The Professor of Truth (15 page)

“An offer of a reward for information leading to a conviction is nothing new,” Nilsen said. “What did your policeman find so offensive about that?”

“The amount. Your people were talking about two million dollars. You can buy a lot of narrative for that kind of money.”

“There was no guarantee he’d get anything. The police were clear with him about that. Every time he raised the subject of a reward they shut him down.”

“He knew the money was there for him if it ever came to a trial and he gave the right evidence. Whatever the police said or didn’t say, he knew the offer was there. But nobody
else did. The judges didn’t know. Khazar’s defence team were never told. If they had been they’d have gone to town on Parroulet. And without Parroulet, there was no case against Khazar.”

“But you have no proof.”

“As you said, I dug a lot of holes. I’m still digging. I’ve seen enough and heard enough to know what happened.”

“To change anything, you still need proof.”

I said, “That’s why you’re here, though, isn’t it? To set the record straight.”

“There is no record,” he said. “Not that you or anyone else will ever see.”

“But still, that is why you’re here,” I said.

He nodded beyond me, towards the window.

“Look at that snow,” he said. “Where does it all come from?”

S IT FAIR TO SUGGEST THAT CAROL INVITED HERSELF
into my life? No. Fairer to say that she invited me into
her
life, quietly but repeatedly, and that at last, without much grace, I went. I have never been sure why I did, nor have I ever had the will, or the grace, to leave again.

She was in my life, of course, before the bombing, but only as an academic colleague, my senior by a couple of years. I liked her well enough then, but always felt a little sorry for her, and a little guilty in her presence. Sorry, because she was (as I thought) competent but dull, besides being married to Harold Pritchley. Guilty, because I was so much luckier in my marriage than she was.

She had married Professor Pritchley when still one of his undergraduate students, had done a PhD—on women’s poetry of the 1930s—under somebody else’s supervision, and then been appointed as a lecturer. When I first arrived Harold and Carol (the cheery rhyme of their union seemed self-mocking) had been together for six or seven years, but by that stage everybody knew it was a marriage of unremitting misery. Harold was, as the Dean of Faculty and everybody else acknowledged, brilliant. He was also cruel and—by the time I knew him—a drunkard. When Carol married him he
was not yet in thrall to the bottle, the brilliance must have had a certain charm, and the cruelty, which she could hardly have missed, she was deluded enough (so she later told me) to think would never be directed at her. Presumably they had both had their reasons for marrying, but all I could see in his eyes when he looked at her was how much he despised her. His malice was not discreet: all of us within the department saw it. He would humiliate her in front of us by first seeking her opinion and then exposing her ignorance of this or that subject. In private (again, I learned later) his favourite sport was to taunt her failure to get pregnant—a failure caused as much by his drinking as by any biological problem of hers. His emotional abuse was extreme, but he was, she said, too much of a coward ever to hit her. Most of the rest of us were also cowards, adherents to the middle-class religion of Nonconfrontism, and we watched, cringing, as he ground her down. On one occasion I, who was at least fifteen years younger than Harold, could not bear his rudeness, and tried to defend Carol’s argument if not Carol herself. He turned on me and I was demolished too. When this happened a second time, a few weeks later, I told him he should be ashamed of himself. He said shame was the prerogative of third-raters and children, and suggested that I was only in the job I was because he had thought—wrongly, but he was
not
ashamed to admit his mistake—that I showed promise and would, given time, grow up. I reminded him that there had been an interview panel of five. He said that that only underlined the failings of management by committee. I never spoke to him again. Two months later he left
us for a prestigious Fellowship at Cambridge. Nobody, as far as I know, warned Cambridge what they were really getting.

Years later Carol told me that though it must have looked as if he had left her too—the final humiliation—in fact she had refused to go with him. That decision, she said, marked the beginning of her independence, a state for which she would always be grateful. She said this with a vehemence that I thought suspect, but I did not challenge it. I had no wish to do so.

She certainly bloomed after Harold’s departure—took more care of her appearance, became more animated and engaging and shed the skin of dullness she had previously worn. Perhaps even then—between her liberation from Harold and the bombing—she wanted something from me. An affair? If she flirted with me, I was oblivious. I was more than content with Emily, and by then we had Alice. The idea of a relationship on the side never so much as occurred to me.

Afterwards she was solicitous and kind, as everybody was, but somehow her sympathy did not irritate me as that of others did. Perhaps this was because I soon recognised that there was self-interest in it. Philosophy tells us that there is self-interest in all sympathy, but hers had the virtue of being neither blatant nor much disguised. She was practical too, covering for me at work on bad days, encouraging me on good ones. I knew what she wanted, but could not reciprocate. She was very patient. She probably thought I wasn’t “ready,” whereas I was certain I never would be.

Several times in those first years, after an evening function of one kind or another, she offered me a lift home. She
lived on the other side of town in a district that had, until the early twentieth century, been a village in its own right—the birthplace in fact of David Dibald (not that there was a plaque or street name anywhere to commemorate him)—and usually drove to work. “It’s taking you miles out of your way,” I protested, the first time. “I’ll just get a bus.” “It’ll only be fifteen minutes at this time of day,” she said. “And it’s raining.” So I accepted.

After a while I had to give directions—she didn’t know my part of town, she said. But as we turned into my street a recognition stirred in her: she and Harold had looked at a house here.

“Harold thought it was too middle class,” she said.

“What did he expect? It’s a middle-class area,” I said.

