Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  ‘How are things with your boyfriend, Hugh? Do you plan to live together? Are you going to move in with him?’ he asked. He didn’t usually ask anything about Hugh, certainly not so directly, but he found the way Janet was so completely ignoring him both disconcerting and irritating. After one of these sessions, he never expected her to be affectionate or to cuddle up to him; that was the last thing he wanted, but it did seem a bit much for her to immediately immerse herself in a book, as if she were showing him the door, now that he had fulfilled his strictly physical function. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, or any other subject that would command her attention.

  She closed her book, although not completely, leaving one finger in as a marker, and Tomás could finally see the cover clearly: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, a Penguin edition with a grey spine. He was unjustifiably surprised: he had never seen her reading before, but given that she worked among books, it would have been odd for her not to open and read one now and then.

  ‘There never are any plans with him, just habit and repetition,’ she said. ‘He’s too busy to make plans, or even to stop to think that the future exists beyond the following day or the following week. He’s the sort who lives from day to day. As far as he’s concerned, things are fine as they are. He doesn’t like change.’

  ‘What about you, though? Are things fine for you too?’

  ‘No, they’re not. I’ve been waiting for things to change for years now, but I know that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘So what next?’ Tomás felt suddenly curious, and reproached himself for not having asked such questions on previous occasions.

  Janet removed her finger from its place in the book, turned down the corner of the page and put the closed book on the pillow. She sat up a little, leaning on one elbow, her head resting on one hand, while with the other – with its long, painted nails – she stroked her mane of hair, perhaps considering whether to answer or not. She must have been a natural blonde, although a duller blonde than she was then. Her hair was a positively dazzling, Scandinavian yellow, so intense as to be unmistakable if you happened to see her in the street; sometimes it resembled a golden helmet lit by a hidden sun that fell like a spotlight on her through Oxford’s shifting clouds.

  ‘I’ve given him an ultimatum,’ she said coolly, and all her features grew suddenly thinner, as happens to the very old, in whom, however, it’s a warning of imminent death; as if nose, eyes and mouth had turned into sharp, cutting ice, even her lovely curved eyebrows and her chin. ‘I’ve given him until next weekend to change the situation.’

  ‘And what will you do if he won’t? Will you leave him? I imagine you know that ultimatums nearly always rebound against the people issuing them and usually turn out badly.’

  ‘Of course I do, especially in this particular case. I’m not expecting a response, or not at least the one I’d like.’

  ‘So why wait another week, then?’

  She fell silent, then took a large toffee from a glass jar she kept on the bedside table and put it in her mouth. Tom watched as it filled first one cheek, then the other, as if it were too big for either.

  ‘Well, the truth is that you always hope for something, however convinced you are to the contrary. You hope to give the other person a fright, that he’ll imagine how much he’ll miss you, how difficult it will be to live without you. But that other person never imagines anything or takes such warnings seriously. Besides, he’s been used to not seeing me for five days of the week, which is how he wanted it from the start. No, I’m not expecting any surprises. I just thought I owed him a warning, and not to take any steps without telling him beforehand and explaining what those steps would be. Because I won’t just leave him. I’ll ruin his life first. Leaving him wouldn’t be enough after years of broken – not to say, false – promises. False from day one. I’d probably be doing him a favour. No, I’ve squandered my years, invested an awful lot of time, endured night after lonely night. I’ve lost all that time now, and no one can give it back to me. Just to leave him wouldn’t make up for that. If it’s been a complete waste of time for me, if I’ve lost out, then it should be the same for him.’

  ‘He’s married, then,’ said Tomás.

  Janet changed her position, shaking her bracelets as she did so, to shuffle them further up her arm, and she looked at him, surprised, as if wondering why she was telling him all this for the first time, after their many previous encounters. She bit through the toffee so that it was less uncomfortable and unmanageable in her mouth. Her thighs were slightly parted, and she hadn’t put her knickers back on, they were still there on the floor (she may not even have wiped herself clean when he went to the bathroom, possibly a sign of despair, or else carelessness). And although Tom had just visited that part of her anatomy, he felt a sudden impulse to return, an unexpected, irresistible sense of urgency, even though it was doubtless purely visual. She’d been standing with her back to him before, and he hadn’t looked. And the fleeting thought occurred to him: ‘How is this possible? A moment ago I was thinking I should have saved myself the trouble, and yet here I am wanting it again.’

  ‘You’re asking a lot of questions today,’ Janet said suspiciously, and added, not so much to satisfy his curiosity as because she couldn’t stop herself: ‘If you read the papers, you’ll find out. Not that it matters. What matters is that he’s Someone.’ That’s how it sounded, as if she had added a capital letter, indicating ‘someone important’. ‘And I can turn him into Nobody, into a has-been. He knows this, but he doesn’t believe it. He thinks I wouldn’t dare, or that he’ll once again persuade me and placate me, and everything will carry on as before. That I’ll get over it. That I’ll go and see him next weekend and after a few kisses and caresses and a few jokes, I’ll forget all about my ultimatum. That’s one of his charms: his incorrigible optimism. He’s convinced that everything will always go his way. Always. I wish I were like that.’

