Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  ‘But he was Tupra’s teacher, as he was yours and mine. Would you have played such a dirty trick on him?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t, but then I’m a very different person and do a very different job. I wouldn’t have done it to you either, and you were only my student. Have you been to see that policeman Morse yet? He might still be in Oxford, although he’ll be an inspector by now, at the very least. He was the one who gave us all the details of the case, who saw Janet dead.’ He raised his eyebrows in an expression of disbelief and added with what remained of his slowly disappearing innocence: ‘Outrageous.’

  ‘No, I did consider that, but I’m not going to bother. It wouldn’t make sense,’ said Tom. ‘He wouldn’t tell me or admit anything, he might even deny ever having seen me before, might deny all knowledge of that visit more than twenty years ago, and of which there will be no record. He was obviously following orders then, and wouldn’t want to haul any antediluvian skeletons out of the cupboard now. He wouldn’t be allowed to, what the Crown buries stays buried for all eternity. At most, he would look for the file, which probably never existed, given that there was no murder. And yet Janet Jefferys was even allowed to keep her name, they didn’t force her to disappear from the world, to change her name, she just had to leave Oxford. And if a file does exist, for appearances’ sake, it will say: “Case unresolved or open”, nothing more. It would be a waste of time, and I wouldn’t want to embarrass the man, because he seemed a decent enough fellow. I know what it means to obey orders, even when those orders go totally against the grain. I can understand that.’

  Mr Southworth, a studious, peace-loving man, seemed troubled by such machinations, which were entirely new to him, but his strong sense of justice didn’t rouse him to revolt, as if he assumed that one can do nothing to oppose the lofty, legalised justice of the State. He seemed stunned, flabbergasted.

  ‘And what about Tupra and Blakeston? What have they told you?’ he asked doubtfully. ‘Haven’t you spoken to them? Haven’t you called them to account? It must have been their idea. I’m sure Peter had nothing to do with it. Please don’t go and see him, don’t upset him. He would be truly horrified to know the consequences of his advice, the irreparable consequences. He would merely have pointed out to them how useful you could be, and how was he to know they would use that information for such devious ends?’ Mr Southworth was protecting his old friend with almost paternal care. Tomás had calmed down since his first wild irruption into those cosy quarters, but his former tutor had realised, too, that he was now a dangerous man, and could, if necessary, be ruthless.

  ‘He must have made a very convincing case for my usefulness, though, for them to go to such lengths.’

  ‘Well, your linguistic gifts are extraordinary, and very rare, especially among the British, who have no talent for languages at all. There are very few people like you, as you know.’ He preferred to say nothing more to exonerate his teacher and friend, feeling that it would be counterproductive. ‘Haven’t they deigned to talk to you, Tupra and Blakeston, I mean? They’re all you have left, they must have been the ones behind this whole charade.’

  They hadn’t, at first, deigned to speak to him, but Tom had finally managed to speak to Tupra. That was what he had burned to do, talk to Tupra, while he was leaving Madame Tussauds on the way back to Dorset Square and his garret. Except that he immediately diverged from that path and spent several hours wandering the city, even going close to the prohibited zone, where the SIS and the Foreign Office had their offices. He stood for a long time, staring at their respective front doors, wondering if Tupra would be there or away travelling. No, there was no question of going in and creating a ruckus, the bouncers or doormen would immediately have ejected him. He needed to plan his conversation and not rush things, and yet there really wasn’t anything to plan: reproaches speak for themselves, just as irrefutable accusations do, they speak and are listened to, shamefaced. Also, Tupra could hardly deny that Janet Jefferys had lived in York for many years. Nevertheless, he would wait, it was best not to have it out with him on his home turf, it would be best to meet away from those buildings, one of which had no name. It would be another couple of days before his next encounter with his contact, the pudgy young man with the kiss-curl; he would tell Molyneux his demands, and Tupra wouldn’t dare to refuse to see him now, even though there was almost nothing the shameless Tupra wouldn’t dare to do.

