All Souls (11 page)

"Yes, you're on the list. Thank you. I hope you stay on it. I won't hold you up any longer. And I'm sorry I didn't phone first. I haven't got your number. Nor a phone at home. I think I might well get one. Right. Come on, let's go," he said to the dog, who got up again on his three legs and shook himself out of sleep. Marriott picked up his hat.

I didn't give him my number. They went downstairs and I accompanied them to the door. I, who had never been a member of anything in Madrid, had in a few months become a member of the Oxonian congregation by virtue of my job, a member of St Antony's College, to which, as a foreigner, I'd been assigned from the Taylorian Institute, a member of Wadham College, to which I'd been assigned according to the caprice of my head of department, Aidan Kavanagh, and now I was a member of the Machen Company, to which I'd assigned myself without knowing why and without knowing a thing about it. I watched them walking away down the pavement, back down St Giles', stumbling like two drunks along that broad, monumental street also in exile from the infinite. It was nearly lunchtime. Before closing the door I waved to the gypsy flowerseller who was already busily devouring a sandwich. She wasn't as attractive as Marriott had said. She had big teeth and a huge smile; even at that distance I could see the bits of lettuce stuck to her teeth. I
could
imagine her involved in some quarrel at Didcot station or somewhere else, with her black leather jacket and her tangled mane of hair, kicking out with her high boots, biting - like the dog - with her big teeth. Her name was Jane, she was a bit dense but very sweet and I knew that she'd got married, at all of nineteen, to the man - invisible to me, since he never got
out of his car to help her - who every Sunday and bank holiday dropped her off and picked her up opposite my house, together with her merchandise, in a clean, modern van. It could have been her husband who cut off the dog's leg.

Back upstairs, I collected Marriott's empty beer can, the tearstained Kleenex and the two crushed carnations still in their silver foil that he'd taken out only to leave behind on the sofa where he'd been sitting. I noticed these three things as they dropped into the rubbish bin on that Sunday in the March of my first year in Oxford.

I
DON
'
T
TAKE
SO
much notice of the rubbish now, whole weeks and even months pass without my paying it any attention, it may be that I don't notice it at all or only very occasionally, just for a second, as you might recall something so long disowned or extinct that you banish it at once from your thoughts to preclude all possibility of its ever existing again or to make it seem like something that in fact never did exist, something that never took place. In the short time that has passed since I left the city of Oxford too many things have changed or begun or ceased to be.

