Pantheon

by Sam Bourne

  The echo on his voice surprised him. This was no corridor. He stepped into the almost-dark, calling out again. No answer.

  He walked further, slowly becoming conscious that the path he was taking was narrow. He put out his hand, expecting the touch of cold concrete. Instead he felt rough metal, the texture of a bicycle chain. Slowly he began to make out the shape of a conveyor belt.

  He had read about this innovation. He was inside the tunnel, the one that connected the New Bodleian to the Old, stretching under Broad Street. It had been lauded as a feat of engineering and great British ingenuity. Instead of librarians scurrying back and forth between the two buildings, a mechanical conveyor would do the work for them, dumbly transporting whatever had been requested, whether it were Principia Mathematica or Das Kapital.

  James squinted upward to see a stretch of pipework attached to the ceiling. That must be the pneumatic tube system introduced with equal fanfare last year: put the request slip in the capsule and off it whizzed, powered by nothing more than compressed air. Aeroplanes, the wireless, the cinema — the world was changing so fast. It was already unrecognizable from the Victorian age his parents still inhabited.

  ‘Miss? Are you there?’ Where had the librarian gone and why was she not answering?

  There was a sharp turn right; he wondered how far he had gone. Could he already be under Radcliffe Square? He didn’t think he had walked that far, but perhaps the absence of light had confused his senses. He suddenly became aware that he was cold; he shivered, feeling the film of sweat that still coated him.

  What was that? Was that a flicker of light far ahead? There had been some kind of change, perhaps a torch coming on and off. He quickened his pace.

  He broke into a jog. ‘Miss, is that you?’

  There was a delay and then an answer, one that made his blood freeze.

  The answer was ‘No.’ And it was spoken by a man.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Who’s there?’ He could hear the alarm in his own voice.

  ‘Is that Dr Zennor?’

  An accent. What was it? Dutch? German? He couldn’t even see where the voice was coming from. What exactly had he walked into here? ‘Where has the librarian gone?’

  ‘I am the librarian.’

  As that moment, James was dazzled by a bright-yellow beam aimed directly in his face. He turned away, lifting his hand to his eyes.

  ‘My apologies, sir. For the light, also I am sorry.’

  The torch was now angled away from his face, but still James remained blinded. He blinked and blinked again to regain his vision. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Please.’ Pliz. ‘Do not swear at me.’

  James could feel his rage building again. In a low voice, the calmness of a man repressing fury, he repeated, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Epstein. I am now the night librarian here.’

  So that would explain the accent: an emigre German. ‘And what happened to the woman?’

  ‘I saw her down here after six of clock and told her to go home already. Such long days they work, these girls. Working for seven days she has been, without a break. On a trot.’

  ‘On the trot.’

  ‘Yes. On the trot. That is what I mean.’

  ‘But she was helping me. I had a request.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I know this. I am helping you myself. I was trying to find the books.’

  ‘The books Mrs Zennor was borrowing?’

  ‘That’s right. But why you come down in the tunnel? This is prohibited, yes?’

  James exhaled. His heart was pounding, at a pace that refused to slow. The light shining in his face had rattled him. He was still dazed, but it was not just the light. Something else.

  The man spoke again. ‘Please. I have them now. You are to follow me.’

  They walked in silence, James embarrassed by his pursuit of this man underground. And also fearful — that he would, by saying the wrong thing, induce a change of heart in the emigre librarian, that he would come across as too sweatily anxious. So he curbed his impatience to see the books in the man’s hands and waited till they emerged into the relative light of the stairwell, moving from there back inside the reading room.

  ‘We have to save the power, you see. At night. That is why there is no lights down there. Only this.’ Epstein waved his torch. ‘And no conveyor of course. So this I do by hand. It takes a long time, for which I apologies.’

  ‘No need to apologize,’ James replied.

  ‘Apolog ize, yes, of course. Sorry for my English. I can read it perfectly, but I never had to speak it before so much.’

