The Professor of Truth (11 page)

And then a time came when she no longer came to me in dreams. And a while after that I found, to my horror, that she had faded a little in my mind, and I would catch up a photograph of her and Emily, terrified that I would not recognise them. And yes, there they were behind the glass, but I saw also that they had gone, or perhaps that I had gone. I was looking at a photograph in which they were still six and twenty-eight, while I was racing towards middle age, and on beyond that to decrepitude.

Had I gone for counselling, I might have asked the counsellor, how is it that I hardly ever dream of Emily? I asked it of myself, but I didn’t come up with any answers.

Once, when I was coming home from work on the bus, earlier than usual, a man and a little girl got on, two or three stops after I had, and sat across the aisle from me. She was
six, seven at most—Alice’s age—and in school uniform. The man was probably ten years younger than I, tall and thin, with untidy curly hair, and there was a boyish, gently ribbing tone to his voice when he spoke to the girl, his daughter. He’d just picked her up from school. I had a vague sense of having seen him before. Maybe he taught at the University. As soon as they were seated the girl made him open the free newspaper he’d picked up on entering the bus, a copy of which I’d been idly, blindly leafing through, and they began what was evidently a regular game. He took the left-hand page and she the right-hand one of each spread, and as they turned them they counted the pictures of different items on each side. The winner was the one with the highest number by the time they got to the end of the paper. The first time through it was houses, then it was animals. She won both times. “You’re much too good at this,” he said, as she called out a dog and two horses to his solitary fish. “Oh, that’s so unfair!” he groaned, a minute later. “Look at all those cows! That’s, uh, 98–3 to you.” She giggled at his plucked-from-the-air number but kept concentrating. She didn’t miss a trick, with her heart-shaped, pixie face and shining blue eyes and the same out-of-control curly hair as her dad’s. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. It wasn’t clear who was more snuggled into whom. I knew how she would smell to him: not
what
she would smell like, but
how
, to
him
, her father. “Let’s play again,” she said. “But I always lose,” he said. She insisted. This time they were car-spotters. For a few pages it was close, and he kept up a running commentary—“One to me, two to you, oh, another to me, we’re both winning,
oh, now I’m ahead, I’ll beat you this time, I’m winning 3–2.” Her legs kicked up with pleasure. I forced myself to sit back. I could see what page they were on, and began turning my own paper in time with theirs. Together we turned, and again, and then there came a story about floods in Italy, and a photograph of a car park full of floating cars, dozens of them, on the right-hand page. “I give up,” the father said. “Why are they swimming?” the daughter asked. My eyes stung, my tongue was suddenly choking me. Her wonderful, innocent question ached in my ears. I stood up and pressed the bell, and lurched from the bus a mile short of my usual stop. I thought I was going to be sick with jealousy.

I walked the rest of the way home in tears, remembering Alice’s first day at school. Emily hadn’t wanted to upset her by crying when she had to let her go, and so we’d agreed that I would take her. It was a ten-minute walk to the school. Alice chatted all the way, telling me the exact contents of her school bag, which we’d packed together the night before and repacked in the morning; and then, as the school building loomed and she saw all the other children in their new blue shirts, and the other fathers and mothers, converging on the gate, she fell silent and clutched my hand more tightly, and I felt my own pulse quicken and my throat tighten. But she was brave, we were both brave. She said, “Will it be all right?” I said, “It’ll be fantastic, just you see.” And she said, “Are you coming with me?” “No,” I said, “but I’ll get you to the door, and make sure somebody is there to show you where to go, and then you’ll be fine.” “But where will I go?” she asked. “You’ll see when you get inside,” I told her.
And she accepted that, because it came from me, and said, “Okay,” quite casually, as a girl ten years older might have said it.

So we came to the door and I said, “Now give me a kiss and a hug,” and she did, and her teacher was there, who recognised her from the visit we’d made at the end of the previous term. “Hello, Alice,” she said. “Do you remember me?” “I think so,” Alice said, and she took the teacher’s hand and in she went. I let go of her, and she of me, so easily that I hardly realised we had done it. She didn’t look back, and it was over, not such an ordeal for either of us, but at the end of that first day, and all the too few schooldays that followed, either Emily or I would be there to greet her and take her home, and that was the thing, that was the joy and the pain of the man and his little girl on the bus, the thing that could never happen for me and Alice again. And I hoped that Emily had been able to keep holding her hand all the way, and that if there was a door maybe they had gone through it together.

