Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (27 page)

That is why they also gave me videos. I would sometimes watch them right there, in that building with no name, just a number, with no sign or notice or any obvious function, alone or accompanied by young Nuix or by Mulryan or Rendel; and sometimes I would take them home, to look at them more closely, to unpick them and later present my report, which was, almost always, purely oral, they rarely asked me for anything in writing, at least not so much later on, because I do seem to have written quite a few.

There were all kinds of things on those videos, they contained the most heterogeneous subject-matter imaginable, often all jumbled up, almost crammed together on some tapes, while the content of others was more carefully grouped, and organised with more discernment, some were almost monographs: fragments of programmes or news bulletins that had been broadcast publicly, recorded from the television, and edited and put together later on (sometimes I had to sit through whole programmes, new and old, even programmes about people who were already dead, such as Lady Diana Spencer with her awful, mistake-ridden English and the writer Graham Greene with his impeccable English); parliamentary speeches, talks or press conferences given by prominent or obscure politicians, British or foreign, and by diplomats too; interrogations of prisoners in police cells and their subsequent testimony in the relevant court; as well as the sentences or warnings handed out by bewigged judges, yes, there were quite a lot of videos of severe judges, I don't know why; interviews with celebrities which did not always appear to have been made by journalists or intended to be shown, some had the air of informal or more or less private conversations, perhaps with hangers-on or people pretending to be fans (I remember seeing a priceless one with a buoyant Elton John, another nice one with the actor Sean Connery, the real James Bond who was kicked by Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love, those deadly blades, and another equally funny one with the ex-footballer and drinker George Best; a terrible one with the businessman Rupert Murdoch and a rather pompous and comic one with Lord Archer, the ex-politician — he had, by then, been sent to prison for lying about something or other, I can't remember what — and author of a few somewhat contrived action novels); at other times, the names rang a bell, but they weren't famous enough for me to be able to identify them, perhaps they were very local luminaries (there wasn't always any indication of who was speaking, sometimes none at all, just a few letters and numbers next to each face deemed to be of interest or a valid subject for interpretation — A2, BH13, Gm9 and so on — to which I could refer subsequently in my reports); there were also interviews or scenes with anonymous people in various circumstances, often filmed, I think, without their knowledge and without, therefore, their consent: someone looking for work or offering to do something, anything, some were really desperate; a granite-faced functionary (rolling his eyes) listening to some member of the public telling him his problems, doubtless in the former's municipal or ministerial office; a couple arguing in a hotel room; a man in a bank asking for a loan at highly disadvantageous rates; four Chelsea fans in a pub, preparing to crush Liverpool by virtue of vast quantities of booze and vociferous enthusiasm; a business lunch put on by some company or other, with twenty or so guests (not the whole thing, fortunately, just highlights and a speech at the end); a university don giving an appalling seminar; the occasional lecture (not the whole thing, unfortunately, I saw a very interesting one by a lecturer at Cambridge, about literature that has never existed); the sermon (the whole thing this time) by an Anglican bishop who seemed slightly inebriated; the oral exams for students wanting to enter a particular university; a doctor giving a smug, detailed, verbose diagnosis; girls answering strange questions at casting sessions, perhaps for an advertisement or something far worse, all too monosyllabic for me to find out. Sometimes, the videos were obviously home-made or very personal, and consequently more mysterious (I couldn't help wondering how they had reached us and consequently me, unless we had private clients too): the patriarchal Christmas greeting of some absentee who clearly thought he was much missed and needed; the message of a rich man (presumably posthumous or intended to be) explaining to heirs and dispossessed alike the reasoning behind his arbitrary, capricious, disappointing and deliberately unfair will; the declaration of love by a sick man of self-confessed (or more likely alleged) timidity, who claimed he could not bear to experience 'live' the intended recipient's refusal, which he said he knew was inevitable, but which he clearly didn't think was inevitable at all, you could tell by the way he spoke. And this was just the British material, as the greater part of it was, of course. I became aware of the number of occasions and places where people are or can be recorded or filmed: to begin with, in nearly every situation in which we are submitted to a test or an exam, shall we say, and in which we are asking for something, a job, a loan, a chance, a favour, a subsidy, a reference, an alibi. And, of course, clemency. I saw that whenever we ask for something, we are exposed, defenceless, at the almost absolute mercy of the person giving or refusing. And nowadays we are recorded, immortalised, often when we are at our most humble, or, if you prefer, humiliated. But also in any public or semi-public place, the most obvious and flagrant ones being hotel rooms, we take it as read now that we will be filmed at a bank, a shop, a petrol station, a casino, a sports arena, a car park, a government building.