  ‘No. It’s excellent.’ James momentarily considered speaking to him in German, then imagined the delay that would entail — explaining how he knew the language, his reading of the great Viennese analysts and all the rest of it.

  ‘In Heidelberg, I did not need so much English. But now I am here.’

  ‘I see.’ James was trying to identify the three books the German had placed on the desk, their spines facing — maddeningly — away from him.

  ‘I did not choose to leave, Dr Zennor. You see, I am of a type considered, how to say, undesirable by the new governors of my country. I came here two years ago.’

  ‘You are a Jew?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, welcome to England. And thanks for finding these books so quickly.’ James nodded towards them, hoping he would get the hint. ‘You’re obviously a good librarian.’

  ‘Thank you. I am learning. In Heidelberg, I was not librarian.’

  ‘No?’ James glanced again at the books, but the man was still laboriously engaged in signing them out, taking what seemed an age over each word.

  ‘No.’ Epstein smiled a wistful smile. ‘My last job at the university was as a cleaner. I had to mop the floors.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Before that, I was Professor of Greek and Chairman of the Department of Classical Studies.’

  ‘I see.’ James looked into the old eyes, seeing a terrible sadness and longing. He had read about the ghastly things the Nazis were doing to the Jews; he knew of the laws banning them from the professions, burning down their synagogues and God knows what else. But it was different to meet one in person, to see the human consequences of such barbarism standing in front of you.

  The librarian must have grown used to this reaction. ‘Oh, do not feel sorry for me, Dr Zennor. I am very grateful. For my job and for this country. The only country in the world fighting this evil.’

  James glanced once more at the pile on the desk between them.

  The professor pulled himself upright. ‘I am forgetting myself. Please.’

  James picked up the books and shifted over to one of the desks. He turned the first one over. To his surprise, it was a bound volume of journals: The Proceedings of the British Psychological Society for 1920-1. He flicked through it, trying to work out what might possibly have drawn the interest of his wife. This was not her subject after all.

  As he turned the pages, he caught a slip of white paper, the tiniest bookmark that had been left inside. Instinctively, he held it close to his face, hoping that he might catch a scent of her. But it carried no trace. Instead it marked an article entitled: ‘A survey of British veterans of the Great War’.

  Odd. Florence had no particular interest in the last war. If she was not a psychologist, she was certainly not a historian.

  He turned to the next book, written by an American scholar affiliated with Harvard Medical School: Studies in Pediatric Trauma. He flicked through the pages again, looking for one of those tiny white slips. He found it and began reading:

  ‘… sustained exposure of a non-traumatized child to a traumatized adult can result in secondary or passive trauma. Symptoms range from selective dumbness, melancholia, extreme shyness, impaired development, bedwetting…’

  Instantly, he thought of Harry: how he had been slower than the other children to control himself at night, how he had still not mastered it. Florence
had been anxious, refusing to be placated by James’s insistence that their son would ‘soon get the hang of it’. Until now James had thought nothing more of it.

  He picked up the third book. A Compendium of Advice for Mothers. So very unlike Florence, who usually cursed such things. He didn’t need to thumb through the pages. The book opened automatically, the spine already cracked. The chapter heading: Preparing a child for a long journey or separation.

  He read the title again and then once more, the dread rising in him. Any hope he had harboured that this might be a stunt, an attempt by Florence to make a point, was fading fast. There it was in black and white. What his wife had planned for was a long journey. Or, worse, a separation.

  He went back to the first volume, to the article on former combatants in the last war, reading a paragraph at random:

  ‘… subjects in the trial revealed a set of behaviors which recurred. Among them were acute insomnia, including difficulty both falling and staying asleep; excess anger and temper; poor concentration. Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger.’

