Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

a discussion about swords.

If I still remember even Halliwell, obese and with a bright red face and a small, sparse military moustache, how could I not remember all the other people from then, the old, time-travelling porter Will with his clear, limpid eyes, and Alec Dewar – the Butcher, the Ripper, the Inquisitor or the Hammer – a selfless Dickensian teacher beneath his proud facade and his unjustified nicknames; or the inebriated Lord Rymer – the Flask – who had since reappeared with his all too justified nickname, and Rook, the gossipy expert in Slavonic languages, a man with a large head and a slender body – an egghead, in short – who claimed to have been friends with Nabokov and who had, for about a thousand years, been translating Anna Karenina as it should be translated, although with no visible result; the Alabasters, who used to spy on me with bated breath via the closed-circuit television in their second-hand bookshop when I went down to their basement to snoop around in the dust; and the head of my department, Aidan Kavanagh, whom I saw once wearing a waistcoat, as my boss Tupra always did, except that Kavanagh wasn't wearing a shirt underneath his or only some strange sleeveless variety; the fat girl called Muriel – who wasn't really fat – with whom I spent one night, and one night only, and who told me that she lived between the rivers Windrush and Evenlode, in an area which was once a forest, Wychwood Forest; the gypsy florist, Jane, with her high boots, and Alan Marriott with his docile, three-legged dog, who had visited me with his master one morning, just as, many years afterwards, late one night, the white pointer had visited me with his mistress, Perez Nuix; my best friend Cromer-Blake, my guide in the city and who had sometimes been both father- and mother- figure to me, alternating between health and sickness during my time there and dead four months after my departure (I still have his diaries); and the great authority Toby Rylands so like Wheeler but, as far as I knew then, unrelated, and who might well have got me into all this by means of a report written then and filed away just in case; the young woman with the rhythmic, well-shod feet and perfectly turned ankles, to whom I had not dared to speak with sufficient emotion, the emotion I felt in her presence, on a late-night train journey from Didcot station, and Clare Bayes, my lover. All those people existed in my life before Luisa, whom I met only on my return. While I might not have left any mark on Oxford, my time there had certainly left a mark on me. As this other period of London solitude would too, even if, one day, it appeared to me like a daydream never lived and shorn of consequences, and I could misquote those lines from Milton each morning: 'I wak'd, time fled, and day brought back my day.’

No, it wasn't at all certain that what was happening now did not count, while I was working in a foreign country and in a building with no name and for whom I did not know, or only sometimes, as young Perez Nuix had explained to me in my apartment. And at the same time as I asked Tupra that question in the car, about what he had studied at Oxford, I glanced up at my illuminated window behind which I was already yearning to be: it would have looked just like that while she was standing in the street wondering whether or not to ring the bell, and afterwards too, while she was inside on that night of heavy, steady, sustained rain, talking and even lecturing, and asking me for that awkward favour which I finally granted a few days later, and which now made me feel in silent debt to Tupra – or perhaps it was a secret, guilty debt – and which somewhat checked my anger or near rage, for I could still not come to terms with what Reresby had or hadn't done – what I had thought he would do – in that gleaming toilet for cripples, to use his term, in which he might, who knows, have left another cripple, and in which he had been about to leave a corpse, before my very eyes, a man decapitated in my presence.

'I read medieval history, in the Modern History department,' he replied. 'But I've never done anything with it, professionally, that is. Why do you ask?’

I had time to think, although not in as clearly articulated a form as follows here: 'What a shame I didn't know before. Instead of beating De la Garza up, he could have made friends with him, even joined forces, De la Garza being such a connoisseur of chic medieval literary fantasy. He might at least have shown him more mercy.’

What I actually said was this: 'Oh, so it's a kind of nostalgic throwback, the sword, I mean. Perhaps a youthful fantasy.’

He did not initially appreciate my irony, he pulled a face and I heard an impatient tut-tutting: after my triple blunder with his name, he must consider that I was in no position to criticise him or to make derisive comments.

