Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  He and the bulky General Montgomery waited behind them like two henchmen, as if they were also part of the queue, and Tomás could not resist trying to dispel his own disquiet, because at least Montgomery had addressed a few sullen words to him and thus acknowledged his existence, unlike the man who appeared to be his boss.

  ‘Did he say his name was Reresby?’ he asked in a quiet voice. ‘I thought it was Tupra?’

  The burly viscount still had his black beret firmly on his head and his duffel coat fastened, he needed only to pull up his hood to complete the effect. His moustache was a very skilful copy of his hero’s moustache, it was just a shame that physically he was the exact opposite of the famous Spartan General, as Montgomery was also known. He shot Tom a scornful glance.

  ‘Mr Tupra calls himself whatever he pleases depending on the occasion, and as best suits us,’ he answered abruptly. ‘It’s not your turn to ask questions yet, Nevinson.’ He had not abandoned his stern stance, and it was odd that he should treat someone so much younger than him like that, for this rival of the victor of El Alamein was thirty-five if he was a day. He treated Tomás like a schoolboy or like someone of an inferior rank; he was clearly a military man, dressed in semi-civvies. Tom increasingly had the impression that the fellow felt he was doing him a favour simply by staying by his side and allowing him to gaze on Tupra and the lecturer.

  The imposing Ms Beckwith paid and Tupra followed, and she hung back so that they could emerge together into the light and breadth of Broad Street. Tupra, or Reresby, continued not to look at Tom or speak to him, still busy as he was with playing the gallant. Tom and Montgomery followed them like servants of old, keeping a respectful distance while the two flirts exchanged telephone numbers and cards, brief laughter and jokes, then said goodbye, presumably, Tom thought, until a few hours later. Then Tupra tossed his raincoat over his shoulders with an elegant, almost cocksure gesture, and strode off towards St Giles’ without even turning round to urge them to follow him, his coat flapping behind him like a cloak in the wind. When he reached the pub, The Eagle and Child, he walked straight in, and his two followers hastened to do likewise, the student guided by the field marshal, who was steering him along with his great hand on his shoulder, a very firm hand that did not, however, go so far as to actually propel him onwards.

  Once they were all seated at a table next to the large window and with three glasses of beer before them, Tupra finally addressed Tom, clearly feeling that no formal introductions were necessary. He obviously thought that, since they both knew who was who, why waste time on superfluities. Tomás Nevinson was, by then, feeling utterly cowed and diminished, a bundle of nerves or, rather, a bundle of fears; ever since he’d woken that morning, he had gone over and over in his stubborn imagination the worst things that could possibly happen to him, from his imminent arrest to his condemnation with no right of appeal, to life imprisonment in an English jail (where conditions were legendarily harsh), his whole life ruined almost before it had begun. Tupra’s disdainful attitude and the unexpected presence of his bluff companion had only contributed to further intimidating and unnerving him. The tiny, minimal sense of calm that Wheeler had instilled in him over the phone had completely vanished. He clung to and superstitiously repeated Wheeler’s more hopeful phrases (‘He’ll help you out’, ‘He’ll find some way out of all this’, ‘I would advise taking serious note of what he says’, ‘He’s a very resourceful fellow’), and the less welcome these two strangers made him feel, the more convinced he became that his fate depended on them, and the more inclined he felt, in his tormented inner self, to listen to and accept their instructions. They had succeeded in undermining his hopes with their postponements and indifference, and he had ended up clinging to them as if they were the last people on Earth.

  Tupra had certainly taken his time, but he did finally look up and fix his gaze on Tom, meanwhile unhurriedly sipping his beer. Then, putting the glass down on the table, he intensified his scrutiny and regarded Tom with the same flattering attentiveness he bestowed on whatever happened to be there before his eyes; Tom immediately felt protected and, therefore, well disposed towards this person who, up until then, hadn’t even acknowledged his existence, not even as an obstacle. With those lines from Little Gidding still in his head, Tom thought: ‘For him, I was like a dead man who has departed, an outcast of the universe. Now perhaps I’m like a dead man who returns, bringing the universe with him.’

  ‘Things look pretty bleak, Nevinson,’ Tupra said, coming straight to the point; his voice was quite a lot deeper than it had been when he was chatting to the lecturer, perhaps he had been putting on that other voice, or perhaps he was doing so now. ‘You’ve been most unlucky. Professor Wheeler told me what happened. I’ve also seen the report from that honest policeman, Morse. You made quite a good impression on him, but that won’t be of much help. It certainly won’t be enough. Anyway, I’m familiar with your version of events, so there’s no need for you to repeat it. I’m going to show you a few portraits now to see if you recognise anyone. Blakeston.’ He held out one hand to the general, who was still wearing his heroic beret even in the pub, perhaps he never took it off, perhaps he never washed his hair or perhaps he had no hair, it was impossible to tell. So the man’s name was Blakeston, unless he assumed a different name depending on the situation or the context. He opened the slim, handleless bag he had been holding under one arm, the kind a female student might use; he produced an envelope and passed it to Tupra, who took out eight A5 photos. He placed them on the table in two rows, like a card player revealing his hand at poker. ‘Take your time and study them carefully. See if one of them is the man you saw arriving at Janet Jefferys’ apartment after you left. Or so you say. It may be, of course, that no such man exists.’