  He skimmed a few paragraphs ahead:

  ‘… several of those interviewed displayed an extreme reluctance to speak of their wartime experiences, flinching from even indirect reminders. Perhaps paradoxically, many of these same people complained of unwanted memories of the event, “flashbacks”, as it were. The most common complaint, experienced by some sixty-eight per cent of those surveyed, was of distressing dreams, often violent…’

  James slammed the book shut, his heart hammering. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He was hungry. He had barely eaten since last night and he had exerted himself strenuously on the river early this morning. The alcohol would not have helped either. The room was beginning to spin.

  He stood up and saw Epstein at the desk, the old man’s bespectacled face appearing to shrink and swell, waxing and waning like the moon. He had to get out, into the fresh air. He mumbled an apology, left the books where they were and stumbled towards the exit.

  Outside, he gulped down large draughts of oxygen, clutching the handrail by the entrance. Across the street, the Kings Arms was filling up now with the after-work crowd: not students but academics-turned-civil servants.

  He needed to think but his head was throbbing. What had he been expecting? He had assumed something more direct: an atlas, perhaps a road map, maybe a train timetable. But this, what he had just seen… he felt nauseous.

  Where the hell was his wife? Where had she gone? It unnerved him to imagine that she was living and breathing somewhere — perhaps arriving at a distant railway station or walking down a street or sipping a cup of tea — that she existed somewhere now, at this very moment, and he had no idea where. He told himself he could survive being apart from her, so long as he knew where she was. But he knew that was not true. Ever since those nights and days in Madrid, holding each other as the bombs fell, he felt that nature itself demanded they be together. As a scientist, he was not meant to believe in fate or destiny, so he could not say what he truly felt. Nor did his education have much tolerance for a word like ‘souls’, but that too was what he felt: that their souls had been joined.

  Harry’s arrival had only confirmed it. He loved his son with an intensity that had surprised him. He pictured him now, rarely saying a word to anyone, clinging to his little polar bear. The thought of life apart from his son struck sudden terror into his heart.

  The words appeared before him, floating in front of his eyes: a long journey or separation. A black thought raced through his mind, like a virus carried on his bloodstream. Could it be, was it possible

  …

  Suddenly and without any warning even to himself, as if his mouth, chest and lungs had a will of their own, he heard himself screaming at the top of his voice. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’

  The sound of it shocked him. A group of young men drinking on the pavement outside the Kings Arms looked towards him, their faces flushed, their necks taut with aggression. James wondered if these were the veterans of the Dunkirk retreat — or evacuation, as the BBC delicately phrased it — brought here for treatment at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Florence had mentioned them only yesterday, reporting the scandalized reaction of some superannuated don or other who had been outraged by the soldiers’ constant state of drunkenness. James had shrugged, refusing to condemn servicemen for seeking comfort wherever they could find it.

  Ignoring them, he crossed the road, retrieved his bike from outside Wadham and cycled away.

  He pedalled maniacally, trying to keep his thoughts at bay. And yet they refused to be halted. He could almost feel them in his head, speeding around his cerebral cortex; as soon as he had blocked off one neural pathway, they re-routed and hurtled down another, shouting at him inside his head, forming into words.

  He smothered them with another idea. It was Thursday, nearly seven o’clock in the evening and it was summer. Ordinarily, this was when Florence would be out with her friend Rosemary for the weekly walk of their rambling club. As far as James could tell, most were communists, all but ideological in their zeal for strenuous exercise in the British countryside.

  The group would probably be walking back by now and, if they were sticking with their usual routine, he knew just where to find them.

  And so, for the second time that day — though it felt like another era — he was back by the river, cycling along the towpath towards Iffley Lock. And, sure enough, there they were: Rosemary at the front, in sensible shoes, her sensible brown hair in a sensible bob, carrying one handle of a picnic hamper, the other taken by a strapping young female undergraduate. James let his bike slow, then swung one leg off it, so that he was perching on just one pedal, before hopping off, trying to look calm and composed. No red mists now, he told himself.

  ‘Hello there,’ he called out, giving a wave.

  ‘Is that you, James?’ she asked, peering through spectacles which, while no match for Magnus Hook’s, consisted of two substantial slabs of glass.

