by Graham Swift
Innocence. Innocence.
What I am about to relate occurred only three days after Sam’s annunciatory visit. Yet I don’t think that on that Tuesday morning I was in any particular way altered. Three days had passed, it might be said, since the passing of my innocence. But against this, I maintain, I actually felt more innocent. To discover that for fifty years of your life you have been labouring under a massive misapprehension is a fair enough reminder at least of your capacity for innocence. It puts a sort of childlike hesitancy into your step and a dazed, receptive smile on your face. It makes you feel—as though you have swallowed some initially tranquillizing drug—really quite good.
It was another fine spring day, though there had been rain and, in contrast to the day of Sam’s visit, there was a slight chill in the breeze. That is, I think the chill was in the breeze, not in me. But perhaps what I am struggling to avoid saying is that on that bright May morning, which began with my routinely making my way (always carry on as normal), like a good scholar, from college to library, I felt the first shadowy premonition of what I am now.
For the scholar on foot, the way to the Library (I mean the University Library, not our quaint but incommodious college library) lies along those very paths which Sam and I had trod, on such different business. Over humped bridges, by flowery verges and through budding groves (the veritable groves of academe). There is only one road to cross; then a further, less sylvan path leads to the looming bulk of the Library.
It is hard not to see in this layout an allegorical significance: the Palace—the Citadel—of Knowledge approached through the meads and thickets of Dalliance, along the by-ways of Beguilement. And anyone can be beguiled, even the worthiest pilgrim of Learning. For there, on this spry spring morning, was Potter. Or rather, there was Potter’s easily spotted and meant-to-be-conspicuous car—a red Audi—drawn up at the edge of the road (the Highway of Worldly Traffic) which the good pilgrim must cross. And there, leaning in at the passenger window, was one of the pilgrims. At least she was dressed in the sombre hue of a votary—black skirt, black sweater, black tights, short, pixyish black boots. But such a funereal outfit on a girl of little more than twenty has a way of suggesting not solemnity, not mournfulness at all.
I recognised her as Gabriella, from that evening at Potter’s.
I could see that Potter was leaning across from the driver’s seat and that his hand was extended through the open passenger’s window and was grasping hers. Or rather—which was a crucial difference—he was not grasping her hand, he was grasping her wrist and pulling at it. And it was clear from the tension of her body that, if she was not exactly pulling away, she was resisting his tug. There are only certain limited circumstances in which this sort of contact might occur between a man and a woman (just as there are only certain circumstances in which a woman might stroke, not just touch but quite deliberately, coaxingly stroke, a man’s unsuspecting forearm).
I thought of slinking off—into the Thickets not of Dalliance but of Discretion. But as is often the case when you stumble upon an awkward situation, evasion is more obvious than holding a steady course. I walked on.
Potter saw me first. I’m sure he didn’t wish to see me. I’m sure these were the last circumstances in which he would have wished me to appear on the scene—I admit to savouring my advantage. But then he didn’t know how much I had seen—least of all that I had observed Gabriella in his clutches before, the clutch being then not to the wrist but to the buttock. He let go his grip. She turned: a furl of dark hair; a face, in the gleaming brightness reflected from the wet road, of startled Latin loveliness. A smile—I couldn’t tell exactly—of pleasurable recognition or of flustered gratitude at my timely intervention. She took the opportunity, at any rate, to depart without more ado, moving round to the back of Potter’s car and waiting in the road for a gap in the stream of traffic. I thought: she is going my way, to the Library; I should continue in that direction too. Then Potter, still leaning across towards the passenger window, exclaimed, “Ah, Bill—just the man,” as if he had been expecting me all along. Then he added, opening the passenger door, “Get in.”
“I’m going to the Library,” I said. My eyes may have flickered for a moment to where Gabriella was still standing, waiting for the chance to cross.
