Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (10 page)

The three people I had expected to leave together also left, indeed, they were the first to go. Fortunately for Sir Peter Wheeler, the only guest who lingered until gone midnight was Lord Rymer, The Flask, not because he was very animated or not as yet sleepy, but due to his complete inability to put one foot in front of the other. Since The Receptacle lived in Oxford, this did not pose such a problem. Mrs Berry called a taxi, and between the two of us we managed to detach the heavy, alcoholic Flask from the armchair in which he had installed himself half-way through the evening, and with a few discreet heaves (it was impossible to perform this task quickly) we got him as far as the front door under the supervision and guidance of Peter's walking-stick; we gladly accepted the help of the driver in squeezing him into the taxi, although the poor man would have a tough time prising him out of there on his own when they reached their destination. The hired waiters could not leave without first collecting up the more substantial leftovers from plates and serving dishes, and then I helped Mrs Berry with the cups and glasses and the remaining ashtrays, so that everything was pretty much cleared away, Wheeler hated coming down the following morning to the debris of the previous night, well, almost everyone does, including me. When Peter's housekeeper had gone up to bed, Peter took a seat slowly and carefully at the foot of the stairs, holding on to the banister rail until he had touched down (I did not dare offer him a hand), and took another cigar out of his cigar case.

'Are you going to smoke another cigar now?' I asked, surprised, knowing that this would take him a while.

I had assumed that his sudden decision to take up such an inappropriate seat for a man well into his eighties had been due to a momentary weariness or that it was his usual way of pausing and gathering a little strength before going on up to the first floor where he had his bedroom, perhaps he always stopped there before the ascent. He was still very mobile, but that daily, continual tussle with those shallow, rather steep, wooden steps — thirteen to the first floor, twenty-five to the second — seemed ill-advised at his age. He had laid his walking-stick across his knees, like the carbine or spear of a soldier at rest, I watched him preparing his Havana cigar, sitting on the third stair, his gleaming shoes poised on the first, the central part of the stairs was covered by a carpet or perhaps it was a runner carefully fitted and fixed or invisibly stapled in place. His posture was that of a young man, as was his still thick hair, although this was now completely white and slightly wavy as if it were made of pastry, neatly combed with the parting on the left, which gave one a sense of the far-off little boy, for the parting must have been there, unchanged, ever since early childhood, doubtless predating the surname Wheeler. He had got dressed up for his buffet supper and was not the sort to reach the end of a party in a state of semi-disarray, like Lord Rymer or the widow Wadman or, to some extent too, De la Garza (his tie loose and somewhat askew, his shirt growing unruly at the waist): everything remained intact and in its place, even the water with which he had combed his hair seemed not entirely to have dried (I ruled out the use of brilliantine). And as he sat there apparently untroubled it was still easy to see him, to imagine him as a young heart-throb of the '30s or perhaps '40s — years that were inevitably more austere in Europe — not perhaps in a film, but in real life, or perhaps in an advertisement or poster of the period, there was nothing of the unreal about him. He was obviously pleased with the way his banquet had gone and, even though we had the following morning to talk, he perhaps wanted to discuss it a little now, not to declare the evening quite over yet, he probably felt livelier — or perhaps simply less alone — than he did on other nights, which usually ended early for him. Even though I was the one who was supposed to be all alone in London, not him here in Oxford.

'Oh, only half of it or less. I'm not really that tired. And it's not such an extravagance,' he said. 'Anyway, did you have a good time?'

He asked this with just a hint of condescension and pride, he clearly considered that he had done me a great favour with his idea and his invitation, allowing me to leave my supposed isolation, to see and to meet other people. So I took advantage of this slight display of arrogance to lodge my only justifiable complaint:

