Needless to say, when that picture was published in 1988, I couldn’t help but remember the other image I mentioned earlier and which I’ve never found again, not even on the Internet. Just as well, really, because it was even more unbearable. When a crowd or a mob attacks someone, they always tear off his clothes first, I’m not sure why, whether to humiliate him or out of sheer rage or to make the person feel still more defenceless, or to warn him of what is to come or to brutalise him, I don’t know. After seeing those images of the two corporals being slaughtered like that, I was again filled with terrible foreboding, if ‘foreboding’ is the right word for something that has already happened and is, therefore, already in the past, possibly the distant past. Seeing the collective rage that sometimes gripped the people of Northern Ireland, it was clear to me that, if Tomás had been there, and had passed himself off as Irish and even, for a while, as a member of the IRA, if he had won their trust with the intention of trapping or betraying them, and had been unmasked, he would have suffered something not so very different (possibly worse) from what the corporals had experienced, as had other British soldiers, and perhaps other infiltrators and, of course, informers. Except that his battered, naked body wouldn’t have been left on display as a lesson or demonstration or message or show of force, and they certainly wouldn’t have allowed a priest to help him on his journey into the next world. He would have been buried in secret one moonless night in the middle of a wood, he would have been thrown into the sea or into Lough Neagh, weighed down with heavy chains so that his body would never resurface; he would have been fed to the dogs or the pigs, he would have been chopped into pieces or cremated – ashes that land on an old man’s sleeve for the old man then to blow them off. He would have vanished completely, he would have been snatched away as an added punishment for his superiors and his relatives, snatched away from me, his unknown, distant wife, Berta Isla. He would have been shown no pity, only vengeful rage, he would have been cast out from the universe, what was left of him, what lingered, as if he’d never trod the earth or traversed the world. Just as, throughout history, towns have been razed to the ground and their entire populations wiped out, so that they would leave no descendants, and since they couldn’t be killed two or more times, as their executioners would have liked, they further punished them by destroying every last vestige, all memory obliterated. Just as there is hatred of place, spatial hatred, which leads to that place being reduced to rubble, to the land around being flattened (it’s a very unhealthy thing, that loathing for place), there’s also biographical hatred, personal hatred. Not only do they kill the person, they remove all trace of his pernicious existence, render him null and void as if he’d never been born or lived or died or travelled any distance; as if he’d never done anything either good or bad and was merely a blank page or an illegible inscription, someone of whom no record remains, as if he were no one. That could have been Tomás’s fate, to be plunged into the mist of what happened and didn’t happen, into the dark back of time, down the sea’s throat. To be this: a blade of grass, a speck of dust, a thread, a lizard climbing a wall in summer, a cloud of smoke that finally disperses; snow that falls but doesn’t settle.
I couldn’t talk to Jack Nevinson about those fears dating from 1988 or from before, nor about the Kindeláns, nor about Northern Ireland or Éire. That might have made him doubt, might have undermined his conviction, and what would be the point of that, he was already old and alone, and you need something to hold on to when you’re old and alone, even the most insignificant detail of the day’s events, or, if not that, then a fantasy. When Jack died a couple of months later, I felt even gladder that I’d never said a word to him about those events, because, when he fell out of bed in his pyjamas, he could still go on thinking that his mysterious younger son was alive and would come back, even though he wouldn’t be there to see him. And when, with his death, I remained a little more alone (although my children were with me all those years, as well as the occasional man who never stayed), sometimes, I couldn’t help but feel infected by his feeling, his conviction based on nothing at all. 1988 had dissipated by then, and with it what had happened in Belfast to Corporals Wood and Howes, half-lynched by the members of a funeral cortège and then murdered by several hands, hands so insatiable that they needed to kill each man at least ten times over, four stab wounds and six bullets. Yes, that sense of foreboding gradually faded, but what my father-in-law had said lingered on. For that reason, and out of a kind of superstition that often takes root and becomes a reflex reaction (like touching wood or, in the old days, making the sign of the cross), I would occasionally go out onto one of the balconies, especially at dusk, as it grew dark, or at dawn if I happened to be awake, in order to scan – with binoculars or without – the Plaza de Oriente, where Las Meninas was painted, Calle de San Quintín and Calle de Lepanto, where the Casa de las Matemáticas once stood, and Plaza de la Encarnación, and the esplanade outside the Palacio Real with its many visitors, hoping, at some point, to spot a familiar figure transformed by time and suffering. Or transformed perhaps by a better life than the one he would have had with me, with another wife and other children. Tomás had, indeed, proved too mysterious, and in the realm of chimeras anything is possible.
VII
* * *
‘You can’t imagine, Mr Southworth, the number of times I’ve thought what I thought at that moment when I had to decide what to do, it must be twenty years ago now.’
Tom Nevinson wasn’t that much younger than his former tutor, but he continued to address him respectfully as Mr Southworth. Sometimes it’s impossible to make that shift, for example, with one’s former teacher, especially if, in between, teacher and student haven’t seen each other, if there’s been no continued contact.