“I know. Get in,” he said, in the peremptory tone that gangsters in films use, often reinforcing their words with a gun. Come to think of it, with his eyes hidden by a pair of thick-framed dark glasses, Potter looked, intentionally or otherwise, not a little like a gangster. I had the feeling of having happened on him at his most absurd and desperate—caught in some outlandish charade. Perhaps he realised this. I was glad his eyes were hidden. Perhaps he merely wanted to prevent me from joining Gabriella on the walk to the Library. Perhaps he was trying to save the situation by an apparent seizing of the initiative.
Like a fool, I got in.
Gabriella had crossed the road and was about to disappear from view. The black sweater almost eclipsed the black skirt. He stuck his head out of the driver’s window and shouted “Ciao bella!” in her direction. She didn’t turn. Perhaps she didn’t hear. As we drove off, he said, “I think you’ve met Gabriella. Research student. From Verona. Sweet kid. Sweet kid.”
He looked at the briefcase lying on my knees.
“Where are we going?” I asked meekly.
“Oh—just for a ride. A ride, a spin, a chat. Lovely morning like this. Don’t worry, the Library won’t go away. You’re working on the Pearce manuscripts?”
“Yes, as it happens—”
“And how’s it coming along?”
I shrugged.
“You can’t do it, Bill. You can’t fucking do it!”
“I can’t?”
“You don’t have the background.”
“I’ll find out. That’s why I was—”
“Why should you spend a year researching what I could tell you right now?”
There was an answer to this, not an easy or a scholarly answer. But this was no time to give it.
“They’re my notebooks,” I said.
“It’s my field.”
“It’s my business.”
We stopped at traffic lights. He groped for a cigarette and roughly offered me one. Inside the car there was still a faint trace of scent. The seat was warm. How casually we human beings exchange places. Then I noticed on the shelf in front of me, beneath the dashboard, hidden from Potter by assorted clutter, a small, cylindrical bottle of perfume. So (the evidence of a hasty exit): while they had “had words,” she had coolly taken out her perfume and dabbed herself, perhaps serenely eyed her compact mirror as well. Then, the words getting more heated, she had got out and slammed the door, having absent-mindedly flung the perfume bottle beneath the dashboard. Then she had remembered and reached in through the window—“My perfume”—and he had grabbed her wrist.
These little scenes …
He turned to light my cigarette. The glare of the sun, as it had set off Gabriella’s limpid complexion, showed up his tired features. Minor celebrity-dom has not become Potter. As his TV face has acquired definition, so his private face has become blurred. Perhaps it is exposure to the studio cameras which has given him, in the light of day, the worn-but-defiant looks of a faded matinée idol. The hair, which affects a tousled nonchalance, is betrayed by the crinkled brow. The eyes, when not masked by the raffish sun-glasses, have their own shadowy nimbus. Every so often they have this vexed expression, as if a serious man were trying to get out from the guise of a clown.
“What were you going to look up?”
“Lyell.”
“The Principles?”
“Yes.”
“Which edition?”
“What do you mean, which edition?” I said ingenuously. I knew perfectly well that Lyell published more than ten editions of the Principles of Geology, three with significant revisions, and that the edition I should use—the edition which Matthew would have lent to Rector Hunt and which
the Rector failed to finish—was the 1853 (revised) edition.
“You see, this is just the sort of thing I mean. Lyell published a dozen editions. He revised the thing several times. His thinking changed. Are we talking about the 1850, the 1853 …?”
“Oh—I see. I think the 1850.”
“And are we talking about the Principles or the Elements? You know the difference?”
(Matthew had both. Companion volumes. He lent the Rector both. Over a thousand pages.)
“Ah—”
The lights changed. We drove off.
“It’s my subject, Bill.” The voice took on a more frenzied note. “The spiritual crisis of the mid-nineteenth century is my subject!”
Uttered in the late twentieth century and emanating from that dark-vizored, cigarette-clenching face, these words, if they had not carried such urgency, would have had a comic splendour. Perhaps he realised their preposterousness. We careered round a roundabout. Why should a man whose principal interests seemed to be a dubious bid to become a TV personality, and the exploration of ever-varying female flesh, care at all about scholarship, let alone the spiritual crisis of the mid-nineteenth century? But then why should I—?
“You have a monopoly?”
