greeted me in the most jovial and hospitable manner. He was dragging by the hand (still raised in the air) a fat girl who tottered and shoved her way towards me, smiling broadly. Kavanagh had to shout to make himself heard so that, like Alan Marriott, he spoke in clipped phrases.
"Fancy meeting you here! I thought you didn't like these places! It's taken you nearly
two
years to discover it!" And he thrust two fingers into my face. "This is the best disco there is! The only really fun place in town!" He glanced back at the dance floor with a look of genuine appreciation and satisfaction: the dance floor resembled nothing so much as an operatic mutiny. "I come almost every night! Well, every night I can! I know everybody here!" And with one strong arm, bare to
the shoulder, he made a sweeping gesture taking in the whole club. He took a long swig of his drink. "Would you like to meet someone? I can introduce you to anyone you want! Have a good look around! If you see someone you fancy, tell me and I'll introduce you, no problem! There are dozens of girls," he lowered his voice, "dozens. Ah, let me introduce you to Jessie. Jessie!" He hesitated a moment. "This is my friend Emilio! He's Spanish too!"
"What?"
"Emilio!" Kavanagh jabbed at me with a finger that only just missed poking my eye out. "Another Spanish friend."
"Buona sera!" shouted Jessie above the racket.
"Ciao!" I said so as not to disappoint her. She was wreathed in smiles.
"It's best they don't know our real names," Kavanagh whispered in my ear in Spanish. "It's perfectly safe, they only come to Oxford at night. She thinks I work in the motor industry. I've promised her an Aston Martin."
"Do they still make them?"
"I don't know, but she swallowed it." And he added, in English this time: "Come and join us. We're sharing a table. There are simply dozens of girls," he murmured, "dozens. Del Diestro's here too. He arrived today."
Kavanagh grabbed me by the arm and, with me in tow, gyrated his way over to one of the fat tarts' tables, which was all too familiar to me and which, on the previous three nights, I had rejected with an emphatic scorn worthy almost of one of the effeminate, rustic young men from Oxfordshire (Jessie followed, treacling on her own toes and shoving people to one side). Sure enough there was the celebrated Professor del Diestro, in his own opinion the greatest and youngest world expert on Cervantes, and known in Madrid (according to how much one disliked him) either as Dexterous Diestro or Dastardly Diestro who, at the Department's invitation, was due to deliver a
magisterial and suitably dexterous lecture the following morning. I recognised him from his photographs. The professor, a distinguished, opinionated man in his forties, wearing his designer shirt and his bald pate with equal panache ("A distinguished Spanish professor," I thought when I saw him, amazed and suddenly understanding the reason for his success), was slobbering over and allowing himself to be slobbered over by one of the fattest of the fat girls. It should be said that the sole aim of all these girls, as well as of the rural dandies, the bachelor dons and the more refined students (and my aim too, although at the time I neither realised it nor, therefore, admitted it to myself) was to make the acquaintance of some complete stranger (which was not that easy given the fixed and repetitious nature of the clientele), one's principal goals then being to ask a few superficial questions, to respond untruthfully to the other person's equally superficial questions, to offer them some chewing gum (dancing wasn't obligatory), to kiss them after a decent interval had elapsed and perhaps - depending on the progress and quality of the kisses and on whether one of you had a condom handy - to have a quick fuck in the toilets or in the darker recesses of the discotheque itself or a slower fuck at home later.
Professor del Diestro was already well enough advanced in acquainting himself with his chosen stranger to permit himself a momentary interruption in order to exchange a few cordial words with me, and Kavanagh, after introducing me to the five or six girls present, forced me down on to the sofa in between two of them. I remained lodged between four of the aforementioned thighs (two per girl) and in the sudden knowledge or acknowledgement of the fact that I would not be leaving the discotheque alone that night, I immediately looked to my left and right in order to weigh them up, with the intention of choosing the more lightweight of the two. I perceived at once that the girl on my right was not really fat, only plump, and in
that case — or so I calculated — I would after a while find it possible to feel a certain sexual interest in her. Knowing beforehand the degree of intimacy I would eventually enjoy with them, her features seemed most agreeable and her leonine curls were stupendous, although they had very much the appearance of having only come into existence a few hours before (it was Thursday). I turned my back on the other girl, who was undeniably and undisguisedly fat, and with the one who wasn't quite so fat, Muriel by name, I began an intermittent and rather desultory conversation conducted at shouting pitch of which I recall almost nothing (it was after all just a formality), only that she said she lived in a tiny village - or was it a farm? - near Wych-wood Forest, between the Rivers Windrush and Evenlode. But that might well have been false, as false as the names Emilio and Muriel. Like her companions she chewed gum incessantly and, although she wasn't as full of smiles as young Jessie, who had returned to the floor to dance with Kavanagh and thus secure her Aston Martin, she seemed quite jolly and pleased to meet me and didn't move away when my legs, covered by their lightweight trousers, rubbed against hers, so preeminently abundant but covered only by finemesh tights; more than that, she tended to transform that contact (unavoidable given the cramped conditions) into a deliberate pressure. I did nothing to avoid it either and at one point she put her hand on my knee in familiar fashion and yelled dutifully into my ear:
