Equivocator (2 page)

Justin must have observed me inspecting his stash. Was this his joke at my expense? I'd bolted, head down.

Now I scanned the crowd milling outside the library. Justin would stand out in any company, a head taller than most, with his sombre face and dark blond hair. The way he held himself reminded me of a washed-out ballet dancer between performances: a louche Nureyev, too languid to launch into the dancer's suspended leaps. He was gay and easy with that. When I spied on Justin, what I searingly suspected about myself – and it killed me, as perhaps something similar had killed my father – became an intuition with which it might be possible to live. But how? I lacked the
élan
to share his world
.
No graces or style.

Dad had been charismatic, a class act. An adventurer, wayward and charming but – I'd heard my mother say – too needy to be trusted. Whether his travel-writing career was a cover for espionage had never been ascertained and seemed just another tall tale. Jack Messenger's only child had unfortunately turned out a runt. Still, Dad wasn't around to deplore me.

Outside the library someone touched my elbow, lingeringly. ‘Excuse me – what's the alarm, do you know?'

‘A bomb scare, I heard. Mind you, they're always saying that.'

The enquirer had the look of a professor. If he was not a prof now, he would be. Probably next week. There was something compelling about him. I recognise you, I thought, racking my brains. But where from? It was as if some newscaster had alighted from the television screen, to announce that he'd been watching me.

He gave back my stare, locking into my eyes.

‘We've met before,' he said. ‘You must remember.'

‘I don't think so. Are you on television?'

‘Well, I have been. Randomly.'

‘Oh.' I didn't like to ask what that was supposed to mean.

The face was arresting, attractive in a craggy way, but wolfish, which I liked. And hungry. He was the kind of man who focuses his entire attention on you. You are the most interesting person in the world, even if he's only asking the time. He looked like an intellectual rebel, unprepared to tolerate the crap the powers-that-be like to ladle out. His voice was pure public school: what we used to call a
hwa-hwa
accent. On the other hand, his dishevelment implied he'd just got up after a night of roiling dreams, hurling on his clothes any old how – cords and an earth-coloured sweater. His abundant hair was all over the place, in a romantic way, I felt, as Byron's might have been.

Did I know a good place for coffee? Or rather, a place for good coffee? When one has travelled in the East, one craves real coffee, he observed. That seemed exotic – and a bit precious. A lecturer in our department had spent a decade in Iran and, hearing that my father was
the
Jack Messenger the Orientalist, invited me regularly to his
soirées
with other sociopathic unfortunates
.
Dr Arrowsmith seated you cross-legged on Persian rugs and served exquisite glass cups of tea and coffee. Flushed and miserable, you prayed he'd spare you from describing the coffee – its bitter lisp or its burnt almond tang. You prayed there'd be no far-away-eyed reciting of the poets Rumi or Hafez in the original tongue. Oh no, I thought as the stranger asked about coffee, he's one of
those.
Nowadays it's easy to find good coffee: then, there was Real for toffs and Instant for students.

Pitying my awkwardness, the visitor offered his hand. ‘Rhys Salvatore. Princeton.' His grey-blue eyes searched into my face as though it interested him deeply. How flattering. ‘You are, of course …'

‘Sebastian Messenger. Seb. Researching. Egyptology. But – you don't sound American.'

‘Valleys Welshman. From a village you'll not have heard of. Nantymoel.'

I didn't like to mention that he didn't sound like a Welshman either, nor was his surname remotely Welsh.

‘Is that where Richard Burton comes from?'

‘No. That's Pontrhydyfen.'

‘Oh, right. What's your subject?' I asked.

‘Ah well, you have me there. I'm a bit of this and a bit of that. A philosophical dabbler. A student of comparative cultures and literatures, notably the Cymric, the Chinese and the Persian. A pirate, really, a traverser of boundaries.'

‘Really?' Such postmodern eclecticism was utterly beyond a dumbfounded student of broken pots and hieroglyphs, hunkering in a sandpit with his bucket and spade.

