Enduring Love (6 page)

We stayed up another half an hour talking, but only because we were too tired to set about going to bed. At two o’clock we managed it. The light had been out five minutes when the phone rang and snatched me from the beginnings of sleep.

I have no doubt that I remember his words correctly. He said, “Is that Joe?” I didn’t reply. I had already recognized the voice. He said, “I just wanted you to know, I understand what you’re feeling. I feel it too. I love you.”

I hung up.

Clarissa murmured into the pillow, “Who was that?”

It may have been exhaustion, or perhaps my concealment was protective of her, but I know I made my first serious mistake when I turned on my side and said to her, “It was nothing. Wrong number. Go to sleep.”

Though we
woke the next morning with these events still ringing in the air above our bed, the day with its blend of obligations was a balm to us. Clarissa left the house at eight-thirty to give an undergraduate seminar on Romantic poetry. She attended an administrative meeting in her department, had lunch with a colleague, marked term papers, and gave a supervisory hour to a postgraduate who was writing on Leigh Hunt. She came home at six, while I was still out. She made phone calls, took a shower, and went out to have supper with her brother, Luke, whose fifteen-year-old marriage was falling apart.

I had my shower at the beginning of the day. I took a flask of coffee into my study and for a quarter of an hour thought I might succumb to the freelancer’s temptations—newspapers, phone calls, daydreams. I had plenty of subject matter for wall gazing. But I pulled myself together and made myself finish a piece about the Hubble telescope for an American magazine.

This project had interested me for years. It embodied an unfashionable
heroism and grandeur, served no military or immediate commercial purpose, and was driven by a simple and noble urge: to know and understand more. When it was discovered that the eight-foot primary mirror was ten thousandths of an inch too flat, the general reaction down on Earth was not disappointment. It was glee and gloating, rejoicing and falling-about hilarity on a planetary scale. Ever since the
Titanic
sank we’ve been hard on our technicians, cynical about their extravagant ambitions. Here was our biggest toy in space so far, as tall, they said, as a four-story building, set to bring marvels to our retinas—images of the origins of the universe, our very own beginnings at the beginning of time. It had failed, not through some algorithmic arcana in the software but because of an error everybody could understand: short sight, the stuff of old-fashioned grind and polish. Hubble became the staple of TV stand-up routines, it rhymed with trouble and rubble, it proved America’s terminal industrial decline.

Hubble was grand in conception, but the rescue operation was technologically sublime. Hundreds of space-walking hours, ten correcting mirrors placed around the rim of the faulty lens with inhuman precision, and down at control a Wagnerian-scale orchestra of scientists and computer power. Technically, it was more difficult than putting a man on the moon. The mistake was put right, the twelve-billion-year-old pictures came in true and sharp, the world forgot its scorn and marveled—for a day—then went about its business.

I worked without a break for two and a half hours. What bothered me that morning as I typed up my piece was a disquiet, a physical sensation I could not quite identify. There are certain mistakes that no quantity of astronauts can right. Like mine, yesterday. But what had I done, or not done? If it was guilt, where exactly did it begin? At the ropes under the balloon, letting go, afterward by the body, on the phone last night? The unease was on my skin and
beyond. It was like the sensation of not having washed. But when I paused from my typing and thought the events through, guilt wasn’t it at all. I shook my head and typed faster. I don’t know how I was able to push back all thought of that late-night phone call. I managed to merge it with all the trouble of the day before. I suppose I was still in shock, I was trying to soothe myself by remaining busy.

I finished the piece, corrected it, printed it up, and faxed it to New York, five hours short of my deadline. I phoned the police station in Oxford, and after being transferred through three departments, I learned that there was to be an inquest into John Logan’s death, that the coroner’s court was likely to sit in six weeks’ time, and that we were all expected to attend.

