Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

a handkerchief. There were only two, they were almost squashed. 'But she could inspire horror. The idea of that girl in association with another idea could. Don't you think so? We don't yet know the nature of that missing idea, of the idea required to inspire us with horror. Her horrifying other half. But it must exist. It does. It's simply a question of it appearing. It may also never appear. Who knows, it could turn out to be my dog.' He pointed downwards with his vertical finger, the terrier had lain down at his feet, it wasn't raining that day, there was no danger of it dirtying the sitting-room, it didn't deserve to be exiled to the kitchen on the ground floor (his index finger covered in invisible dust). 'The girl and my dog,' he repeated, and again pointed first at the window (as if the flower-seller were a ghost and had her face pressed to the glass, it was the window on the second floor, that pyramidal house had three, I slept on the top floor and worked in that living-room) and then at the dog, his finger always very erect and rigid. 'The girl with her long, chestnut hair, her high boots and her long, firm legs and my dog with his one leg missing.' I remember that he then touched the dog's stump affectionately or tentatively as if it might still hurt him, the dog was dozing. 'The fact that my dog goes everywhere with me is normal. It's necessary. It's odd if you like. I mean the two of us going around together. But there's nothing horrific about it. But if she went around with my dog. That might be horrific. The dog is missing a leg. I'm the only one who remembers him when he had four legs. My personal memory doesn't count. It's of no importance in the eyes of other people. In her eyes. In your eyes. In the eyes of other dogs. Now it's as if my dog had always had one leg missing. If it had been her dog, it would certainly never have lost its leg in a stupid argument after a football match.' Marriott had told me the story already, I had asked him: some drunken Oxford United fans, late at night on Didcot Station, the lame man beaten and held down by several of them, the dog, not as yet lame, placed on the railway line so that it would be killed by a through train. They had let it go, they had drawn back, frightened, at the last moment, the dog had rolled over, it was lucky in a way ('You can't imagine the amount of blood he lost'). 'That's an accident. An occupational hazard for a dog with a lame master. But if it had been her dog, perhaps it would have lost its leg some other way. The dog is still missing a leg. There must be some other reason, then. Something far worse. Not just an accident. You could hardly imagine that girl getting involved in a fight. Perhaps the dog would have lost its leg because of her.' He emphasised the word 'because'. 'Perhaps the only explanation of why this dog should have lost its leg, if it were her dog, would be that she had cut it off. How else could a dog who was so well looked after, cared for and loved by that nice, attractive flower-seller have lost its leg? It's a horrible idea, that girl cutting off my dog's leg; seeing it with her own eyes; being a witness to it.' Alan Marriott's words had sounded slightly indignant, indignant at the girl's behaviour. He had broken off then, as if he had conjured up too vivid an image with his own terrible hypothesis and had indeed seen the horrific couple. As if he had seen the couple through my window – 'with the eyes of the mind,' I quoted to myself. He seemed to have unnerved himself, to have frightened himself. 'Let's change the subject,' he said. And although I urged him to continue – 'No, go on, you were on the point of inventing a story' – he was not prepared to go on thinking about it, or imagining it: 'No, forget it. It's a poor example,' he had said firmly. 'As you wish,' I had said, and then we had passed on to something else. There would have been no way of persuading him to continue his fantasy, I knew this immediately, not once he had alarmed himself by it. Perhaps he had horrified himself. He must have been shocked by his own mind.

A dog and a young woman in high boots. That rainy night was in fact the first time I had seen this conjunction, this image, with my own eyes; but my memory had already recorded or made the sinister association many years before, in this same country which was not mine, when I was still not married and had no children. (This present time of mine was beginning to resemble that other time; I had no wife or children, although I relied on them and sent them money and missed them every day, at some moment of each day.) The flower-seller Jane used to wear her jeans tucked into her boots, almost musketeer-fashion. The woman hidden behind her umbrella was wearing a skirt, I had glimpsed one thigh. It was doubtless because of that invisible precedent, that imagined image transmitted to me once by the lame bibliophile, that I had felt so relieved to find that the nocturnal white pointer had all its four legs, I had counted them one by one even though I had seen them anyway at a glance. But I had wanted to make quite sure (an instance of reflex superstition, I realised) that he and his mistress did not form some horrific couple already dreamed up by someone else.