  Tomás Nevinson walked and walked and continued walking until night fell and he was utterly exhausted, and only when he returned to his garret, there in the square, and before again shutting himself up in his flat, did he realise that the eternal part of his life, which had become his only life, that wandering, deceiving, disparate life, was over, had reached its natural end. Whatever happened in his conversation with Tupra, he would never go back to a job for which, that very morning – before seeking out the hustle and bustle of the museum, before seeing Claire and Derek – he had felt intense nostalgia. The threat that had hung over him for more than twenty years, growing ever more diffuse and forgotten, did not exist and had never existed, or only in his ingenuous mind and his student panic, a real lamb to the slaughter. It was too late for regrets: he had put his life on hold, and other lives don’t wait, and both his lives, the real and the parallel one, had escaped him. He didn’t care about the other threats, the subsequent and now unlikely threats, those he had acquired under different names and in different languages and accents, and what did it matter, anyway, if those threats were carried out and he exited the world; nothing matters once you realise that a story has ended.

  He saw the dust in the air suspended, he saw it with a noonday clarity in the square disfigured by his surrender, by his exhaustion, and he thought: ‘You can only go back when there’s no longer anywhere to go back to, when there are no more other places and the story has ended. This story has ended here, in Dorset Square, in this place and now.’ He took a few seconds to absorb that thought, to assimilate and accept it, and then he looked to the future, or, rather, to the past: ‘I can only go back to Berta and to our apartment in Calle Pavía – if she’ll let me in. That’s the only thing left standing, the only thing that remains and that is perhaps waiting for me without knowing it’s waiting. Berta hasn’t made a fresh start, as the saying goes, she hasn’t remarried despite having been a widow for years now. My only hope is that Mr Southworth’s French quotation can be applied to her: Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d’amour, “She, like anyone else, had had her love story”, and that I was that love story, dead and alive.’

  ‘Can you remember where that quotation comes from?’ he suddenly asked Mr Southworth, and repeated it; he had wanted to ask that question for ages, because those words had been in his head for far too long. ‘You came out with it that morning, when you said we don’t always know about other people’s love stories, not even when we’re the object of that love. It was when you were talking about what feelings Janet might have for me, although she obviously didn’t feel anything, otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed to set the trap.’

  Alert and intrigued, Mr Southworth crossed and uncrossed his legs in his characteristic manner, sending a ripple through the skirts of his gown. He listened attentively to the words, mouthed them silently, trying to recall where they came from.

  ‘No, it’s impossible, I have no idea,’ he replied with a touch of irritation. ‘Now I won’t be able to stop thinking about it. It must have been from something I’d read recently. It could be Stendhal, but it could just as easily be Flaubert or Maupassant or Balzac. Or even Dumas, who knows. And how could anyone know what she felt. Perhaps she was having her revenge on your indifference, for seeing her merely as a way of passing the time. One thing is certain, you’ll never know.’

  ‘Tell Tupra that I need to see him now, Stevie. Something urgent has come up and it can’t wait. It needs to be dealt with at once, without delay,’ he told Molyneux as soon as the latter sat down in the hotel lounge. He not only addressed him by hi
s first name, when he usually called him by his surname alone – just as, on that long-ago day of decisions in Blackwell’s and in The Eagle and Child, he had been addressed as plain ‘Nevinson’ – he also used a diminutive to belittle the young man, not Stephen or even Steve, but Stevie, which also happened to be the name of that eccentric poet, Stevie Smith, who had been fashionable when he first arrived in Oxford, and who had died quite recently. Molyneux would know none of that, but it didn’t matter: being called ‘Stevie’ would only increase his sense that he was being given an order.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said defensively. ‘Tell me what it’s about and I’ll pass it on, Mr Cromer-Fytton. When I can, of course, because Mr Tupra is always very busy.’ Molyneux didn’t dare repay him in kind by calling him ‘David’ or ‘Tom’. Tomás was of a higher rank and far more experienced.