Emily had wanted Alice to experience Thanksgiving. Rachel wasn’t keeping well again so she and Alfred couldn’t—wouldn’t—come to Scotland. “But it would mean taking Alice out of school,” Emily said.

“So, take her out of school,” I said.

“The school disapproves.
I
disapprove. I don’t want to get into that habit.”

“Once won’t matter. She’s only six.”

“If we go, will you come? It would be lovely if we could all go.”

“I can’t,” I said. “The University …”

“… would disapprove.”

“To put it mildly. I’d be breaking my contract. Sorry.”

“I kind of figured that. Would you mind very much if we went without you?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’ll get by. It’ll be good for Alice. She should see your folks more often. And they’ll love you both being there for Thanksgiving.”

“We’ll only be gone a week,” Emily said. “And we’ll be together here at Christmas, just the three of us.”

“I can hardly wait,” I said, and I meant it, not a trace of irony in there.

Before the sweeter, kinder dreams came the one from which, for a long time, I thought I would never escape, the dream that toppled my world, that stifled the born-again Alan and left the dead me in his place. It was my dream, but it was about Alan.

He was in his office at the University, with a stack of essays waiting to be read. A long evening lay ahead. The weather was grey and drizzly. He drank black coffee from a flask, marked a couple of essays. Outside it grew dark. He drank more coffee, looked at his watch. Six o’clock. They’d flown to London from Edinburgh that afternoon. He thought of them queuing at the gate, boarding the plane, waiting for take-off. He marked a few more essays. Some rain splatted on the window. He looked at his watch again. Just after seven. They would be airborne. He thought of them up there above the
rain. Then what, in this dream? A jolt, a strange rearrangement of the air, some paranormal flicker? He poured the last of the coffee, turned to the next essay. Very bad handwriting (I can see it still): good student, bad writing. He began to decipher it. The phone rang. He reached across the desk and picked it up.

“Alan? It’s Jim.” Jim Collins, his Welsh realist colleague, analyst of male anger and angst in post-war working-class fiction, Barstow, Sillitoe, Storey, Hines, all that. Jim was Alan’s senior by a few years, not that they noticed the difference. He had a daughter, Lisa, the same age as Alice; they were at the same school. He had two sons as well, older, and an ex-wife on the other side of town, and they all seemed to get on fine between the two households. Jim had a cool, commanding way of speaking. He said, “Alan, didn’t you tell me the other day that Emily and Alice were going to be flying to the States?”

“Yes,” he said. “They’ve gone already.”

“They’ve gone? Good. Thank God for that.”

“Actually, they should be in the air right now. They were flying this evening from Heathrow.”

In the dream the words “they should be in the air right now” repeated several times, the emphasis shifting along the line like a crow hopping along a wall. The crow bounced up and down on “right now.”

“Heathrow?” Jim’s voice had suddenly lost its authority. “Shit.”

“What?” Alan said. In the dream he wasn’t perturbed. Why would he have been? “Shit” was such a small, unimportant
word. “Shit happens,” and similar phrases. He said, “What’s up?”

“There’s been a report on the radio. A plane crash in the Borders. They’re saying it’s a transatlantic flight from Heathrow. I don’t know if that’s right, but that’s what they’re saying.”

“On the radio?” Alan said. “Where are you?”

“I’m at home. I’m going to put the TV on. I’ll phone you back.”

In the dream Jim Collins hung up. In the dream Alan Tealing paused, wondering what to do. Even then he wasn’t really worried. A plane crash in the Borders had nothing to do with him. Emily and Alice had
left
Scotland, to go to America. There was no radio or TV in his office. He was half an hour from home if he walked, ten minutes by bus if there was a bus. He wasn’t thinking of taxis, not yet. He looked at the essay again, deciphered a few more lines of the dreadful scrawl in which were hidden some good ideas about
Wuthering Heights
.

The phone rang. In the dream he heard it ring and the air seemed to crumble between his hand and the phone. The hand picked up the receiver.

Jim said, “The plane was flying from Heathrow to New York. It was scheduled to take off at six o’clock.”

Something lurched in Alan’s heart, like a mad dog throwing itself against a door when the bell is rung.

“I’ve written down the flight number,” Jim said, and he read it out.

Alan heard himself say, “That’s their flight.”

