All Souls (16 page)

On the day I remember best and the day on which he seemed most prodigal with truths, he laughed only at the start of our conversation, while we were talking about my colleagues, who were no longer quite
his
colleagues, and he was recounting to me through hints and insinuations some humorous diplomatic or university anecdote, never touching on the war or on espionage. By then (Hilary term of my second year, so it was between January and March, in fact it was the end of March, just before Clare decided to turn her back on me for four weeks) we all knew that Cromer-Blake was ill and, we supposed, seriously so. He'd still said nothing to us about it (he'd been vague, not to say evasive), not to me, to Clare, to Ted, to his brother Roger who lived in London, not even to his revered Rylands, though perhaps to Bruce, the person closest to him for some years, with whom he maintained what used to be called (especially in French) a loving friendship, in which there was neither progress nor withdrawal, neither exclusivity nor constancy. (Bruce was a mechanic from Vauxhall and had no dealings with us: Bruce was his other world.) But Cromer-Blake's visits to the hospital in London - his admissions to hospital were sporadic, each stay there shorter than the last - and the worrying mutability of his appearance - you were as likely to find him back to his normal weight, his skin glowing, as emaciated and ashen - made us
worry with that unspoken concern, very common in England or at least more common there than elsewhere, which has at its root a degree of stoicism and also - in contrast - the optimistic belief that things only exist if you talk about them or, which comes to the same thing, that they don't prosper and will ultimately dissolve into nothing if you deny them verbal existence. None of the people close to Cromer-Blake talked about him (about his now visible illness) behind his back, and in his presence we limited ourselves, if he looked well, to forgetting immediately how he'd looked before - as something we gaily condemned to the realm of what has been - and, when he looked bad, to recalling how he looked before that - silently and intensely longing for the return of what once was.

Cromer-Blake was one of Toby Rylands' dearest and most enduring friends - the loyal scion, the pupil who had not withdrawn once he reached maturity - and for that very reason Rylands was the last person I would have expected to mention the nameless disease, whatever it was. That's why that Sunday, when the two of us were standing in his garden at the river's edge, watching the waters flowing easily by without the illusory resistance put up by the vegetation that in other seasons seemed to push against it as it passed and contributed greatly to the sylvan look of that part of the river, I was surprised when he mentioned Cromer-Blake and his health or lack of it. He was throwing pieces of stale bread into the water to see if the swans who occasionally lived around there would appear.

"They're not coming out today," he said. "They may well have moved on; they spend the whole year going up and down the river. Sometimes when they disappear for weeks on end, they've actually only been a few yards away downstream. It's odd, though, because I saw them yesterday. This is one of their favourite haunts because of the royal treatment they get here. But then there's always got to be a first day for their disappearances. Otherwise, they wouldn't be disappearances, would
they?" And he continued throwing crumbs, smaller now, into the cinnamon-coloured water. "But it doesn't matter, some ducks have arrived instead, look, there's one of them looking for food. And another, and another. They're so greedy, they don't turn their noses up at anything." And then almost without a pause, he added: "Have you seen Cromer-Blake lately?"

"Yes," I said, "two or three days ago. I had coffee with him in his rooms."

The literary scholar was standing on my left, so I caught the keen gaze of his olive-oil eye, which, seen from the side, looked larger than the grey eye. It was some moments before he spoke again.

"How did he look?"

"Very well. He looks much better since he got back from Italy. I suppose you know he took a week's leave. I covered some of his classes for him. He needed a rest, to get away from here. It seems to have done him good."

"So, it did him good, eh?" And the eye shifted fleetingly to the right (towards me) then immediately back again to the ducks. "I knew he'd taken some leave and that he was in Tuscany, but I only found out from others. He hasn't come to see me once since he came back, what, two or three weeks ago now. He hasn't called either." He fell silent, then turned to look me full in the face, as if that were necessary in order to speak of deeply held feelings or to confess to weaknesses. "I find that strange and, I don't see why I shouldn't admit it, it hurts me too. I thought it might be because he looks ill. But you say he looks well. That's what you said, isn't it?"

"Yes, he was very bad in February and now, by comparison, I think he looks much better."

With some difficulty, owing to his immense weight which was due entirely to his size and build, not to fat, Toby Rylands bent down to pick up more bread from the wicker basket he'd placed on the ground. Four more ducks had appeared.

"I wonder when he'll stop coming here altogether. Which day will be the last time I'll see him, unless of course that day has already been and gone without my realising it, in February. That was the last time I saw him, in mid-February. Perhaps he doesn't intend coming here again. Just look at those ducks."

I looked at the ducks. Then I said: "I don't know why you say that, Toby. You know perfectly well that no one enjoys your company more than Cromer-Blake does. I don't believe he'll ever stop coming to see you, not of his own free will anyway."

