All Souls (9 page)

"Does Clare Bayes have any lovers?" I said, and the truth is that I wasn't really prepared when I asked the question, it just slipped out.

"What?" said Cromer-Blake. "Yes, I mean, no. I've no idea."

WHEN
YOU
'
RE
ALONE
, when you live alone and live, moreover, in a foreign country, you take more notice than usual of the rubbish bin, because at times it may be the only thing with which you maintain a constant, no, more than that, an ongoing relationship. Each black plastic bag, new, shining and smooth, waiting to be used for the first time, evokes a sense of absolute cleanliness and infinite possibility. When you replace the plastic bag each night it signals the inauguration, the promise of a new day: everything is still to come. That bag, that bin, are sometimes the only witnesses to what happens during the day of a man on his own, and it is in that bag that the remains, the traces of the man are deposited throughout the day, the half of himself that he discards, everything he has decided not to be and not to have, the negative of what he's eaten, drunk, smoked, used, produced and received. At the end of that day, bag and bin are full, the contents confused, but the man has watched them grow, become transformed, seen them shape themselves into an indiscriminate jumble of which, nonetheless, he knows the explanation and understands the order, for that indiscriminate jumble is itself the order and explanation of the man. The bag and the bin are proof that this day existed, has been added on to all the other days and that, whilst slightly different from the previous day and the next, it was also the same, the visible nexus between the two. They are the one record, the one proof or assurance of the passing of that man, the one task he has truly brought to completion. They act as both connecting thread and clock. Each time he goes over to the rubbish bin and throws something in,
he again sees and has contact with the things he threw away before and that is what gives him a sense of continuity. His day is measured out in visits to the rubbish bin; there he sees the empty pot of fruit yoghurt he had for breakfast and the cigarette packet which, at the start of the morning, had contained only two cigarettes, the envelopes from the post he received, now empty and torn, the cans of Coca-cola and the shavings from the pencil he sharpened before starting work (even if he was going to use a pen), the screwed up sheets of paper he judged unsatisfactory or wrong, the cellophane wrapper that had contained three sandwiches, the cigarette stubs from numerous emptyings of ashtrays, the cotton wool balls soaked in the cologne with which he refreshed his brow, the discarded fat from the cold meats that he ate distractedly while he worked, the useless reports picked up at the faculty, a sprig of parsley and one of basil, some silver paper, bits of cotton, nail clippings, the darkened peel of a pear, the milk carton, the empty medicine bottle, the paper bags made of strong, coarse paper favoured by second-hand booksellers. It all gets packed down, concentrated, covered over and fused together and thus traces the perceptible outline - material and solid - of this sketch of the days of the life of a man. Closing and tying up the bag and putting it outside, the simple act of throwing out scraps and peelings, the act of dispensing with, selecting, discerning what is useless means condensing and bringing to a close the day of which those acts may well have been the only distinguishing features. The result of that discernment is a task that dictates its own end: only when the bin is overflowing is it finished and then, and only then, are its contents rubbish.

I began taking a day-to-day interest in the rubbish bin and its progressive metamorphosis about a year after the night I've just described, at a time when, for a variety of reasons that I will discuss later, I was seeing Clare Bayes less than I wanted to (and had not yet found a replacement) and, were such a thing
possible, my workload in the city of Oxford had dwindled still further (or perhaps it was just that I performed my tasks ever more mechanically). I was more alone and at more of a loose end and the excitement of the discovery phase had long since faded. But even before that, right from the start and especially at weekends, I'd always taken a lot of notice of the rubbish bin, for Sundays in England aren't just ordinary, dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand simply that one tiptoe through them without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, in England they are, as I believe Baudelaire described them, Sundays in exile from the infinite. During the rest of the week, even though my teaching duties remained minimal, there were more distractions, and one distraction in particular, which was never lacking in Oxford (it may turn into the only distraction if you become an addict), was the search for the kind of old, rare, out-of-print books that give pleasure to the morbid or eccentric collector. For those with a taste for them, England's second-hand bookshops are a dusty, sequestered paradise, frequented, moreover, by the most distinguished gentlemen of the realm. The variety and abundance of these shops, the limitless wealth of their stocks, the rapidity with which those stocks are replenished, the impossibility of ever exploring every corner of them, the circumscribed but vigorous and vital market they represent, make them an endlessly surprising and rewarding territory to explore. During my two years of scouting out and hunting down such books with my gloved hands, I obtained many apparently unobtainable marvels at quite ridiculous prices, such as the seventeen volumes of the first and only complete edition of the translation of
The Thousand Nights and a Night
by Sir Richard Francis Burton (better known to booksellers as Captain Burton), which began to appear more than a century ago in a limited edition of a thousand numbered copies of each volume, available only to subscribers of the Burton Club on the understanding (which they honoured) that it would never be
enlarged or reprinted: in fact that exuberant Victorian text has never again been reprinted in its entirety, but only in selections or in bowdlerised editions, which, whilst apparently complete, were in fact expurgated of everything considered at the time (or by Lady Burton) to be obscene. The hunter of books is condemned to specialise in subjects related to his main prey, which he tracks down with the greatest eagerness, and at the same time, as he becomes infected with the unstoppable collecting bug, he grows irremediably and increasingly more generous and accommodating in his enthusiasms. That's certainly what happened to me and, seeing my interests grow ever wider and more disparate, I decided to restrict the prime objective of my systematic searches to just five or six authors, and my choice of those authors was based as much on the difficulty of finding them as on any actual desire to read or possess their books. They were minor authors, who were all in some way odd, ill-fated, forgotten or unappreciated, known only to the few and not even commonly reprinted in their country of origin; the most famous (but much more famous in my country than in his own) and the least minor of them was the Welshman Arthur Machen, that fine stylist and strange narrator of subtle horrors, who, in a survey carried out during the Spanish Civil War amongst fifty British men of letters, was the only one publicly to declare his preference for Franco's side, perhaps merely as an affirmation of his affinity with purest terror. Despite his reputation, his books are not easy to find in English, particularly in the old editions greatly prized by collectors, and when I saw the difficulty I was having finding many of the titles I lacked, I contacted several booksellers and asked them to put by any that came their way and even to seek them out for me.

