Peter died six months after my father, although he was about eight months older than him. Mrs. Berry phoned me in Madrid; she was very succinct, belonging, as she did, to the thrifty generation and doubtless mindful that she was phoning abroad. Or perhaps that was just her style, one of extreme discretion. 'Sir Peter passed away last night, Jack,' she said, employing the usual euphemism. That was all, or, rather, she added: 'I just wanted you to know. I didn't think it fair that you should carry on believing he's still alive when he's not.' And when I tried to find out what had happened and the cause, she merely said: 'Oh, it wasn't unexpected. I had been expecting it for weeks,' and informing me that she would write to me later on. I couldn't even ask her to whom it would have been 'unfair,' to Peter or to me. (But presumably to both of us.) A few days later, I recalled that in England, in comparison with Spain, they take a long time to bury their dead and that I might still be in time to travel to Oxford and attend the funeral. So I phoned her several times and at different hours of the day, but no one answered. Perhaps Mrs. Berry had gone to stay with a relative, had left the house as soon as her employer died, and I realized that there was almost no one I could ask now to find out more information. There was Tupra, but I didn't turn to him: it was hardly a moment of difficulty, confusion, trouble or danger, and he hadn't himself deigned to inform me of Peter's death. I was assailed by the feeling—or perhaps it was a superstition—that I didn't want to waste a cartridge unnecessarily, as if with him I only had a certain number that would last as long as our respective lives. Young Pérez Nuix didn't bother to tell me either: she may not have known Peter personally, but she would have heard. I could have phoned one of my former colleagues, Kavanagh or Dewar or Lord Rymer the Flask or even Clare Bayes—the very idea!—but I had long ago lost touch with them. I could have tried The Queen's or Exeter, the colleges with which Peter had been connected, but their bureacracy would almost certainly have passed me fruitlessly from office to office. And the truth is I couldn't be bothered; memory and grief don't always chime with social duty. I was very busy in Madrid. I would have had to dust off my cap and gown. So I just let it go.
Mrs. Berry's promised letter took more than two months to arrive. She apologized for the delay, but she'd had to take care of almost everything, even the recent memorial service, a ceremony which, in England, tends to take place sometime after the death. She was kind enough to send me a copy of the order of service, listing the hymns and readings. Wheeler hadn't been a religious man, she explained, but she had preferred to fall back on the rites of the Anglican church, because 'he always hated the improvised ceremonies people hold these days, the secular parodies that are so popular now' The service had taken place in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, a church I remembered well; it was where Cardinal Newman had preached before his conversion. Bach had been played and Gilles, as well as Michel Corrette's gentle, ironic Carillon des morts; hymns had been sung; passages from Ecclesiasticus had been read ('. . . He will keep the sayings of the renowned men: and where subtil parables are, he will be there also. He will seek out the secrets of grave sentences ... he will travel through strange countries; for he hath tried the good and the evil among men. Many shall commend his understanding; and so long as the world endureth, it shall not be blotted out; his memorial shall not depart away, and his name shall live from generation to generation. If he die, he shall leave a greater name than a thousand: and if he live, he shall increase it'), as well as the Prologue from La Celestina in James Mabbe's 1605 translation and an extract from a book by a contemporary novelist of whom he was particularly fond; and his praises had been sung by some of his former university colleagues, among them Dewar the Inquisitor or the Hammer or the Butcher, whose eulogy had been particularly acute and moving. And this had all been arranged according to the very precise written instructions left by Wheeler himself.
Mrs. Berry also enclosed a color photo of Peter taken some years before ('I thought you would like it as a keepsake,' she said). Now I have it framed in my study and I often look at it, so that the passing of time does not cause my memory of his face to grow dim and so that others might still see it. There he is, wearing the gown of a Doctor of Letters. 'It's made from
scarlet cloth with grey silk edging or facing, and the same on the sleeves,' Mrs. Berry explained. 'Sir Peter's gown had belonged to Dr. Dacre Balsdon, and the grey had faded somewhat, so that it looked more like a dirty blue or a greyish pink: it had probably been left out in the rain. I took the photo in Radcliffe Square on the day he received that degree. It's a shame he took off his mortarboard to pose for the picture.' There is, of course, no word in Spanish for the untranslatable 'mortarboard.' Underneath his gown Peter is wearing a dark suit and a white bow tie, an outfit which is referred to as 'subfusc' and is compulsory at certain ceremonies. And there he is now in my study, fixed forever on that far-off day, in a photo taken when I did not yet know him. The truth is that he changed very little from then until the end. I can recognize him perfectly when he looks at me with those slightly narrowed eyes, and you can clearly see the scar on the left-hand side of his chin. I never did ask how he got it. I remember that I hesitated over whether to ask him on that last Sunday, after lunch, when I was about to go to the station and get the train back to London and he accompanied me to the front door, leaning more heavily than ever on his stick. I noticed then that his legs were weaker than they had been on any other occasion, but they were doubtless capable of carrying him about the house and the garden and even up to his bedroom on the second floor. But he looked very tired, I thought, and I didn't want to make him talk much more, and so I chose to ask him something else, just one more thing before we said goodbye:
'Why did you tell me all this today, Peter? Believe me, I found it fascinating, and I'd love to know more, but I find it odd that, after years of knowing each other, you should tell me about all these things you've never said a word about before. And once you said to me: "One should never tell anyone anything," do you remember?'