Professor Rylands abruptly emptied the rest of the bread from the basket into the water, without bothering to break it up, crumbs and whole slices of bread floating together for a moment on the muddy waters of the Cherwell, then he threw the basket down - it remained upside down on the grass, like a peasant woman's hat, with the handle as the bow - and went back to the small table on which Mrs Berry, his housekeeper, had placed sherry and olives. Although it was only the end of March, it wasn't cold outside if you kept out of the wind. It was a Sunday of sunny spells interrupted by sparse cloud and the sun wasn't to be wasted, because it helped you to get through this day and move on into the next. Rylands was wearing one of his bow ties and a thick yellow sweater with a wool-lined windcheater on top; the sweater was longer than the windcheater and formed a band of yellow below the brown leather. He sat down on an upholstered chair and drank a glass of sherry. He downed it slowly in one, then refilled it.

"Of his own free will," he said, "of his own free will. To whom does the will of a sick man belong? To the man or to the illness? When one is ill, just as when one is old or troubled, things are done half with one's own will and half with someone else's in exactly equal measure. What isn't always clear is who the part of the will that isn't ours belongs to. To the illness, to the doctors, to the medicine, to the sense of unease, to the passing years, to times long dead? To the person we no longer
are and who carried off our will when he left? Cromer-Blake is no longer the person we think he is, or the person he used to be, he's not the same. And unless I'm very much mistaken, he will become less and less himself until he simply ceases to be altogether. Until he's neither one nor the other, not even some third or fourth party, but no one, no one."

"I don't understand you, Toby," I said, hoping that the phrase in itself would dissuade him from continuing and that he would stop. Hoping that he would say something like "Let's drop the subject," or "Forget it," or "Pay no attention to me" or "It doesn't matter." But he said none of those things.

"Don't you?" And Toby Rylands stroked his thick, white, well-combed hair, the way Cromer-Blake did (perhaps he'd copied the gesture from Toby Rylands), except that Rylands' hair was much whiter. "He must have been very blond once," I thought, just before he said what I (as a superstitious
madrileño
or an anglicised stoic) would have preferred him not to say: "Listen," he said, "listen to me. Cromer-Blake is going to die. I don't know what's wrong with him and he's not going to tell us, assuming that is that he knows for certain or hasn't managed to put it out of his mind, at least for short periods, through sheer irresponsibility and will power. I don't know what's wrong with him but I'm sure it's something very serious and I doubt that he'll last much longer. He was in a dreadful state when he came here last in February, he looked as good as dead to me. He looked like a dead man. You say he's better now, and you can't imagine how pleased I am to hear that; I only hope it lasts. But he's been better before only to get worse again shortly afterwards, and that last time I saw him he had the look of a condemned man. It broke my heart to see him like that and, when he dies, it will break even more, but it's best to get oneself used to the idea. Yet it hurts me that he doesn't come and see me because of that, while he still can. The reason he doesn't come has nothing to do with his appearance, I mean, whether
he looks all right or at death's door; it isn't because he doesn't want to distress me, or because he doesn't want me to see him when he's really bad. I know the real reason he doesn't come and see me. Before, I was an old man (though I've looked like an old man for a long time now; you've only known me a year, but I've always looked older than my age), I was inoffensive, even useful, my digressions were instructive and my malicious comments and jokes amusing, and I still had things to teach him, even though I don't know much about your particular field, Spanish literature - I still don't understand why he didn't study English literature, so much more varied. But that isn't how he
sees
me any more, now I'm the mirror in which he's afraid he'll see himself reflected. His end is near and so is mine. I remind him of death because, of all his friends, I'm the one nearest to it. I'm the illness he's suffering from, I'm old age, I'm decay, my will has gone wandering off somewhere on its own, like his, only I've had time to get used to that, and getting used to losing one's will means learning to hold on to it as long as possible, to delay its departure, to do as little harm as possible. He hasn't had that chance, and he can't be blamed for it. I shouldn't blame him for avoiding me, poor boy. Although you'd never know it, he must be utterly bewildered. He must be terrified. And unable to believe what's happening to him."

Toby Rylands drank a little more sherry and half-closed his eyes whose opposing colours, now that the sun shone full in his face, blended into one. He picked up an olive.

"I don't know," I said. "I'm not sure you're right, Toby. It would never occur to me to think of you as being near death, as you put it, nor in anyway reminiscent of or like some kind of harbinger of death. You're not even that old, and you're in excellent health. You look wonderful. Last year your classes were packed out and if you hadn't been due for retirement this year they would have gone on being packed out. No burned-out
old has-been could fill a lecture hall in Oxford. Maybe Cromer-Blake simply hasn't had time to come and see you."

