Pantheon (9 page)

He began to pace, looking at the rows of desks, new and barely scratched – lacking the dents, cracks, blemishes and the gluey, human resin accreted through centuries that coated the wood at the ‘Radder’. He looked at the clock. The librarian had been gone more than five minutes, closer to ten. He wondered what could possibly be keeping her.

Where on earth would Florence have gone? Mrs Grey was right: the obvious answer was her parents’ house, but he had ruled that out. He could feel a swell of anger rising inside him. He needed to see what the hell Florence had been looking at here. It could be her regular studies, Darwin and the like, but it could be something else, something more urgent. What was it Grey had said?
Something she had to check, something she had to find out, before she could leave.

So what the hell was it? What had Florence had to find out? And where was that damned librarian?

He marched at full speed past the administrative desk, breaking through the invisible barrier that separated clerks from readers, and through the door the librarian had taken nearly quarter of an hour earlier.

Behind it, he found himself on a landing for a service stairwell. Dimly lit by a single sickly bulb, it was painted a functional grey, the floors covered in a thin linoleum. Instinctively he headed downstairs.

Two flights down he came to a pair of double doors. He pushed them open to see what struck him at first as a long corridor. He called out. ‘Hello?’

The echo on his voice surprised him. This was no corridor. He stepped into the almost-dark, calling out again. No answer.

He walked further, slowly becoming conscious that the path he was taking was narrow. He put out his hand, expecting the touch of cold concrete. Instead he felt rough metal, the texture of a bicycle chain. Slowly he began to make out the shape of a conveyor belt.

He had read about this innovation. He was inside the tunnel, the one that connected the New Bodleian to the Old, stretching under Broad Street. It had been lauded as a feat of engineering and great British ingenuity. Instead of librarians scurrying back and forth between the two buildings, a mechanical conveyor would do the work for them, dumbly transporting whatever had been requested, whether it were
Principia Mathematica
or
Das Kapital
.

James squinted upward to see a stretch of pipework attached to the ceiling. That must be the pneumatic tube system introduced with equal fanfare last year: put the request slip in the capsule and off it whizzed, powered by nothing more than compressed air. Aeroplanes, the wireless, the cinema – the world was changing so fast. It was already unrecognizable from the Victorian age his parents still inhabited.

‘Miss? Are you there?’ Where had the librarian gone and why was she not answering?

There was a sharp turn right; he wondered how far he had gone. Could he already be under Radcliffe Square? He didn’t think he had walked that far, but perhaps the absence of light had confused his senses. He suddenly became aware that he was cold; he shivered, feeling the film of sweat that still coated him.

What was that? Was that a flicker of light far ahead? There had been some kind of change, perhaps a torch coming on and off. He quickened his pace.

He broke into a jog. ‘Miss, is that you?’

There was a delay and then an answer, one that made his blood freeze.

The answer was ‘No.’ And it was spoken by a man.

‘Who’s there?’ He could hear the alarm in his own voice.

‘Is that Dr Zennor?’

An accent. What was it? Dutch? German? He couldn’t even see where the voice was coming from. What exactly had he walked into here? ‘Where has the librarian gone?’

‘I am the librarian.’

As that moment, James was dazzled by a bright-yellow beam aimed directly in his face. He turned away, lifting his hand to his eyes.

‘My apologies, sir. For the light, also I am sorry.’

The torch was now angled away from his face, but still James remained blinded. He blinked and blinked again to regain his vision. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Please.’
Pliz.
‘Do not swear at me.’

James could feel his rage building again. In a low voice, the calmness of a man repressing fury, he repeated, ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Epstein. I am now the night librarian here.’

So that would explain the accent: an émigré German. ‘And what happened to the woman?’

‘I saw her down here after six of clock and told her to go home already. Such long days they work, these girls. Working for seven days she has been, without a break. On a trot.’

‘On the trot.’

