All Souls (23 page)

hesitant, tearful figures appear, stumbling perhaps on the rails, skidding on the gravel, two figures who are John Gawsworth and the mother of the watching child, Clare Newton, a woman who is still young, younger than her daughter on this night in Brighton. They're walking hand in hand, with Armstrong leading; they're leaning on the crisscrossing iron girders, clinging on to them as if they feared slipping and falling into the water, although it's possible that that is precisely why they've gone to the bridge, to fall in and drown, or perhaps not, perhaps they're simply crossing the bridge on foot, with obvious difficulty, perhaps they're in flight or stunned or troubled or drunk or ill, perhaps they don't know what they're doing. The child immediately spots the two figures in the darkness because they're both dressed in white and because one of them is her mother (and because the person who will become Clare Bayes only has eyes for the iron bridge and its promise of brightly coloured trains). There's Mummy,' says the daughter, pointing at the bridge. The nanny takes no notice of her at first, she doesn't even look up but goes on crooning some trifling song while she sews or does nothing and simply sits with her hands folded in her lap watching over the child left in her charge. The girl
sees
how the man, who is perhaps Gawsworth, walks to the middle of the bridge, still pulling the mother behind him, and although the daughter does not know it yet — her nanny will whisper this to her during her future childhood, not telling her everything until much later, not telling her until it is demanded of her - they're standing on a bridge from which many a pair of unhappy lovers have thrown themselves. But perhaps they're not going to throw themselves in, although that night they are doubtless unhappy, perhaps they're on the bridge for some other reason, who knows, it might be that Gawsworth himself, who leads the mother, does not himself quite know what that reason is. Armstrong takes out the metal flask from the pocket of his white jacket, but he doesn't toast anyone now or spout on about
anything or proffer it to the lips of the first Clare Newton, who laughed so much (to the lips he had so often kissed), but takes a few hurried swigs, almost as if concealing the fact from the woman he loves and who follows behind him. She looks down, while he looks up, possibly she suffers from vertigo and cannot help looking down, down into the broad river of blue or rather black waters (since it is night) and because that is the only way of accustoming herself to them, because perhaps the mother does intend throwing herself in, and perhaps she is the more decided of the two and wonders if Gawsworth, or Terry Armstrong, will jump too, as they've promised and planned to do. It doesn't escape the first Clare Newton's notice that he keeps drinking from his metal flask, perhaps that's his way of accustoming himself to the liquid fate that awaits them; and it doesn't escape the nanny's notice either ('Look, there's your mummy with a man'), although she watches in astonishment and still without understanding what she's seeing. Perhaps the mother and the man made their promises and plans and reached their agreement the night before or during the day in some hotel room, and have agreed (Clare Bayes doesn't know, no one knows) because no other solution other than ending it all occurs to them. Gawsworth is one of life's unfortunates, easily perplexed, never serious, he just makes jokes, plays games (his thinking is erratic, his character weak) and he cannot accept that life has caught up with him, that it has finally closed in on him. The King of Redonda can't have an heir or take care of a child, he can't even take care of the woman he loves and who carries his child, perhaps he couldn't even if she wasn't. And Clare Newton has agreed this with him (Clare Bayes doesn't know, no one does) because she's afraid and desperate, she's been alone and homeless and possibly penniless for three nights and four days spent in cheap hotels or perhaps wandering the inhospitable city while Armstrong still does not come and there's no one to take care of her, three nights and four days of being
