He wished he’d never heard that particular form of words, ‘to pass yourself off as someone else’, because now, with time on his hands to think, he had begun to analyse it. For years, he’d never even considered what it meant, it was simply his job to be various others and almost never himself. Mr Cromer-Fytton, though, had no characteristics, no role or behaviour had been assigned to him, he’d been given no other languages to speak, no particular diction or accent, which meant Tom was free to mould him as he wished because there were no spectators to be deceived or persuaded, and Tom realised that he found it hard to know who he really was. All those comings and goings, all those absences, had blurred his identity. Until very recently, and for some time, he’d been Jim Rowland, schoolteacher, but he had quickly buried him. Once that London train had set off, distancing him from that other self, he rarely looked back. When he was haunted by memories of Meg and Val, especially Val, he would immediately dismiss them, as he had before in other incarnations, without a thought, almost without a hint of remorse; you couldn’t allow yourself to get caught in a spider’s web. The only place to which his mind or memory did keep returning was Madrid, the house on Calle Pavía and the now empty apartment on Calle Jenner (he’d been kept informed of any really important news, the death of his mother first and, later on, that of his father), the streets of Miguel Ángel and Monte Esquinza and Almagro and Fortuny and Martínez Campos and so many others. If he was still someone, if time and circumstance had not worn him away, transforming him into an illegible stone or inscription, then he was, despite everything, Tomás Nevinson: the youngest son of Jack Nevinson from the British Council and Miss Mercedes from the British Institute, the boyfriend and then husband of Berta Isla, and the father of Guillermo and Elisa. Jim Rowland had been just another role, an illusion, he had nothing in common with the man who had behaved so appallingly badly with that woman, getting her pregnant, fathering a little girl, and then abandoning them both. That idiot teacher wasn’t him, but he, Tomás Nevinson, had done more or less the same; or worse, he had pretended to be dead and was still pretending, and hadn’t yet revealed the truth to his wife. He was suddenly filled with longing for Berta and the life snatched from him when it had only just begun. Knowing full well that his missing life continued to be off limits to him and that a large part of it had already passed, he pinned all his hopes on Tupra’s phone call: the one thing that could rescue him from his sorrows and his temptations would be to feel useful again and minus his own personality. Inactivity and waiting were urging him on to reclaim that missing life, and he couldn’t allow himself to do that, because it undermined and confused him, provoked crazy thoughts, made him think of Madrid.
In his search for crowds and multitudes and throngs, he often went to Madame Tussauds in Marylebone Road, just around the corner from his flat, almost on his doorstep. There were always long queues, mostly foreign and British tourists, and school groups led by their teachers, whole classes on a special trip to London; in a few years’ time, Val would probably be among them, transported there from the town where he’d condemned her to live, possibly for ever. Inside, you could barely take three steps without bumping into one of the hundreds of people being photographed next to the most famous of the wax figures, the current ones and the old favourites, from the Queen to the Beatles, from Churchill to Elvis Presley, from Kennedy and Cassius Clay to Marilyn Monroe. Tomás wondered if the younger visitors would know who those last three were, or when they would be withdrawn and replaced. ‘The living forget the famous so quickly now,’ he thought, ‘and feel only impatience, scorn and resentment for those who didn’t even have the courtesy to wait for them in order to exist and who are known to them only by name, or because of some irritating legend whose creation pre-dated them and should, therefore, be erased. The living feel increasingly at home in their role as barbarians, invaders and usurpers: “How did the world dare to consider itself important before we were born, when, in fact, everything begins with us and everything else is mere junk, to be crushed and tossed onto the scrap heap.” I’m part of that,’ he thought, ‘I’m both alive and dead, and as far as almost everyone is concerned, I’m not even a dead man worth remembering, not even by those who loved me, not even by those who loathed me.’
Being there, in the queue and inside the museum, in the midst of so many fresh, young, thoroughly alive people eager to see the celebrities of yesteryear or their current idols, captive and at their mercy, available to be photographed and to be touched – although touching was forbidden – honed wax figures who were far more distinguished than him, even though he could walk and talk and see; all those things contributed to him feeling less solitary, less preterite and less spectral. He may have been alone and silent, and always an outsider, never one of the jolly groups, yet he could still share in the enthusiasm and chatter surrounding him, both jostling and jostled; he would hear their shrill exclamations when they recognised a favourite singer or footballer, and would even dare to make some superfluous comment to a fellow visitor standing next to him: ‘It doesn’t look much like him, does it?’ for example, or ‘I always thought the originals allowed their exact measurements to be taken, and I imagined Mick Jagger to be taller somehow and not so weedy, didn’t you? Perhaps he’s shrinking with age.’ To which one clever woman replied: ‘Do you think Cromwell and Henry VIII would have agreed to being measured up?’
