All Souls (3 page)

I've completely forgotten her face but not her colours (yellow, blue, pink, white, red), yet I know that during the whole of my youth she was the woman who made the greatest and most immediate impact on me, although I also know that, traditionally, in both literature and real life, such a remark can only be made of women whom young men never actually meet. I can't remember now how I got talking to her, nor what we talked about during the less than half-hour journey between Didcot and Oxford. Perhaps we didn't even have a proper conversation but just exchanged three or four casual remarks. On the other hand, I do remember that, although not young enough to be a student, she was still very young and therefore not particularly elegant, and that the collar of her raincoat was open just enough for me to see the pearl necklace (cultured or real I couldn't say) which, in the fashion of a few years back, the best-groomed English girls thought the thing to wear even though the rest of their outfit was informal or apparently casual (she herself was neat rather than elegant). The other thing I remember about that woman, with her bobbed hair and forgotten features, was that she looked as if she'd just stepped out of the 1930s. Perhaps to Will the porter all women looked like that on the days he found himself in that particular decade. Anyway, whatever it was we talked about, it was not personal enough for me to ascertain any concrete facts about her. Perhaps her
clear eyes finally closed with tiredness and I didn't dare do anything to prevent it. Perhaps during that thirty-minute journey my desire to look at her was stronger than my curiosity or my capacity for conjecture. Or perhaps we spoke only of Didcot, of the dark, cold station we'd left behind and to which we would both have to return. Like me she got off at Oxford but, since I was unable to do any preparatory groundwork, I couldn't even offer to share my taxi with her.

For the next ten days, I walked all over Oxford with the aim or rather with the unconscious hope of meeting her again, which was not that improbable assuming she'd not just gone there on a visit but lived in Oxford. I spent even more time in the streets than usual and with every day that passed her face became more blurred, more confused with other faces, as tends to happen with the things one struggles to remember, with all those images memory shows no respect for (that is, before which memory does not remain passive). It's no wonder, then, that today I can recall none of her features - just an unfinished portrait, an outline drawing with the colours barely blocked in, not painted -despite my having with certainty seen her a second and, I think, a third and possibly even a fourth time. But the one definite sighting I had of her — ten days after that first encounter — occurred on a terribly windy day and was over before I knew it. Coming out of Blackwell's with less than enough time to get to one of my translation classes with the punctilious Dewar, I quickened my step and walked straight ahead into the teeth of the hurricane that had blown up whilst I'd been browsing in the bookshop. About twenty paces further on, outside Trinity, I passed two female figures also in a hurry and with their heads bowed against the wind. Only when I'd taken another four or five steps (and had my back to her) did I realise who it was and turn round. What surprised me most was that she and her friend, who had also walked on four or five steps, had also stopped and turned round. At that distance of eight or nine paces we looked
at each other properly. She smiled and shouted, more in order to identify herself than to indicate her recognition of me: "On the train! At Didcot!" I hesitated for a moment as to whether I should approach or not and whilst I hesitated, her friend tugged at her sleeve and urged her to continue on her way. Her skirt swirled about in the wind, as did her short hair. I remember that particularly because during the brief moment in which she stood there on Broad Street and shouted: "On the train! At Didcot!" she had one hand to her hair, holding it off her forehead, and the other to her skirt, holding it down against the elements. "Yes, on the train! At Didcot!" I repeated to indicate that I recognised her too (the hem of my blue coat beating against my legs), but then her odious, tugging friend whose face I did not see was carrying her off, not towards Dewar and the Taylorian, but in the opposite direction. I had no other firm sighting of her that year or the next, after which I left Oxford for Madrid, although not immediately to settle down there, as I now realise I have. What I regret most is that on that second occasion, I didn't manage a glance at her English shoes or her ankles which would doubtless have seemed fragile in the wind. I was too intent on observing the wary flappings of her skirt.