I no longer live alone or abroad, I'm married now and living in Madrid again. I have a son. That son is still very young, as yet he can neither talk nor walk nor, of course, does he have a memory. I don't understand it yet, how he came to be, I mean, he seems foreign to me, strange and alien, although he lives with us day and night and hasn't left us for a minute since he was born and despite the fact that for him there's no expiry date, as there may be for his mother or for me, as there was for Clare Bayes or (perhaps) for me two and a half years ago, at the end of my residence in Oxford. For him, on the contrary, there's no time limit. Only a short while ago he did not even exist. Now he's an eternal child. Sometimes I look at this child of only a few months and I remember Alan Marriott's words. I wonder what would be required in order for this child to inspire horror, or to whom the child has been attached in order that that other person will inspire it. I'm troubled by the fantasy that I - his own father — might be the missing factor, the one necessary for
the two of us to provoke terror, that he might be the one idea necessary for me to do so. I watch him sleeping. So far he's a completely normal child. Alone, he can't inspire horror, on the contrary, both his mother and myself, in common with all the people who surround us and visit us here in Madrid, feel the protective urge that very young children usually provoke. They seem so fragile. One wouldn't protect something that inspired horror, although I also wonder if perhaps that horror enjoys the protection of what Alan Marriott called its horrifying other half, of that or of whatever reveals or causes the horror by association, by conjunction. Just as the dog would have protected the flowerseller and the flowerseller the dog, in the example proposed by Marriott. This son is, I think, much loved by his mother and by me (for his mother he is doubtless a transient deity condemned to lose his godliness), but there's something compulsive about him, as I suppose there is about all children during their first months of life, and there are moments when I would not want him to disappear exactly — that isn't it at all, that would be the last thing I'd want, it would drive us into madness — but rather I would like to return to the situation of having no children, of being a man with no prolongation of himself, of being able to embody for ever and in unadulterated form both son and brother, the true figures, the only ones to which we are accustomed, the only ones in which from the start we are and can feel at ease. The exercise of the paternal or maternal function is something that comes with time, is doubtless a duty imposed by time. It requires adaptation, concentration, it's something that happens. I still cannot comprehend that this child is here and is here for ever, the harbinger of an extraordinary longevity that will survive us both, nor can I grasp that I am his father. Today I had some meetings to go to and some business to deal with (business that involves a lot of money: that too has changed, I now earn and handle large amounts of money, although not as much as a college
bursar), and in the middle of one of those conversations I completely forgot the existence of my son. I mean that I forgot he had been born, forgot his name, his face, his brief past which it was my responsibility to witness. I don't mean that I just stopped thinking about him for a moment, which is not only normal but beneficial to both, I mean that the child simply did not count. I did not, on the other hand, forget my wife, for whom there never was nor foreseeably will be an expiry date as there was for Clare Bayes from the moment I set eyes (full of the sexual admiration I also feel for Luisa) on her lovely, hard, sculpted, square-jawed face and her tasteful evening décolletage. (Despite the fact that I haven't known my wife that long and I could quite feasibly have forgotten her, I did not do so.) So this morning, while I talked to a financier called Estévez, fiftyish and very extrovert (three or four times he proudly referred to himself as a "go-getter"), my son became not something that has ceased to exist but something that had never existed. For no less than forty-five minutes, while the go-getting Estévez regaled me with splendid business propositions, I forgot I had a son and in my head I made plans for myself and my wife (especially travel plans) as if this son who still cannot walk or talk did not exist at all. For no less than forty-five minutes his life was literally wiped from my mind. He disappeared, he was cancelled out. Then, although nothing in particular, nothing concrete reminded me, I suddenly remembered him. 'The child," I thought. I didn't mind remembering him — I felt glad to do so - nor did I mind immediately jettisoning the plans I'd been rapidly sketching out as I chatted to that most encouraging and enthusiastic of fellows, Estévez the go-getter. It didn't bother me in the least. What did bother me and make me feel guilty was my having forgotten him, and that made me wonder again today, as I have on other occasions when I've watched him sleeping, if I will not prove to be his horrifying other half, if, seeing that only a few months after his birth I'm capable of completely forgetting his existence, I'm not therefore destined to play that role. There's no reason why this should be so, it could happen to anyone, but forgetting gives rise to rancour and rancour to fear. He will forget me, because he will not have known me as a child or as a young man. A little while ago I asked my wife who, despite motherhood, remains very calm and serene, if she thought this child would always live with us, as long as he was a child or at least while he was still very young. She was getting undressed for bed and her upper body, her breasts still swollen, was uncovered.

"Of course he will, don't be so silly," she replied, "who else would he live with?" And she added while she removed her dark tights. "As long as nothing happens to us, that is."

"What do you mean?"

She was almost naked. In one hand she held her tights, in the other her nightdress. She was almost naked.

"Nothing bad, I mean."

Clare Bayes' son didn't live with her and her husband. Or rather, he was generally with them in Oxford only during the holidays, when he came back from his prep school in Bristol. He went there firstly because it had been decided that when he was thirteen, he would go to the well-known and extremely expensive Clifton School, on the banks of the Avon, just outside Bristol - it was his father's old school - and secondly to ensure that from as early an age as possible he should become accustomed both to the place and to being far from home. His holidays were much shorter than mine and those of his parents (in Oxford, classes are taught for three terms of exactly eight weeks each - Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity - and the rest is idleness for those who, as was my own case, have no administrative duties, not even the invigilation of exams) and besides I was always away then, visiting Madrid or travelling in France, Wales, Scotland, Ireland or England itself. I never stayed in Oxford
unless I had to, except once, right at the end. I was never, therefore, in Oxford at the same time as Clare's son, and that was the most convenient state of affairs for me, and the best suited, I suppose, to our adulterous affair. One shouldn't involve children. They're both too inquisitive and too squeamish. They're overdramatic and full of apprehensions. They cannot bear anything shadowy or ambiguous. They see danger everywhere, even where there is none, and can always spot a potentially dangerous situation, even if it is not dangerous exactly but merely confused or unusual. For more than a century now children have ceased to be brought up to become adults. Quite the contrary, and the result is that the adults of our era are brought up - we are brought up - to continue to be children. To get worked up over some sports event and grow jealous at the slightest thing. To live in a state of constant alarm and insatiable desire. To be fearful and angry. To be cowardly. To observe ourselves. Within Europe, England has shown the least interest in following that path and until only very recently she still enthusiastically and rigorously beat her most tender shoots with a consequent and much commented upon burgeoning of deviations (of the sexual variety) amongst its more impressionable citizens. However, according to what Clare told me, caning was no longer permitted at the school in Bristol and so I imagined that, as well as escaping the sufferings endured at school by his real and fictional predecessors, once home her son Eric would bask in the special privileges reserved for children who are boarded out for most of the year. Despite her innate lack of consideration and her natural expansiveness, Clare was considerate enough not to talk that much about him, at least with me, for I, even without knowing him, could not but see in him the vestiges or the living evidence of her past love. However dead a past love may be, new lovers are much more upset by them than they are by real and current disaffections even if the latter
create all kinds of practical difficulties. However, with me, Clare only spoke about her son Eric if I asked after him.