  ‘So Hugh is Someone, then?’ Tom couldn’t resist asking. ‘But who is he? Do I know him?’

  ‘That’s a question too far. Look, I’m tired. You’d better leave.’ She said this without moving, without giving the slightest indication that she might see him out, or even stand up to give him a farewell kiss. Tomás could see what he could see, her still moist, still slightly tumescent cunt; it seemed to him to be pulsating, and he felt it calling to him still more loudly. He wanted to enter it again or take a closer look, and, after all, what was there to stop him? Nothing. He crouched down so as to observe it brazenly and from the appropriate height, and even reached out two fingers, for the visual is often a prelude to the tactile, but not always, some men prefer to look and abhor any contact. ‘What are you doing?’ Janet interrupted him in a voice that was both incredulous and offended, and quickly brought her thighs together as if a dagger were approaching, thus shutting off the view. ‘What’s wrong with you tonight? I’ve just told you that I’m really tired. What were you thinking? Aren’t you in a hurry to get away? Well, I’m in a hurry to get to sleep.’

  Tomás Nevinson paused, embarrassed, his fingers in mid-air. ‘Yes, what am I doing?’ he asked himself. He improvised a feeble, unconvincing excuse, of the kind you don’t expect to be believed, merely heard and ignored:

  ‘You misunderstood, I’m sorry. I thought I’d left my cigarettes on the bed, underneath you. I must have them in my jacket.’ He stood up, went over to where his jacket was, put it on, and took out the small metal Marcovitch cigarette case, placed a cigarette between his lips, but didn’t light it. Now that he was on his feet, he put his raincoat on as well and prepared to leave, since he had nothing more to do there and there was nothing more he wanted to do. ‘Let me know how it goes. With the ultimatum, I mean. I wish you luck.’

  ‘I’ll need it.’ She fell silent for a few seconds, then added, more to herself than to him, ‘I can hardly be bothered to set it all in motion; vengeance is hard work, and stressful too. But I’ll do it. I’ll do it …’

  Jane
t said these last words while staring into space, and almost out of inertia. She did sound genuinely exhausted now. She picked up The Secret Agent, opened it and stared at the page. She pretended to be reading, as if she were saying to him: ‘As far as I’m concerned, you’ve left already.’ But she wasn’t taking in a single word. Tom went over to her, stroked her cheek by way of a goodbye, and she mechanically raised her hand to return his gesture, but without looking up; she miscalculated and scratched him slightly with her long nails and knocked the cigarette from his lips. Tom turned away, but didn’t flinch or go and look at his face in the mirror, it could only have been a tiny scratch. He didn’t pick up his cigarette either, which must have rolled under the bed. She didn’t even notice this minor incident, her eyes fixed on the same page as if she were studying a map she had to memorise.

  Tomás went downstairs into the street; it was a chilly night. He walked only as far as the corner of Beaumont Street, took out another Marcovitch cigarette and lit it, deciding to smoke it there, looking up at the lighted windows of Janet’s flat, for that second, untimely urgent impulse had not entirely dissipated, despite the rebuff he’d received, but he knew the night was over and that there’d be no point in going up again. Given her sudden tiredness, he was expecting the lights to go out at any moment, and then the temptation would vanish. There was no street lamp on St John Street where he was standing, but there was one near Janet’s door. This is why he could see without being seen. He was just about to stub out his cigarette when a well-built man of medium height suddenly appeared. Tom hadn’t seen him get out of a car or even heard his footsteps before he entered that pool of light. He had dark, wavy hair, was wearing a long, calf-length overcoat, black or navy blue, as if in the hope that this would make him look taller and slimmer, with a pale grey scarf carefully tucked in at the collar, and matching grey gloves, the kind a racing driver might wear. Tom only glimpsed the man’s face, a flash, a blurred snapshot: a nose with large nostrils, small, bright eyes, cleft chin, an attractive combination, at least at first glance, which is all Tom had. He would have been in his forties, and moved with great ease and confidence. He took the three steps up to the door in one agile bound. Tom saw him ring the bell, saw him say something very quickly (something like ‘It’s me, open up’, nothing more), and then he went straight in. He raised the collar of his coat and disappeared behind the door, which immediately closed again. Tomás Nevinson continued looking up at the windows for the time it took to smoke another cigarette. The windows remained lit, but he saw no figure silhouetted in them. The man was clearly visiting someone else, and now he, Tom, really did have nothing more to do there.