  Tomás was not amused by this implied distrust, but then again, why should anyone believe him? Why should he be believed by a judge or jury who, as Wheeler had pointed out, would have no idea what really happened? He said nothing and studied the faces. They all looked rather distinguished or respectable, well-to-do. They certainly didn’t resemble criminals, rough and tough and sinister, they were all well dressed and neatly coiffed. And the photos weren’t mugshots taken in a police station. They were, to use Tupra’s word, like portraits. Not studio portraits, but gleaned perhaps from newspapers. Some were wearing the obligatory pinstripe suit, de rigueur among the rich and powerful in England. Tom soon whittled them down to two; he’d never seen the other six before.

  ‘It could have been one of them,’ he said, pointing to the two men whose features most closely resembled those he had seen at a distance: a nose with slightly flared nostrils; one of the men had small, rather drowsy eyes, while the other man had large, somewhat vehement eyes, or perhaps he had merely been dazzled by the flash; both had a slightly cleft chin, although the cleft was longer in one than in the other (like the actor Christopher Lee, who, at the time, was known for playing Sherlock Holmes and Dracula), but, of course, in the photo, that dimple could be a shadow, a trick of the light; and dark hair, although not as wavy as he remembered seeing in the light from the street lamp, but that image, which he had never made any real effort to retain, was already growing blurred. It’s infuriating that the harder you try to remember certain features and summon them up, the faster they tend to fade, grow dim and slip away. The same thing happens with the faces of our lost loved ones too, those you saw on a daily basis when they were alive; it happens with those who are merely absent, their faces tending to freeze in one expression or look; it happened to Tomás with Berta’s face whenever they were apart, her face appearing in his mind again and again, quite still, as if she were a painting, not someone full of breath and movement. ‘Yes, I’d say it was him,’ he added, choosing the one with the vehement eyes and the smaller chin. ‘Who is he? What’s his name?’ And he hoped that, whoever he was, his name was Hugh.

  Tupra picked up the six rejected photos and put them back in the envelope.

  ‘Are you sure,
Nevinson? Look again. Is that the bloke you saw?’ That was the word he used, ‘bloke’, not exactly respectful. ‘Because if he was, then I’m telling you, that’s very bad news for you. You need to be absolutely certain.’

  ‘Why bad news for me? What have I done wrong? I can’t be one hundred per cent certain. Bear in mind that I saw him at night, for maybe a second. This is only a photo, and it may not even be a recent one. Perhaps if I saw the man in the flesh, then I’d be able to identify him more accurately, or maybe not: by his stature, his build, the way he walked. All I can say is that, if he’s six foot two, then it’s not him.’

  ‘I think he’s five foot seven at most.’

  ‘Then it probably is him. I’m inclined to think it is. But why bad news for me?’

  Marshal Blakeston smoothed his moustache as if he needed to make some mechanical, manual, nervous preparation before intervening in the presence of his boss and without being told to, and his intervention took the form of jabbing with his index finger at the photo, which would need to be thoroughly cleaned afterwards, of fingerprints and possibly sweat and the odd drop of beer.

  ‘And you’ve never seen him before, Nevinson? I mean on the TV or in the press. Not that he appears very often, but from time to time. This man is Somebody.’ And he said it like that, as if it were capitalised, just as Janet had on her last night, or, rather, last hour. She’d used exactly the same expression. ‘Perhaps you recognise him because of that, rather than from seeing him standing in the doorway of your lover. Think carefully now.’ The already rather antiquated word ‘lover’ grated on Tom, he had never thought of the assistant from Waterfield’s in that grand manner. She was simply a young woman he occasionally had sex with, and with no intention of continuing that relationship or giving the matter any further thought or importance. That’s how it was among people his age, among students and non-students. If anyone was a ‘lover’, it was that man Hugh in London: he and Janet had been together for years, and she was unhappy, fed up with nothing changing, and she’d just given him an ultimatum.

  ‘No, I hardly ever watch television, and I just glance at the newspapers. I have no idea who he might be, and I certainly don’t recognise him from the TV or the press, but from having seen him the night before last in St John Street, ringing the bell of an apartment that might or might not have been Janet’s apartment, that’s the truth. Nor could I swear it was him. He certainly looks like him, but what do you want me to say? I can’t be certain. Who is he? What’s his name?’ he asked again, and now, having heard those doom-filled words ‘bad news’, he wasn’t sure if he wanted him to be called Hugh or something else.

  Tupra again took the floor, having first, with one imperative hand, brushed aside Blakeston’s finger, although without actually touching it, rather like someone shooing away an insect. Blakeston had kept his finger pressed down on the photo rather too emphatically.

  ‘He’s an MP,’ he said. Despite all the time he had spent in England, Tomás took a few seconds to remember that those initials stood for ‘Member of Parliament’. ‘His name’s Hugh Saumarez-Hill, and it’s highly likely that he was the man you saw, because, as we’ve known for some time, he’s been in a sexual relationship with Janet Jefferys. It makes sense, then, that he should visit her.’

