Despite the Falling Snow (24 page)

“I’m sure you know a lot…”

He raises a hand. “Anyway, I discussed various things with her, and then she mentioned you, and how you had met, and so on, and that was the end of that. Or so I thought.”

“And then,” he says, “we met, you and I, over tea, a couple of times. And now it’s beginning to happen again.” He sits back with some satisfaction, as though his explanation is now complete.

“What’s happening again?”Alexander asks, puzzled.

“The Russia questions. Again, and again. And again. And do you know something? Every last one of those conversations somehow ends up being about you.”

“Oh.”

“I am not a brilliant man when it comes to emotional or psychological affairs,” he says. “But it would take a dunce not to make the obvious conclusion.”

Alexander’s stomach drops. “I see,” he says quickly, hoping that the aforementioned conclusion is so obvious that there will be no further need to articulate it.

“My wife has found something in you.” He makes it sound distasteful, as though it might be a ringworm or a virus.

“What do you mean?” Alexander asks.

“
Something
,” Professor Johnson replies, as if unsure. He pauses, and looks out of the window. “Something that attracts her. Something she does not find in me. Attention, perhaps, excitement, understanding; I have no definite idea.”

Alexander sits forward in his seat, and assures Frank Johnson that he is a man of some integrity at least, and that he is certain that his conduct has not been inappropriate.

The professor laughs, heartily, but the pressure of sound cannot quite cover the tone of concern beneath.

“
Inappropriate
,” he repeats. “I’m sure it hasn’t. I am not, after all, accusing you of a sordid affair, or of any type of affair whatsoever.”

Alexander holds his look. “What
are
you accusing me of?”

The answer takes such a long time to come that Alexander begins to think that the question has been forgotten. Professor Johnson swings around in his chair, and looks out from the window, and all that can be heard in the tiny room is his laboured breathing, and Alexander’s own quiet shiftings on the chair. When, ever so slowly, that chair of his begins to creak back around again, Alexander feels his limbs stiffen in anticipation.

“I accuse you,” the professor says, rubbing at his huge forehead, “of endearing yourself to my wife. Of conversing with her in a way that pleases her much more than my way. Of giving her something to look forward to each day. Of making her happier in a way, but also somehow more dissatisfied. In short, I accuse you of coming between us.”

“We are friends, nothing more.”

“Please…” he says, raising a hand. “You are taking her to Moscow.”

Alexander stands up. “It seems to me that this is something you should be discussing with your wife, Professor Johnson. I don’t make her decisions for her.”

“That’s the easier way of looking at it. You have certainly influenced her.”

“What would you have me do? Stop seeing her?” Alexander wants to know what his view of the situation is. He does not, as yet, feel compelled to let the professor know that Estelle will be travelling to Russia without him. There is a principle at stake here.

“There’s the thing,” Frank Johnson says. A slow smile spreads over his granite face. His teeth are a little crooked, Alexander notices. “Logically I cannot see a reason why you should. As you say, you are friends, nothing more.”

“But?”

There is no further comment.

“Then what is your reservation?” Alexander asks.

He looks down, with a sigh, and waves a hand as if to close off this particular line of conversation. When he glances up again, his dark, heavy eyes look infinitely tired.

“You confuse me, Alexander.”

“Imagine how I feel.”

A brief smile at this. “You see, I can’t decide what your inner response has been to our discussion,” the professor says. “It seems to me there are two general possibilities. That as a man of integrity, as you call yourself, you feel your conduct has been, and will continue to be, nothing less than honourable, and therefore there is no need to stop…socialising with my wife. Or secondly,” he continues. “That your intentions toward her are in some way inappropriate – be they romantic or otherwise, and that, as a man of integrity, you think that perhaps you should stop seeing her.”

Alexander sits silently for a moment, for he feels he is being pushed to agree to the latter suggestion.

“At least in both scenarios I am a man of integrity,” is all he says. “You know, Professor, feelings rarely conform to the ‘general possibilities’ that you speak of.” He is buying himself time.

“True, but that is very rare,” comes the reply. “I believe, Alexander, that feelings are not quite as complex as people like to give them credit for. Usually, there is one main force driving you in any given situation – jealousy, anger, compassion, even honesty – and these will condition your responses. Time and again, the same responses occur to the same situations. All part of that human condition, that people are so fond of invoking.” He turns again to the window. “You see it in history, in science; and, of course, in literature. Very little changes in novels over the years,” he says with a sigh. “Style, primarily, and the method of writing, but the rest of it, well…” He raises his hand and waves it dismissively at the window and then turns so that he is facing Alexander once more.

“What sort of man are you?” he asks, suddenly.

“Modest,” Alexander replies.

“Ha!” he barks. “Amusing, but you don’t get away that easily.”

“Why are you concerned with my character?”

“I may not take a minute interest in the day-to-day details of my wife’s life,” he says. “But I am interested in what makes you interesting to her.”

“I am honest, and direct, and reasonably kind. I love learning, and I love life – I find it exhilarating most of the time.””

“Good qualities, all. What else?”

“I can cook.”