One morning, when he was in one of the most crowded rooms, he noticed a boy and a girl, especially the girl. She would have been about eleven, and her brother a couple of years younger, and you could tell they were brother and sister because they were so alike. They barely stopped to look at any of the figures, but ran back and forth, going from one room to another, returning briefly to the first room before racing off again, coming and going all the time, too excited and overwhelmed by the superabundance of things to see, shouting to each other: ‘Look, Derek, look who’s here’ and ‘Look, Claire, they’ve got James Bond as well’; the sheer number of visitors prevented them from fixing on one particular figure, and they were constantly being enticed away by new discoveries. This was common enough behaviour among children at Madame Tussauds, and, for some time now, the museum has really been aimed at them and at adolescents, which is to say at the universe’s great infantilised masses, who continue to grow exponentially.
What attracted him were the faces, the features of those two siblings. He had a strange feeling that he knew them, that he wasn’t seeing them for the first time, especially the girl. But who could they be? Where could he have seen them? He felt a shiver – or should that be a shudder or flash? – of unequivocal recognition, followed by an irritating inability to place them, as when, in a film or TV series, we see a minor actor or actress with an unmistakable face and yet can’t recall what other roles we’ve seen them in. And the more we try to put a name to them, the more they elude us, or we muddle them up with someone else, and our brain – having lost all interest in the plot – won’t rest until we’ve tracked them down. His very first, irrational thought was that they could be his own children, Guillermo and Elisa, but that was just the absurd product of his perplexity. There was, of course, no reason why his children couldn’t be on a visit to London, but they were different ages, Guillermo was older than Elisa, not the other way round, they wouldn’t be speaking English and they wouldn’t be called Derek and Claire. So who were Claire and Derek? Which part of his brain were they coming from? How did he know that attractive young girl? Because she would clearly grow up to be very attractive. In his mind, he rapidly riffled through the various children with whom he’d had some minimal contact on his travels, because he had sometimes mingled with the local population, had sometimes slept with a mother or a young woman with younger siblings, but the ages still didn’t match. He’d spent the last five or more years far away from all that, cloistered in a provincial town, which he wasn’t allowed to leave even in the school holidays, and, during that time, he’d known many pupils, male and female, and precisely because
he’d been in such close contact with them, he could clearly recall most of their faces, although he had a rather vaguer memory of their other qualities, but none of them had ever aroused in him that mixture of unease and fascination, a feeling similar to that provoked by certain paintings or portraits, which, inexplicably, you can’t take your eyes off: you think you’ve looked your fill and so pass on to others in the same museum, but something impels you to go back and study them again, something forces you, two or three times, sometimes four, not to part from them just yet. He realised that he couldn’t take his eyes off those two children and that his gaze was becoming increasingly Spanish (in England, people tend not to look at anyone too intensely or fixedly, still less at a preadolescent, still less if it’s an adult doing the looking), that he was captivated by the children’s almost identical features, although the girl’s face was the more evocative, the more unequivocally familiar from some other time in his life. That fact drew him like a magnet, and he tried to follow her through the different rooms and not lose her among the crowd. It made no sense at all, the girl would only have been born when he was already in his thirties, at the very earliest. He couldn’t possibly have known her before.
Claire was very fair, with delicate features that were also somehow fierce and determined, indicating someone of a fiery nature. She had a very red mouth, typical of children and young people, with slightly downturned corners, which gave her an expression that was sometimes scornful, sometimes melancholy, suggesting a person who might one day prove rather testing, both to herself and to others. However, she often smiled too, and then the corners of her mouth lifted with excitement and joy, revealing a gap between her front teeth that would one day prove the downfall of some man or perhaps several. Her eyes were inquisitive, taking in one wax figure after another swiftly and intelligently, so swiftly that she and her brother didn’t linger long before any of them: ‘Look, Derek, it’s Napoleon, I’ve studied him at school’ or ‘Claire, you missed Darth Vader. Go back and have a look’.
It was only a matter of time before the keen-eyed girl would notice that man who kept appearing and reappearing, following his own erratic itinerary and observing her curiously and insistently with strangely southern eyes. Far from taking fright, though, Claire kept an equally curious eye on him, shyly and modestly as befitted her age. Perhaps she could see that Tomás’s espionage was not in the least unsavoury or dubious, but born of pure pleasure and sympathy. Sympathy and mental effort, like someone deciphering an enigma. For children who have not yet reached adolescence, and who tend to be ignored by most adults, attracting the attention of a grown-up is rather flattering and comforting. They feel, for a moment, that they’re important enough to be singled out. This was probably the case with Claire (Derek was more childish and distracted, and probably hadn’t noticed a thing). Claire continued to rush here and there, but in each room, she would stop to check out of the corner of her eye if Tom Nevinson – or was he David Cromer-Fytton? – was still paying his kindly visual homage to her or if he had grown tired and bored. She did this discreetly and still shyly, but with no show of fear. After all, what could possibly happen in such a cheerful, busy place?