‘What was it that you thought?’ asked Mr Southworth, perhaps more out of deference than out of any real curiosity. He had still not recovered from the unexpectedness of the visit, which had happened totally unannounced, with no previous phone call; from the sudden irruption into his life of this middle-aged man claiming to be Tomás Nevinson, but who was so different from the man he remembered. Mr Southworth’s hair was now almost white, prematurely white, but otherwise he hadn’t changed very much. He occupied the same rooms in St Peter’s College, and was still very skilful at managing the waves of his black gown, the skirts of which fell around his legs in a cascade, but never became entangled, and which he still insisted on wearing at tutorials and classes, even though this was beginning to be frowned upon in the 1990s, as a sign of authority and elitism, a foretaste of a new, more rancorous century. Everything was beginning to be frowned upon then, any show of courtesy, distinction or knowledge was experienced as an affront. However, Mr Southworth was naturally courteous, distinguished and knowledgeable – as, even more so, was Professor Wheeler (who, shortly afterwards, would be made Sir Peter Wheeler) – and he wasn’t willing to go against his own nature in order to content the manipulated masses brought up in a state of congenital victimism and encouraged to use an inferiority complex as the passport, alibi and engine of their existence.
‘It will seem extreme to you, as if I were making a claim to clairvoyance,’ said Tom Nevinson, ‘but I was sure my decision would affect my whole life, as has proved to be the case, not necessarily in the days or months or even the years that followed, but I knew that, from that moment on, it would affect everything else, and yet my life had barely started; you knew me then and perhaps remember what I was like, but you have no idea what I’m like now. What I thought and have often repeated to myself was this: “What is now will be always. I will be who I am not, I will be a fiction, a spectre who comes and goes and departs and returns. And I will simply happen, I will be sea and snow and wind.” I would repeat this over and over as a way of confirming it to myself.’ He fell silent, his eyes intense and bewildered, looking around him at the cosy, book-lined room where, an eternity or two ago, he’d attended so many tutorials, as if he couldn’t believe how unchanged it wa
s after all his years of wandering, and, besides, he’d realised that his words meant nothing to Mr Southworth, who could have no idea what lay behind them.
Back then, he hadn’t told him about his subsequent phone conversation with Wheeler, or only very briefly. Nor about his encounter with his recruiting officers, Tupra and Blakeston, nor the conditions they’d imposed on him. One condition had been that he must join them immediately, and the other, to tell no one anything. If he was going to work for the Secret Service and be trained by them, everything, from that very instant, would be just that – secret. Nevinson had come to say goodbye to Mr Southworth a few days later, but, as regards his problem, to which Southworth had been privy from the start, he’d merely said: ‘You were right, Mr Southworth, thank you. Professor Wheeler was a great help. He gave me some sound advice, and it’s all resolved now. The police won’t trouble me any more, they’ve seen I had nothing to do with the death of that poor girl.’ ‘And what about that man Morse?’ Southworth asked. ‘He seemed a clever, painstaking fellow.’ ‘Don’t worry, it’s all cleared up with him as well. I took some legal advice, and the Professor was very persuasive.’ ‘Have they found the man who did it?’ ‘Not that I know, but I imagine they will.’ Mr Southworth was discreet and didn’t want to insist, to draw him out. If necessary, he would ask Peter, as he called him, and with whom he was friends. And that’s what he did a week later, when they met in Southworth’s room at the Taylorian, alone, although Wheeler declined to go into detail, as if it were a trivial matter, tedious, old news. ‘Ah, yes, young Nevinson,’ he’d said. ‘Oh, a fuss about nothing. A mistake, a misunderstanding, a nasty shock. He’ll be back in Madrid by now, under Starkie’s wing, or about to be.’
Yes, the no-longer-young man claiming to be Tom Nevinson and who doubtless was (why would anyone pass himself off as a former student of his after twenty years, why would he bother to lie to him like that?), the man who had turned up in his rooms at St Peter’s with a febrile look in his eyes and the rather startled expression of someone who has just seen a ghost or climbed out of the hole of a long, deep deception, or undergone torture or survived an ordeal, realised that Mr Southworth knew almost nothing. He went on talking nonetheless. He hadn’t known where to begin and had found it hard to get started; once he had, however, he didn’t want to lose momentum, even if that momentum was rather violent and bordering on the incoherent.
‘And I recalled two lines I’d read a short while before: “Dust in the air suspended marks the place where a story ended.” ’ And before he could say anything more, Mr Southworth, who was a cultured, well-read man, immediately and un-pedantically gave the source of those lines, like someone recognising a passage from the Bible.
‘Ah, yes, Eliot’s Little Gidding if I remember rightly.’
‘Yes, I’d just happened to read it, not the whole thing, only fragments. I know the poem by heart now, from start to finish, and have for some time. And then I thought: “Here, now, is the end of my story. But what awaits me? Because, at the same time, I’m still here, and now is always. This is the death of air. But one can survive that.” That’s what I thought, Mr Southworth, and it was both fortunate and unfortunate.’