I was rarely told in advance what I should look out for, what character traits, what degree of sincerity, or what specific intentions I should try to decipher in each indicated person or face, when, that is, I took work home. The following day, or a few days later, I would have a session with Mulryan or Tupra or with both, and they would ask me then whatever they wanted to know, sometimes one small detail and sometimes a great deal, it all depended, referring to the people in the videos by their respective names if these appeared in the films or were so well known as to be unmistakable, or, if not, by their assigned letters and numbers: 'Do you think that, despite his words of contrition, Mr Stewart is defrauding the tax office again? He got caught out five years ago, but he came to an agreement and paid more than he owed to avoid any problems, so might he, therefore, believe that he is now free of suspicion?' 'Do you think FH6 intended to repay the loan when he applied to Barclays for it? Or did he never intend paying it back at all? He was given the loan three months ago, you see, and hasn't been seen since.' I would say what I thought or what I could, and then we would pass on to the next one, in the briefer, more practical and prosaic cases, that is. Most cases, however, were not like that at all, they were elusive and complex, often vague and even ethereal, always tricky to respond to, more like those that Wheeler had dealt with in his day and which he had forecast for my day too, or, rather, which he had suggested would come my way, even though there was no war on; that, sooner or later, they would be brought to me for my opinion. And for that majority of cases one needed in effect what he had distractedly called — as if to play down the solemnity of those two expressions, which appeared, at least initially or, indeed, not even then, to be contradictory — 'the courage to see' and 'the irresponsibility of seeing'. For a long time, I was far more conscious of the latter, until I got used to it and, when I did, stopped worrying. And then . . . Ah, then, it's true, came the great irresponsibility.

The process of getting used to it, however, had been started by Wheeler on that Sunday in Oxford when he also talked to me about myself. Or perhaps by Toby Rylands, who had, at some point, already spoken to Wheeler about me, and had singled me out as someone of like mind, made of the same clay from which they had been shaped. But, no, it wasn't Rylands, because it isn't what is said of us behind our backs which changes things — which transforms things inside ourselves — it is what someone with authority or armed with mere insistence tells us about ourselves to our face that reveals and explains and tempts us to believe. It is the danger that stalks every artist or politician, or anyone whose work is subject to people's opinions and interpretations. If a film director, writer or musician begins to be described as a genius, a prodigy, a reinventor, a giant, they can all too easily end up thinking that it might be true. They then become conscious of their own worth, and become afraid of disappointing or — which is even more ridiculous and nonsensical, but it can't be put in any other way — of not living up to themselves, that is, to the people it turns out they were — or so others tell them, and as they now realise they are — in their previous exalted creations. 'So it wasn't just a product of chance or intuition or even my own freedom,' they might think, 'there was coherence and purpose in everything I was doing, what an honour to discover this, but what a curse too. Because now I have no option but to abide by that and to reach the same wretched heights in order not to let myself down, how awful, what an effort, and what a disaster for my work.' And this can happen to anyone, even if neither their work nor their personality is public, they have only to hear a plausible explanation of their inclinations or behaviour, an incantatory description of their actions or an analysis of their character, an evaluation of their methods — and to know that such a thing exists, or is attributed to them — for them to lose their blessedly mutable course, unforeseeable and uncertain, and with it their freedom. We tend to think that there is some hidden order unknown to us and also a plot of which we would like to form a conscious part, and if we glimpse a single episode of that plot in which there seems to be room for us, if we sense that we are caught up in its weak wheel even for an instant, then it is hard for us ever again to be able to imagine ourselves torn from that half-glimpsed, partial, intuited plot — a mere figment of the imagination. There is nothing worse than looking for a meaning or believing there is one. Or if there is one, even worse: believing that the meaning of something, even of the most trivial detail, could depend on us and on our actions, on our intention or our function, believing that there is such a thing as the will or fate, and even some complicated combination of the two. Believing that we do not owe ourselves entirely to the most erratic and forgetful, rambling and crazy of chances, and that we should be expected to be consistent with what we said or did, yesterday or the day before. Believing that we might contain in ourselves coherence and deliberation, as the artist believes is true of his work or the potentate of his decisions, but only once someone has persuaded them that this is so.