  ‘You knew? Who? The two of you? Then it must have been him.’

  ‘We two are more than two, indeed more than a hundred, I’ve really no idea how many.’

  ‘Probably more than a thousand, Bertram,’ said Viscount Blakeston proudly, again quickly smoothing his moustache. But Tupra took no notice of him and went on:

  ‘And we, who are more than a hundred, know quite a lot. Not everything, but a lot. Some know some things and others other things, but when we put it all together, we know almost everything, at least about MPs and those in positions of responsibility. Given those facts, it would seem likely that it was him, but, then again, it can’t be, because Mr Saumarez-Hill is beyond suspicion. Our diligent Inspector Morse has been talking to him, as well as to a few people who work with him. Morse went up to London yesterday. Mr Saumarez-Hill didn’t deny his relationship with Janet Jefferys, that would have been foolish. The last time he saw her was last weekend, as usual, and he has no idea who could possibly have wanted to harm the young woman, whom he never visited here in Oxford, she always went to see him, they met in a small flat belonging to his family, and which he uses as an occasional office and for informal work meetings. Mr Saumarez-Hill says that he and his wife are estranged and have very few activities in common, not even on Saturdays and Sundays. Politics takes up all his time, a handy excuse, but more or less credible, or one that you could at least pretend to believe.’

  ‘I wouldn’t believe him if I were his wife,’ said Blakeston, and again Tupra continued speaking as if he hadn’t heard him.

  ‘So the bloke has no idea what Jefferys used to get up to during the rest of the week, or what friends she had. He’d never even heard of you, sir, but then that’s understandable.’ It was odd that he should suddenly address Tom respectfully as ‘sir’ when he had just referred to Saumarez-Hill dismissively as ‘the bloke’; this seemed a deliberate ploy, not a slip of the tongue. ‘According to Morse, he didn’t seem at all curious about her life, but then some people are after one thing only and anything else is surplus to requirements. The fact is, though, that he spent the whole of Wednesday night in London and has witnesses to that effect. He couldn’t have been in Oxford, unless, that is, his witnesses are mistaken or are lying. The former is unlikely, given that the night before last is still very recent; the latter is perfectly possible, it happens a lot everywhere. But since there’s no proof of that, their testimonies are valid. That’s why I said earlier that, if he was the bloke you saw, then that’s bad news for you, because he’s out of the picture and you are still the main suspect, pretty much the only one actually. Everything will point to you because there isn’t anyone else, do you understand? Laying the blame on a thief or a maniac, well, the police only resort to that in the most perplexing of cases, or when a lot of time has passed and they’re still completely in the dark. Right now, that would be premature.’

  ‘Or inadmissible since there’s already a fellow who had carnal relations with her around the time she was killed,’ said Blakeston, having first adjusted his beret, which had been in no need of adjustment.

  ‘As Blakeston put it so simply and graphically, Mr Saumarez-Hill is Somebody. He’s influential and important and protected by his party. A Whig with a future, you see. The police aren’t going to try to catch him out without some reason, without some clues. On the contrary, even if there were any such clues, they would still tend to hold back, to wait, and investigate other avenues, because of who he is. You on the other hand …’ Tupra paused and looked Tomás up and down with his all-embracing eyes, as if what he saw in him were his fear and exhaustion, his imminent ensuing surrender. ‘You, on the other hand, are nobody.’

  ‘An outcast of the universe,’ was Tom’s immediate thought, echoing Wheeler’s words, copying them mentally, ‘although put more crudely and without the literary reference. Yet they say it as if this were not simply what awaits us all from birth onwards, to traverse the Earth without our presence changing it one iota, as if we were mere ornaments, bit-part players or eternally motionless figures in the background of some painting, an indistinguishable, dispensable, superfluous mass, all of us replaceable and invisible, all of us nobodies. The exceptions are so few that they hardly count, and, after only a short time, a century or ten years, no trace remains of them either: most end up the same as those who were never important anyway and then it’s as if none of them had ever existed, or perhaps only as a blade of grass, a speck of dust, a life, a war, a handful of ashes, a thread, the kind of thing that matters to Wheeler, but that no one else remembers. Not even wars are remembered once the battlefield has been cleaned up.’ He decided to go no further with these thoughts, since he urgently needed to consider his own situation, to t
hink about himself. He allowed himself one final outburst, by way of puerile compensation: ‘Even that Saumarez-Hill fellow will one day be forgotten, contrary to what they seem to believe; he, too, will be nobody, given that he shared his lover with me and was, therefore, the same as me, whether knowingly or not.’

  ‘Would they hold back?’ he asked, genuinely surprised, and with a touch of premature desolation in his voice. This would have been normal in a dictatorial country like Spain, with a police force that was, at the same time, arbitrary and servile, and basically corrupt. But he wouldn’t have imagined such a thing possible in England. Perhaps there were sectors, spheres, in which all countries resemble each other and are all governed in the same way. ‘Would that include Morse? He didn’t strike me as being the kind to turn a blind eye and do nothing.’