"Ta, ta, ta," Toby Rylands exploded into bitter laughter. Then he said: "I know what you're thinking, you think I'm just saying all this because of that, because I had to retire. You think that's why I suddenly see myself as being near death and other such nonsense just because I'm not doing anything and spend too much time thinking, alone in this garden by the river, that eternal image of the passing of time. Or at home . . . with the silent Mrs Berry. That's pure platitude and anyway I'm not inactive. I'm writing the best book ever on Laurence Sterne and his
Sentimental Journey.
You may say that doesn't matter much or matters only to a select few, and isn't much of a reason to feel that people still. .. expect something from me, but it matters to me. I love that book and it matters to me that it should be properly understood and that I should understand it as I study it one more time and explain it to you all: I expect something from myself, you see. No, it's got nothing to do with retirement, nothing at all. For years now I've watched the days pass with that slow downhill feeling we all experience sooner or later. It doesn't depend on age really, some people experience it even when they're children; some children already have a sense of it. I felt it early on, some forty years ago, and I've spent all these years letting death approach and it still frightens me. The worst thing about the approach of death isn't death itself and what it may or may not bring, it's the fact that one can no longer fantasise about things still to come. I've had what is commonly referred to as a full life, or at least that's how I regard it. I haven't had a wife or children, but I've had a life spent in the acquisition of knowledge and that was what mattered to me. I've always gone on finding out more than I knew before and it doesn't matter where you put that 'before', even if it's only today or tomorrow. But I've had a full life, too, in the sense that my life's been crammed with action and the unexpected. As
you'll no doubt have heard, I was a spy, like so many of us here, because that, too, can form part of our duties; but I was never just a penpusher like that fellow Dewar in your department, indeed like most of them. I worked out in the field. I've been in India and in the Caribbean and in Russia and I've done things I could never tell anyone about now, because they would seem so ridiculous no one would believe me. I know only too well that what one can and cannot tell depends very much on the timing, because I've dedicated my life to identifying just that in literature and I've learned to identify it in life too. I shouldn't be telling you any of this now, but the fact is that in my life I've run mortal risks and betrayed men I had nothing against personally. I've saved a few people's lives too, but sent others to the firing squad or the gallows. I've lived in Africa, in the most unlikely places, in other eras, and I watched the suicide of the person I loved." Toby Rylands stopped short, as if he'd been led to make that last remark by his memory, not by his will (the will he held on to so hard but which was now no longer his alone); he recovered at once, doubtless because to continue was the best way of undoing it. "Oh, and battles, I've been a witness to those too. My head is full of bright, shining memories, frightening and thrilling, and anyone seeing all of them together, as I can, would think they were more than enough, that the simple remembering of so many fascinating facts and people would fill one's old age more intensely than most people's present. But it isn't like that, and even now, when it seems that nothing unexpected is ever going to happen to me again, I mean,
nothing;
when the life I lead here in my garden and my house with the all too predictable Mrs Berry seems designed to guarantee that nothing happens; when anything surprising or stimulating seems over and done with, out of the question, I can assure you that I do still want more:
I
want everything;
and what gets me out of bed in the mornings continues to be the expectation of what might happen, all unannounced. I'm always expecting the unexpected, and I still fantasise about what might still be, as I did when I was sixteen and left Africa for the first time and absolutely anything was possible because when you know nothing there's room for all kinds of knowledge. I've been slowly wearing away at my ignorance and, as I said, I've always kept on learning. But that ignorance is still so vast that even today, at seventy, leading this quiet life, I still cherish the hope of being able to embrace everything and experience everything, the unknown and the known, yes, even things I've known before. There's as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can't accept that certain things won't repeat themselves. That's why I sometimes envy Will, the old porter at the Taylorian, who must be twenty years older than me and yet, now that he's let go of his will for good, he lives in a constant state of joy and anxiety travelling back and forth in time throughout his life, both enjoying great new surprises and repeating things he knew before. That's a way of not renouncing anything, even though he's unaware of it and even though his life spent in his porter's lodge has been anything but full from my point of view. But my point of view is irrelevant here, as is anyone else's. Knowing that some time one will have to give up everything, whatever that everything is, that's what's unbearable, for everyone, it's all we've ever known, all we've ever been used to. I can understand someone who regrets dying simply because they won't be able to read their favourite author's next book, or see a new film starring an actress they admire, or drink another glass of beer, or do today's crossword, or continue to follow a particular television series, or because they won't know who won this year's FA Cup. I can understand that perfectly well. It isn't only that anything still might happen, some unimaginable piece of news, a sudden turn-around in events, the most extraordinary experiences, discoveries, the world turned upside down .. . The other side of time, its dark back. It's also because so many things hold
us here. There must be dozens of things holding Cromer-Blake here. As many as there must be for you or for me or for Mrs Berry." And Toby Rylands pointed towards the house. "Imagine it, poor chap. But it seems that when it comes to his final hour, I won't be one of those things."