The Professor of Truth (7 page)

It could not be said, at that point in my life, that there was anything at which I had totally
not
succeeded. And then, that summer, there was. My parents bought me a dozen driving lessons—a present in honour of my first-class degree—and a week before returning to university I took the driving test. The instructor advised against it: he said I wasn’t good enough, but I wanted it out of the way. I booked one last lesson immediately before taking the test in the instructor’s car. “Good luck,” the instructor said without a smile. He handed over the keys and went off to buy himself a coffee, leaving me vaguely amused by his pessimism. I shouldn’t have been. I failed. Not marginally; not because I nudged the kerb or miscalculated my stopping distances or forgot to indicate while turning left. No, I failed spectacularly, stalling the car half a dozen times, kangarooing down the street in first gear, nearly bumping the car in front of me at a junction, then narrowly missing a cyclist when I pulled out without checking my mirrors. This was when the examiner ordered me to park and switch off the engine. The test was over. I didn’t argue. I moved to the passenger seat, stunned and humiliated by defeat. The examiner drove back to the test centre, and handed the keys to the instructor. “I did warn you,” the instructor said. “Never mind. We can try again.” I said I would phone him to arrange more lessons the next time I was home. I had no intention of doing so.

Mum and Dad, separately and together, tried to persuade me back behind the wheel. I would regret it if I didn’t master this particular skill, they said, not to mention—although, delicately, they did—the waste of money if I gave up. But
the experience had shaken me. I couldn’t face the thought of a second failure. Only Karen, who didn’t then show any interest in driving but would later learn with no difficulty at all, offered comfort. “You think about things too much,” she said. “What does it matter if you can drive or not?” Her question lodged. I began to construct a defence: just why
did
I need to be able to drive? There were buses, trains, bicycles. I was an accomplished pedestrian. Anyway, I couldn’t afford a car and wouldn’t know what model to buy even if I could. Cars were antisocial, dangerous, polluting. I made a badge of honour out of my inability. Who needed a car? Alan Tealing didn’t.

Two years into my postgraduate study, the condition of being carless seemed simply to reinforce the idea that being an academic, pursuing knowledge of no practical purpose in an out-of-the-way place, was my natural state: I could barely imagine myself as anything else. I led some tutorials; gave presentations at seminars; buried myself in research for my PhD. I read and read and read. I absorbed a lot of literary theory and forgot most of it. I understood what the theorists were saying but they were saying very little. What the writers they were writing about said was much more interesting. But would I be able to survive in this world if I didn’t speak the language of theory? I would find out, no doubt.

Seeing a notice about an international conference on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction, the very period of my research, I brought it to the attention of my supervisor, who urged me to submit a proposal for a paper. It was accepted. The conference was to take place in
Philadelphia. I had never been to the USA before—had never been further than France and Spain on family holidays—but, with the assistance of the department, I raised the funds to go. And it was in Philadelphia that I met Emily.

She was at the registration desk, handing out welcome packs, when I arrived on the first morning of the conference. I can still picture her, her shape in the plum-coloured sweater, her smile, her efficiency, the way her black hair fell across her face when she bent to find my lapel badge. This, I now know, was the moment of rebirth. This was the moment of love at first sight—a concept detestable in fiction (too clichéd, too random, too unreconstructed) but which, on the basis of my own experience, I have to accept is possible in real life.

“Wow, haven’t you come a long way?” she said.

“I’m giving a paper,” I said, thinking that this easily justified the distance.

“Isn’t everybody?” she said.

I felt foolish, but she said it so pleasantly that I didn’t care. “Are you?” I asked.

“Me?” She laughed, and smiled again, and I forgot that anyone else was in the queue behind me. “I’m not even majoring in Literature. I’m just here to earn some money to pay my school fees.”

“But you could sit in on some of the sessions?”

“I have to sit out here,” she said. “But even if I could, wouldn’t they bore the pants off me?”

“No, I don’t think so. Well, not all of them.”

She looked at me sceptically. “Which ones would you recommend?”

“Well …” She confused me. I waved the welcome pack at her. “I’d need to show you in the programme.”

“How about yours?” she asked, and when I started to make some excuse she interrupted me. “You surely haven’t come all this way to give a
boring
paper?”

Someone shuffled impatiently behind me and I took flight. “I’d better go,” I said. “I’m holding everybody up.”

“See you later, Mr Tealing,” she said.

“See you later,” I replied.

And I did. Every time I came out of the conference theatre or one of the nearby seminar rooms that day, which I did as often as I could, Emily was there at the desk. Nearly all of the name badges were gone, and she was seated, somehow looking relaxed on the hard, small, black chair, reading a paperback. I went over to her. I had nothing particular to say, I just wanted to talk to her, be around her. She had folded her book back on itself, something that I with my reverence for books never did, yet somehow it seemed fine that she should. I asked what she was reading and she showed me the cover. It was a detective novel, by an author I’d never heard of. This was fine too. Her irreverence in the context of the conference, with its distinguished speakers and erudite themes, made me want to laugh.

“What does ‘epistemological relativism’ mean?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t apologise,” she said. “It’s not one of yours.” I reached for her novel and she batted my hand away. “Don’t be silly, it’s not in there either. How about ‘textual reflexivity’?”

“Well—” I began, but she cut me off, and read from the conference programme.

“The paper right before yours tomorrow is called ‘Manifestations of Epistemological Relativism and Textual Reflexivity in the Narrative Structures of Three Novels by Conrad.’ I just wondered what the heck it meant.”