Wheeler smiled at me with a mixture of slight, almost imperceptible melancholy and mischief. He placed both hands on his walking stick and said:
'It's true, Jacobo, you should never tell anyone anything . . .until you yourself are the past, until you reach the end. My end is fast approaching and already knocking insistently at the door. You need to begin to come to terms with weakness because there will come a day when it will catch up with you. And when that moment arrives, you have to decide whether something should be erased forever, as if it had never happened and never even had a place in the world, or whether you're going to give it a chance to . . .' He hesitated for a moment, looking for the right word and, not finding it, he made do with an approximation: '. . . to float. To allow someone else to investigate or recount or tell it. So that it won't necessarily be lost entirely. I'm not asking you to do anything, I assure you, to tell or not to tell. I'm not even sure I've done the right thing, that I've done what I wanted. At this late stage, I don't know what my desires are any more, or if I have any. It's odd, towards the end, one's will seems to become inhibited, to withdraw. As soon as you go through that door and walk away, I shall probably regret having told you. But I can be sure that Mrs. Berry, who knows most of what happened, will never say a word to anyone when I'm gone. With you I'm not so sure, though, and so I leave that up to you. I might prefer it if you kept silent, but, at the same time, it consoles me to think that with you my story might even . . .' He again sought some better word, but again could not find it: '. . . yes, that it might still float. And that's really all it comes down to, Jacobo, to floating.'
And I thought and continued to think on the train back to Paddington: 'He's chosen me to be his rim, the part that resists being removed and erased, that resists disappearing, the part that clings to the porcelain or the floor and is the hardest bit to get rid of. He doesn't even know if he wants me to take charge of cleaning it up—"the constitution of silence"—or would rather I didn't rub too hard, but left a shadow of a trac
e, an echo of an echo, a fragment of a circumference, a tiny curve, a vestige, an ashy remnant that can say: "I was here," or "I'm still here, therefore I must have been here before: you saw me then and you can see me now," and that will prevent others from saying: "No, that never occurred, never happened, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it never existed, never was.'"
Mrs. Berry also spoke in her letter about the drop of blood on the stairs. She couldn't have helped hearing part of our conversation as she bustled around in the kitchen and came and went, on that last Sunday when I visited them (the verb she used was 'overhear,' which implies that it was involuntary), and how Wheeler referred in passing to the stain as if it had been a figment of my imagination ('Just there, where you say you saw ...'). She felt bad about having lied to me at the time, she said, to have pretended to know nothing, perhaps to have made me doubt what I had seen. She asked me to forgive her. 'Sir Peter died of lung cancer,' she wrote. 'He knew deep down that he had it, but he preferred not to. There was no way he would go to the doctor and so I brought one, a friend of mine, to the house when it was already too late, when there was nothing to be done, and that doctor kept the diagnosis from him—after all, what was the point in telling him then?—but he confirmed it to me. Fortunately, he died very suddenly, from a massive pulmonary embolism, according to what the doctor told me afterwards. He didn't have to endure a long illness and he enjoyed a reasonable life right up until the end.' And when I read this, I remembered that the first time Wheeler had suffered one of his aphasic attacks in my presence—when he had been unable to come out with the silly word 'cushion'—I had asked him then if he'd consulted a doctor and he'd replied casually: 'No, no, it's not a physiological thing, I know that. It only lasts a moment, it's like a sudden withdrawal of my will. It's like a warning, a kind of prescience . . .' And when he didn't finish the sentence and I asked him what kind of prescience, he had both told me and not told me: 'Don't ask a question to which you already know the answer, Jacobo, it's not your style.'