THE
SHOES
CLARE
BAYES
wore were never English, always Italian, and I never once saw a low heel or buckle or a rounded toe on any of them. When she came to my house (which was not that often) or when we managed to end up together at her house (even less often) or we met in a hotel in London or Reading or even Brighton (though we only went to Brighton once), the first thing she would do was to ease her shoes off at the instep and then with a kick, one for each shoe, send them ricocheting against the walls, as if she were the owner of innumerable pairs and cared nothing for their ruination. I would immediately pick them up and put them where we couldn't see them: the sight of empty shoes always makes me imagine them on the feet of the person who has worn them or might wear them, and seeing that person by my side - with their shoes off - or not seeing the person at all upsets me terribly (that's why, whenever I look at the window of some old-fashioned shoeshop with its rows and rows of shoes, I automatically see it filled by a multitude of cramped, uncomfortable figures). Clare had the habit - apparently acquired during her childhood years spent in Delhi and Cairo - of going barefoot when indoors (fortunately in England almost everywhere is carpeted) and so my most vivid memory of her legs is not the memory shared perhaps by many others, that of strong, slightly muscular calves, as seen when poised above their high heels, but rather that of two slender legs, almost boyish in their movements, as seen when barefoot. She would lie on my bed or her bed or on a hotel bed and smoke and talk for hours, always with her skirt still on, but
pulled up to reveal her thighs, the dark upper part of her tights or just her bare skin. She was not circumspect in her gestures and would frequently ladder her tights, often scorching them by briefly, unconsciously brushing against them with the cigarette she waved around with an abandon uncommon in England (and learned perhaps in the southern lands of her childhood), a gesture accompanied by the tinkling of the various bracelets adorning her forearms, bracelets she sometimes neglected to take off (it was little wonder that sometimes real sparks flew from them). Everything about her was expansive, excessive, excitable; she was one of those beings not made for time, for whom the very notion of time and its passing is a grievance, and one of those beings in need of a constant supply of fragments of eternity or, to put it another way, of a bottomless well of detail with which to fill time to the brim. More than once, for that very reason, because of that endless drawing out of whatever we had begun, we ran the risk of her husband, Edward Bayes, glimpsing with his own eyes the retreating back or the wake of the very thing he surely knew about and was continually trying to reject or perhaps forget. Consequently, I was always the one who had to interrupt Clare's interminable ramblings and comments, her chronic logorrhoea, her eternalising of the contents of each moment as she lay back on the bed, smoking, gesticulating, pontificating, crossing and uncrossing her legs, folding them beneath her, extolling or railing against her past and her present, jumping from one plan for her immediate future to the next, without ever actually bringing any of them to fruition. I was the one who had to set the alarm clock or keep an eye on the watch on the bedside table and decide it was time to part, or (in Oxford) keep one ear open for the city's obsessive bells chiming the hour, the half hour and the quarter hour, then inconsiderately pealing out again as evening fell; I was the one who had to hurry her along, look for the shoes I'd put away after her arrival, smooth her skirt and make sure it
was on straight, remind her not to forget her umbrella or the brooch impaled in the carpet or the ring left by the washbasin or the bag containing the strange collection of purchases she always brought with her wherever we met, even if it was on a Sunday (and, if we were at her house, I was the one who had to empty the ashtray, help her change the sheets, open the window and rinse my glass). Clare always carried all manner of things with her and would spread them out wherever she arrived as if she planned to spend the rest of her life there, even on occasions when we had less than an hour to spend together between our respective classes. (I still have one pair of earrings that I never did manage to expel from my house.) Fortunately, by upbringing, she was incapable of going out into the street without her makeup on, and her hair was a mane of artificially tangled curls on which my caresses or any prolonged, intense contact with a pillow made little impact. Thus, whilst I did not have to comb her hair before we said goodbye, I did have to check that her face bore no sign of the private eternity she'd erected and maintained during the time spent in my company, that her face was not flushed, her eyes not too soft, that all signs of joy were obliterated (in Oxford the distances are so short they barely give one time to change colour). To achieve all this I had simply and briefly to rehearse with her the intellectual exercise that underpins all adultery, that is, help her in the invention of seamless stories for the benefit of Edward Bayes and to ensure she didn't contradict herself when telling them, although she herself considered the exercise unnecessary and bothersome (her expression darkened whenever we said goodbye because of my insistence on it). She was careless and frivolous and smiling and forgetful and, had I been Edward Bayes, or so I thought then, it would not have taken much scheming or effort on my part to ascertain her every thought, her every move. But I wasn't Edward Bayes and perhaps if I had been, Clare's activities and intentions would have seemed utterly impenetrable to me.