In England second-hand booksellers still travel round the country visiting ancient bookshops in obscure towns and remote villages, turning up at country houses owned by the illiterate descendants of some late but lettered man, snapping up bargains
at shabby local auctions, never missing even a makeshift or spur-of-the-moment provincial book sale (often held in such places as the local fire station, the foyer of a hotel with no guests, or a church cloister). Since their lives are an endless round of travelling, researching and hunting things down it makes sense to tell them what you're looking for, because the chances are they can find it for you. Amongst the booksellers whose acquaintance I cultivated was a married couple by the name of Alabaster, who made a major contribution to my stock of eccentric acquisitions. Their shop was small, dark and comfortable, simple and insalubrious, a cross between a cosy nook and a haunted house, with beautiful fine wood shelves all of them warped and barely visible beneath the weight and inconceivable disorder of the thousands of books that did not so much fill the shelves as crush and bury them. The Alabasters must have made a reasonable living for inside that dark, stuffy, dusty place, lit even at the brightest hours of the day by a couple of lamps with glass shades, was the additional glow of a television screen which, in the closest of closed circuits, allowed them to see what was going on beneath the one flickering bulb of the shop's basement without their having to keep going up and down the stairs every time a prospective buyer ventured down there to explore its depths. As if wishing to participate in a modernity with which their merchandise was so at odds, the couple seemed to spend their days watching on television (in black and white) what could be seen only a few yards away, right under their noses (in colour). Mrs Alabaster was a smiling, authoritarian woman, with one of those very English smiles that you see adorning the faces of famous stranglers in films as they're about to choose their next victim. She was middle-aged with greying hair, fierce eyes and capped teeth and, wrapped in a pink woollen shawl, she would sit at her desk, writing incessantly in an enormous accounts book. To judge by her constant activity, which she interrupted only (but frequently) to gaze with intent interest
via her screen upon the lower levels of the bookshop (almost always empty, always uneventful) the amounts of money handled by the Alabasters must have been vast and the accounts accordingly complex. Mr Alabaster, the husband and original bearer of the name, was equally smiling but his smile was more like that of the strangler's anonymous victim just before he realises his fate. He was a good-looking, well-groomed but casually dressed man still blessed with a thatch of immaculate grey hair and with the slight air of an ageing, theoretical Don Juan (of the type prevented by social class or by an early, rock-solid marriage from ever savouring the charms of the role), who still retains a suggestion of the coquetry and cologne of his less hypothetical years. But, despite the fact that he too was almost always in the shop, I can't recall him ever once answering my questions or queries. He would smile and greet customers in the manner of an energetic, lively man (his whole bearing was intrepid) but he delegated anything requiring a reply, however insignificant, to the greater knowledge and authority of his wife. He would turn to her and repeat with great vivacity and exactitude the question he'd just been asked - appropriating it as his own, as if he were the one interested in knowing the answer: "Have we had anything in by Vernon Lee, darling?" - adding only that one word, "darling". While she enjoyed the benefits of the desk and a comfortable armchair, he had to content himself with sitting on one of the stepladders from which I myself, not without a twinge of guilt, would often dislodge him in order to browse along the more neglected and less accessible upper shelves. He would remain standing until I'd finished up above and then, after wiping down with a cloth the one step that was his seat, he would sit down again without even a hint of impatience. Every time I went into the shop, I found them there, in the same immutable places and positions, she scribbling numbers in a huge ledger or scanning the television screen with her fierce eyes, he leaning back a little on the ladder, his arms
crossed (I never saw him reading a book or leafing through a newspaper, still less talking to Mrs Alabaster) in an attitude of expectation, his most strenuous activity (which he shared with his wife) being that of (indirectly) surveying the basement. The cheerfulness and urbanity with which Mr Alabaster greeted any customer entering the shop indicated that, in his role as passive subaltern, the mere appearance of someone through the shop door was the highlight of his day, and his effusive greeting of that customer its most glorious and sociable moment. For, as I have said, the fact is that subsequently he was incapable of answering the simplest question or even of indicating the shelf the buyer was looking for ("Have we got a travel section, darling?") Their absorption in the televisual observation of their basement made me wonder if the Alabasters were not perhaps empowered to see something invisible to other mortals. Often, when inspecting the basement, I would spend less time examining the books than peering into corners and at the floor in the hope of discovering some tiny animal they kept there or of hearing the tenuous breathing of a ghost. But I never saw or heard anything and when I descended to that cobwebbed basement to rummage around in the half-shadows, I imagined that the appearance on their boring screen of my figure — seen in the flesh upstairs only seconds before - would have the Alabasters catching their breath with excitement and more than once I was tempted to perform some prank or steal a book just to provide them with a little entertainment or to arouse alarm. In fact I did neither but I would try to loiter there as long as possible and move about the basement swiftly, randomly, unexpectedly, or repeatedly take my gloves off and put them on again, button and unbutton my coat, smooth my hair, make a lot of noise blowing the dust off books then leaf through them ostentatiously or with exaggerated slowness, take notes in my diary, tap my foot in feigned impatience or doubt, cough, sigh, mutter and exclaim in Spanish and generally lend as much variety as
possible to the meagre spectacle I doubtless presented for those four eyes (two childlike and two perverse) observing me in my hunt for books.