A shout of laughter. “I know. Ever since I can remember my wife has been telling me that she always wanted a man that could cook. And now she has the ‘King of Catering’.”

The silence that follows is awkward, unwieldy; and Alexander does not know how to grasp and subdue it. The professor will not look up, but watches his own large fingers, as he laces them in and out of each other. In his mind, Alexander curses Business Week for that circus-like headline.

“Perhaps you’re making too many assumptions about what she wants,” he offers at last. “If it’s any consolation to you, I can tell you that it seems to me that your wife already has what she wants. And who.” He tries to stop there, graciously, but finds he cannot. The professor’s potential discomfort is of no concern to him at this moment.

“Except perhaps for a little encouragement regarding other things she is interested in – like writing, or travelling. Whether she is able to write brilliantly is irrelevant. And subjective. The point is she wants to try. And the encouragement to do so may be all she lacks.”

“Perhaps,” Frank Johnson replies abruptly, frowning. “But from what I have read of her work, which I admit, is not that much, she is not a great writer. She may improve, but the chances are that, at the end of the day, she will contribute nothing to the world by typing prose into a computer. Even I don’t attempt it. Because it’s difficult for me to encourage mediocrity. It goes against everything I stand for. I know it’s harsh in one respect, but there it is. Can you understand that?”

Alexander nods. “Yes. It’s a view I try to uphold too. But I don’t think you’re giving her a fair chance. She’s hardly begun. And when she does begin, who sets the standard that decides whether her writing is worthwhile or not?”

The professor frowns slightly, but does not reply. Then he reaches a big hand across his desk to the shelves of Irish literature, like a child reaching for a worn, loved blanket, and he extracts a small paperback book, whose title Alexander cannot read.

“Joyce,” he says, raising the book. “‘The Dead.’ A fine short story. Do you know it?”

“I’ve read it. But it has been a good while. I don’t remember much.”

“Good. May I?”

Alexander nods, and watches as he leafs quickly through the pages. They fall open easily at certain places, those which he particularly likes, he presumes. Why the professor has decided to read to him, he cannot say. Perhaps he feels, as Alexander himself does, that they have exhausted whatever they have to say to each other. It takes him only seconds to find the place he is looking for, but as he lifts the book to read, there is a knock at the door.

“Two minutes,” he shouts, and there is a muffled noise in reply. “My twelve o’clock tutorial,” he says. “A good boy, but a feverish imagination. Now, where was I….” He looks back down at the book, and after a short pause to indicate the end of conversation and the beginning of the reading, he begins:

“The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”

He looks up. “Have you ever loved a woman so much that you felt unable to live without her? I haven’t.”

Alexander is deeply saddened by this admission. He would have been better pleased if Estelle was married to someone utterly devoted.

“Yes,” he replies. “My wife, Katya.”

“But you
have
managed to live without her.”

“I have had little choice.”

Professor Johnson shrugs, a gesture of dismissiveness, and Alexander feels he could easily hit him then, with his ironic tone and his air of superiority.

“My life with and without my wife is something you will never know anything about.” He stands up to leave.

The professor stands, also, quickly. “Wait a minute. You’re right. I push things too far sometimes to no real purpose. It was bad of me. I apologise. Please don’t go.”

Alexander is burning, with anger, with sorrow, with confusion again, but he remains there. He forces himself to read the titles of a row of books behind the professor’s head. Then he takes a breath.

“Your tutorial is waiting,” he says.

“He will wait.”

“I’m sure, but I must go.”

“Do you like it?” he asks quickly, pointing at the book.

A pause. “Very much.”

“Good. I had a feeling that you might. Please,” he says. “Please.”

The pleading tone sends a shiver down Alexander’s core, and he feels both contemptuous and pitiful. He does not sit down, but neither does he make a move to leave, and at once the professor continues:

“I like this piece, that’s all. I think it is a fine, melancholy piece of writing. And I’m trying – in some sense – to learn what it means.” His large voice softens at this last sentence. He looks up. “May I continue a little?”

Alexander nods.

“Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.”

“He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey, impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”

The book closes with a snap.

Alexander cannot speak. He would like to – he would like to tell Frank Johnson that he reads beautifully, for his anger has left, to be replaced by something deeper and sadder, but his throat is dry, a sensation that is becoming too familiar these days.

“I wanted to know if you would see in it what I do,” Professor Johnson says. “Purely selfish motives. One is always looking for understanding.”

As he speaks, he makes his way to the door, and opens it. Outside, a blond-haired young man scrambles to his feet from the floor where he has been sitting, and at a signal from the professor, comes inside the room as Alexander leaves. The windowless hallway is dark and cold, and Alexander turns briefly to look back at that tiny room where only a desk lamp makes an impression on the shadows of the winter’s afternoon.

“I thank you for coming,” Professor Johnson says.

Alexander nods briefly. Placing his hat back on his head, he turns and walks quickly away.

M
ISHA TOLD HIM THAT HE WAS
naïve to think that his wedding day would be the happiest day of his life.

“The most
nervous
day, my friend,” he had said. “Or the most frightening. But happy? You won’t have
time
to feel happy.”