“He was an idiot,” she said, puncturing the generally accepted view of Professor Pritchley’s intellect. She slowed the car. “That one there. It looks all right, doesn’t it? But Harold wanted to live in a mansion, although he professed to despise all social ambition. What a snob he was.”

We arrived at my house and she switched off the engine. “It’s so quiet,” she said, and we sat listening to the quietness until I felt oppressed by it.

“Thanks for the lift,” I said.

“You’re welcome, Alan,” she said, and quickly asked my opinion of a student she was finding difficult, and that led on to something else, and it was all fine and unthreatening but at the same time I was thinking,
she wants to come in
, and I didn’t want her to come in.

“Well,” I said, opening the passenger door, “thanks again,” and again she said, “You’re welcome,” like a polite waitress. I got out of the car.

“See you tomorrow,” she said, and I smiled at her and closed the car door, and she drove off, and I entered my silent, empty, familiar house.

Over time these lifts and conversations became, almost, a habit we shared. We’d get to my house, sit in the car and chat about the function we’d just attended, about department politics, about books and writers. I still didn’t invite her in, but gradually she became bolder, till at last she was asking questions that I wouldn’t have tolerated from anyone else. She had hardly known Emily, having met her only two or three times, and had spoken to Alice just once when we bumped into her at a garden centre, and so she didn’t have a claim on them, a proprietary interest, in the way that I felt my family, Emily’s family, did. She did not think they
belonged
to her, and for this I was grateful.

She asked on one occasion if I’d been alone when the news came through, or if anyone had come to be with me. I told her of Jim Collins’s role, how he had fielded calls and fed me drink and sat with me through most of the night. Eventually he’d had to go, back to his own family, still alive even if not together under one roof. My neighbours Brian and Pam Hewat were on a winter break in Madeira or Tenerife or some such place and weren’t due back for a few days. The next morning I went to the railway station and headed south, and when I came home days later—was it seven, was it eight?—my sister, Karen, and my parents had installed
themselves, having been given a key by Brian and Pam. They stayed for a week until I asked them to leave, because there was nothing they could do. “We’d stopped hugging and started arguing, actually. It wasn’t good.”

“You were in shock,” Carol said.

“Yes. Sometimes I think I still am.”

“All of you,” she said. And then: “I wish I could have helped.”

“You had your own troubles.”

“They were nothing by comparison. And anyway that was all over by then. But obviously I couldn’t have helped. What help could anyone have been?”

“People did help,” I said. “They were incredibly helpful. You were, I remember. But really, if I am truthful, none of it even scratched the surface.”

“And now?” We had been looking straight ahead, out through the windscreen, but she turned her face to me and I met her gaze, and it was so full of hope that I could not disappoint her.

“Now you scratch the surface,” I said.

She touched my wrist lightly. It was enough to be going on with.

The next time I felt I could not simply let her drive away. I asked if she wanted a coffee. She did, of course.

I knew that she wanted me too, but I didn’t understand why. I’ve never understood it. I am irritable, moody, antisocial, obsessive, irreparably damaged. I am not to be depended on. Why would she or anyone want me? It cannot just be pity. I would see that at once and not stand for it.
But there she was, week after week, an open though never desperate invitation, and week after week I edged closer to not rejecting it. Not just weeks but years went by. Slowly she coaxed me out into some kind of light. Then the trial happened and I was back in darkness, and still she waited. Till one night—I don’t know what configuration of circumstances caused it other than the coffee being supplemented by a glass of wine—I brought things to a head with a sudden, bald statement of fact.

“I’ll never marry again,” I said. “I absolutely know that.”

“Nor me,” Carol said, “but for different reasons. There are negative ones and positive ones, don’t you think?”

“Yours being?”

“Negative. I could never trust a man enough to marry him, not after Harold. There’d always be the niggling fear that anyone I liked that much would turn out to be another shit after all, and I couldn’t go through that again. I don’t really trust anybody any more, that’s the thing. Your reasons, I imagine, are more positive.”

“I’ll never meet someone who can match Emily, you mean?”

“Yes. And you won’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t marry again.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “I won’t.”

We were in the living room, in two armchairs, separated by a low table. It was a summer evening, still light outside, and silhouetted against the French window Carol’s head might almost have been Emily’s, except that she was in the
wrong place. Emily almost always sat, legs tucked up, on the sofa. I tried to picture her sitting where Carol was, and myself watching her from where I was. The picture didn’t come. This made the situation easier than it might have been.

“It’s not true what I said about not trusting anybody,” Carol said. “I trust you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I’ve known you for years.”

I nodded, deferring to the fact.

“You’re not exactly a stranger, Alan. Anyway, I trust you. Why is that? Maybe it’s because you’re so loyal to Emily. You won’t let go. I respect that. I trust
that
.”

There was more to come, I knew. I waited.

“But you know, I think by now she would want you to let go.”

“Don’t,” I said.

Don’t start, I meant. But, having started, she couldn’t or wouldn’t stop.

“When I saw the two of you together it was obvious that you were happy and secure in each other. Even when I saw you at work, on your own. If her name was mentioned. I was jealous of what you had.”

“Don’t,” I said again.

“But I was. I was jealous of you both. And you had Alice, too. I was jealous of you for having her.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to tell her a third time.

“I was jealous of Emily.”

My surprise wasn’t total, but Carol must have caught something of it in my look. She flinched, held her ground.

“I’m being very forward, aren’t I?” she said.

I could have closed it down then. I could have agreed with her, made it clear that she had overstepped a mark, was pushing too much into private territory, but that wasn’t really what she was doing. She was confessing something about herself. What did surprise me was that I didn’t mind.