The Library Paradox (28 page)

I do not know about the other visiting rooms, but number 10 turned out to be not a room, but a cage. With walls and ceiling of wire mesh, it sat within a larger room; the interior of the cage was divided into three sections by two parallel walls of mesh forming a corridor running down the middle. Each section contained one chair. The guard introduced me into one section through a little door which he locked behind me. He himself then entered the little corridor which divided the two sections, pushed the chair there to one end of it, and sat down with a carefully cultivated lack of expression on his face. I waited, and he waited. Nothing happened for several minutes, and I felt uncomfortable, exposed, and somehow deeply ashamed for myself, for the prison, and for humanity in general that such cages should exist. I cringed secretly, while remaining outwardly composed, and sat motionlessly without a sign of impatience. Time passed, but I refused stubbornly to look at my watch. It struck me that the guard had a dreadfully boring job. We both waited.

After what seemed like an endless time, I heard sounds and saw the slight figure of a man being led towards the opposite side of the cage between two guards. He was handcuffed and they pushed him along with an inhuman rudeness and lack of ceremony which disgusted me. I tried to tell myself that like the screaming crowds who mocked Dreyfus, the guards believed him guilty, guilty of the murder
of a little child, and that were I personally to encounter the murderer of a child, I would not be tempted to treat him with any particular delicacy.

The door of the cage was opened, and the prisoner was introduced inside and locked in. His two guards moved off a very short way. The situation was awful. There was at least a yard’s distance between us, the width of the corridor where the guard was sitting stolidly, and every word we spoke would be overheard by at least three people. I felt awkward and tongue-tied for a moment. Then the prisoner crossed his part of the cage to the barrier which divided us and, leaning against it, he looked directly across at me, fixed me, in fact, with a look so direct and so intense that my inhibitions dropped suddenly away. Two paths crossed in my mind, and I seemed to be standing in front of the prisoner Dreyfus on his desert island, pleading, shouting his innocence to the four winds, standing alone on the rocks as a symbol of injustice and persecution. The man in front of me was a broken man, his shoulders bent, his face drawn, the spark of life dimmed yet not extinct. Kept alive, perhaps, I thought suddenly, by nothing other than his terrible grievance. I felt a little shudder run through me. Rising, I went to stand directly across from him and looked back at him, meeting his eyes. Erasing the very consciousness of the guard from my mind, I spoke the words I had carefully prepared.

‘Mr Gad,’ I said, looking at him, ‘I must inform you of something which will mean a great deal to you. The black dog is dead.’

He looked up suddenly, stared at me in amazement, but said nothing.

‘Yoni went to see the dog on the day he died,’ I continued. ‘He says he never did see the dog, but others say he did.’

‘Yoni – Yoni is accused of killing the dog?’ articulated the prisoner suddenly, in the hoarse voice of someone unused to speech. It was obvious that he had caught on to my meaning instantly; the code was working. I responded with a brief nod, wishing that I could tell him to avoid the word
killing
. I did not want anything of the kind to remain in the memory of the guards.

‘He claims he didn’t see the dog,’ I went on. ‘I want to help him; I wish I knew if it were true, or if in fact he did see the dog – maybe because … someone asked him to.’

‘Asked him to?’ he repeated, and his eyes filled slowly with a look of horrified consciousness; I could see the idea forming in his mind as clearly as it was in my own, that Jonathan might have gone to kill the professor in order to offer his uncle a future, however heavy the price.

Jonathan, so cheerful and so full of life – spending the rest of it here, in this hell!

He blanched. The expression on his face alone was enough to convince me that the man in front of me knew no more about Jonathan’s purpose in visiting Professor Ralston than I myself did. Yet I tried to ask him again.

‘Yes – was he asked to go
see the dog
?’ I insisted.

‘No, never, never,’ he said with such horror that his hair seemed literally to be rising upon his scalp, and his voice rose to a dangerous pitch of excitement. ‘I would
have given my right hand, I would have given my life to avoid this.’

It was borne in upon me that his words were not a mere expression; he meant them literally. I felt no doubt that he would, as he said, have given his life, have chosen death, rather than see his nephew condemned for murder, whether innocent or guilty. I sighed.

‘You never thought this might happen?’ I said. He shook his head, and suddenly, as I stared at him, his eyes rolled upwards under their lids, revealing only the whites in a horrific image of blindness, and he fell to the floor like an inert mass.

‘Fainted,’ said the guard in the corridor with scant interest. ‘They often do, during visits. It’s too hot. End of visit, that means, I guess.’ And releasing me, he guided me firmly back to the governor’s office, with much clanking of keys and metallic doors.

‘Well?’ said the governor, ignoring me and looking at him.

‘They only talked about a dog, like the other fellow, except now the dog is dead,’ said the guard laconically.

‘What is this about a dog?’ said the governor to me, eyeing me coldly.

‘This dog was very important to Mr Gad before he went to prison. It was the one attachment he preserved to the outside world, except for his nephew,’ I said firmly. ‘However, the dog has died. I felt it my duty to tell him before his release, so that the news would not come as too great a shock to him once he is free.’

‘This telegram says you are here to investigate a murder,’ he said angrily.

‘The murder of a dog,’ I replied unmovedly.

‘What kind of investigation is this? What could he know about the death of a dog?’

‘Not much, indeed,’ I replied.

‘I consider this a hoax,’ he said icily. ‘Thanks to this, Gad’s visiting rights are cancelled from now until the end of his term of imprisonment.’

I reminded myself that he had visiting rights only every three months anyway, and would be released in much less than that. There was clearly nothing to be gained by sweetness, so I allowed my natural impulses to take over.