Salvatore smiled. ‘Right now I'd settle for halfway decent coffee.'

I pointed out the way to the Senior Common Room and when he invited me to join him, found myself consenting. I doubted whether the professor would find many intellectuals to converse with there. The SCR, haunted by emeritus dons nodding off over journals, was one step away from a nursing home.

As we advanced together over the quad, the visitor's fame and charisma acted as a magnet. Youngish lecturers swivelled in mid-stride and headed across the concourse, gliding in his wake, stray ducklings cleaving to a long-lost mother duck. When I tried to slip away, Salvatore started introducing me: ‘I don't know if you've met Sebastian Messenger. He is an up-and-coming Egyptologist, researching into … I'm sorry, Sebastian, I didn't quite catch?'

Scarlet, I mumbled something about the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And that I'd just remembered I had an appointment. To discuss it. The Book, that is. Of the Dead.

The guy appeared oddly reluctant to let me go – and fond, like an uncle. He'd catch up with me, he said, and we'd talk properly. We knew each other, he repeated. From way back.

I felt, as I loped back to the library, that I had obscurely disappointed the stranger, starving him of some nourishment he craved. And that, if I turned my head, I'd see him gazing after me.

‘Oy, watch where you're fucking going, wanker.'

‘Sorry.' I realised I was running in an arc, dreamily skewed. I slowed down to a walk.

That afternoon there occurred a luminous interlude in the stacks. All the lights were functioning but the two earnest young truth-seekers weren't around to luxuriate in it. I ran my eyes over venerable volumes under K-L and wondered what the self-appointed sage had been looking for. Kant? Kierkegaard? Lacan? Lavater? Or perhaps, nothing in particular. Perhaps it was all show. He might have been a hollow vessel with a yen for disciples. Or an ambitious competitor spreading disinformation.

Go to S, I told myself. Find Rhys Salvatore. But Salvatore's
oeuvre
was incomprehensible. It flitted between languages with mandarin aplomb. It was on the trail of a cosmic
aporia
, so the blurbs indicated. But what might an
aporia
be, when it was at home? Apparently it had no home. An impasse, a state of puzzlement, a point of doubt and indecision, a kind of hole, explained a dictionary, where meaning deconstructs itself.

Right. A hole. And this geezer is actually hunting for this insoluble impasse, I thought? The heroic search for a drain or sump? And he is paid for this?

I headed towards Travel. Although I owned a copy of everything he wrote, and avoided reading them, I still found myself heading to the shelves in case another imprint might present a different face. All Dad's books were out.

*

‘I've been hoping to catch up with you.' Salvatore seems ageless, though he must be bordering on elderly. At the same time he doesn't appear terribly healthy. As if he didn't sleep. ‘You are rather elusive, you know, Sebastian. Whenever I land, you take off.'

This is so like what Jesse said last night – ‘You're never
here
, Seb – even when you
are
here' – that I can hardly breathe. I'm with Jesse under false pretences, is my partner's theme. He
knows
: ‘I followed you,' he blurted. ‘On one of your night-walks.'

‘I've several times attended conferences,‘ Salvatore continues. ‘For instance, the Cairo conference last year – where I missed you by a whisker! My daughter was with me. It would have been nice to introduce you. Anyway, we had a good conference and afterwards we stayed on a few days at Luxor, a haunt of yours. But I knew you and I would catch up with each other again. How are you?'

‘Fine, yes – thanks.'

‘Yes, but
really.
How are you?'

If you wanted to get in touch, I think, there's always the internet. There are so many ways of tracing people. Altogether too many. Nobody can hide these days. There's a sense of
déjà vu
. You have been peering out of the shadows, I think, and shiver: and somehow with Dad's eyes. Melting eyes, variable between blue and grey. Why am I thinking that? Ludicrous. I ought to ask point blank. But, if I ask, he might tell me.

The tide: it's advancing too swiftly. It waits until we're not looking and makes a dash forwards.

And now Salvatore – as he was always going to do – speaks Dad's name.