'Possibly. I always liked medieval history, and the military history that I studied later on,' he replied calmly, he was, after all, a man capable of seeing the funny side of things where there was one. 'But never dismiss ideas born of the imagination, Jack, you only get to them after much thought, much reflection and study, and considerable boldness. They're not within the grasp of just anyone, only those of us who see and who keep looking.' – 'It's a very rare gift indeed nowadays, and becoming rarer,' Wheeler had explained to me over breakfast, 'the gift of being able to see straight through people, clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad, without effort.' – 'Like you and me, like Patricia and Peter.' – And Peter had added: 'That is the way, in which according to Toby, you might be like us, Jacobo, and now I think he was right. We could both see through people like that. Seeing was our gift, and we placed it at the service of others. And I can still see.' – Patricia, that is how Tupra referred to young Perez Nuix, by her first name, or else by the diminutive form Pat, just as Wheeler would say Val sometimes, when he recalled his wife Valerie, whose early death he had preferred not to tell me about, as yet ('Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right,' he had said almost in a whisper, as if he were asking me a favour, that of allowing him to remain silent). This was not the same as when Tupra or Mrs Berry called me Jack, that was because it was easier for them and a phonetic approximation of my real name Jacques, more than Jacobo and Jaime, although no one ever used it now. And then Tupra went on and concluded his explanation: 'That atavistic fear is so powerful, Jack, that if ever one of our contemporaries finds a sword hovering above his head or pointing at his chest, the moment the sword disappears from view and returns to its scabbard, he'll feel so grateful that anything that happens to him afterwards will seem good and he will accept it without resistance, not just without defending himself, but with immense relief, almost with gratitude, because he will have surrendered even before the first blow was struck, having given himself up for dead. And he will do whatever you want him to do: he will betray, denounce, confess the truth or invent a lie, he will undo what has been done and retract what has been said, he will disown his children, beg forgiveness, pay whatever is asked, allow himself to be mistreated and accept his punishment without a murmur. Without opposition and without haggling. Because, as I said, people today can only conceive of the sword as a weapon to be used, not merely brandished as a threat or as a way of keeping someone quiet. That's what guns are for or even knives, no one would bother taking up such an awkward object, such an encumbrance, if he were not going to make use of it, at least that is what anyone who sees a sword raised against them will believe. That is why the Krays provoked such fear, right from the very start, even when they lacked power or influence and were mere beginners, upstarts: because they would turn up with their sabres and they would use them too. They would cut and slash, you bet they did, and in London too. And that panic continued and remained for ever, it became legendary the panic they spread with that archaic brand of violence from a more barbarous age. Admit it, Jack, even you breathed more easily when I put the sword away. And everything after that seems almost welcome, isn't that right, Jack? Admit it.’

I had to admit he was right, but I did not do so out loud. The fact that he should boast about it struck me as intolerable.

'And what was the point this time, Bertram?' I asked instead. 'You didn't use it, damn it; fortunately, you only pretended you were going to use it, but I don't know what good it did you, taking the sword out and terrifying us both with it or with everything that came afterwards. I didn't notice you taking advantage of De la Garza's fear to interrogate him or to get something out of him, or to demand an apology, or to force him to undo something he had done or to get money out of him. What exactly were you after, may I ask? To frighten me? If so, what you did was gratuitous and entirely unnecessary. It was absolutely outrageous. There was no need for you to produce a double-edged Landsknecht sword. Nor to half drown him in the toilet. Nor to hurl him against that bar. Unless all you wanted was to punish him because he had got in your way. I agree the man is an arsehole, but he's completely harmless. You can't just go around beating people up, killing them. Especially not if you're going to involve me.’

For a moment Tupra again invaded my side of the car with his curly hair, to look up at the window as I had done, perhaps he wanted to make sure that no figure had since appeared there, silhouetted against the light.

'That isn't what I do,' he said. 'And I see you know about swords. You're quite right, it is a Landsknecht Or Katzbalger, a genuine one,' he added pedantically and with a touch of pride. 'But why, according to you, can't one do that?’

His question caught me off guard, so much so that I did not, for a moment, know what he was talking about, even though I had just said what it was that could not be done.