Wheeler had, in the end, begun at the beginning, if anything ever really has a beginning. Anyway, that Sunday morning, when I woke up much later than I would have wanted to and, of course, much later than he was expecting me to, he allowed himself no further preambles or postponements or circumlocutions, in so far as it was possible for him entirely to renounce such long-established characteristics of thought and conversation. The incomplete words he had at his disposal to tell me what he was going to tell me were, I suppose, mystery and limitation enough. As soon as he saw me come downstairs looking sleepy and ill-shaven (just a quick once-over with the razor so as to appear presentable or not, at least, too thuggish), he urged me to take a seat opposite him and to the right of Mrs Berry, who occupied one end of the table at which they had both just had breakfast. He waited until she had very kindly poured me some coffee, but not until I had drunk it or woken up a bit. On the half of the table unoccupied by table-cloth and plates and cups and jams and fruit lay open a large, bulky volume, there were always books everywhere. I had only to glance at it (the attraction of the printed word) for Peter to say in urgent tones, doubtless because he had not counted on such a late awakening on my part:

'Pick it up, go on. I got it out to show you.'

I drew the volume to me, but before reading a single line, I half-closed it — with one finger keeping the place — to have a look at the spine and see what the book was.

' Who's Who? It was a rhetorical question, because it clearly was Who's Who, with its rich red cover, the guide to the more or less illustrious, that year's United Kingdom edition.

'Yes, Who's Who, Jacobo. I bet you've never thought of looking me up in that, have you? My name is on that page, where it's open. Read what it says, will you, go on.'

I looked, I searched, there were quite a few Wheelers, Sir Mark and Sir Mervyn, a certain Muir Wheeler and the Honourable Sir Patrick and the Very Reverend Philip Welsford Richmond Wheeler, and there he was, between the two last names: 'Wheeler, Prof. Sir Peter', which was followed by a parenthesis, which I did not, at first, understand, which said: '(Edward Lionel Wheeler)'. It only took me two seconds, though, to remember that Peter used to sign his writings 'P. E. Wheeler', and that the E was for Edward, so the parenthesis was only there to record his name in its official entirety.

'Lionel?' I asked. Another rhetorical question, although less so this time. I was surprised by that third name, which had always seemed so actorly, doubtless because of Lionel Barrymore, and because of Lionel Atwill, who played archenemy Professor Moriarty to the great Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, and because of Lionel Stander who was persecuted in America by Senator McCarthy and had to go into exile in England in order to continue working (and become a bogus Englishman). And then there was Lionel Johnson, but he was a poet friend of Wilde and Yeats, a man from whom John Gawsworth claimed descendance (John Gawsworth, the literary pseudonym of the man who was in real life Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, that secretive writer, beggar and king, with whom I had been rather obsessed during my time teaching in Oxford all those years ago: his fanciful ancestry also included Jacobite nobles, namely, the Stuarts, the dramatist Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's contemporary, and the supposed 'Dark Lady' of the Sonnets, Mary Fitton, the courtesan). 'Lionel?' I said again with just a hint of mockery, which did not escape Wheeler.