All Souls (8 page)

"No, not really. I think my mind's still very much on a young girl I saw some days ago on the train from London and again yesterday in Broad Street. But since I don't know who she is and may never see her again I might well begin to think about your friend Clare too." - "What an idiot," I thought, "why can't I think about something more fruitful, more interesting? Relationships with those with whom we have no blood ties never are; the possible variety of paths such a relationship can take are minimal, the surprises all fakes, the different stages mere formalities, it's all so infantile: the approaches, the consummations, the estrangements; the fulfilment, the battles, the doubts; the certainties, the jealousies, the abandonment and the laughter; it wears you out even before it's begun. I feel troubled by my absence from the world and can no longer tell the difference between what I should spend my time thinking about and what is just a deplorable waste of time and thought. I feel completely off-balance and I shouldn't be thinking about either of them, the girl or Clare Bayes. The one thing I shouldn't be doing is
thinking
about them. I'm just drunk and generally confused. Here I am with all the time in the world in this static
city I happen to have ended up in, and I'm turning into an idiot." I continued my thoughts out loud to Cromer-Blake: "I shouldn't be thinking about these things, I should be thinking about something more interesting. More to the point, I should be talking about something more interesting, I'm sorry."

"Is
there anything more interesting?" Cromer-Blake had once more adopted a serious tone, though less serious than before and without losing his indulgent, good-humoured air. This was real after-dinner talk. He'd taken out a cigarette from the packet I'd placed on the table and rather ineffectively put a flame to it with my lighter. He never carried cigarettes or matches of his own. He held the cigarette as if it were a pencil. He didn't inhale. In fact he didn't really know how to smoke at all.

"I suppose not," I said and drank the last of my port while I looked for answers; Cromer-Blake refilled my glass. His hand was steady again. I relit his cigarette, properly this time.

'Thanks. I mean, take me, take Dayanand, or even the Warden; take Kavanagh, Toby or the Ripper, who, given their ages and temperaments, must surely lead chaste lives. And take Ted of course. Well, you don't know them as well as I do. Oh, yes, I know them all. Not one of us thinks of anything else all day but men and women, the whole day is just a process one goes through in order to be able to stop at a given moment and devote oneself to thinking about them, the whole point of stopping work or study is nothing more than being able to think about them; even when we're with them, we're thinking about them, or at least I am. They're not the parentheses; the classes and the research are, so are the reading and the writing, the lectures and the ceremonies, the suppers and the meetings, the finances and the politicking, everything in fact that passes here for activity. Productive activity, the thing that brings us money and security and prestige and allows us to live, what keeps a city or a country going, what organises it, is the thing that, later, allows us to think with even greater intensity about
them, about men and women. It's like that here, even in this country, contrary to what we say and contrary to our reputation, contrary to what we ourselves would like to believe. Yes, it's all that other activity that's the parenthesis, not the other way round. Everything one does, everything one thinks, everything else that one thinks and plots about is a medium through which to think about them. Even wars are fought in order to be able to start thinking again, to renew our unending thinking about our men and our women, about those who were or could be ours, about those we know already and those we will never know, about those who were young and those who will be young, about those who've shared our beds and those who never will."

'That's all very nice but it's a bit of an overstatement, isn't it?"

"Maybe it is, but that's what I see in myself and all around me. I even see it in this city where you'd think study left neither time nor space for anything else. And it will always be like that. I know that when I'm old and retired and can do nothing more than receive specious honours and tend my garden, I'll still think about them and stop in the street to admire people who aren't even born yet. That's the one thing that won't change, I'm sure of it. And that's why I think about them so intensely now. I'm manufacturing and storing up future memories in order to create a little variety for myself in my old age. My old age will be a solitary one, like Toby's. You should make friends with him."

"And what about Clare? Who does she think about?"