bewildered, terrified, unable to believe what is happening to her: her will has wandered off somewhere, she doesn't know now how to hold on to it, to delay its going, it's no longer entirely hers, like the will of an invalid or an old man or one troubled in mind. He drinks, she looks at the water. The two stop in the middle of the bridge. They stumble. Gawsworth puts his arm - his strong arm - round her shoulders, as you put your arm around those you wish to protect and love, and with the other hand he grasps hold of an iron girder. In his first hand he still has hold of the flask, which, though he hasn't realised it yet, must be empty by now. It's Armstrong's turn to look down, whilst the mother looks up, trying to make out the garden of her house to which she will never return and her daughter, wondering if she'll still be watching, hoping that she won't be, that the nanny Hilla will have put her to bed and be singing her to sleep because the mail train from Moradabad will have passed already, marking the end of the child's day (Clare Newton doesn't know that as usual the train is running very late). The two lovers, who have only been unhappy lovers for a short time, stand still, they don't continue their walk, they don't cross the whole bridge. And it is then that from around the corner the Moradabad mail train appears, the train for which, as on every night of her present and future foreign childhood in the south, the little English girl is waiting, the train that always arrives incalculably late (no one can ever tell how late it will be, and that night is no exception) and that's why, although it's almost reached its destination, it seems as if it will never slow down. Gawsworth looks towards the oncoming train whose approach the mother hears without having to look up (the metallic noise inaudible to the child), instead she looks down again into the water. The fickle, mellow moon is now just a sliver. And then Armstrong raises the arm encircling the first Clare Newton's shoulders, frees himself and frees her, and now with both hands - with those hands that piloted planes and that
will one day beg for alms - he grasps hold of and crushes his body against the crisscrossing iron girders, his drunkenness suddenly evaporated, his flask fallen from his hands, his eyes wide open and fearful like those of Alan Marriott's dog just before the football hooligans at Didcot station severed its back leg. There are so many things that hold us here,' Gawsworth is perhaps thinking, 'and anything might still happen.' Or perhaps he doesn't think it, he knows it. The mother must know it too, but nevertheless she holds out until the last moment, with her body so perilously close to the rails - her body that is beginning to swell with what is not yet and will never be Clare Bayes' younger brother or sister - and she does not follow Armstrong's example, the two lovers do not do the same thing, and instead of holding tight to the iron girders, the mother falls or jumps between them, in her white dress (as white as Rylands' hair, as white as the breasts of the not-so-plump girl from Wychwood Forest, Muriel) Clare Newton throws herself into the water. And while Clare Newton jumps and Terry Armstrong does not jump, the train passes, filling the entire length of the iron bridge, lighting up the river with its windows (the men on the barges below look up at the train and grow dizzy) and that is the image that helps the girl to go to sleep and to come to terms with the idea of spending another day in a city to which she does not belong and which she will only perceive as hers once she has left it and when her only chance to recall it out loud will be with her son or with a lover, for lovers serve the same function as children do, to listen to our story. The mother falls, with her slow downhill feeling, with her feeling of being burdened down, of vertigo, of falling, gravidity and weight, with her swollen body and her blurred features, with her false plumpness and her despair. And Gawsworth's eyes - that have been closed and void of any gaze for years now - see how the body of the person he loved falls and drowns; and the child Clare observes from high above how the body of the person she loved - the mother she
cannot remember on this night in Brighton - disappears into the blue waters of that river gleaming brightly in the blackness; and perhaps the father, from the other end of the garden, near the house, also sees how long it takes for the body of the person he loved to surface and sees that it does not surface. (All three see the person they love kill herself.) And it is the nanny, Hilla, who sees how the men in the barges fail to find the body of the beloved, which is swept away on the current, it's she who will reveal the secret, because neither Armstrong nor the father nor the iron bridge over the River Jumna will. And when the train has passed and Clare Bayes who was then Clare Newton loses sight of the swaying lantern on the last carriage and waves goodbye to it, a goodbye that is never spoken in expectation of any response because there is no one there now to respond, the bridge is once more deserted, in darkness, idle and shadowy. The other white figure remains there for only a few seconds, perhaps he vomits into the River Yamuna like an Oxford beggar into the River Isis, before fleeing, terrified, the last King of Redonda, the writer John Gawsworth, the Real Writer, who will never write again nor leave any trace behind him. Except possibly a metal flask that has perhaps been there ever since that night, crushed and rusty and empty between the rails."