‘Yes. On
the
trot. That is what I mean.’

‘But she was helping me. I had a request.’

‘Yes, yes. I know this. I am helping you myself. I was trying to find the books.’

‘The books Mrs Zennor was borrowing?’

‘That’s right. But why you come down in the tunnel? This is prohibited, yes?’

James exhaled. His heart was pounding, at a pace that refused to slow. The light shining in his face had rattled him. He was still dazed, but it was not just the light. Something else.

The man spoke again. ‘Please. I have them now. You are to follow me.’

They walked in silence, James embarrassed by his pursuit of this man underground. And also fearful – that he would, by saying the wrong thing, induce a change of heart in the émigré librarian, that he would come across as too sweatily anxious. So he curbed his impatience to see the books in the man’s hands and waited till they emerged into the relative light of the stairwell, moving from there back inside the reading room.

‘We have to save the power, you see. At night. That is why there is no lights down there. Only this.’ Epstein waved his torch. ‘And no conveyor of course. So this I do by hand. It takes a long time, for which I apologies.’

‘No need to apologize,’ James replied.

‘Apolog
ize
, yes, of course. Sorry for my English. I can read it perfectly, but I never had to speak it before so much.’

‘No. It’s excellent.’ James momentarily considered speaking to him in German, then imagined the delay that would entail – explaining how he knew the language, his reading of the great Viennese analysts and all the rest of it.

‘In Heidelberg, I did not need so much English. But now I am here.’

‘I see.’ James was trying to identify the three books the German had placed on the desk, their spines facing – maddeningly – away from him.

‘I did not choose to leave, Dr Zennor. You see, I am of a type considered, how to say,
undesirable
by the new governors of my country. I came here two years ago.’

‘You are a Jew?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, welcome to England. And thanks for finding these books so quickly.’ James nodded towards them, hoping he would get the hint. ‘You’re obviously a good librarian.’

‘Thank you. I am learning. In Heidelberg, I was not librarian.’

‘No?’ James glanced again at the books, but the man was still laboriously engaged in signing them out, taking what seemed an age over each word.

‘No.’ Epstein smiled a wistful smile. ‘My last job at the university was as a cleaner. I had to mop the floors.’

‘Oh.’

‘Before that, I was Professor of Greek and Chairman of the Department of Classical Studies.’

‘I see.’ James looked into the old eyes, seeing a terrible sadness and longing. He had read about the ghastly things the Nazis were doing to the Jews; he knew of the laws banning them from the professions, burning down their synagogues and God knows what else. But it was different to meet one in person, to see the human consequences of such barbarism standing in front of you.

The librarian must have grown used to this reaction. ‘Oh, do not feel sorry for me, Dr Zennor. I am very grateful. For my job and for this country. The only country in the world fighting this evil.’

James glanced once more at the pile on the desk between them.

The professor pulled himself upright. ‘I am forgetting myself. Please.’

James picked up the books and shifted over to one of the desks. He turned the first one over. To his surprise, it was a bound volume of journals:
The Proceedings of the British Psychological Society for 1920–1
. He flicked through it, trying to work out what might possibly have drawn the interest of his wife. This was not her subject after all.

As he turned the pages, he caught a slip of white paper, the tiniest bookmark that had been left inside. Instinctively, he held it close to his face, hoping that he might catch a scent of her. But it carried no trace. Instead it marked an article entitled: ‘A survey of British veterans of the Great War’
.

Odd. Florence had no particular interest in the last war. If she was not a psychologist, she was certainly not a historian.

He turned to the next book, written by an American scholar affiliated with Harvard Medical School:
Studies in Pediatric Trauma
. He flicked through the pages again, looking for one of those tiny white slips. He found it and began reading:

‘ … sustained exposure of a non-traumatized child to a traumatized adult can result in
secondary or passive trauma.
Symptoms range from selective dumbness, melancholia, extreme shyness, impaired development, bedwetting …’

Instantly, he thought of Harry: how he had been slower than the other children to control himself at night, how he had still not mastered it. Florence had been anxious, refusing to be placated by James’s insistence that their son would ‘soon get the hang of it’. Until now James had thought nothing more of it.