At no point did Tomás notice any accompanying parents or teachers. The two children seemed far too young to have gone to Madame Tussauds on their own. Perhaps their elders, their parents, with no interest in seeing the displays, were waiting for them in the shop or the café, or out in the street. It was a fine day, so perhaps they, the parents, were waiting for them quietly in a park or sitting outside having a drink; yes, the father and the mother, or one of them, just the mother perhaps, whose face they had inherited. And then he had a sudden flash of insight: those children, or, rather, the girl, yes, the girl was the spitting image of Janet, well, they both resembled her, but the girl was the same sex and the likeness was quite extraordinary, like a reproduction in miniature, on a reduced scale. That was where the child came from, from part of his remote past. Janet. That’s the name he’d known her by during those youthful years of occasional sexual encounters; he’d only learned her surname once she was dead, and hadn’t forgotten it since. That girl Claire looked like, or, rather, was, the daughter that poor, dead Janet Jefferys had never had.
It had been twenty or more years since he’d last thought about Janet Jefferys, and her face had become unreal to him, pining palely away until that precise moment, until he saw, or, rather, recognised, what must have been her daughter, because the resemblance really was remarkable. Then, as if someone had placed a photo before his eyes, he could clearly see Janet’s delicate, fierce, determined features, her dazzling, Scandinavian-yellow hair, doubtless dyed, which sometimes resembled a golden helmet lit by a hidden sun that fell like a spotlight on her through Oxford’s shifting clouds, utterly unmistakable if you saw her in the street; she had very red lips and a gap between her front teeth, which lent a childish element to her smile, just as it did to that little girl’s smile, except that she still was a little girl. He could recall Janet in movement too, and her naked or semi-naked body, as he had seen it on quite a few occasions, and, on the very last occasion, when he had approached her still tumescent, still unwashed cunt with his eyes and fingers. It felt as if all that had happened a million years ago. He had lived several lives since then, while her life had stopped.
He had, in fact, ceased thinking about Janet there and then. The news of her murder had shaken him, but he hadn’t had time to assimilate it, to feel the necessary shock and regret, as he would have done in different circumstances, had he not found himself directly affected and involved. He had immediately realised the danger he was in, and there is no defence against the egotism of youth: he had to look to his own needs, to confront the threat. ‘I didn’t kill her, I know that,’ was the thought that rushed through his mind now, ‘but, if I had, then my main concern would surely have been to avoid being caught and to emerge unscathed; even someone who kills another person by accident, unintentionally, is only briefly horrified, then instantly moves on to thinking how best to protect or save himself, and ensure, if he can, that his life is not ruined or merely changed, even though the person he has killed has changed so radically that he or she no longer has a life.’ That murder had determined the direction his life would take; in a sense, it had robbed him of the life he’d had up until then. He’d accepted the conditions and thrown himself wholeheartedly into the cause, and since it was too upsetting to recall the origin of that catastrophe, that earthquake, he had tended to blank it out, feeling that taking on the various tasks he was assigned on each occasion, in each place, was more than enough for him to deal with. If there was anything good about the state of perpetual disquiet and endless pretence in which he lived, it was that it prevented him from going over and over the reason why he’d begun that absurd life. He had often completely forgotten about it, and thus forgotten about poor Janet too. After all, their relationship had been superficial, utilitarian, almost functional on both sides, and on Janet’s part there was also perhaps a desire for revenge, one of those strange acts of reprisal purely for the avenger’s own satisfaction and use, and about which the object of the reprisal would never know: Hugh Saumarez-Hill, the name came to him at once, one of those memorable double-barrelled names. An MP who, it seemed, hadn’t done particularly well in the 1970s. Not that Tomás was interested in politics, and he didn’t much care who was in power, given that, in his line of work, one’s personal preferences were very much put to one side. He knew enough to be able to carry out his work properly, and, he assumed, that particular MP couldn’t have been very prominent during that time, because he would have heard of him and his name would have appeared in the press. He hadn’t been a minister of anything while his party was in government, and it’s likely that his promising career had been cut short, like that of so many Labour politicians with the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher and her successor John Major, who, between them, occupied 10 Downing Street for some eighteen years. Hugh Saumarez-Hill might still be
in Parliament, where he would be merely one of many, and so, in the end, he hadn’t been Somebody with a capital ‘S’, as Janet and Tupra and Blakeston had said, yes, it had been Blakeston who told him that. Or he might well have slipped over into the more opaque world of the private sector. What a waste, though, the hundred thousand brilliant futures that come to nothing, the world is full of them and, in politics, one mistake, one foolish alliance, one miscalculation, is all it takes to fail. Unless Janet had blackmailed him and ruined or brought his career to an abrupt end, as she’d told Tomás was her intention, so as to have her revenge on his caution and his carelessness, his endless procrastination and smugness, he couldn’t quite remember the details. That night had been the first and only night Janet had spoken to him about her London lover, and, indeed, the only time he’d asked her about him. Tomás Nevinson reran that thought: ‘Unless Janet had …’ But what was he thinking? Janet couldn’t have done anything after that night. She couldn’t see or hear or touch or feel or speak, or get angry or look or read; she’d been lying on the bed, reading The Secret Agent, and this struck him suddenly as an ironic warning, because isn’t that more or less what he had become? Or could she have done all those things and even given birth to two children, the same two he could see there before him on that idle morning in Madame Tussauds in 1994? Weren’t they far too like the young Janet Jefferys not to be hers, not to have sprung from her? The young Janet Jefferys? But then there had been no other.
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