'In fact, the only symptom, during almost the whole time he was ill,' Mrs. Berry went on, using a term doubtless learned from her medical friend, 'was the occasional hemoptoic expectoration, that is, coughing up blood.'—And I thought when I read that paragraph: 'So much of what affects and determines us is hidden.'—'This used to be quite involuntary and only happened when he coughed particularly hard, and sometimes he didn't even realize; remember, although he may not have seemed it, Sir Peter was very old. So although it's impossible to be sure, that might be what you found that night at the top of the first flight of stairs and that you took such pains to clean up. I'm very grateful to you, because that, of course, was my job. On a normal day, it would have been most unusual for me to miss something like that, but I was so busy that Saturday getting ready for the buffet supper, with all those people, and, if I remember rightly, you pointed to the wood, not the carpet, where it would have been much more visible. Anyway, on your last visit, when I heard Sir Peter telling you about his wife's blood at the top of that first flight of stairs, sixty years before and in another house, well, I was afraid you might think you'd had a supernatural experience, a vision, and I had to let you know about this other real possibility. I do hope you'll forgive my pretense at incredulity, but I couldn't, at the time, mention something that Sir Peter preferred not to acknowledge. Well, the truth is he chose not to do so right up until the last. Indeed, he died without knowing he was dying, he died without believing that he was. Lucky him.' And then I recalled two things I had heard Wheeler say in different contexts and on different occasions: 'Everything can be distorted, twisted, destroyed, erased, if, whether you know it or not, you've been sentenced already, and if you don't know, then you're utterly defenseless, lost.' And he had also stated or asserted: 'And so now no one wants to think about what they see or what is going on or what, deep down, they know, about what they already sense to be unstable and mutable, what might even be nothing, or what, in a sense, will not have been at all. No one is prepared, therefore, to know anything with certainty, because certainties have been eradicated, as if they were infected with the plague. And so it goes, and so the world goes.'
Yes, now I'm living in Madrid again, and here, too, everything points towards that, or so I believe. I've gone back to working with a former colleague, the financier Estevez, with whom I worked for a few years after my Oxford days, when I married Luisa. He no longer refers to himself as 'a go-getter' as when we first met, he's grown too important for such nominal vanities, he doesn't need them. I contacted him from London, to sound him out regarding job opportunities, given my imminent return: I had saved quite a lot, but could foresee a lot of expenses on my return to Madrid. And when I told him briefly over the phone what I had been up to, I noticed that he was impressed when I said I'd worked for MI6, even though I'd been employed by a strange unknown group in a building with no name, which never gets a mention in any book—so ethereal and so ghostly that it didn't even require its members to have British nationality or to swear an oath—and even though I couldn't give him any proof, but only tell him what I knew. Not that I wanted to give him too many details, and those I did were invented. Anyway, he took me on at once to help with his various projects and he trusts my judgment, especially about people. And so I do still interpret people, just for him, now and then, and given my previous experience—given my record—he always listens to me as if I were the oracle. Thanks to him I earn enough money to be able to pay for Luisa to have some botox treatment, if one day she should ever want to, or indeed anything else that might improve her appearance, if she ever starts to get obsessed, although I don't think she will, it's not in her nature. To me it looks as good as before I left, before I left my home for England, her appearance I mean. And what I didn't see for a long time—but which was seen by another in my absence—that, too, seems just as good. And when I say I don't live alone but half-alone, that's because I either take the children out or visit them almost daily, and on some afternoons Luisa comes to my apartment, leaving the kids with another babysitter, not the stern Polish Mercedes, who has married and set up on her own—she's apparently opened her own business.
This is how Luisa wants it, with each of us in our own apartment, which is perhaps why she has never said what I wanted her to say or write to me during my solitary and, subsequently, troubling time in London: 'Come, come, I was so wrong about you before. Sit down here beside me, here's your pillow which now bears not a trace, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before. Come here. Come with me. There's no one else here, come back, my ghost has gone, you can take his place and dismiss his flesh. He has been changed into nothing and his time no longer advances. What was never happened. You can, I suppose, stay here forever.' No, she hasn't said that or anything like it, but she does say other occasionally disconcerting things; during our best or most passionate or happiest moments, when she comes to see me at home as she must have gone to see Custardoy over a period of many months, she says: 'Promise me that we'll always be like this, the way we are now, that we'll never again live together.' Perhaps she's right, perhaps that's the only way we can remain properly attentive and not take each other or our presence in each other's lives for granted.
