The Professor of Truth (2 page)

I put on a jacket, gloves and thick socks. I was just lacing up my boots when the telephone rang. It was set to ring eight times before the answer-machine kicked in. I reached it on the fourth ring. I said, simply, “Hello?” because I had learned that it was sometimes better to retain the option of not being myself, and a male voice said, “Dr Tealing?” “Who is this?” I asked, and the line went dead. I dialled 1471 and the familiar automated, polite, female voice intoned,
A caller who withheld their number rang, today, at 1227 hours. Thank you for calling. Please hang up
.

It was not so unusual. I didn’t think much about it. I finished tying my boots, went outside, fetched the snow shovel from the garden shed, and started to dig a path from there to the back door of the house.

There had been quite a fall, three or four inches. Each shovelful lengthened the path I was making by less than a
foot. The snow was dense and weighty. After a few minutes, despite the cold, I was sweating. Muscles in my back and shoulders began to protest, but I liked the feel of the effort. I worked like a machine, with regular, repetitive movements, and with the mindlessness of a machine. This, too, I liked. When I reached the back door I paused, stretched, then bent to the task again, this time going round the house to the street.

It is an ordinary suburban street, one of a number of drives, crescents and avenues that form a little residential district where once was rough pasture. The houses, most of them built in the 1960s, are modest in size and of no great character. When new, they were doubtless called contemporary. Now, surrounded by mature trees and hedges and having borne the effects of half a century of Scottish weather, they are all a little tired and dated. Some are doing better than others. Mine has not had the care and attention it might have received from someone else, or from myself in different circumstances.

I was—I am—a lecturer in English Literature. The University where I work is an institution of no great age located in a part of Scotland that positively groans under the accumulation of history. I am fifty-five as I write this, not much older than the University, yet I too feel the burden of past events upon me.

I am the PhD kind of doctor. Some of my colleagues are disdainful of other academics who do not have these letters after their names. I, obviously, do not attract such disdain. Instead I receive sympathy, or a kind of hushed reverence which has
nothing to do with the power of my intellect and which I do not find flattering. There are occasions when I would much prefer their disdain. I am, after all, like most of them, only a lecturer. But I am special, because unlike any of them I lost my wife and daughter when the aeroplane in which they were travelling was blown out of the sky by a bomb.

I never wanted to be special, not for this or any other reason. Nevertheless, I am.

I could once have been a professor—
the
Professor—of English Literature. Important people in the University invited me to apply for the then vacant Chair, and I was advised that it was as good as mine if I wanted it. Yes, I could have been a real professor, and who knows, somewhere in a storeroom there might even be a real chair, commissioned in the 1960s. That was eighteen years ago, when the code of governance concerning appointments was less rigorous, and to be told such a thing, and told it not all that discreetly, was not uncommon. Perhaps the people who suggested it (the Principal of the University and the Dean of Faculty) thought that being a professor would take my mind off the bombing, which had happened three years earlier. Perhaps it was a suggestion born, at least partially, of kindness: they felt it would be good for me as well as for the University. And perhaps it would have been, but nobody can now say, because I declined the invitation and did not apply.

I
am
a professor, but only an imagined one. No one knows this but myself and my colleague Dr Carol Pritchley. It is our secret—our secret joke really. It is what this is all about and why I am writing it down.

I have plenty of space in this house that was built, and bought, for a family to live in. I have two rooms for work, and two computers. One room—the study—is for university work. It was where I had been that morning. The other—the old dining room—is where my special work goes on. The Case, I call it. The two rooms and what they contain are as separate and different as day from night.

It was late January. The days were short, meagre of light. A sense of confinement had pressed on me all winter. I’d seen no one for weeks, not even Carol. She was not just my colleague but also my friend. My occasional sexual partner, to be specific. Our relationship was an on-off one, and it was off at that time. We’d had a couple of ill-tempered days together at New Year, nothing serious, just enough irritation to make it seem like a good idea to give each other some space, and this was my space, closed-in and solitary. The snow added to the oppressiveness, yet there was also comfort in the way it deadened everything. To be half-asleep, or feel only half-alive, is sometimes a relief.

Carol and I would meet soon, say little, possibly nothing, about our fractious New Year, and resume our relations. That was how we conducted ourselves. It seemed to suit both of us pretty well, although a greater degree of emotional commitment might have suited Carol better. But, to be frank, the way we were was about as much as I could cope with.

When the new path was complete I fetched the grey bin from beside the shed and wheeled it out to the pavement. There was a grey bin for general rubbish and a green bin for compostable matter, and they were emptied on alternate
Fridays. That week it was the turn of the grey bin. But maybe the bin men wouldn’t come. In a country of unpredictable winters you never know whether snow will bring everything to a standstill or people will soldier on stoically, even when it is futile to do so. So it was from force of habit rather than in faith that I brought the grey bin to the kerbside, ready for emptying in the morning. Others, I noticed, had done the same.

Actually I didn’t give a damn about grey bins and green bins, not when I thought about it. That was the point: not to think about it. Just to do things, to get through the waking hours and the hours that were supposed to be for sleep, was all, at that juncture of my life, that concerned me.

That “juncture” of my life had been going on for twenty-one years.

There hadn’t been a snowplough along the street all day. Presumably the priority was to clear the main roads. The street was churned and criss-crossed by tyre marks where some residents had managed to get their cars out. The parked cars were covered in smooth, thick, white mattresses.

My driveway was empty. No car had sat in it for twenty years, except when my parents came to stay, which had not happened in a long while and was unlikely to happen again. (I don’t drive, never have.) If anyone had been going to attempt a journey that day it would have been Emily, but she wouldn’t have wanted to drive anywhere. She’d have gone sledging with Alice.