  ‘I need to see him now, and it is, I assure you, in his interest. Today or tomorrow, but no later than that. And if he’s not in London, then he needs to come back from wherever he is. Someone will know where to find him. Just tell him this: I’ve met Janet Jefferys’ children.’

  Despite Tom’s imperative tone, Molyneux remained his usual opinionated, inquisitive self. The kiss-curl, the lacquer and the bicoloured hair had gone, he had reverted to an earlier look, which wasn’t actually any nobler, merely less ignoble.

  ‘And who’s she? And what about her children? Are they young or grown-up? I really can’t see what’s so urgent, especially if they’re still only small.’

  ‘Just give him the message, Stevie. He’ll understand, and then you’ll see how urgent it is. Do you want to bet money on him seeing me at once?’

  Molyneux declined, and he would have lost the bet, for that same night, he rather resentfully phoned Tomás, on Tupra’s behalf.

  ‘Mr Tupra says he has some free time tomorrow after work. He asked if you would prefer to go to the building with no name – his words, not mine – or if he should come to the hotel or some other place nearby, whatever suits you best. At seven o’clock.’ He couldn’t resist asking: ‘By the way, what does he mean by “the building with no name”?’

  Tomás didn’t answer. He decided to take with him the small revolver, his 1964 Charter Arms Undercover, which had accompanied him during his tranquil years in that provincial town, just in case he found Tupra too exasperating, too dismissive, in case he wanted, at the very least, to give him a fright, although time does take the sting out of even the most painful of wounds. They wouldn’t let him into the building with no name, which he knew so well, and to which Molyneux had not yet been given access. He suggested meeting in a café close to his garret; they would be alone there, and no one would frisk them, although he never could be sure that Tupra or Reresby was alone.

  Bertram Tupra didn’t change. Tomás hadn’t seen him for a long time and he really hadn’t changed; he was one of those men who remain frozen at a certain age as if by a process of crystallisation, or else by the application of an iron will that allows them not to age more than they deem tolerable. (He may well have had that iron will when he was still an adolescent, or earlier still, for there had always been something anomalous about his manner, his clothes, his accent, his knowledge: an indefinable trace of his harsh, combative origins, plagued with difficulties.) He had hardly changed at all from the first time they’d met, in the Oxford where they had both been students, although it was hard to imagine Tupra studying Medieval History, which, if Tom remembered rightly, had been his chosen subject. He doubtless dyed the near-ringlets at his temples, but that was the only minor artifice he allowed himself. His bulbous cranium was still crowned with abundant curls, his mouth still appeared to lack consistency, like soft chewing gum. His exaggeratedly long eyelashes were still far more like those of a woman than a man, his skin was still disturbingly lustrous and the lovely golden colour of beer, his eyebrows like black smudges and with a tendency to grow together (he probably made frequent use of tweezers), his rather coarse nose still looked as if it had once been broken by a blow or by several, his all-embracing, appreciative gaze, mocking and pale, still looked at everything straight on and from an appropriately male height, probing the past and bringing it back into the present for as long as it remained under his scrutiny, endowing it with due relevance and not rejecting it as outmoded or insignificant. Unlike almost everyone else, for whom anything that is over no longer counts.

