Ever After (22 page)

“What were you going to look up?”

“Lyell.”

“The
Principles
?”

“Yes.”

“Which edition?”

“What do you mean, which edition?” I said ingenuously. I knew perfectly well that Lyell published more than ten editions of the
Principles of Geology
, three with significant revisions, and that the edition I should use—the edition which Matthew would have lent to Rector Hunt and which the Rector failed to finish—was the 1853 (revised) edition.

“You see, this is just the sort of thing I mean. Lyell published a dozen editions. He revised the thing several times. His thinking changed. Are we talking about the 1850, the 1853 …?”

“Oh—I see. I think the 1850.”

“And are we talking about the
Principles
or the
Elements
? You know the difference?”

(Matthew had both. Companion volumes. He lent the Rector both. Over a thousand pages.)

“Ah—”

The lights changed. We drove off.

“It’s my subject, Bill.” The voice took on a more frenzied note. “The spiritual crisis of the mid-nineteenth century is
my subject
!”

Uttered in the late twentieth century and emanating from that dark-vizored, cigarette-clenching face, these words, if they had not carried such urgency, would have had a comic splendour. Perhaps he realised their preposterousness. We careered round a roundabout. Why should a man whose principal interests seemed to be a dubious bid to become a TV personality, and the exploration of ever-varying female flesh, care at all about scholarship, let alone the spiritual crisis of the mid-nineteenth century? But then why should I—?

“You have a monopoly?”

“You have credentials?!”

If he hadn’t suddenly started to drive like a madman, I might even have begun to feel sorry for him. I had encountered him at a bad moment. He had had a lovers’ tiff, poor man, and been witnessed in the process. Now, with me as a hostage to his spleen, out was coming all his deeper discontent.

And why was I so immovable? If I owned the Notebooks, did I own Matthew? I might have said, “All right, stop the car,” and handed over the briefcase. I admit that on this bright morning, three days after my interview with Sam, I came close to doing just that. “Here you are”—with a sweet and compassionate smile—“What does it matter? If it means so much to you.”

And how does anyone find “their subject”?

We had driven out of town and turned on to a minor road that led across flat, glistening farmland, threaded by willow-fringed ditches. It was then that he began to behave like a frustrated rally-driver. Admittedly, there was a virtual absence of traffic, and visibility was perfect, but there was the problem of the sharp bends the road took, after long straights, round the corners of ancient, inviolable fields. Also the problem, on occasion, of an oncoming car. I clung, reflexively, to my briefcase. I thought: he means to scare me into surrender. I fleetingly but seriously indulged the fantasy that all this was a deliberate exercise: Plan B, or Abduction. I was being whisked away to some secret hide-out, where the price of my release would be the contents of my briefcase. I would be found, a day or so hence, wandering dazed and dishevelled by the roadside.

But there was a moment—I swear it—when all speculation seemed beside the point. As we headed towards a right-hand bend which the expression on Potter’s face seemed grimly to disregard, I thought: he means to kill us both, him and me, on this spring morning. He could really do it. And as we hurtled towards this possible outcome, I was conscious of the vibrant green of the fields, of little, individual larks trilling somewhere, unseen, above us, and I had a distinct vision of the ghost of Matthew Pearce (he wore a black frock-coat and was wondering just what it was he had started) coming to visit the scene of the crash, coming to ponder these two dead men who had died locked in mortal argument over his own lifeless remains.

“Why don’t you stick to poetry, Bill?”

“The terms of the Ellison Fellowship,” I jabbered, “clearly allow me—”

“Fuck the Ellison Fellowship. The Ellison Fellowship’s a fucking joke. You know that.”

“Michael, I think you should slow down.”

“What do you
want
, money or something?”

“I think you should
slow down
.”

“You want to sell the Notebooks, is that it?”

“I think you—”

“Okay, okay—”

He slowed down, braking hard and just in time for the bend. A cold smile squeezed his lips. He drove with exaggerated caution and gentleness.

“There’s no need to hang on to that briefcase like that—I need my hands for the wheel, you know.”

I had to admit this was so.