I took a taxi to Soho to meet a radio producer who showed me into his office and told me he wanted me to do a program on supermarket vegetables. I said they weren’t my thing. Then the producer, whose name was Eric, surprised me by getting to his feet and making a passionate speech. He said that the demand for year-round snow peas, strawberries, and the like was wrecking the environments and local economies in various African countries. I said it was not my field, and I gave the names of some people he might try. And then, even though I barely knew him, or perhaps because of that, I returned the passion and gave him the full story. I couldn’t help myself. I had to be saying it to someone. Eric listened patiently, making appropriate sounds and shakes of his head but looking at me as though I were contaminated, the bearer into his office of a freshly mutated virus of ill fortune. I could have broken off, or made an artificial ending. I pressed on because I couldn’t stop. I was telling it for myself, and a goldfish would have served me as well as a producer. When I had done, he said his goodbyes hurriedly—he had another meeting, he’d be in touch with another idea for me—and as I stepped out into the filth of Meard Street I felt tainted. The unnamed sensation returned,
this time in the form of a pricking along my nape and a rawness in my gut, which resolved itself, for the third time that day, into an unreliable urge to crap.

I spent the afternoon in the reading room of the London Library, looking up some of Darwin’s more obscure contemporaries. I wanted to write about the death of anecdote and narrative in science, my idea being that Darwin’s generation was the last to permit itself the luxury of storytelling in published articles. Here was a letter to
Nature
dated 1904, a contribution to a long-running correspondence about consciousness in animals, in particular whether higher mammals like dogs could be said to have awareness of the consequences of their actions. The writer, one Mr.——, had a close friend whose dog favored a particular comfortable chair near the library fire. Mr.—— witnessed an occasion after dinner when he and his friend had retired there for a glass of port. The dog was shooed from its chair and the master sat down in its place. After a minute or two sitting in contemplative silence by the fire, the dog went to the door and whined to be let out. Its master obligingly rose and crossed the room, whereupon the pooch darted back and took possession once more of the favored place. For a few seconds it wore about its muzzle a look of undisguised triumph.

The writer concluded that the dog must have had a plan, a sense of the future, which it attempted to shape by the practice of a deliberate deceit. And its pleasure in success must have been mediated by an act of memory. What I liked here was how the power and attractions of narrative had clouded judgment. By any standards of scientific inquiry, the story, however charming, was nonsense. No theory evinced, no terms defined, a meaningless sample of one, a laughable anthropomorphism. It was easy to construe the account in a way that would make it compatible with an automaton, or a creature doomed to inhabit a perpetual present: ousted from its chair, it takes the next
best place, by the fire, where it basks (rather than schemes) until it becomes aware of a need to urinate, then goes to the door as it has been trained to do, suddenly notices that the prized position is vacant again, forgets for the moment the signal from its bladder, and returns to take possession, the look of triumph being nothing more than the immediate expression of pleasure, or a projection in the mind of the observer.

I myself was comfortable within a large, smooth-armed leather chair. In my line of vision were three other members, each with a book or magazine on his lap, and all three asleep. Outside, the raucous traffic in St. James’s Square, even the dispatch motorbikes, was soporific in the way that other people’s frantic motion can be. Indoors, the murmur of water along unseen ancient pipes and, nearer, a creaking of floorboards as someone, invisible behind the magazine rack, moved a couple of paces, paused for a minute or two, and then moved again. This sound, I realized in retrospect, had been perched on the outer edges of my awareness for almost half an hour. I wondered if I could reasonably ask this person to keep still, or suggest he take a pile of magazines and go and sit in silence. My tormentor stirred—four leisurely squeaking steps, and then there was peace. I tried to continue with Mr.—— and the mental capacity of dogs, but now I was distracted. When there was movement across the room, I made a point of not looking up from my page, even though I was taking nothing in. Then I gave way, and all I saw was a flash of a white shoe and something red and the closing of the sighing swing doors that led out of the reading room onto the stairs.