"Oh, I don't know, I was talking about how men, the male sex, think, they're the only thoughts I know well, the only ones I can be sure of identifying correctly, with a few minor variations. I imagine Clare thinks about her husband and about her son and certainly about her father with whom she has, as far as I can make out, an intense, ambivalent relationship: a mixture of resentment and unconditional love, of hope and indignation, something like that. I imagine that for her, as for me, only men count. She spent her childhood in Egypt and India surrounded by women, but on the other hand lacked the principal female figure, the mother. She never talks about her mother or at least she's never talked to me about her; I imagine her mother died when she was very young, possibly even in childbirth. I don't know, she's never spoken of it in my presence. Her father was a diplomat and she saw him only rarely. In her version of her childhood there was always a dark-skinned nanny in a long dress at her side: her eyes still soften when she sees an immigrant woman in the streets wearing the colourful clothes of the country she left behind. She's had a strange life, like that of so many English people for whom their country was only a name until they returned as adults, or visited it for the first time. There aren't that many of them left now, though, they're an endangered species. She came here as a student and ended up teaching here. That doesn't usually happen. Most of our students manage to get jobs where the real money is, in finance or management, even if the only thing they know about is Gongora and Cervantes. That's the advantage of studying here, it's assumed that after enduring our teaching methods and our continual hounding of them, which admittedly lessens with the years, they're fitted for any task, even if all they can do is scan sonnets and stammer out a few incoherent remarks about Calderon or Montaigne in an oral exam. Only the most ill-equipped for life in the world, like myself, come creeping back wearing these silly gowns."

Cromer-Blake removed his gown as he said this and I took the opportunity to take mine off too, for I never felt comfortable wearing it in private, seeing in it a suspicious and unpleasant reminder of the traditional short cloak - ridiculous but now, happily, abolished - worn in my own country. Cromer-Blake carefully hung up the black gown on the back of the door and
sat down again. He was still drinking port and followed the first cigarette he'd purloined from me with a second, which he was at that point drunkenly attempting to light in the middle. He filled the air with smoke (unfiltered by his lungs), a far showier, denser pall of smoke than the (filtered) cloud I exhaled from time to time. Cromer-Blake was drunk, probably much drunker than I was, but he spoke as decisively and fluently as on the occasions when he wanted to confound some visiting colleague from another university who'd been invited to the weekly seminars that took place in the library at the Taylorian (he was particularly cruel to hagiographers of Garcia Lorca, a writer he classified as a nincumpoop - he delighted in showing off his knowledge of dated slang - and a fraud). 'Clare's case is different since she's perfectly capable of looking after herself in the real world and could easily have had a career as a diplomat like her father, who would gladly have helped her. I don't know why she's ended up here really, since she isn't exactly passionate about teaching, maybe it's just because of Ted. Despite the fact that we've been friends for years, get on magnificently well together and have a great deal in common, I don't think I know her very well. There's something odd about her, something opaque and turbid, as if her foreign past prevented you from seeing her clearly and made her ultimately incomprehensible. With most people, after a certain age you know or you can guess what they want or what their intentions are, what they're really interested in or at least how they like to spend their time. With her I don't really know, not for certain. But then, I realise, my thoughts are completely taken up by my young men, past, present and future. In fact that's all I think about, although my activities and my profession would seem to indicate that I'm also interested in Spanish literature (which doesn't interest me in the least or, at any rate, no more than that of anywhere else, in fact less than that of some other places) and promotion up the academic ladder (which only half-interests me, not out of
ambition, but in order to avoid risks to myself and to be able to get on with my work more easily) and in the plots constantly being hatched in this city. The latter do interest me rather more, I must confess, but I don't dedicate myself to them body and soul, the way so many others do. When it comes down to it, the ultimate aim of all these plots is financial, it's all a question of money, but the huge sums that the colleges shift around are always institutional funds, no one can get their hands on them or profit from them. I myself have a lot of money at my disposal in the form of grants for study, research and travel, but I only have it in usufruct, as do the bursar and the Warden. There've been cases of bursars with sole responsibility for millions of pounds which, through their good management, they've been kind enough to increase, and yet, when it came to paying their funeral expenses, a collection had to be made. As soon as you retire or die the money you administer and share out, distribute and assign, the money you see and touch and nurture disappears, leaving you without the least personal gain, the least trace of its existence, and passes to another temporary keeper. The only things that count here are the institutions, and whilst you can achieve considerable power as a member or representative of one of those institutions, you can achieve nothing without them or outside them. That's why it always pays to be on good terms with the Warden, and even more so with the bursar. Everything we have, everything we enjoy, including our influential contacts in London, both political and financial, lasts only as long as our post, our activity and our life, no longer than that. One of the things Toby misses most is that now he hardly ever gets anyone in London phoning up to consult him. Destitution is possible but not inheritance. I think that's one of the reasons why there are so many bachelors here. It doesn't really encourage one to have a family knowing that, after a life of discipline and sacrifice but also of authority and wealth, one will have nothing to leave that family but the miserable pension of an obscure university
lecturer. Despite all that, I still hope one day to be bursar of this college. I know it won't grieve me that much to give up the money when called upon to do so. Above all I know there'll be no ill-mannered, spoiled child to reproach me for it, I mean for the extreme poverty that would await us after the years of pomp. There's no risk of my having a family."

