All Souls

by Javier Marías

  And when Clare finished her story, I got up from the floor and returned to my window and to looking at her, thinking: "But it can't be, it wouldn't be, it isn't."

  She got up from the bed and came over to me, and then the two of us looked in silence out of the window that revealed in the distance the fantastic imitation of the palaces of her childhood; there was a moon and clouds; her breasts brushed against my back. Clare stroked the back of my neck and I turned round and we looked at each other as if we were each the other's vigilant, compassionate eyes, the eyes that look out at us from the past and no longer matter because they've known for a long time now how they're obliged to see us: perhaps we looked at each other as if we were each the other's older brother or sister and were sorry we couldn't love each other more, more at least than an older brother or sister. And it was then that I remembered some lines I'd seen quoted, the lines of another English writer of whose life (unlike Gawsworth's) much is known, but whose obscure death, which was violent and legendary, has had to be imagined, like that of Clare Newton: he was stabbed to death before he was thirty years old one day in Trinity term, on the thirtieth of May four hundred years ago, in Deptford (a name that means deep ford), near the Thames, which is what the Isis is called everywhere and at all times except when it passes through Oxford. The lines were: "Thou hast committed fornication; but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."

  The next day Clare dropped me at the door of my house in Oxford (and although it wasn't yet night we no longer made any attempt to hide). I saw that the gypsy flowerseller, who set up her stall opposite my house on Sundays and bank holidays, was just then being picked up by her invisible husband in his clean, modern van. That meant that, despite the warm, suspended, immutable spring light, it was growing late and it would not be long now before the weak wheel of the world would start rolling again and the stillness come to an end. I realised with joy that I'd been spared another Sunday in exile from the infinite.

  OF THE THREE, two have died since I left Oxford, but neither of the two was Clare Bayes, they were, as anticipated, Cromer-Blake and Toby Rylands. The man who was both father- and mother-figure to me as well as being my guide in that city died four months after I left and did not see another Michaelmas or another year, and so my second and last year was also Dr Cromer-Blake's last, though he'd spent much longer in that water than I had. And it was Toby Rylands, who would die two years later (just two months ago, in fact), who sent me an express letter and who kept Cromer-Blake's diaries, which later, when he too died, travelled south to my safekeeping as requested in Rylands' last will and testament. His letter was very short and to the point, as if he were loath to say much about the long-expected event, or about the person who, after his death, became the mirror in which he did not wish to see himself: as if now it were Rylands who could not bring himself to visit Cromer-Blake, to visit his tomb or his memory.

  Cromer-Blake was buried in London (in north London, where he was born, and although there was no need to make a collection to pay for the burial of the man who was never to be bursar, there were few people at the funeral, mostly colleagues (so supportive, so good-humoured) from the Taylorian. The priest who said the prayer for the dead and delivered the sermon had the ill grace to request the removal of the children of two colleagues, who had accompanied their parents to the Catholic church at Marble Arch to take advantage of the trip to London by spending the rest of the day at London Zoo. Of Cromer-Blake's family (his parents, an unmarried brother and a married sister) only his brother Roger was there, and it seems that as soon as the service was over he raced off in a sports car (possibly an Aston Martin) without saying a word to anyone. His friend Bruce was absent, as was Dayanand, from whom, according to the diaries, of which I understood only fragments, though I've read them in their entirety, Cromer-Blake had definitively distanced himself in the last months of his life. A few members of his college attended: not the Warden, Lord Rymer, for whom he'd done so many favours - with whom he'd been working hand in glove - but the economist Halliwell, from whom everyone fled after the funeral to avoid being bespattered by his one topic of conversation. Obituaries appeared "in two of the nationals, neither of them very kind", as Rylands enigmatically put it. The Professor Emeritus was succinct in his letter, which had obviously been written in haste, in order to be done with his obligations as soon as possible, but he was also upset. "Cromer-Blake knew what was wrong with him for nearly a year, he knew last December in fact. He was so brave. According to those who continued to see him, he bore his terrible sentence with apparent unconcern. It's odd how the most unlikely people show great courage in the end. How immensely sad. I can't stop thinking about him." The express letter - it concluded by giving me an address in London so that I could, if I wished, send a donation to a charity in memory of Cromer-Blake - said little more.

  I sent nothing, although I fully intended to. The truth is that I tried to forget about his death the moment I learned of it and, to some extent, I succeeded because it's not so hard to forget such a thing when the dead person is far away and had already begun to recede into the past even when he was alive. The last time I saw him, his health was average to poor. Kind as ever, he'd offered to give me and my huge suitcases full of books a lift to the station from where I would go to London, then on to Paris by train and hovercraft and by another train south to Madrid. But the night before my departure he felt worse and called to tell me that he had best spend the next day at home. So I paused in my preparations for leaving and went over to his college to say goodbye. Although it was late June and pleasantly warm, he received me lying on a sofa and covered by a blanket, like Saskia; the check blanket over his legs had replaced the dark cataract of his gown, which hung, black and immensely long, behind his door, as mine does in my house in Madrid. He had lost part of his aesthetic disguise. The television was on, an opera with the sound turned down. He said he felt cold, a bit feverish. I can't remember what we talked about now, I've forgotten as one does forget things to which at the time one gives no importance, the things that don't seem interesting because they're done with no awareness of the fact that what one says or does - or what one sees - has meaning and weight. And at the time that farewell had neither meaning nor weight, or at least not much, perhaps because I wanted to think that Rylands was being excessively gloomy in his predictions (Cromer-Blake did in fact seem quite nonchalant) and my thoughts were more on my leaving, on what awaited me (in the future, in all that is flat and diaphanous) than on what I was leaving behind (in the past, in all that is rough, rugged, and opaque). All I remember is that, while he cast occasional glances at a clamorously silent Falstaff, his customary pallor was even deathlier than usual, but that was not remarkable: at exam time dons always looks extra pale. That night he was almost the colour of his prematurely grey hair, which was less and less grey now and more and more white. I didn't stay long, it was late. I had to finish my packing and he perhaps wanted to listen to Falstaff.