'Yes, an excellent time, Peter, thank you. I would have had a much better time, though, if you hadn't invited that idiot from the embassy, what on earth made you do it? Who the hell is he? Wherever did you dig the numskull up? Oh, he's got a future in politics, that's for sure, even in the diplomatic service. And if that's the idea and you're hoping to squeeze some funding out of him for symposia or publications or something, then I won't say a word, although it still seems a little unfair that I should end up acting as his interpreter, and very nearly procurer and nursemaid as well. He'll be a minister in Spain some day, or, at the very least, ambassador to Washington, he's exactly the kind of pretentious fool with just a thin veneer of cordiality that the Right in my country produces by the dozen and which the Left reproduces and imitates whenever they're in power, as if they were the victims of some form of contagion. When I say "the Left", of course, that's just a manner of speaking, as it is everywhere nowadays. De la Garza is a safe investment, I agree, and, in the short term, he'll get on well in any political party. The only problem is that he did not leave here a happy man. Still, that's some consolation, at least, since he ruined most of my evening.' I had said my piece.

Wheeler lit his cigar with another of his long matches, although he did so less singlemindedly this time. He looked up then and fixed his eyes on me in fond commiseration, I was standing at the bottom of the stairs, a short distance from him, leaning on the frame of the sliding door that led from the main living-room to his office and which he usually kept open (there were always two lecterns on view in the study, on one a dictionary of his own language lay open, along with a magnifying glass, on the other an atlas, sometimes the Blaeu, sometimes the magnificent Stieler, also open, with another magnifying glass), I had my arms crossed and my right foot crossed, too, over my left, with only the toes of the former resting on the ground. Whereas the eyes of his colleague, friend and fellow scholar, Rylands, had had a more liquid quality and, most strikingly, had each been of a different colour — one eye was the colour of olive oil, the other pale ashes, one was cruel like the eye of an eagle or a cat, the other bespoke rectitude, the eye of a dog or a horse — Wheeler's eyes had a mineral appearance and were rather too identical in design and shape, like two marbles almost violet in colour, but flecked and very translucent, or even mauve, but veined and not at all opaque or even, almost, the colour of garnets, or possibly amethysts or morganites or the bluer varieties of chalcedony, they varied according to the light, according to whether it was day or night, according to the season and the clouds and whether it was morning or evening and according to the mood of the person doing the looking, and, when narrowed, resembled the seeds of pomegranates, the early autumn fruit of my childhood. They would once have been very bright, and frightening when in angry or punitive mood, now they preserved only the embers and a touch of fleeting irritation in their otherwise mild appearance, they usually looked with a calm and a patience that were not innate, but learned, honed by the will over time; but there had been no attenuation of their mischievousness or their irony or their all-embracing, earthy sarcasm, of which they were clearly capable at any moment, given the chance; nor of the assured penetration of one who has spent his entire life observing and comparing, and seeing in the new what he has seen before, and making links and associations, and tracking things down in his visual memory and thus foreseeing what is yet to be seen or what has not yet happened, and venturing judgements. And when they appeared to take pity — which was not infrequent — that spontaneous expression of pity was immediately tempered by a sort of jaded recognition or weary acceptance, as if in the depths of his pupils lay the conviction that in the end and in some measure, however infinitesimal, we all brought our own misfortunes upon ourselves, or created them or allowed ourselves to suffer them, or perhaps acquiesced to them. 'Unhappiness is an invention,' I sometimes quote to myself.