"Cromer-Blake doesn't want to talk to me or tell me anything about Clare," I thought. "He's quite capable of speechifying for hours on any subject in the pretence that he's talking to me about Clare, but he still hasn't told me anything it would be in my interests to know; he's capable of revealing his most intimate desires, his most deep-seated ambitions, of making all kinds of confessions I haven't asked for in order to avoid telling me anything concrete about his friend Clare. If what he wants is to distract me, to dissuade me and protect her from any attempt on my part at seduction, he's going about it the wrong way. The more he avoids and delays telling me what I want to know, the greater, more urgent, exclusive and all-embracing that interest becomes. I'm even beginning to forget about the girl on the train as being too hypothetical, too young, too autonomous, too unconscious of her own presence. Clare isn't like that. Clare is possessed of more self-knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge that makes people attractive, the kind that gives them their worth: the fact that they can shape their lives, plan and carry through their actions. The interesting thing is to act knowing that what one does or does not do has weight and meaning. There's nothing interesting about chance and the only promise innocence holds is the manner of its loss. Clare must have lovers, although Cromer-Blake doesn't want to tell me so, probably more out of friendship and respect for her husband than for reasons of discretion (according to what he's told me, Cromer-Blake needs, appreciates and indeed relies on indiscretion). What do I care about a husband I don't even know nor, if I can help it, ever will know? What do I care about the long-established marital ties of a city where I neither belong nor have any? How can anything that happened before me have any possible influence or weight? I'm free of the responsibility of having been a witness here, I've witnessed nothing. This static city was set in motion the day I arrived, only I didn't realise it until this evening of disquieting thoughts and events. And once I'm gone, what importance can whatever happens next possibly have? I'll leave no trace. This is just a stopping-off point for me but I'll be stopping long enough to make it worth my while finding what people call 'someone to love'. I can't let myself have all this time at my disposal and not have someone to think about, because if I do that, if I think only about things rather than about another person, if I fail to live out my sojourn and my life here in conflict with another being or in expectation or anticipation of that, I'll end up thinking about nothing, as bored by my surroundings as by any thoughts that might arise in me. Perhaps Cromer-Blake is right, at least in part: perhaps the most pernicious, and furthermore impossible, thing is
not
to think about women, or in his case men, about a particular woman, almost as if there were a part of our brain that could only deal with that kind of thought, thoughts that other parts of the brain flee from or perhaps despise but without which they cannot function fruitfully, properly. As if not thinking about someone (even if that someone were more than one person) could prevent you from thinking about anything. At least that's what happens to people who aren't serious. I'm not serious, I should not in fact be taken seriously, my thinking is erratic, my character weak, but few people know that and, more to the point, no one here knows that and I very much doubt anyone has given the matter much thought. So I'm going to ask Cromer-Blake directly, taking advantage of the fact that we're both drunk and that questions asked during drunken conversations always get an answer, I'm going to ask him now if Clare has or has had lovers, if she's in love with her husband, and whether he thinks I have
any chance of success should I try to make her the person I'll spend my two years (already less than two years now) thinking about. Two years that will be permeated by this sense of unease. Since he's destined to be both father- and mother-figure to me, I'm going to ask Cromer-Blake for his advice and I'm going to ask if during this time I can have Clare in usufruct, with no hope of personal gain, leaving no trace once I'm gone. I'm going to ask him right now, without bothering to lead the conversation back to the subject, I'm going to ask him now point-blank, as one never asks anything in England but as one does in Madrid, even though Cromer-Blake has just repeated the word 'bursar' several times and appears to have steered the conversation right away from what I want to know. I'm going to ask him straight out and he'll have no alternative but to answer yes or no. He must know, although he could always say that he doesn't."