Now that the restless time-waster had left, I transferred my irritation to the management. The building was notorious for its noise, above all the buzzing fluorescent lighting in the stacks, which no one could fix. Perhaps I’d be happier at the Wellcome library. The science collection here was laughable. The assumption appeared to be that the
world could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories, and biographies. Did the scientific illiterates who ran this place, and who dared call themselves educated people, really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilization?

This inner rant may have lasted for as long as two minutes. I was enclosed by it, invisible to myself. I came to by the simple assertion of a self-consciousness that even Mr.—— could not have claimed for his friend’s dog. It was, of course, not a squeaking floorboard or the library management that agitated me. It was my emotional condition, the mental-visceral state I had yet to understand. I sat back in my chair and gathered my notes. At that stage I still had not grasped the promptings of footwear and color. I stared at the page on my lap. The last words I had written before losing control of my thoughts had been “intentionality, intention, tries to assert control over the future.” These words referred to a dog when I wrote them, but rereading them now, I began to fret. I couldn’t find the word for what I felt. Unclean, contaminated, crazy, physical but somehow moral. It is clearly not true that without language there is no thought. I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word. As guilt was to the past, so, what was it that stood in the same relation to the future? Intention? No, not influence over the future. Foreboding. Anxiety about, distaste for the future. Guilt and foreboding, bound by a line from past to future, pivoting in the present—the only moment it could be experienced. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Fear was too focused, it had an object. Dread was too strong. Fear of the future. Apprehension, then. Yes, there it was, approximately. It was apprehension.

In front of me the three sleepers did not stir. The swing doors had moved in diminishing pendulum movement, and now there was nothing but molecular reverberation, one step up from the imaginary. Who was the person who had just left? Why so suddenly? I stood up. It was apprehension, then. All day long I had been in this state. It was
simple, it was a form of fear. A fear of outcomes. All day I’d been afraid. Was I so obtuse, not to know fear from the start? Wasn’t it an elemental emotion, along with disgust, surprise, anger, and elation, in Ekman’s celebrated cross-cultural study? Was not fear and the recognition of it in others associated with neural activity in the amygdala, sunk deep in the old mammalian part of our brains, from where it fired its instant responses? But my own response had not been instant. My fear had held a mask to its face. Pollution, confusion, gabbling. I was afraid of my fear, because I did not yet know the cause. I was scared of what it would do to me and what it would make me do. And I could not stop looking at the door.

It may have been an illusion caused by visual persistence, or a neurally tripped delay of perception, but it seemed to me that I was still slumped in my smooth leather chair staring at that door even while I was moving toward it. I took the broad red carpeted stairs two at a time, swung myself on the newel post round the half-landing, took the final flight in three strides, and burst into the clerkly, predigital calm of the booking and catalogue hall. I dodged past fellow members, past the suggestion book and the schoolboyish tangle of satchels and coats, through the main door, and out into the street. St. James’s Square was gridlocked, and empty of pedestrians. I was looking for a pair of white shoes, trainers with red laces. I threaded quickly among the jammed vehicles throbbing patiently. I knew exactly where I myself would have stood to keep the library doors covered: on the northeastern corner across from the old Libyan Embassy. As I went, I glanced to my left up Duke of York Street. The pavements were empty, the streets were full. Cars were our citizens now. I reached the corner, by the railings. There was no one, not even a drunk in the park. I stood there awhile, looking about me and getting my breath. I was right on the spot where the policewoman Yvonne Fletcher had been shot dead by a Libyan from a window
across the road. At my feet was a little bunch of marigolds tied with wool, such as a child might bring. The jam jar they had arrived in had been knocked over and had a little water inside. Still glancing about me, I knelt and returned the flowers to the jar. I couldn’t help feeling as I pushed the jar closer to the railings, where it might escape being kicked over again, that it might bring me luck, or rather protection, and that on such hopeful acts of propitiation, fending off mad, wild, unpredictable forces, whole religions were founded, whole systems of thought unfurled.

Then I went back indoors to the reading room.