And when Clare finished her story, I got up from the floor and returned to my window and to looking at her, thinking: "But it can't be, it wouldn't be, it isn't."

She got up from the bed and came over to me, and then the two of us looked in silence out of the window that revealed in the distance the fantastic imitation of the palaces of her childhood; there was a moon and clouds; her breasts brushed against my back. Clare stroked the back of my neck and I turned round and we looked at each other as if we were each the other's vigilant, compassionate eyes, the eyes that look out at us from the past and no longer matter because they've known for a long time now how they're obliged to see us: perhaps we looked at
each other as if we were each the other's older brother or sister and were sorry we couldn't love each other more, more at least than an older brother or sister. And it was then that I remembered some lines I'd seen quoted, the lines of another English writer of whose life (unlike Gawsworth's) much is known, but whose obscure death, which was violent and legendary, has had to be imagined, like that of Clare Newton: he was stabbed to death before he was thirty years old one day in Trinity term, on the thirtieth of May four hundred years ago, in Deptford (a name that means deep ford), near the Thames, which is what the Isis is called everywhere and at all times except when it passes through Oxford. The lines were: "Thou hast committed fornication; but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."

The next day Clare dropped me at the door of my house in Oxford (and although it wasn't yet night we no longer made any attempt to hide). I saw that the
gypsy
flowerseller, who set up her stall opposite my house on Sundays and bank holidays, was just then being picked up by her invisible husband in his clean, modern van. That meant that, despite the warm, suspended, immutable spring light, it was growing late and it would not be long now before the weak wheel of the world would start rolling again and the stillness come to an end. I realised with joy that I'd been spared another Sunday in exile from the infinite.

OF
THE
THREE
, two have died since I left Oxford, but neither of the two was Clare Bayes, they were, as anticipated, Cromer-Blake and Toby Rylands. The man who was both father- and mother-figure to me as well as being my guide in that city died four months after I left and did not see another Michaelmas or another year, and so my second and last year was also Dr Cromer-Blake's last, though he'd spent much longer in that water than I had. And it was Toby Rylands, who would die two years later (just two months ago, in fact), who sent me an express letter and who kept Cromer-Blake's diaries, which later, when he too died, travelled south to my safekeeping as requested in Rylands' last will and testament. His letter was very short and to the point, as if he were loath to say much about the long-expected event, or about the person who, after his death, became the mirror in which he did not wish to see himself: as if now it were Rylands who could not bring himself to visit Cromer-Blake, to visit his tomb or his memory.

Cromer-Blake was buried in London (in north London, where he was born, and although there was no need to make a collection to pay for the burial of the man who was never to be bursar, there were few people at the funeral, mostly colleagues (so supportive, so good-humoured) from the Taylorian. The priest who said the prayer for the dead and delivered the sermon had the ill grace to request the removal of the children of two colleagues, who had accompanied their parents to the Catholic church at Marble Arch to take advantage of the trip to London by spending the rest of the day at London Zoo. Of Cromer-Blake's family (his parents, an unmarried brother and a married sister) only his brother Roger was there, and it seems that as soon as the service was over he raced off in a sports car (possibly an Aston Martin) without saying a word to anyone. His friend Bruce was absent, as was Dayanand, from whom, according to the diaries, of which I understood only fragments, though I've read them in their entirety, Cromer-Blake had definitively distanced himself in the last months of his life. A few members of his college attended: not the Warden, Lord Rymer, for whom he'd done so many favours - with whom he'd been working hand in glove - but the economist Halliwell, from whom everyone fled after the funeral to avoid being bespattered by his one topic of conversation. Obituaries appeared "in two of the nationals, neither of them very kind", as Rylands enigmatically put it. The Professor Emeritus was succinct in his letter, which had obviously been written in haste, in order to be done with his obligations as soon as possible, but he was also upset. "Cromer-Blake knew what was wrong with him for nearly a year, he knew last December in fact. He was so brave. According to those who continued to see him, he bore his terrible sentence with apparent unconcern. It's odd how the most unlikely people show great courage in the end. How immensely sad. I can't stop thinking about him." The express letter - it concluded by giving me an address in London so that I could, if I wished, send a donation to a charity in memory of Cromer-Blake - said little more.