We took a turn back towards town. I felt the blood in my veins, the air in my lungs. He could have done it. He lit another cigarette. I refused. We reached the centre in stiff silence. How strange, how incongruous is an ancient university city. These age-grimed walls, these modern people; this hoarded learning, this mindless sunshine.

The traffic thickened. Posses of cyclists weaved around us.

“So—the Library, then,” he said, with sudden, bizarre amiability. “Let’s take you to the Library. It won’t have gone away.” Then he added, as if we were back at our point of departure, as if the last twenty minutes simply hadn’t occurred: “Yes—a sweet girl, Gabriella. Does this and that for me. Very bright. Very—hard-working. You know—” he turned and glanced at me “—if ever you need a research assistant.”

He watched the denimed rump of one of the passing cyclists.

I thought: Plan C, Seduction by a Female Agent.

Then, as we came to a halt in the line of cars, he said, “Christ!”

I had seen her too, at almost precisely the same moment—Katherine, walking towards us on the opposite pavement (carrying that straw bag), so far not having spotted us. He was plainly caught between the incriminating hope that she might not notice us at all and the difficulty of justifying to me why he should let his own wife walk right by without greeting her. We were at a standstill and—for a variety of reasons—I considered making a quick exit. Then Potter lowered his window and called out, with a sort of clotted brightness: “Katherine!”

She stopped, gave a perplexed smile, then, since her side of the road was clear and we remained stationary, walked over towards us. At some point she took in the fact that I was sitting beside Potter, and her smile became more perplexed. She stooped by Potter’s door.

“Hello,” she said. “How was London? Hello Bill.”

“Fine,” Potter said. “London was fine.” The repetition seemed to come sideways out of his mouth, expressly for my benefit. “Thought I’d drive back early. Beat the traffic. I bumped into Bill here on the way in. Just giving him a lift to the Library.”

Katherine looked at me. Her puzzled smile turned into one of undisguised intrigue. “But you’re a long way from the College, Bill.”

“Exactly,” Potter said, quick off the mark and seeing his escape route. “What is our Bill doing on the other side of town so early in the day, yet supposedly on his way to the Library? A question he hasn’t answered.” He darted me a look. Then he said to Katherine as the traffic began to move, “Why don’t you hop in? You’re on your way home? I’ll take you there, after we’ve dumped this reprobate here.”

Katherine got in, scrambling across the back seat. Then she leant forward, a hand on each of the front seats, so that her face was almost between us. She seemed suddenly all alertness and amusement, as if this chance encounter had brightened an unpromising day.

“Well, Bill,” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell us?”

Plainly, the joke was on me, and, plainly, Potter was relishing the twist in the situation. I might have been more discomforted if it hadn’t been for the little bottle of perfume still lying under the dashboard (and for a kind of dazed thankfulness for still being in one piece). I thought: it is quite simple. All I have to do is nothing. All I have to do is leave the bottle of perfume just where it is. But I couldn’t do it.

“You’d be surprised if you really knew,” I said. I gave a quick sideways glance at Potter.

“Ah—a man of mystery,” Katherine said.

I don’t think she had seen the bottle. She sat back. I shifted in my own seat in such a way as to make my briefcase slip, as if by accident, from my knees. Leaning forward to retrieve it, I contrived at the same time to scoop up the bottle, then transfer it, hidden in my hand, to my pocket. Potter glanced from the road ahead to me. Maybe he hadn’t seen it. I don’t think so. Maybe the moment of my secreting it was the moment of his realising it was there in the first place. I couldn’t tell, with his eyes hidden by those glasses.

“Hang on to the goods,” he said, with a slight touch of gall.

Katherine leant forward again, grasping the back of my seat. “How’s it going?” she said, looking over my shoulder.

“Oh—fine.” I gave the briefcase a meaningless caress.

“No,” she said, in a softer, more solicitous, more all-embracing tone. “I mean—how’s it going?”

It was strange. It was like a question spoken out of her husband’s presence. Her lips were almost in my ear. It was as though at any moment she might have ruffled my hair or put her arms round my neck. Potter looked at us both, like some foxy chauffeur. To my surprise, I found myself suddenly glad of the briefcase lying across my lap, screening the state of things between my legs. Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if she had seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe she
had
seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe that’s how things were.

“Oh—okay,” I said.