For a moment they flashed before me, Emily and Alice, packed together on a sledge, whooping with delight, rushing
down a white slope in bobble hats and with stripy scarves flying. They were the ages they always were. Then they were gone.

I gave Emily’s car to my sister, or she took it away, I don’t remember which. I just wanted it out of my sight. And indeed my sister obliged and I never saw it again.

I was alone in the street. I pulled back a glove to look at my watch: one o’clock. It occurred to me that the schools might have closed because of the weather. I had no memory of having heard children passing the house earlier. But if there was no school, why weren’t there children outside now, building snowmen, throwing snowballs, taking sledges to the park? Didn’t children enjoy snow anymore? Did they spend all their free time in their bedrooms, insulated from the real world, watching TV or playing computer games?
All
of them?

I thought these thoughts, then chided myself for having them. It served no purpose to resent children for being what and who they were, for not being Alice. But again, that was the point: there
was
no purpose to my resentment. It was simply there.

My neighbour Brian Hewat had not only put out his grey bin and made a path to his front door, but had also cleared the snow from the stretch of pavement in front of his house. Seeing this, I felt an obligation to do the same, and set to work again. The red plastic shovel scraped less easily and more raucously over the surface of the pavement than it had over the smooth stone slabs around the house. I was slightly ashamed of the noise. It was as if I were boasting about my
sense of civic responsibility, even if only to the deserted, smothered street.

Which, however, wasn’t quite as empty as I’d thought. As I finished, and was shouldering the shovel to return it to the shed, I became aware of someone standing a few yards away. A man in a long black coat, hands in pockets, and with a black woollen hat pulled down over his brow and ears. I had no idea how long he’d been there. He must have walked up the street when I was busy digging, and the snow had muffled his approach.

“You’re being a good citizen,” the man said.

Even in those few words, the American accent was unmistakable, although I could not have identified the region to which it belonged. I was surprised, and then, almost immediately, not surprised. The voice of the man on the phone half an hour earlier, and that of this man standing in the snow, telling me I was a good citizen, were one and the same.

“People don’t clear the sidewalks anymore,” the man said. “They don’t even consider it. ‘That’s somebody else’s job, what do I pay my taxes for?’ You know what I’m saying? But I come along here and I find not one but two of you, right alongside of one another.”

I nodded in the direction of Brian’s house. “He beat me to it,” I said. Brian was retired, he had more time on his hands, theoretically.

“Good citizens, all the same, both of you,” the American said.

“It doesn’t take much.”

“It takes more than some people are prepared to give.”

I was not happy to be having this conversation. I felt it as an intrusion, that it in some way threatened my privacy, even though anybody looking at us would have assumed we were neighbours exchanging a few superficial words about the weather. The American, however, was not a neighbour. He was unknown to me, yet I was already sure that I was not unknown to him, and that our words carried some meaning to which I was not yet privy. A low anger began to simmer inside me.

“Can I help you in some way?”

“Yes, I think you can,” he said. “And maybe I can help you.”

“Who are you?”

Slowly he took his right hand from the pocket of his coat. It was as if his brain had consciously to instruct the arm to withdraw, bringing the hand with it. The hand was gloveless. It pointed behind me, at the house.

“I think we should go inside.”

Of course I could have said no. I could have said, not until you tell me who you are and what you want. But I saw that this would be pointless. There was an order in which things would happen, or they would not happen at all. For me to find out who this man was, I would have to allow him into my home. I did not want this, but it was necessary. Already I knew that it was essential to continue the conversation.

“This is about the bombing, isn’t it?” I said.

“Let’s go in,” the American said, and without waiting for a reply, because he knew that he was not going to be refused, he started to move, heading towards the back door, along the path that I had made for him through the snow.

O MANY YEARS HAD PASSED, YET I WOULD STILL
always try to reach the phone whenever it rang. Missing a call when I was out, that was one thing: it was what the answer-machine was for. But I never could get out of my head the notion that the one call I ignored when I was in would be the one that counted, the one that, if only I’d picked up the phone, I might later have thought of as “the breakthrough.” There
had
been breakthroughs of various sorts, but each one had only ever been from one locked room into another. The years had been like a succession of cells in a vast old prison that refused to release me. Time was my Château d’If. I would scratch away at one wall with the blunt knife of hope, the ragged nails of despair, and then one day the stone would crumble and there’d be enough space to scramble through, so through I’d go, only to be confronted by another wall. Yet still I clutched the blunt knife, and sucked the ragged nails. Even after all the disappointments, I refused to abandon the possibility that I might find out who had murdered my wife and daughter; who had
really
murdered them. This was why I followed the American inside.

•  •  •

He sat at the kitchen table. I made coffee, not because I was feeling hospitable but because some kind of preparatory ritual seemed necessary before we got down to whatever business it was that had brought him to me. After the nipping cold, the kitchen felt as hot as a laundry. It even looked a little like one as I had clothes drying on the pulley above our heads. I had taken off my gloves and jacket, but left on my boots because I felt that in my socks I would somehow be more vulnerable. The American hadn’t taken his boots off either. He’d removed his coat and laid it across another chair. He kept the woollen hat on, but pushed it back to reveal part of a tall, sloping forehead. He was very thin: the coat had bulked him out greatly. A beard that hardly was a beard flecked his grey, gaunt cheeks. His hands and fingers were long and bony. He wore a dark-blue ribbed jersey with a round neck, out of which his own neck grew like the trunk of a scraggy tree. The eyes were black and intense. He had the look of a man who might recently have returned from a long expedition, in the Antarctic perhaps, on which many things had gone wrong.