  ‘Yes, yes it is. I was just-’

  ‘Don’t worry, I can guess.’ She nodded at the young woman on the other side of the picnic basket who immediately and deferentially yielded her handle to James, falling back to join the chattering group of women a few paces behind. How Florence fitted into this group, James could not imagine, except that it was a pretty safe bet that several would have had a strong ‘pash’ for her. Perhaps Rosemary too. He took the basket in one hand, wheeling his bike in the other, and waited for her to speak first.

  ‘So, you’re looking for Florence?’

  ‘I am, as it happens. I don’t suppose you know where she-’

  She cut him off, her gaze fixed straight ahead: ‘How long has she been gone?’

  ‘Since,’ he made a gesture of looking at his watch, ‘this morning, as a matter of fact.’ He was carrying the hamper in his left arm, which was already buckling under the strain. But he was reluctant to say anything, lest he distract Rosemary whose brow was fixed in concentration. But it was she who stopped.

  ‘Audrey!’ she shouted, turning to address one of the walkers behind. ‘Could you and Violet take the hamper? There’s a love.’

  Two of the girls rushed forward to do as they had been told. Rosemary supervised the handover, then waited while the rest of the group overtook them, ensuring that she and James were well out of earshot. ‘Gone since this morning, you say,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you thought she might be with us.’

  ‘Well, it’s Thursday evening. She never misses her weekly walk, rain or shine.’

  ‘Ramble, Dr Zennor. We call it a ramble. And, you’re right, Florence is a stalwart. She hated missing the last couple of weeks.’

  ‘Missing them? She didn’t miss them.’

  ‘Well, she wasn’t here.’

  ‘I think you must have that confused. I remember it distinctly, Florence left at five o’clock, walking boots on. Same as always. I c
an picture her coming home, telling me about it.’

  ‘Well, I run this rambling club, Dr Zennor, and I’ve never missed a week. Not one. And I can tell you that Florence was absent last Thursday, as she was the week before. She’s not the kind of woman whose presence goes unnoticed.’

  James was baffled. ‘Did she give any explanation?’

  ‘Only that something had come up. Something important. She was very apologetic.’

  James was working through the different logical possibilities, trying to rank them in order of probability: that Rosemary was lying; that Florence had joined some other group and lied to her friend in order to spare her feelings; that on both Thursdays Florence had indeed been somewhere else, somewhere important, and had lied to him about it.

  Rosemary spoke again. ‘This is very awkward, Dr Zennor. When speaking about the affairs of others, one never knows how much one is meant to know. Or how much the other parties themselves know.’

  ‘Affairs? What do you mean, “affairs”?’

  ‘Sorry. That was a very poor choice of word. Sorry about that. When one is speaking about the lives of others, let’s put it that way, one is never quite sure where the boundaries lie.’

  ‘Look, Miss-’ he ran dry, immediately regretting the attempt at a name.

  ‘Hyde, it’s Rosemary Hyde. And that rather makes my point, Dr Zennor. I have been your wife’s friend for at least ten years, since we were at school together. I suspect I am her closest confidante. And yet you are not entirely sure of my name.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ he said, without much conviction. ‘It’s just that I always thought your friendship was… well, I just left you two to get on with it.’ He was still preoccupied by the notion of his wife pretending to have gone out walking the last two Thursdays, putting her boots on, arranging for Mrs Brunson to look after Harry. Why would she have done that? Where would she have gone?

  ‘It’s not a criticism,’ Rosemary was saying. ‘Rather it might illustrate your problem.’

  He could feel the red mist descending. ‘Yes? And what exactly is my “problem”, Miss Hyde? Because as far as I can see my only “problem” is that my wife and child are missing. I have been sent on a wild goose chase to the Bodleian library that proved no use at all and now you want to play games with me — suggesting that my wife has been lying about her recent movements — rather than just spitting out where the hell she is. That’s all I want to know, Miss Hyde. Where is she?’