'The Left has always been a manner of speaking everywhere, I mean, the Left that you Spaniards, Italians, French and Latin Americans refer to, as if it existed or ever had existed outside the realms of the imaginary and the speculative. You should have seen it in the '30s, or even before. A mere collective fantasy. Disguises, rhetoric, the more austere the uniform, the more fraudulent, all pompous facets or forms of the same thing, always hateful and always unjust, and invulnerable too. I prefer being able to tell that someone's a bastard from his face, right from the start, at least you know where you are and don't have to waste energy convincing anyone else. They're all oppressors, it's amazing that people don't realise this
ab ovo,
it makes little difference what cause they're fighting for, what public cause, or what their propaganda motives are. Frauds and transcendental innocents alike all describe these motives as historical or ideological, I would never call them that, it's too ridiculous. It's amazing that some people still believe there are exceptions, because there aren't any, not in the long run, and there never have been. Well, can you think of any? The Left as the exception, how absurd. What a waste.' He exhaled a large puff of smoke as if indicating a paragraph break, and as if to move on to another subject, which is what he did: 'As for Rafita, as his poor father calls him, I don't think you should complain about him or bear him a grudge, that would be pure viciousness having just sent him off to his certain death on the roads (who knows, it may already have happened)' — and he made to look at his watch, without even getting as far as pushing back his sleeve — 'possibly condemning in passing Mayor Pennick and his submissive wife, not, I suppose, that they would be any great loss to anyone either, in public or in private life. Rafa's the son of an old friend of mine, quite a bit younger than me, in fact, by at least ten years. He was in London during the war, he helped when things got difficult. Later on, he joined the diplomatic corps and applied unsuccessfully for the embassy. I mean the embassy here, he spent half his life wandering around Africa and part of Oceania until they retired him. He's asked me to keep Rafita amused now and then, to give him a bit of guidance and lend him a hand when he needs it. You know what parents are like, they never see their children as grown-ups nor as the unpleasant people they can sometimes turn into, always assuming they weren't clearly so from the cradle on and the parents have simply chosen not to notice.' — 'Much less the utter morons they can turn into,' I thought, without interrupting Peter. — 'You may think I'm not the best person to amuse, guide or help anyone, but if I give a supper . . . To be honest, I didn't think he'd come. As far as I know, he has plenty of company in London. I'm sorry you got stuck with him for so much of the time, and Lord Rymer wasn't much help either, I was relying on their shared interests to bring them together. And, of course, I'd assumed Rafita would be more self-sufficient in English than he is, he's been living here for nearly two years now, and I would have sworn that he learned it when he was a child, his father's English is very good, true he has a slight accent, but nothing like his offspring's, which is diabolical. Pablo, the father, hardly drinks at all, whereas Rafita is like a hip-flask only with more capacity, terrible, a kind of refillable bottle. His father's a wonderful man, but he's got an imbecile for a son. It happens, doesn't it, as frequently or as infrequently as the other way round. And yet the idiot will go far.' — 'He's got a complete moron for a son,' I thought, again without saying it, 'and he'll doubtless end up a minister.' — Wheeler exhaled more smoke, slowly this time, the time it took to blow two or three smoke-rings, as if this topic were not of much interest to him either and as if his explanations should have been more than enough to settle the matter once and for all. I took out my cigarettes, he rattled his large box of expensive matches at me, offering me one, I showed him my lighter to indicate that I already had a light, and lit my cigarette. The manner in which he asked his next question led me to believe that he was, for some reason, driven to ask it or that it had been on the tip of his tongue for a while, it clearly wasn't just a way of passing the time nor did it belong to the chance to-and-fro of conversation, to the post-prandial comments that arise or assert themselves at the end of a supper or a party, when everyone has gone or when you are one of those to have left the party along with other guests. Tupra and the fat judge and Beryl, who were probably approaching London by now, would perhaps be talking about us or about the Fahys and the widow Wadman. To the lady mayoress's great embarrassment, De la Garza and the mayor of Thame or Bicester, or wherever it was, would possibly be mulling over the topic of elusive slags, assuming they had not yet perished on a bend in the road and that De la Garza was managing to make himself understood in English for more than two consecutive words (he could always resort to mime and, in doing so, take his hands off the wheel, thus increasing the risk of an accident). And even Mrs Berry would be going over it all in her head, unable to sleep, she too had received guests and been an ancillary hostess, she wouldn't want this long night to finish just yet either. 'Tell me, what did you think of Beryl? How did she strike you? What impression did she make?'

'Beryl?' I said, caught slightly unawares, I hadn't imagined he would ask me about her, but rather about his friend Bertram, if he was a friend, and about whom he had forewarned me. 'Well, we barely spoke really, she seemed to take very little notice of anyone else, and she didn't appear to be enjoying herself much either, as if she was here out of duty. But she's got very good legs, and she knows she has and makes the most of them. She's got rather too many teeth and too big a jaw, but she's still rather pretty. Her smell is the most attractive thing about her, her best feature: an unusual, pleasant, very sexual smell.'