“You have credentials?!”
If he hadn’t suddenly started to drive like a madman, I might even have begun to feel sorry for him. I had encountered him at a bad moment. He had had a lovers’ tiff, poor man, and been witnessed in the process. Now, with me as a hostage to his spleen, out was coming all his deeper discontent.
And why was I so immovable? If I owned the Notebooks, did I own Matthew? I might have said, “All right, stop the car,” and handed over the briefcase. I admit that on this bright morning, three days after my interview with Sam, I came close to doing just that. “Here you are”—with a sweet and compassionate smile—“What does it matter? If it means so much to you.”
And how does anyone find “their subject”?
We had driven out of town and turned on to a minor road that led across flat, glistening farmland, threaded by willow-fringed ditches. It was then that he began to behave like a frustrated rally-driver. Admittedly, there was a virtual absence of traffic, and visibility was perfect, but there was the problem of the sharp bends the road took, after long straights, round the corners of ancient, inviolable fields. Also the problem, on occasion, of an oncoming car. I clung, reflexively, to my briefcase. I thought: he means to scare me into surrender. I fleetingly but seriously indulged the fantasy that all this was a deliberate exercise: Plan B, or Abduction. I was being whisked away to some secret hide-out, where the price of my release would be the contents of my briefcase. I would be found, a day or so hence, wandering dazed and dishevelled by the roadside.
But there was a moment—I swear it—when all speculation seemed beside the point. As we headed towards a right-hand bend which the expression on Potter’s face seemed grimly to disregard, I thought: he means to kill us both, him and me, on this spring morning. He could really do it. And as we hurtled towards this possible outcome, I was conscious of the vibrant green of the fields, of little, individual larks trilling somewhere, unseen, above us, and I had a distinct vision of the ghost of Matthew Pearce (he wore a black frock-coat and was wondering just what it was he had started) coming to visit the scene of the crash, coming to ponder these two dead men who had died locked in mortal argument over his own lifeless remains.
“Why don’t you stick to poetry, Bill?”
“The terms of the Ellison Fellowship,” I jabbered, “clearly allow me—”
“Fuck the Ellison Fellowship. The Ellison Fellowship’s a fucking joke. You know that.”
“Michael, I think you should slow down.”
“What do you want, money or something?”
“I think you should slow down.”
“You want to sell the Notebooks, is that it?”
“I think you—”
“Okay, okay—”
He slowed down, braking hard and just in time for the bend. A cold smile squeezed his lips. He drove with exaggerated caution and gentleness.
“There’s no need to hang on to that briefcase like that—I need my hands for the wheel, you know.”
I had to admit this was so.
We took a turn back towards town. I felt the blood in my veins, the air in my lungs. He could have done it. He lit another cigarette. I refused. We reached the centre in stiff silence. How strange, how incongruous is an ancient university city. These age-grimed walls, these modern people; this hoarded learning, this mindless sunshine.
The traffic thickened. Posses of cyclists weaved around us.
“So—the Library, then,” he said, with sudden, bizarre amiability. “Let’s take you to the Library. It won’t have gone away.” Then he added, as if we were back at our point of departure, as if the last twenty minutes simply hadn’t occurred: “Yes—a sweet girl, Gabriella. Does this and that for me. Very bright. Very—hard-working. You know—” he turned and glanced at me “—if ever you need a research assistant.”
He watched the denimed rump of one of the passing cyclists.
I thought: Plan C, Seduction by a Female Agent.
Then, as we came to a halt in the line of cars, he said, “Christ!”
I had seen her too, at almost precisely the same moment—Katherine, walking towards us on the opposite pavement (carrying that straw bag), so far not having spotted us. He was plainly caught between the incriminating hope that she might not notice us at all and the difficulty of justifying to me why he should let his own wife walk right by without greeting her. We were at a standstill and—for a variety of reasons—I considered making a quick exit. Then Potter lowered his window and called out, with a sort of clotted brightness: “Katherine!”
She stopped, gave a perplexed smile, then, since her side of the road was clear and we remained stationary, walked over towards us. At some point she took in the fact that I was sitting beside Potter, and her smile became more perplexed. She stooped by Potter’s door.