Shortly after informing them of my interest in any book by Machen they might come across (although the truth is they never seemed to stray even a mile outside Oxford) and over a period of several days of forays into bookshops, I observed a man who seemed to be following almost in my footsteps. I saw him nosing around in Waterfield's vast antiquarian bookshop, in the mysterious upper floor of Sanders the engravings shop, in Swift's and in Titles, both in Turl Street, in the secondhand section of Blackwell's monumental and comprehensive emporium, on every one of Thornton's three floors, in out-of-the-way Artemis and even in the tiny Classic Bookshop that specialised in Greek and Latin texts. I consider myself to be a fairly observant person but it took no special talent to notice that particular man: he himself was fairly remarkable, but what most drew the eye was the dog he always had with him and that waited for him outside. It was a nice little mahogany-coloured terrier with an intelligent face but with one leg missing — its left back leg had been nearly amputated. That's why it always lay down while it waited, though it stood up as soon as it heard anyone leaving the shop at whose door it was tied, in the hope, I imagine, that it would be his bibliomaniac master. Since I usually arrived at the bookshops before the latter, I also left before him and each time the terrier would hop to its feet and reveal its small polished stump like an atrophied wing. I'd stroke its head and the dog would sit down again. I never heard the dog bark or growl even when it was raining or blustery outside; it never seemed disgruntled. Its owner, who was more or less my age, was still in possession of both his legs, but he complied with the old saying that owners always look like their dogs in that he was rather lame in one of them, his left. Although during
those two or three days I never actually saw them together (the man inside the shop, the dog outside), the association was easy enough to make, their two recurring presences rendering it unequivocal. The man dressed in good albeit rather threadbare clothes, wore a hat as to the manner born and, judging by his complexion and hair colour, was Irish. Inevitably, though I'd paid him little attention, I had noticed him inside the bookshops, for even in the most extensive and labyrinthine of establishments I had at some point found myself perusing the same bookshelf as him, but we'd only exchanged the most fleeting of neutral, that is veiled, glances. At no point did it occur to me that he could have any connection with the path traced by my own random footsteps, still less that he might be following in them, although it did seem odd that I'd never before noticed such an immediately identifiable couple, not even whilst walking round the town, and yet now I met him often enough to find their maimed figures, his and the dog's, slightly and momentarily troubling, however little notice I took of them. Perhaps they were strangers passing through, a bookseller and his dog up from London on a recce to Oxford.