During my second and last year at Oxford, at the beginning of the term known as Trinity, whose eight weeks are spread over April, May and June, Clare Bayes' son fell ill whilst at school and Clare and Edward had to drive down to Bristol and bring him home. He remained in Oxford for four weeks to recuperate and during that period of convalescence and recovery I practically stopped seeing Clare altogether. As I mentioned earlier, although we didn't see each other very regularly or on all that continuous a basis, it's also true to say that from the time we met - with the exception of the vacations - we never went more than a week without meeting at least once, even if it was only for a swift, turbulent half hour between classes. Those four weeks were the worst weeks of my two years in Oxford (though perhaps the weeks that followed were no better). Not only was I more alone and at even more of a loose end (during their final term students either skip classes or the classes end up being cancelled to allow the undergraduates to devote themselves to preparing for the exams and the dons to preparing ever more fiendish questions) but I also discovered with great displeasure that the tenuous and sporadic feelings of jealousy I had very occasionally felt about Edward Bayes (or about their past love, unrepeated with or for me) became focused on her son Eric and the care his mother lavished on him to my immediate detriment. It was she who decided not to see me while the child Eric was at home and although his affliction was not a serious one, merely slow in passing (after the second week he was allowed out, as long as he took it easy), Clare Bayes decided to make it up to him for all the months of the year he spent away from her. Taking advantage of his illness, she wanted to nurture him, to make him more of a child, to feed her retina with images. Or so I surmised.

I called her at her office every two or three days (which was
all she allowed me to do) on the pretext of finding out how the boy was coming along and with the intention of persuading her to agree, at her convenience, to just one more swift, turbulent encounter. I was never more available, more accommodating, more full of suggestions, all of which were - one after the other, day after day — declined. I was also at my most ardent (verbally). But Clare wanted no adult distractions or interruptions while the child Eric was at home. She was prepared to receive my calls, even to call me to give me a progress report, believing or pretending to believe that I was really concerned about the infection or the broken bone (I can't even remember what it was that brought the boy home, so little attention did I pay to her explanations), which, in the body of someone who was no more to me than an intrusive stranger, was presumably being fought off or was healing. She wouldn't agree to see me and when we met in the street or in the echoing corridors of the Taylorian, she greeted me with even more restraint and indifference than she normally showed me in public - as a precautionary, though instinctive measure. And then she'd continue on her way. In an all too southern European gesture, I would turn to watch the strong, slightly muscular legs poised on their high heels as she walked away. Now that I never saw her barefoot, they never seemed slender or boyish in their movements. I couldn't force her to stop by grabbing her arm and remonstrating with her as I've seen desperate lovers do in films, for in the streets of Oxford (and even more so in the echoing corridors of the Taylorian) there are, at any given moment, large numbers of dons or colleagues (they've taken the town over) who, on the pretext of walking from one college to another or from a meeting in one building to another meeting in another building, mill around in front of the shop windows or the billboards outside the (scarce but adequate) theatres or cinemas or contrive over-long exchanges of greetings and impressions (on university life). (Maybe they're spying.) And the Taylorian is constantly filled with an impassioned, almost furious thread of a voice, a distant metallic murmuring, which is Professor Jolyon delivering his magisterial lectures, banished (mercifully) to the top floor. Anyway, I couldn't really be said to be desperate. Clare Bayes had banished me from her Catte Street rooms for the duration and, of course, forbidden me to phone her at home, even at times when Edward's absence could be guaranteed. Now it didn't matter if her husband was there or not, because the child Eric was always certain to be there. Though I had never met him, I felt an intense antipathy for that child who had snatched from me the only affection - unsteady, precarious and with no future, but still the only one in evidence - that I'd enjoyed in that static city preserved in syrup. But I never (quite) reached the point of desperation.