Perhaps I wouldn't have wanted to know about them, or would have been content simply to imagine them. At any rate, I was the one who, at the closing of each passionate parenthesis, had to put everything in order and almost propel her out of my pyramid house (with each floor narrower than the last), drag her from the hotel we were staying at or else free myself from her momentary, last-minute tendency to cling (grief for the ending of time) and, on the rare occasions I dared set foot in her house in Edward Bayes' absence, neutralise her rasher impulses. (Adultery is hard work.)

Clare had few scruples, but then no one who knew her would ever have expected anything else, for her charm lay in large measure precisely in her lack of consideration both for other people and for herself. She often made me laugh, the talent I most appreciate in others, but I know that my fondness for her, and hers for me, was never long-lived or solid enough to prove dangerous (for I was not Edward Bayes, nor was I ever in any danger of supplanting him). It has always seemed to me overly ingenuous to think that because someone loves us - that is, because independently of us that person has made a decision temporarily to love us and only afterwards informed us of the fact - their treatment of us will be any different from the treatment they mete out to others, as if, immediately subsequent upon that other person's independent decision and declaration, we were not certain to be relegated to join those others, as if, in fact, as well as being ourselves, we had not always been "the others". The last thing in the world I would have wanted - at least during those fragile days I lived in Oxford, with only a very uncertain sense of my own identity — would have been to have Clare treat me as she treated Edward Bayes or her father or even the ironic Cromer-Blake, who was simultaneously paternal and filial towards her, while her father was simply paternal and her husband purely marital. I suppose my relationship with her was preeminently fraternal, as has tended to be the case with women I've known well, doubtless because I had no sisters and felt the poorer for it. Although our meetings were never that frequent I did have the opportunity to observe Clare at close quarters and, without wishing to speak ill of her or - let's say - speak of things that others, on hearing them from my lips, might consider derogatory, I put myself often enough in the shoes of the others - in the shoes of her father, of Edward Bayes and even of Cromer-Blake - to know without a doubt that she showed none of them the least consideration. I put myself above all in the shoes of Edward Bayes and I remember on one fifth of November, nine months after we'd met - I remember the date because it was Guy Fawkes Day and from Clare's study window, in All Souls, in Catte Street, across from the old Bodleian Library and the Radcliffe Camera, I could see some little boys begging pennies for the guy they'd made for the occasion out of rags, string and old clothes to represent the executed plotter Guy Fawkes, who is burnt that night on bonfires throughout the land - when I put myself so successfully in his place (in the place allotted to him, but perhaps never filled) that Clare confused me with him.

The four of us, Bayes, Cromer-Blake, Clare and myself, had arranged to meet there in order to go out to lunch and I had been the first to arrive at Catte Street, deliberately getting there twenty minutes early. The previous night Clare and I had stayed on far too late at a hotel in Reading and, contrary to our custom when we visited Oxford's neighbouring town, had travelled back on the same train (when Edward Bayes was away we took Clare's car and when he wasn't we always travelled on different trains, there and back, to London or to Reading). Anyway, we'd arrived at Oxford station and walked together beneath a fickle, mellow moon, our faces to the wind, until on a corner still some distance from our respective houses, we went our separate ways. During the train journey we'd also sat next to each other since, being friends in the eyes of the world, not to have done so
would have struck anyone seeing us as even odder. A member of the Russian department called Rook had certainly seen us. He was dozing, slumped in the first-class carriage we had initially got into because, from the platform, it had appeared to be empty. He saw us and we saw him when we were already advancing down the corridor, laughing in a compromising or overly frank and unEnglish manner and he, with what one presumed to be a nod of his sunken head, addressed Clare first with a "Mrs Bayes" and then - doubtless because he didn't know how to pronounce my name, or because he found it difficult to remember — bade me a simple "Good evening". We walked on to find a seat as far away as possible from him, but even there dared utter nothing but the briefest of noncommittal phrases in the lowest of voices. Afterwards, when we walked the streets of Oxford, for the first time together and alone, beneath the fickle, mellow moon, our faces to the wind, we heard his footsteps a little way behind, echoing the rhythm of our steps, or at least we thought they were his and not just the echo of our own. We neither turned round nor exchanged a word until the moment came for us to part and then we simply said "Goodbye" without even stopping or looking at each other (such is the sadness of secrecy). I heard nothing after that except, for an instant, Clare's footsteps hurrying away; I doubt she heard my own weary steps. Rook was famous because for the past twelve years he'd been engaged on a new translation of
Anna Karenina