‘Shades of Eliot again, I believe.’
This time, Tomás didn’t bother confirming the source, he was too absorbed in what he was saying, too distraught, his eyes darting about, now directed brightly at his former tutor and his surroundings, now turned dully inwards, towards some memory or a whole jumble of memories, towards the void.
‘One survives that death, Mr Southworth, the death of air. I know this and can tell you it’s true. I’ve experienced it myself.’ He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow and temples, even though, despite his agitated state, he wasn’t actually sweating. The handkerchief was clean and neatly folded, and remained so. ‘It’s very difficult to end a life, when life doesn’t want to depart. It’s even difficult to kill someone, when life decides it’s not yet time to abandon that person, that it’s not ready to withdraw. It’s the same if someone tries to kill you, if you struggle against it with all your might and, more especially, your will. You’ve no idea what the will is capable of if attacked. How could you know that, here in Oxford. This is a peaceful place, outside the universe.’
Mr Southworth had gradually recovered from his initial feelings of awkwardness and surprise and was trying to reconcile the brilliant young man with a gift for languages, who had attracted so much attention during his time at university, both his and that of other teachers, with the man before him now. This man was about forty, possibly more (it might well be over twenty years since he’d last seen him). He had a greying moustache and beard and both his body and face had filled out. His hair was flecked with grey and was thinner than it used to be; he wore it combed back, revealing a deeply receding hairline. The young man’s pleasant features had grown coarser: it was as if his nose had become somehow broader and his square chin more like a trapezoid, the chin of an ancient cartoon character; his grey eyes had lost what spark they’d had, and seemed profoundly dull and tormented, their colour darker and their pupils wild, whereas, before, they had been piercing and restless; the one thing that hadn’t changed was his full, shapely mouth, although it was slightly concealed by his moustache and seemed less red and less firm. His forehead and chin were deeply lined, horizontally and vertically, and he had a faded scar just below the left-hand corner of his mouth, very similar, thought Southworth, to Peter’s scar, which had never faded, and which, according to what Peter had told him, was the result of a car accident back in 1941, during his training at Lochailort, on the west coast of Scotland. With time, Nevinson’s scar would also grow whiter (pining palely away, but never entirely gone); it was odd that they should both have a scar in the same place and running in the same direction, for in both men, the scar ran diagonally down to the base of the chin.
The new Nevinson was talking very fast, almost gabbling, but, at the same time, he gave the impression of someone utterly resolute, who wouldn’t go off at tangents once he’d calmed down, who could now think clearly and had regained his composure. Nor would he beat about the bush. There was something mutinous about him, impatient, exasperated, an inner hardness that the young Tom had lacked, so far as he could remember anyway. The younger man had been easy-going and ironic, whereas this man was grave and angry, with little time for jokes. Southworth hadn’t thought about it for a long time, but now he remembered how fearful, almost terrified, Tom had been after his interview with Morse, at which Southworth had insisted on being present, as witness and protector. His panic, utter confusion and sheer horror had been due, too, to the hammer blow he’d just received, the news that the young woman he’d had sex with the night before, and on other occasions too, had been murdered shortly after they’d parted, after he’d left her flat. What was her name? Morse had mentioned her name, and, oddly, as Southworth now recalled, Tom hadn’t known her surname until then. She worked in Waterfield’s bookshop, and her name and her surname both began with a ‘J’, something like Joan Jefferson or Jane Jellicoe or perhaps Janet Jeffries. He’d read nothing about the incident in the newspapers, but that wasn’t so very strange, since he didn’t tend to read a daily paper, indeed, whole days would pass before he had time to cast an eye over one in college, for he was always too busy rushing from tutorial to seminar, and any remaining hours were devoted to studying and to his voluminous reading. It was true that Oxford and Oxonians lived outside the universe, absorbed in their own petty affairs. Tom had told him afterwards that everything was fine, and, like most of his colleagues, Southworth wasn’t that curious about the world outside Congregation, as if what happened outside the university wasn’t really their concern. He’d immediately forgotten about the episode, he didn’t know the girl or couldn’t place her, and all girls seemed rather alike to him; and since it was no longer a matter affecting one of his students, the crime might as well have been committed in Manchester or Paris or Warsaw. The man befor
e him now wouldn’t have been alarmed by a violent death, even the death of someone close, nor by a policeman’s questions, even if they implicated him, or not at least in the same way. ‘Perhaps,’ thought E A Southworth (which was how his name appeared on the sign on his door), ‘he wouldn’t even have blinked. He would have accepted it as just another incident in the world, the world that was always faithful in its fashion, the world he now knows. What has this Tom seen over the last twenty years?’ he wondered as he continued to observe him. ‘What has he done or had done to him, to have become so heartless? He had been heading off to be a diplomat in Spain or a civil servant in the Foreign Office, which were the obvious routes open to him, given his mastery of so many languages. But this isn’t the face of a diplomat or a civil servant. This is the face of someone rootless and disillusioned, and doubtless desperate. Yes, and heartless too.’
Berta Isla Page 37