He picked up the third book.
A Compendium of Advice for Mothers
. So very unlike Florence, who usually cursed such things. He didn’t need to thumb through the pages. The book opened automatically, the spine already cracked. The chapter heading:
Preparing a child for a long journey or separation
.

He read the title again and then once more, the dread rising in him. Any hope he had harboured that this might be a stunt, an attempt by Florence to make a point, was fading fast. There it was in black and white. What his wife had planned for was a long journey. Or, worse, a separation.

He went back to the first volume, to the article on former combatants in the last war, reading a paragraph at random:

‘…
subjects in the trial revealed a set of behaviors which recurred. Among them were acute insomnia, including difficulty both falling and staying asleep; excess anger and temper; poor concentration. Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger.’

He skimmed a few paragraphs ahead:

‘ … several of those interviewed displayed an extreme reluctance to speak of their wartime experiences, flinching from even indirect reminders. Perhaps paradoxically, many of these same people complained of unwanted memories of the event, “flashbacks”, as it were. The most common complaint, experienced by some sixty-eight per cent of those surveyed, was of distressing dreams, often violent …’

James slammed the book shut, his heart hammering. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He was hungry. He had barely eaten since last night and he had exerted himself strenuously on the river early this morning. The alcohol would not have helped either. The room was beginning to spin.

He stood up and saw Epstein at the desk, the old man’s bespectacled face appearing to shrink and swell, waxing and waning like the moon. He had to get out, into the fresh air. He mumbled an apology, left the books where they were and stumbled towards the exit.

Outside, he gulped down large draughts of oxygen, clutching the handrail by the entrance. Across the street, the Kings Arms was filling up now with the after-work crowd: not students but academics-turned-civil servants.

He needed to think but his head was throbbing. What had he been expecting? He had assumed something more direct: an atlas, perhaps a road map, maybe a train timetable. But this, what he had just seen … he felt nauseous.

Where the hell was his wife? Where had she gone? It unnerved him to imagine that she was living and breathing somewhere – perhaps arriving at a distant railway station or walking down a street or sipping a cup of tea – that she existed somewhere now, at this very moment, and he had no idea where. He told himself he could survive being apart from her, so long as he knew where she was. But he knew that was not true. Ever since those nights and days in Madrid, holding each other as the bombs fell, he felt that nature itself demanded they be together. As a scientist, he was not meant to believe in fate or destiny, so he could not say what he truly felt. Nor did his education have much tolerance for a word like ‘souls’, but that too was what he felt: that their souls had been joined.

Harry’s arrival had only confirmed it. He loved his son with an intensity that had surprised him. He pictured him now, rarely saying a word to anyone, clinging to his little polar bear. The thought of life apart from his son struck sudden terror into his heart.

The words appeared before him, floating in front of his eyes:
a long journey or separation.
A black thought raced through his mind, like a virus carried on his bloodstream. Could it be, was it possible …

Suddenly and without any warning even to himself, as if his mouth, chest and lungs had a will of their own, he heard himself screaming at the top of his voice. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’

The sound of it shocked him. A group of young men drinking on the pavement outside the Kings Arms looked towards him, their faces flushed, their necks taut with aggression. James wondered if these were the veterans of the Dunkirk retreat – or
evacuation,
as the BBC delicately phrased it – brought here for treatment at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Florence had mentioned them only yesterday, reporting the scandalized reaction of some superannuated don or other who had been outraged by the soldiers’ constant state of drunkenness. James had shrugged, refusing to condemn servicemen for seeking comfort wherever they could find it.

Ignoring them, he crossed the road, retrieved his bike from outside Wadham and cycled away.