and because, during an academic year spent in America, he'd met and become friendly with Nabokov. His translation — though no one, not even his publisher, had as yet seen a line of it - was to be both definitive and incomparable, beginning with a fundamental innovation in the title, for, according to both Rook and Nabokov - to whom he always referred as "Vladimir Vladimiro-vich" to indicate his familiarity both with the man and with Russian patronymics — the correct tide was
Karenin
not
Karenina,
since Anna was neither ballerina, singer or actress, the only women, however authentically Russian, whose family name it would be admissible to feminise in a text in English or in any other Western language. He and I had met on more than one occasion in the Senior Common Room in the Taylorian where, drinking cups of anaemic coffee and casting the occasional lazy, loathing glance at the scholarly contents of our respective briefcases, we lounged around pretending to be putting the finishing touches to our lesson preparation. Rook - a man with a massive head perched on a slender body - was always only too ready to talk about Nabokov or to enlighten me about Lermontov or Gogol, but his personal life was a closed book to the other members of the Oxford congregation. For that reason one could quite happily attribute to him any habit or characteristic one liked, and the reputation he had was of being a dreadful gossip. In fact in Oxford that is of no great significance. What would be extraordinary would be for someone not to have such a reputation: anyone who's not a scandalmonger or, at the very least, malicious is doomed to live as marginal and discredited an existence as someone unfortunate enough to have graduated from a university other than Cambridge or Oxford itself, and such a person has no chance of adapting because he will never be accepted. In Oxford the only thing anyone is truly interested in is money, followed some way behind by information, which can always be useful as a means of acquiring money. The information obtained can be important or superfluous, useful or trivial, political or economic, diplomatic or epistemological, psychological or genealogical, familiar or ancillary, historical or sexual, social or professional, anthropological or methodological, phenomenological, technological or straightforwardly phallic, it doesn't matter; but anyone wishing to survive there must have (or must obtain without delay) some sort of transmissible data. Giving information about something is, moreover, the only way of not having to give out information about oneself, and thus, the more misanthropic, independent, solitary or mysterious the Oxonian in question, the more information about other people one would expect him to provide in order to excuse his own reserve and gain the right to remain silent about his own private life. The more one knows and tells about other people, the greater one's dispensation not to reveal anything about oneself. Consequently the whole of Oxford is fully and continuously engaged in concealing and suppressing itself whilst at the same time trying to winkle out as much information as possible about other people, and from there comes the tradition - true — and the myth - also true - of the high quality, great efficiency and virtuosity of the dons and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to the dirtier work involved in spying and of their continued employment by both British and Soviet governments who vie for their services as prestigious agents -single, double and triple (Oxonians have sharper ears, Cantabrigians fewer scruples). However, the effect of this is that the aforementioned right to remain silent about one's private life is reduced literally to just that, that is, to saving oneself the humiliation and embarrassment of having to own up and make it public knowledge oneself, since, given the universal need to supply information about other people in order not to have to divulge anything about oneself, the very information that one avoids giving, others (a whole host of them) covet, spy out, pursue, track down, obtain and end up broadcasting in order, in turn, to avoid having to reveal any information about themselves. Some weak spirits (only a few) give it up as a bad job right from the start and, with a reprehensible lack of resistance and modesty, make a full public confession of their private affairs. Though frowned upon because of the frank, easygoing and heterodox attitude it reveals towards the game, this is permitted because it is seen as both unconditional surrender and abject submission. On the other hand, some virtuosi in the field manage, in spite of everything, to keep secret their habits, vices, tastes and practices (perhaps by dint of renouncing
all
habits, vices, tastes and practices), which does not, of course, prevent other people from inventing and attributing to them every vice they can think of; however, the variety and resultant contradictions in such incongruous and motley reports tend to make one distrust their veracity. Occasionally, though, such virtuosi (but they have to be
real
virtuosi) do get their own way and no one really knows any hard facts about them at all. Rook was without a doubt an eminent member of that class (such a consummate master of the art, you'd think he'd been trained by the Soviets). Apart from his absolute commitment to his monumental translation and his encounter with Vladimir Vladimirovich in Britain's former colonies, nothing was known about him (his personal life was a blank) and, on the other hand, one could take it for granted that anything he knew would, the instant he knew it, rapidly pass into the realm of popular knowledge.