I haven't forgotten what Custardoy told me, not a single word; any information that the mind registers stays in it until oblivion catches up with it, and oblivion is always one-eyed; I haven't forgotten his insinuations or more than insinuations ('Everyone has their own sexuality,' he said with madrileño bravado, each rasping word dragged out like the music from a music box, 'with some people it's straightforward and with others it isn't. Didn't the same thing happen when she was with you? I mean, what can I say, pal, I had no idea either'), and on occasions I've been tempted to try hurting Luisa, just a little, as if unintentionally, distractedly, accidentally, to see how she would react, to see if she would accept it without protest, holding her breath, just to know how she would respond. But I've always stopped myself and always will, I'm sure,
because that would be like accepting that Custardoy had been right and exposing myself to a new poison, and I'd had quite enough poison on that night with Tupra or, rather, Reresby. Also, it implied a danger, albeit remote: that of putting myself in the place of the man I had so feared, the devious fellow of my imagination, who might turn up one rainy night, when they're stuck at home, close his large hands around Luisa's throat—his fingers like piano keys—while the children— my children—watch from a corner, pressing themselves into the wall as if wishing the wall would give way and disappear and, with it, this awful sight, and the choked-back tears that long to burst forth, but cannot, the bad dream, and the strange, long-drawn-out noise their mother makes as she dies. ('While it isn't something any of us would wish for, we would nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies,' Reresby had said that night. '. . . even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us.') No, one mustn't slip or skate too close, one mustn't toy with the time, temptations and circumstances that might lead to the fulfilment of some probability carried in the veins, our veins, and my probability was that I could kill, I know that now, well, I knew it before, but I know it even better now. Best to shy away from it all and keep oneself at a distance, better to avoid it and not to touch it even in dreams ('Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death'), so that not even in dreams could someone say: 'Your wife, that wretched Luisa your wife, Jacques or Jacobo or Jack, Iago or Jaime, that never slept a quiet hour with you because the names don't change who you are . . . Let me be lead within thy bosom and may you feel the pinprick in your breast: despair and die.' No, that won't happen, it doesn't happen. Best to keep away.
One day, I went over to his part of town, Custardoy's; normally I try to avoid it as much as I can, which isn't easy, given that it's so central. I don't avoid it for any real reason, it's just that places become marked by what you did in them, far more than by what they did to you, and then something happens which bears a very faint resemblance—a mere shadow, a poor imitation, nonsense, no comparison—to the grudge against place, the spatial hatred, that the Nazis felt for the village of Lidice which they reduced to rubble, razed to the ground and wiped from the map, and for so many other towns in Europe, and the spatial hatred that Valerie Harwood felt perhaps for Milton Bryant and Woburn, and Peter Wheeler for Plantation Road, that pretty leafy street in Oxford, and I myself for the building with no name near Vauxhall Cross and the indiscreet headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service by the Thames with its look of a lighthouse or a ziggurat, where I never venture if I go to London now, whether with Luisa or without her; I have a little money in bank accounts there—well, you never know when you might have to leave Spain in a hurry. But I did feel a kind of spatial hatred for Calle de Bailen and Calle Mayor, quite unconscious, because I like the area, despite the fact that various oafish mayors have done their best to ruin it. I was passing by the Palacio Real, where I sometimes go to see an exhibition, and, which is another building that can no longer be seen from any other angle but from the front—one of the many views that those same idiotic mayors and their town planners and venal architects have inconsiderately and idiotically stolen from both the inhabitants of Madrid and the people who visit it. I was returning from some errands on the other side of Plaza de España when I came across two policewomen on horseback—they regularly patrol there now that all the traffic has been sent underground in this, the capital of tunnels—one white horse and one black, and I passed so close to the white one that I almost touched him and felt his breath—you only realize how tall they are when you're next to them. I hadn't gone five steps beyond the crossroads when I noticed at my back the horse's agitation or anxiety: the dog belonging to a woman who happened to be passing had started barking at the horses and harassing them, and the white horse took fright, reared up and was about to bolt, and did indeed try to make a run for it, although it only got a few yards, while the dog—tis tis tis, aerial footsteps, it was a pointer like Pérez Nuix's, except that this one had a spotted coat and a brown head—got even more excited by all that reined-in skittering and the almost galloping clatter of hooves and barked more loudly. The policewoman regained control of the horse at once, although not without some alarm and some effort: she had to turn it in circles in order to to rein it in and calm it down, and the owner of the dog finally dragged her pet off and put an end to its incursions—the tis tis tis sounded much sadder now—and stopped its barking. The other horse, the black one, wasn't in the least perturbed, either by the pointer's threats or by its companion's attempted escape, he was clearly less delicate. The sound of clattering hooves soon slowed, and when the momentary commotion had subsided, the policewoman and her horse stood quietly for a while, silhouetted against the royal facade, while she soothingly stroked his neck, under the gaze of two guards in nineteenth-century costume, inscrutable and motionless in their sentry boxes by the Palace gates. We weren't far from the monument to Captain Melgar, with its disproportionately small legionnaire, a kind of dwarf Beau Geste trying to scramble up to the Captain's beard or mustaches.
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