  The following day, at the end of one of his tutorials in St Peter’s College, in the rooms of a newly recruited and still youthful teacher or don, Mr Southworth, a plain-clothes policeman was waiting respectfully and patiently outside for the class to end. He said he wanted to speak to Tom and asked Southworth, quite unnecessarily, if he could come in. Southworth in turn asked if he could stay or if he should leave, to which the police officer replied that this was up to him and Mr Nevinson, and that, for the moment, he merely wanted to check a few facts and ask a few questions. That ‘for the moment’ did not augur well. He introduced himself as Inspector or Sergeant or whatever it was, and prefixed his name with some initials – DS or DI or CID or DC – none of which meant anything to Tomás, and so he failed to retain them, thus remaining unclear as to the man’s rank, and ascertaining only that he was a member of the Thames Valley Constabulary and was called Morse. The three men sat down – Southworth overcome by curiosity, or perhaps a desire to protect his brilliant student – and the policeman, a serious man of thirty or so, with pale, watery-blue eyes, a slightly hooked nose, a wavy mouth that looked as if it had been drawn in pencil, and a vaguely imperious air, said rather than asked:

  ‘Mr Nevinson, last night you were with Janet Jefferys in her flat in St John Street, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I was. Why?

  ‘You suppose?’ said Morse, opening his eyes wide in scornful surprise. ‘Aren’t you sure?’

  ‘What I meant to say was that I realise now that I’ve never known her surname, or, if she told me what it was some time ago, I’ve forgotten it. To me, she’s just Janet who works at Waterfield’s. But it must be her, I imagine, if she lives in St John Street. I’ve been there several times, of course, and last night too, but why? What’s happened? And how do you know?’

  Morse did not answer this, but said:

  ‘Doesn’t it seem a little odd to you that I, who have only seen her once and when she’s no longer alive, should know her surname, but you don’t? Was your relationship that superficial?’

  ‘No longer alive? What do you mean, “no longer alive”?’ asked Tomás, more uncomprehending than alarmed.

  ‘I assume, naturally, that she was alive when you left? How long were you there? What time did you leave?’

  Tomás began to get used to the idea or to assimilate the words as if they were true, because he had heard them clearly and they were clearly true. He turned pale, felt sick and a desire to retch, but controlled himself.

  ‘She’s dead? What happened to her? How can that be? I was with her until about ten o’clock, and she was absolutely fine. I spent a whole hour with her, from nine until ten, more or less, and at no point did she feel unwell.’

  The policeman said nothing for a few seconds, studying him with an interrogative eye, as if waiting for him to say more or to give something away by his facial expression. This was enough to make Tomás feel uncomfortable and to alarm Mr Southworth, who raised one hand and opened his mouth to intervene. In the end, he didn’t, perhaps because he had not yet mentally formulated what he was about to say, and he was always a very precise fellow. Instead, he merely held out the palm of that hand to Morse, as if allowing him to go first or as if urging him to continue. As if he were a theatre director prompting a distracted or forgetful actor to give his response. And he succeeded.

  ‘She had no reason to feel unwell,’ said Morse in a voice that was a strange mixture of harsh and gentle. ‘Her death was caused by her tights, with which she was strangled. And as far as we can ascertain, this happened at around the time you left her. Either a little before or a little afterwards.’

  The sense of danger is as quickly aroused as the survival instinct, and Tom Nevinson was not thinking now about what had happened to Janet, that she was no longer in this world and had been driven from it in the cruellest possible way, without warning and with no chance to prepare herself, vainly resisting someone else’s decision and her own extinction, unable to believe what was happening to her, trying to call for help and unable to utter a sound. He did not even ponder how strange it must be to cease to exist, the incredulity of the person who still retains some remnant of consciousness, until that, too, is snuffed out. What he thought was this: ‘I casually removed those tights last night and, who knows, maybe I laddered them or accidentally tore them; they were left lying on the floor along with her knickers, no one picked them up, and I, of course, didn’t bother, it wasn’t my job. Who would have thought they would be put to such use, that someone, some dark, murderous person, saw them there and immediately had that idea, how is that possible? A murderer. Those tights will, therefore, have my fingerprints on them, and not those of the well-built man who arrived after me, he probably kept his grey racing-driver’s gloves on, at no point would he have removed them, and so his fingerprints won’t even be on the doorbell downstairs, and I was too far away to see if it was Janet’s doorbell, although it must have been, even though I didn’t see his silhouette or hers later on in the window, the door and the bed were too far away, she would have opened the door perhaps thinking I had come back to try my luck again, she would have interrupted her reading or her absorbed contemplation of those lines in The Secret Agent, a novel she will never finish now …’ Because our thoughts immediately revert to ourselves and our own salvation as soon as we realise we might b
e in danger, then even the still warm dead are relegated to the background; after all, we can’t do anything for them now, nothing for poor Janet with her wasted, truncated time, but, on the other hand, there’s Tom to worry about.

  ‘It must have been afterwards,’ he said hastily, naïvely. ‘I can assure you that she was alive when I left. It must have been the man who arrived immediately after that.’