‘Inhumanity is probably not the best way to govern a prison,’ I said frigidly. ‘Fortunately it is not my concern if it is the principle upon which you wish to establish your authority.’

We glared at each other in silence.

‘Show this woman out,’ he said finally, turning away from me and indicating the door to the guard. And I was pleased enough to rise and leave, to emerge into the outside world, to capture the waiting cab, to listen to the smart clip-clop of the hooves trotting away from the dreadful prison, and then to the soothing rumble and whistle of the train as it carried me through the Devon countryside towards Tavistock Junction. Once safely settled on the express for Paddington, I began to reflect upon what I might conclude from my visit, but fell asleep instead out of pure emotional exhaustion, and did not wake until the train pulled into the station.

As it stopped with a shudder, I started awake from a dream so vivid that I had to shake myself to return to the present. I had been standing in the shadows of a darkened room, holding Cecily and Cedric by the hands. It was eerie, but their presence warmed and protected me (although in reality, in that situation, I should have been terrified threefold). The room was lit only by a shaded lamp which threw a dim glow onto the motionless, standing figure of a man. He looked at us wordlessly, we looked at him, and I tried to make out his features in the gloom. That sharp nose, those sunken cheeks – why, it was Professor Ralston, returned to haunt his own study! Yes, that is where I was standing. I recognised it now, saw the desk and chairs, returned to their upright positions. I saw, also, the bleeding wound in his chest.

Who killed you?
I asked him, but he did not answer. Of course not, I thought reasonably. How silly of me to ask questions to a dead man. I squeezed the children’s warm little hands, tiny anchors linking me to the world of the living. He could not tell me how he had died. Yet his eyes were fixed upon me.

It was actually more of a powerful image than a dream.

As I gathered my wraps and descended the steep step onto the quay, part of my brain was still under the spell of the strange vision. It was evening, but not very late. There was no reason not to …

I found myself on my way to the professor’s library.

With no fixed purpose, I let myself into the building and, unlocking the door of the study, I stood where
I had been in my dream and looked towards the place where I had seen the professor standing. There was no lamp, but the dim evening light was grey, not black, and I tried to conjure up his presence within it. I remained concentrating, calling him forth with all of my powers. I stood silently, evoking his presence, receptive, asking for communication. The minutes passed slowly. And I heard a faint noise.

And then another one. The sound of steps overhead, in the flat above me. Slowly, these steps began to descend the stairs leading to the door behind the desk, the door to the professor’s rooms.

Can I describe my feelings? I believed, yes, I truly believed that I had conjured the dead. I stood frozen, too petrified to take note of the many physical manifestations of fear which flooded me; a kind of horrified fascination glued me to my spot. I would not have fled for the world. I expected no grinning death’s head or rotting flesh, but let me admit it openly and frankly – difficult as I myself find to believe it now, as I write it – I did, truly and completely, expect the professor, in the dim, shadowy incarnation I had seen in my dream. The steps reached the bottom, the door opened quietly. My eyes were fixed upon it.

It was Edmund who stepped into the study.

He leapt back, violently startled at seeing someone standing there, knocked himself sharply against the doorjamb, and stood breathing heavily, one hand rubbing his head. His other hand, which clutched a piece of folded paper, was pressed to his pounding heart. He looked
completely undone by the shock, and the sight of his state brought me to myself.

‘So you do have a key to Professor Ralston’s private rooms,’ I said. ‘I thought there must be a double somewhere. No one takes the risk of having a single key to an important lock.’

‘Professor Taylor had it together with the others,’ he said faintly.

‘And he gave it to you? To look for something? What?’

Edmund did not look capable of any vigorous reaction after the shock my presence had given him, which seemed to far outweigh the shock he had caused me, in spite of the fact that he had unexpectedly encountered a mere solid human, whereas I was expecting to come face-to-face with a ghost. Taking advantage of his weakened state, I crossed over to him and removed the paper firmly from his hand. He did not resist. It was a short letter, written in the cramped handwriting of someone ill and weary.

‘What does this mean? Professor Ralston’s father wanted to marry your mother?’ I said, lifting my head in surprise and looking at the pale, still-motionless young man who stood facing me, leaning against the doorjamb.

‘Yes,’ he said, with the ghost of a shrug.

Time seemed to have stopped in the darkening room, and the atmosphere breathed no violence. I knew I should be afraid of Edmund, yet I found it impossible.

‘Did you kill Professor Ralston because of this?’ I asked.

He looked surprised, and roused up a little.

‘Of course not!’ he said. ‘What an idea!’

‘Did you kill him because of your thesis?’ I continued.

‘I didn’t kill Professor Ralston at all, and nor did my father,’ he said. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘Your father?’ I said, taken aback, even astounded by
these unexpected words. ‘What do you mean, your father? I thought – Professor Taylor had said that your mother was a widow. If you have a father, why – then how could Professor Ralston’s father have wanted to marry your mother?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he snapped. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of illegitimate children?’

‘Oh,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘And Professor Taylor knew about it?’

He had obviously thought that I knew more than I did. Now he seemed to regret having spoken. He did not answer, and I stared at him, thinking.

Why was he here, searching for this letter? Why did he have the key? Who had given it to him? Who had I seen searching, searching among papers and documents, in this very room?

‘Professor Taylor!’ I said suddenly. ‘Professor Taylor has had a second family all this time, growing up alongside the real one!’

‘No, it isn’t like that,’ he replied quickly. ‘My father is an honourable man.’

‘Hmm,’ I said doubtfully, trying to adjust myself to this new vision of the white-haired history professor as a rake. My expression seemed to stimulate Edmund to defend him.