  Tomás Nevinson had changed far more, and not only because of the various masks he’d been obliged to improvise or accept during his years of role-playing and usurpation; he’d reached a point where he had no idea what his real face looked like, if it was with or without a beard, with or without glasses, with or without a moustache, with short hair or long hair, fair or dark or greying, thick or sparse, if he had scars, was thin or slightly fatter, plump like Molyneux or still solidly built, if he was still attractive (he had, after all, won the heart of the dental nurse Meg some years before). Or, rather, what that face would have been like had it evolved naturally and without suffering any hardship, had he been free to lead the life he should have led. He wondered if he would be recognised by people from the past, although what people would they be? Would Berta Isla recognise him, she who had known him from their schooldays? Above all, he felt exhausted and battered, often slightly drab, and internally much older, as if, inside, he were ten or perhaps fifteen years older than the forty-three years he had not yet reached. The itinerant life wears a man down, as does the hidden, feigned, vicarious, usurped life, the life of treachery, exile and death. He had known them all for most of his life now. When he felt this most acutely, he would remember another line from Eliot, from an early poem: ‘I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled’, which he wasn’t quite sure how he would translate into his first or second language, something he always did, although it was never clear which language came first or second. He felt it was essential to preserve an element of rhyme, but not so much the rhythm: ‘Envejezco, envejezco, llevaré los bajos de los pantalones vueltos’; or, more colloquially and faithfully: ‘Me hago viejo, me hago viejo …’

  That was his first thought – ‘I grow old’ – when he saw Tupra there untouched by time (Tupra had already arrived at the café and was waiting for him) with a serene, cordial, almost affectionate smile on his lips, as if he and Tom had been in regular contact during the long period when they hadn’t seen each other at all. He was a few years older than Tom, not many – Tom wasn’t sure how many exactly – but he seemed quite a lot younger, indeed Tom was convinced that he would always look both younger than him and younger than his age, which must have been rather unnerving for people being introduced to him for the first time, new recruits and the women he seduced. He looked as if he hadn’t a care in the world, even though he knew what awaited him, a call to account at the very least, a past fury made present. This blatant unconcern annoyed Tomás. He hadn’t taken off his raincoat and probably wouldn’t (he guessed this would be a brief encounter), and he slipped his hand into his pocket as he once had in that provincial hotel, touched the butt of the gun with the tips of thumb and index finger, just to reassure himself it was there. Or else to give himself courage, you never stop feeling intimidated by someone who intimidated you from the outset.

  ‘So you met her children. They’re called Bates, I understand. Yes, you forced me to do a little homework,’ said Tupra affably. ‘How did that come about? I didn’t even know they existed. As you can imagine, I don’t follow the trail of all the people who are occasionally useful to us and to whom we extend a helping hand, each according to his or her merits. We’ve greatly improved the lives of some, or at least provided a solution. They certainly can’t complain of any lack of generosity on our part. You yourself have benefitted from it, Nevinson. And in no small degree either, indeed, you continue to benefit.’ He was still using that corporate ‘we’ and, as he had at the beginning, he addressed him as ‘Nevinson’, but then he’d never really stopped doing that, apart fro
m on certain occasions when he’d called him ‘Tom’, depending on the circumstances, the pressures or the requests being made, because Tupra had more than once begged him to do something, and had, over the years, relied on him, on his patience and intelligence, on Tom’s boldness and stamina and self-sacrifice, and on his own ability to make Tom overcome his scruples, something he had always succeeded in doing. He had got the first word in, and Tomás saw at once what he was up to: he wanted to turn the tables on him right from the start. It was as if he were saying: ‘Don’t come to me with your reproaches, you owe me a debt of gratitude. Before you accuse us, remember what we’ve done for you and consider your own best interests, because whether your situation proves acceptable or disastrous or, who knows, pure torment, all hangs on the outcome of this meeting.’

  ‘Was I so very important, Bertram, for you to do what you did to me? You snatched my life from me before it had even begun, when I was only a beginner,’ said Tomás with a serious, ominous look on his face. He refused to be infected by his boss’s façade of light-hearted cordiality, which was already about to stop or already had stopped being quite so light-hearted, he knew that and Tupra would know it too. Tupra was no fool, and one of his great gifts was his ability to anticipate other people’s reactions, to sense what was happening in their heart of hearts. Tomás was leaving and would not be taking any more orders from him. The dust in the air marking the story’s end was still hanging there suspended.

  Tupra took a cigarette out of his Egyptian cigarette case and lit it with the tremulous flame of his Zippo lighter. And knowing that Tomás was also a smoker, he didn’t bother to blow the smoke to one side.