That was what I was paid to do in the building with no name. I ceaselessly made associations, rather than interpretations or decipherings or analyses, or, rather, those merely came afterwards, as a rather feeble consequence. Wheeler had more or less announced this to me that Sunday in Oxford, in his garden or during lunch: there is no such thing as two identical people, nor has there ever been, we know that; but nor is there anyone who is not related in some way to someone else who has traversed the world, who does not have what Wheeler called affinities with someone else. There is no one who has no ties, there never has been, no links of fate or character, which, anyway, comes to the same thing (I was paraphrasing Wheeler freely), except perhaps for the very first men, if they really did exist before all others rather than many of them springing up in many places simultaneously. You see two very different people and see them, moreover, separated by centuries from your own life, so much so that, by the time the second one appears, the first has been forgotten for all those centuries, just as I had stored away the anaesthetised image of that horrific couple dreamed up by Alan Marriott. They are people who differ in age, sex, education, beliefs, mentality, temperament, affections; they might speak different languages, come from countries far, far away from each other, have entirely contrary biographies and not share a single experience, not a single parallel hour in their long, respective pasts, not a single comparable one. You meet a very young woman, with her ambition so untouched and intact that you cannot yet tell if she has any ambition or not, I remember Wheeler saying. Her shyness makes her hermetic, so much so that you're not sure if her very shyness is not merely a pretence, a timid mask. She is the daughter of a Spanish couple you know and whom you visit, the parents force her to say hello, to join in, at least for a while, to have supper with the guest and with them. The young woman does not want to be known or even seen, she is there against her will, feigning indifference and coolness, waiting for the world – which she feels owes her a debt – to take an interest in her, to court her, seek her out and even offer her reparation, but feeling vastly bored if the friend of her parents (whom she does not consider to be part of the world: she has, by association, excluded him) displays an insistent curiosity in her, watches her with friendly concern, flatters her and draws her out. She is a slightly offended sphinx, or perhaps she is frightened, or vulnerable and uncertain, or deceitful, an impostor. She's impossible to fathom, she wants people to take notice of her and, at the same time, sees this as interference, she can't bear to be noticed by someone who doesn't count, someone who, according to her perceptions and criteria, has no right to notice her. She isn't and cannot be unpleasant, she doesn't go quite that far, besides, no one with a pretty, blushing face ever is, but it is impossible to imagine what lies behind the helmet of her extreme youth, it is as if she wore the visor lowered so that all one could see of her eyes were her eyelashes. The immature and the unfinished are the most unfathomable of things, like the four lines of a drawing, dashed off and left incomplete, which do not even allow you to speculate on the figure they aspired to be or were on the way to becoming. And yet something nearly always does emerge, says Wheeler. Rarely do you meet a person about whom you remain forever in the dark, rarely – by dint of sheer persistence on our part – does a figure fail to emerge, however blurred or tenuous, and however different from what you were expecting, remote, defined, or out of keeping with those few initial lines, even incongruous. You become accustomed to the darkness of each face or person or past or history or life, you begin, after unflagging scrutiny of the shadows, to be able to make something out, the gloom lifts and you grasp something, discern something: the discouragement abates then or else invades and wraps around us, depending on whether we wanted to see something or to see nothing, depending upon which characteristics, which affinities we find in which person, or whether these are merely our own marks, our own memories. Anyone who wants to see nearly always does end up seeing something, imagine, then, what a person committed to seeing could achieve, or someone who makes a career out of it, like you and like me, you think you haven't begun, but you began a long time ago, you just haven't yet been paid to do it, but now you will be, very soon; it's the way you live anyway. There are so few of us who have the courage and the patience to keep looking that we get well paid for it ('Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking and keep looking beyond the purely necessary, even when you have the feeling that there is no more, no more to think, that it's all been thought, that there's no more to see, that it's all been seen'), to examine in depth what appears to be as smooth, opaque and black as a field of heraldic sable, a compact darkness. Yet one suddenly catches a gesture, an intonation, a flicker, a hesitation, a laugh, a tic, an oblique look, it can be anything, even something very trivial. You hear or see something, whatever it might be, in the young daughter of the couple you are friendly with, you see something that you recognise and associate with something else, that you heard or saw in someone, I think, while Wheeler continues his explanation. You see in the girl the same conceited, cruel, neurotic expression, the identical expression, that you saw so often in a much older man, almost elderly, a magazine publisher with whom you