I had wondered too. I thought about trying to explain it to her, but then saw that she didn’t want it explained. Anyway, I couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you have to turn up to find out.”

“Don’t know or don’t care?” she said. It must have shown on my face. “Oh, I see, both. Will you have to turn up?”

“I think it would be rude not to,” I said, “since I’m on straight after.”

“I think I’ll skip it but creep into yours,” Emily said. “At least I understand your title. Tomorrow at eleven, then. Look, I have it marked.” And she showed me her copy of the programme, and there was my name, Alan Tealing, circled. I felt famous, and rich beyond measure.

“What about tonight?” I asked. “There’s a reception. Are you going to be there?”

“No way,” she said. “I’m out of here at five. Somebody else is doing the waitressing. Good luck to them.”

“I thought you might be hosting it.”

“God, no! What an idea!”

“What are you doing instead, then?”

“I’m not doing anything instead. I’m going home.”

“Well, would you let me buy you a drink before you do?” I couldn’t believe I’d asked her. I couldn’t believe I sounded
so confident either, because inside I was terrified she’d say no.

“What about the reception? Shouldn’t you network?”

“Shouldn’t I what?”

“Circulate. You know, like blood.”

“I’d rather go for a drink with you.”

“Well,” she said, “that would be very nice. There’s a crummy little bar I know where
nobody
else from here will go.”

“That sounds perfect,” I said.

That was it, then: Alan and Emily. I can still recite that exchange word for word, as it happened. Or I believe I can, which is almost the same thing. I can’t, however, remember what we discussed over several drinks in the crummy little bar that evening. We could have talked until dawn, but I had to get up early to rehearse my paper. And she did creep in, telling me later that she’d enjoyed it and that I was a natural lecturer. Other speakers simply read their papers out, often very badly, then sat down again. What was the point of that, she demanded. They might as well have mailed them. But I had only glanced at my text, and had spoken with passion, and she’d felt that what I had to say was important.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“But you said you didn’t sit in on any of the sessions, so how do you know about the other speakers?”

“I lied,” she said, and she showed me her programme again. “See, you weren’t the only one I marked. But you’re the best—so far.”

I always knew what attracted me to Emily—her smile, her eyes, her face, her figure, her warmth, her openness, her vivacity, her American can-do attitude, her not caring what other people thought. I was attracted by her name too, Emily. She was named after the poet Emily Dickinson, and that was fine, she said, because she happened to like Emily Dickinson’s poems. “Presumably your parents do, too?” I’d asked. She seemed less sure of this. “You know what, I think they liked the
idea
of her. Mom kind of admired her isolation. And her poems are very short, mostly. I think that helped.” “Do you have a favourite?” I asked. “I have lots of favourites,” she replied, and would not be forced to choose one above the rest—which endeared her to me still more. I can think of a thousand other reasons, but what attracted Emily to me?

Perhaps my quietness, my politeness, my diffidence, even my accent. Like our voices, our humours—in the medieval sense—were different but complementary, I thought. She was sanguine, I phlegmatic; she was spring to my winter, air to my water. I put this to her and she said, “In the medieval sense! What about in the twentieth-century sense? You like my jokes and I like yours.” It was true. When we quarrelled, which was seldom, it blew up in a moment and then was gone. Sometimes, I know, I irritated her with my cautiousness, but with one exception I never found her enthusiasm anything but inspiring. She thought I was passionate, brilliant, funny. And I was, or I could be with her urging me on.

The exception was the business of my not driving. She was incredulous that at the age of twenty-three I couldn’t
drive, and even more so that I had no intention of retaking the test. But I had made a virtue out of failure, and would not be budged, and Emily, rather than be defeated, came to see my refusal as a kind of charming old-world quirk. Later, when Alice was on the way, she nagged me to take lessons again—it would make life with a child so much easier if both of us could drive—but I wouldn’t do it, and after a while she ceased trying to persuade me. As Karen had asked long before, what did it matter? Emily drove, I didn’t. It wasn’t, after all, necessary for me to drive. We were together, and we had Alice. That was all that was necessary.

A few weeks after the conference, following a flurry of letters, and a couple of phone calls neither of us could afford, Emily came to visit. A few weeks after that, I returned to America to see her. It was on this trip that I first met her parents, Alfred and Rachel. Before I went home I asked Emily to marry me, and she said she would.

HEN, ALL THOSE YEARS AGO, THE DEAN OF FACULTY
suggested that I apply for the Chair, he said that the University was keen to have a generalist “at the helm of the good ship English Literature.” He actually came out with that absurd phrase. He himself was a generalist, he said, a historian equally at home in the seventeenth as in the nineteenth century. The man who had just vacated the Chair, Harold Pritchley, was a specialist (Modernism). He was also (the Dean did not say this but we both knew it to be true) a mean, vindictive, arrogant dipsomaniac. Specialists were all very well, the Dean said, and of course from the point of view of research they were essential, but the University felt that somebody with a broad yet convincing knowledge of the whole range of English Literature should now head up the department. If a person of my qualities were appointed it would send out a message.

“And what would that be?”

The Dean looked perplexed, as if I’d asked an unfair question.

“Well, that we espouse excellence in all things. That we value breadth as well as depth. That we are not a den of obscurity.”

“I see.”

“That we are connected to the real world.”

Maybe it wasn’t kindness after all. Maybe it was opportunism. What the Dean said next seemed to suggest the latter.

“Not everybody was enamoured of Harold Pritchley. His way of conducting business.”

“I didn’t think anybody was.”

“A brilliant mind, of course. But he rather polarised opinion. And alienated potential friends and sponsors.”