Jack Messenger, he says. He knew Jack. As schoolboys. And later, of course. Your father, he says, was a genius. And I was so sad when. Of course it was the loss to you and your. Yes. Oh, I can't speak about it, forgive me. We lost touch, Salvatore mourns in a curious piping wail. And then when they brought back his. His remains. From Turkey. Did they ever find out how he?

‘No,' I say, to cut him off, and start to rise. He doesn't touch me but I feel detained, and sink back down.

‘Jack was the only genius I ever knew.'

Aside from yourself, I don't say.

And then Salvatore raises the topic of the shed. The shed, he is saying, when they dug it up. Your father's writing shed in the garden? The shed. The den. Not the shed itself of course, but what they found underneath.

Perhaps it was my nightmares that have always convinced me that I saw the cadaver they unearthed. Right down to the smell that over the years has assailed me from time to time, passing a restaurant ventilator shaft or lugging rubbish out to the bin. I couldn't possibly have seen the corpse. My mother and I had been evicted for the police search and stayed away for weeks. The body was not Dad's. I never thought it was.

‘Everybody assumed …,' he says.

‘Yes, but it wasn't.'

‘No, of course not. And then. Last year. He was found and brought home. A kind of closure for you and your family.'

Closure? What is this closure they all talk about?

Salvatore wonders, by the way, whether Dad left a Persian manuscript or any letters from his last visit to Iran? He assumes not. Salvatore has been in touch with Jack's publisher but the lady who used to edit him is either dead or has moved on (can't people tell the difference?) and nobody appears to know anything.

No, I say, there's nothing. And if there were, wouldn't it have been published? I think: the old guy's just a nosy-parker with perfectly false teeth perched on a log pulling on his socks.

‘We were at school together – he was
the
friend of my youth, Sebastian. And I have access to papers of his – I'll be happy to share – I want you to meet my daughter – '

I consult my watch. The sea has sidled nearer. Waves are tonguing in, making progress with every surge. How they covered all that ground is a mystery, unless we've been here far longer than I'm aware. Without answering, I excuse myself and, turning away, retrace my steps across the sand.

‘Don't run off, Sebastian,' he calls, as if I were a child escaping from leading reins, and he hurries behind me, panting, apologising for touching a nerve, if he has, he's terribly sorry: what is my talk about this evening?

‘The Abomination of Monthu!' I call, without slackening pace, and even to me this sounds thoroughly inane and my behaviour appears infantile. And I think: I'll go home to Jesse now, and offer him some clarity. I'll ask him please to forgive my follies, which is all they are, and to stay, for he's all the world to me. I'll say: it's not so much falsehoods we live with as the habit of silence. Let me bring truth out into the open between us. And I know I won't, because I'm shot through with all these voluptuous arrows and tied to a tree.

*

Manchester, 1986. It was, I think, the following day when I again spotted the Spanish Welshman from Princeton, in the library foyer where they exhibited a sixteenth century printing press. The machine resembled a mediaeval torture instrument, I always thought: a dual purpose thumb-screw and rack. Salvatore stood with folded arms, a scuffed briefcase at his feet. Dad had owned one like it, bought in Germany. He'd been hiking in the Schwarzwald searching out old Nazis to interview. Not finding any, he'd made some up off the top of his head, so I overheard him drunkenly boasting to some pal – and they both cracked up laughing. That book – that fiction – had sold well and it kept on selling, even or especially when its methodology and conclusions came into question.

I sought the briefcase after he'd disappeared. I was thirteen. At first I accepted – and my mother bitterly believed, for reasons she never precisely disclosed – that Jack had deserted us. Without a word. Jack liked people to think he was working for the Soviets, she said, or the Shah, or the Bolivians; makes out he's Philby and Maclean all rolled into one. And perhaps he was, how do I know? I'm changing my name, she said. Her eyes were half closed with weeping. (Don't, I said, don't change your name – it's my name too). My mother sobbed, I heard her, into her pillow in the night. I sobbed too. There were no sightings. Dad's bank account remained untouched.