The next thing was someone calling from a distance, as if through a dense fog or in the blackest of starless nights. “Alan!” the voice called. “Alan!” He tried to make the voice wake him. He tried to make it sound feminine, Emily’s voice, and he tried to hear Alice’s voice alongside it, or beyond it, “Daddy!” but they wouldn’t come. “Alan!” the voice called. “Are you there?” and he was, the receiver still pressed to his ear, and Jim was saying, “You’d better go home, Alan. You need to go home. I’ll meet you there.”

He left everything as it was, the essays in two piles, the flask, the mug, the scattering of pens and books on the desk. He went out of his office and down the stairs into the drizzling dark. He found a taxi or got on a bus or walked home but I have no knowledge of how he made that journey. He came round, or out of whatever state he was in, when he heard Jim Collins’s voice again.

“Alan,” Jim said.

Jim was standing under the street lamp outside the house, in a raincoat with the collar turned up. Alan stopped in front of him. In the dream, he did not seem able to speak. “You’re getting wet,” Jim said. Alan looked down at the lapels of his jacket and saw that it was so. He had come away without his coat. How stupid, to have done that in such weather.

After a few more moments Jim said gently, as if to somebody elderly and forgetful, “Do you have your key?” Alan looked down again, beyond the soaking jacket, and his two clenched hands were there. He raised them, turned them over. Perhaps he pushed the right one forward a little, I cannot say, but Jim grasped it and opened out the fingers.
The key lay in the palm. Jim took it, and Alan saw the outline of the key like a ghost on the skin, apart from where the notched part of its blade had dug in so deep that it had drawn blood. “Come in out of this,” Jim said, and he unlocked the front door and Alan followed him into the empty house. Jim switched on lights, and the television, and Alan sat down and sitting there he found out what he already knew, that the dream was not a dream, it was real and happening before his eyes. Jim watched with him, then he said, “Here,” and helped him shrug off the jacket and took it away somewhere. There was a noise of glasses in the kitchen, cupboard doors, and then Jim was back in the room saying, “Where do you keep your drink?” And right after that the telephone started ringing.

When Emily traded her country for mine, I thought she was making a great sacrifice, but she always denied it. It was an adventure—as almost everything, however mundane, was an adventure for her—and anyway it made sense, because shortly before the wedding took place I had completed my PhD and successfully applied for a lectureship in Scotland. Emily had urged me to apply: she didn’t have a career path like me, she said, she just had a life path, and she’d go wherever it took her. And it was true that Scotland was a new country for both of us: I’d never crossed the border with England before I went for the job interview.

How different, though, was the old Scottish town with its newish university from the kind of place I’d once imagined
us living in: some pretty New England haven with its “Little Ivy” college shining in the bright glories of the fall, and white clapboard houses basking in the regular heat of summer. Everything in Scotland was grubbier, rougher at the edges, colder. The town did have its share of leafy walks, parks, quiet streets, abundant big-treed gardens and solid Victorian villas; and there was the history, the old churches and cobbled streets, and the castle; but it had quarters, too, of deprivation, waste and ruin. Yet on the whole Emily liked it, even our unremarkable house in its unremarkable suburban crescent. When I apologised for taking her away from her homeland she said I was trying to saddle her with my own disappointment. “You’re the one who lost out,” she said. “You got a real taste for it when we got married, didn’t you?”

She was right. We’d honeymooned in Cape Cod, gone to Boston and on up to Maine, and I had loved it, feeling as if I were on a movie set of an earlier America. Later, when Alice had arrived and I worried again that Emily might be homesick, she breezily denied it. “You just want all those clichés,” she said. “Dodging squirrels as you bicycle to class, you and Alice at the soda fountain in some old-time diner—I can read you like a book. America’s not like that.” But it had seemed so to me. “Anyway,” she always said, “we can do the States later. You get a job at Harvard, and then we’ll all go home.” It was probably never going to happen, but it was pleasant to think it might, and Emily even had her parents keep an eye out for possibilities for me—a year or two on some exchange if such a thing could be arranged. And when she went with Alice for Thanksgiving on that last journey she’d
said, half-seriously, that she was going to do some scouting for me. Afterwards, I considered whether going to America might be the best thing I could do, to get away from all that was familiar, but I had neither the heart nor the energy to attempt to organise it. The only place I went after their deaths was into myself.