“Hello,” she said. “How was London? Hello Bill.”
“Fine,” Potter said. “London was fine.” The repetition seemed to come sideways out of his mouth, expressly for my benefit. “Thought I’d drive back early. Beat the traffic. I bumped into Bill here on the way in. Just giving him a lift to the Library.”
Katherine looked at me. Her puzzled smile turned into one of undisguised intrigue. “But you’re a long way from the College, Bill.”
“Exactly,” Potter said, quick off the mark and seeing his escape route. “What is our Bill doing on the other side of town so early in the day, yet supposedly on his way to the Library? A question he hasn’t answered.” He darted me a look. Then he said to Katherine as the traffic began to move, “Why don’t you hop in? You’re on your way home? I’ll take you there, after we’ve dumped this reprobate here.”
Katherine got in, scrambling across the back seat. Then she leant forward, a hand on each of the front seats, so that her face was almost between us. She seemed suddenly all alertness and amusement, as if this chance encounter had brightened an unpromising day.
“Well, Bill,” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell us?”
Plainly, the joke was on me, and, plainly, Potter was relishing the twist in the situation. I might have been more discomforted if it hadn’t been for the little bottle of perfume still lying under the dashboard (and for a kind of dazed thankfulness for still being in one piece). I thought: it is quite simple. All I have to do is nothing. All I have to do is leave the bottle of perfume just where it is. But I couldn’t do it.
“You’d be surprised if you really knew,” I said. I gave a quick sideways glance at Potter.
“Ah—a man of mystery,” Katherine said.
I don’t think she had seen the bottle. She sat back. I shifted in my own seat in such a way as to make my briefcase slip, as if by accident, from my knees. Leaning forward to retrieve it, I contrived at the same time to scoop up the b
ottle, then transfer it, hidden in my hand, to my pocket. Potter glanced from the road ahead to me. Maybe he hadn’t seen it. I don’t think so. Maybe the moment of my secreting it was the moment of his realising it was there in the first place. I couldn’t tell, with his eyes hidden by those glasses.
“Hang on to the goods,” he said, with a slight touch of gall.
Katherine leant forward again, grasping the back of my seat. “How’s it going?” she said, looking over my shoulder.
“Oh—fine.” I gave the briefcase a meaningless caress.
“No,” she said, in a softer, more solicitous, more all-embracing tone. “I mean—how’s it going?”
It was strange. It was like a question spoken out of her husband’s presence. Her lips were almost in my ear. It was as though at any moment she might have ruffled my hair or put her arms round my neck. Potter looked at us both, like some foxy chauffeur. To my surprise, I found myself suddenly glad of the briefcase lying across my lap, screening the state of things between my legs. Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if she had seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe she had seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe that’s how things were.
“Oh—okay,” I said.
We headed back towards the Meadows of Dalliance and the True Path of Knowledge. Potter slowed down near the spot where he had hijacked me earlier. The day had warmed. The wet road was now a dapple of damp and dry patches. It would not have surprised me if, as I made to get out, Katherine had suddenly kissed me or pinched my cheek—like a mother saying goodbye to a son departing for school. Instead, she sat back—not bothering to move into my place beside Potter, giving me a sort of bold-but-beleaguered look.
“Bye, Bill.”
“Happy hunting,” Potter said.
Whoever designed our University Library must have known what they were about. It is variously likened to a fortress, a prison, a power-station. Alcatraz. Fort Knox. It stands in geographical and architectural scorn of the cosy huddle of colleges some half a mile distant across the lawn-fringed river. And the inference, I suppose, is that it will continue to stand so—with all those books, all that compacted civilization, still safe inside—when the fragile colleges and tranquil lawns are no more. Even inside, it is not exactly inviting. You have the impression that books are stored here as ammunition is stored in readiness for some awesome, cataclysmic conflict. All day long, along mysterious passage-ways and up and down secret lift-shafts, they are shifted and trundled like shells in the bowels of a vast dreadnought.