We headed back towards the Meadows of Dalliance and the True Path of Knowledge. Potter slowed down near the spot where he had hijacked me earlier. The day had warmed. The wet road was now a dapple of damp and dry patches. It would not have surprised me if, as I made to get out, Katherine had suddenly kissed me or pinched my cheek—like a mother saying goodbye to a son departing for school. Instead, she sat back—not bothering to move into my place beside Potter, giving me a sort of bold-but-beleaguered look.

“Bye, Bill.”

“Happy hunting,” Potter said.

Whoever designed our University Library must have known what they were about. It is variously likened to a fortress, a prison, a power-station. Alcatraz. Fort Knox. It stands in geographical and architectural scorn of the cosy huddle of colleges some half a mile distant across the lawn-fringed river. And the inference, I suppose, is that it will continue to stand so—with all those books, all that compacted civilization, still safe inside—when the fragile colleges and tranquil lawns are no more. Even inside, it is
not exactly inviting. You have the impression that books are stored here as ammunition is stored in readiness for some awesome, cataclysmic conflict. All day long, along mysterious passage-ways and up and down secret lift-shafts, they are shifted and trundled like shells in the bowels of a vast dreadnought.

I sat, belatedly, at my desk, Lyell’s 1853 edition in front of me. Also before me, the 1855 (enlarged) edition of the
Elements of Geology
. Yes, I knew, all right, which were the proper editions. But I couldn’t concentrate (any more than the Rector). I couldn’t feel whatever it was Matthew had felt. What was I doing, a hapless civilian in this arsenal of learning? I fingered the phial of perfume in my pocket. Yes, I admit it, I took it out, unscrewed the gold cap and sniffed. It is as well that library-goers are generally used to each other’s eccentricities.

She would be here, somewhere in this building. The girl in black. Gabriella. I should find her, return the bottle. This, after all, was the classic way in which Romance began: the misplaced article, the trinket retrieved. This, after all, was the way life worked, the way it took its chances and began again, especially on a May morning when sunlight penetrated even the thick bulwarks of the University Library and fondled the dusty racks of books. What was I doing in this necropolis? What was I doing, bent over a book about the antiquity of rocks?

A simple matter. All I had to do was wander the premises. The History section was a good bet. I would happen upon her, as if by chance. We were, after all, half introduced. I would whisper, in this place meant for whispering,
that perhaps, if she could spare a moment from her studies, a cup of coffee … Better still, a bite of lunch … Over coffee, or lunch, I would venture a disclosure or two (why not?) about the Pearce manuscripts. She would say (let it go, let it pass) how much she had admired Ruth. Then, at a certain point, with the deft timing of a practised intriguer and wooer of women, I would produce the bottle of perfume: “I think this is yours.…”

It didn’t happen, of course. That is, I didn’t find her. So how do I know, if I didn’t find her, that—?

(But how could it have happened?)

A library is equipped so that any book within it may be located precisely; but people—that is a random matter. And, of course, in so vast a complex as our University Library, it would be perfectly possible for two people, wandering independently along different routes, to elude each other for ever. I toured the building. I patrolled the corridors. I peeped along shelves and at the hunched forms at rows of desks.

A mad aberration induced by my having survived my ride with Potter? (He could really have done it.) A portent of things to come? This other life; these leases of life.

January and May.

I loitered on stairs and by the populous Main Catalogue. At the exodus for lunch I lingered by the main entrance, sun streaming through the tall doors. Gabriella. A name like a flower. And from Verona. Balconied city of love. The name was inseparable in my mind from something dark-haired, dark-eyed and slender. I couldn’t imagine a blonde called Gabriella. I couldn’t imagine Katherine being called Gabriella.

When I returned to my college room I still possessed the little bottle. I put it on one of the glass shelves in my
bathroom. It is still there now, a source of perpetual speculation, I imagine, to Mrs Docherty, who cleans for me. But then its curiosity value has been far surpassed by other, recent events. It was Mrs Docherty, after all, accompanied by a porter, who “found” me. In the “old days,” she has since comfortingly told me, college cleaners were regularly stumbling upon suicidal inmates. There is something about this contemplative life. But she herself had never had the misfortune …