I said in a low voice: “I have to speak to you. It’s important. It won’t take long. Isn’t there somewhere we can go?”
“It’s safer in the market than here.”
She turned back, and I walked at her side casually, not looking at her, two shoppers in the crowd forced into temporary proximity by the press of shuffling bodies. Once in the market she paused to look into a window where an elderly man and his assistant were selling flans and tarts fresh from the oven. I stood beside her, pretending an interest in the bubbling cheese, the seeping gravy. The smell came to me, savoury and strong, a remembered smell. They had been baking pies here since I was an undergraduate.
I stood watching as if considering what was on offer, then said very quietly into her ear: “The SSP have been to see me—they may be very close. They’re looking for a group of five.”
She turned from the window and walked on. I kept to her side.
She said: “Of course. They know there are five of us. There’s no secret about that.”
Standing at her shoulder, I said: “I don’t know what else they’ve found out or guessed. Stop now. You’re doing no good. There may not be much time. If the others won’t stop then get out yourself.”
It was then that she turned and looked at me. Our eyes met for only a second but now, away from the flaming lights and the richness of the gleaming fruit, I saw what I hadn’t noticed before: that her face looked tired, older, drained.
She said: “Please go. It’s better that we don’t see each other again.”
She held out her hand, and in defiance of risk I took it. I said: “I don’t know your surname. I don’t know where you live or where to find you. But you know where to find me. If you ever need me send for me at St. John Street and I’ll come.”
Then I turned and walked away so that I need not watch her walking away from me.
I am writing this after dinner, looking out from the small back window towards the distant slope of Wytham Wood.
I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can’t appreciate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost. But emotions have their own time and place. Fifty is not an age to invite the turbulence of love, particularly not on this doomed and joyless planet when man goes to his last rest and all desire fades. So I shall plan my escape. It isn’t easy for anyone under sixty-five to get an exit permit; since Omega only the aged can travel as they will. But I don’t expect any difficulty. There are still some advantages in being the Warden’s cousin, even if I never mention the relationship. As soon as I’m in touch with officialdom it is known. My passport is already stamped with the necessary travel permit. I shall get someone to take my summer course, relieved to be spared that shared boredom. I have no new knowledge, no enthusiasm to communicate. I shall take the ferry and drive, revisit the great cities, the cathedrals and temples of Europe while there are still roads that are passable, hotels with sufficient staff to provide at least an acceptable standard of comfort, where I can be reasonably sure of buying petrol, at least in the cities. I shall put behind me the memory of what I saw at Southwold, Xan and the Council, and this grey city, where even the stones bear witness to the transience of youth, of learning, of love. I shall tear this page from my journal. Writing these words was an indulgence; to let them stand would be folly. And I shall try to forget this morning’s promise. It was made in a moment of madness. I don’t suppose she will take it up. If she does, she will find this house empty.
BOOK TWO
Alpha
October
He returned to Oxford on the last day of September, arriving in mid- afternoon. No one had tried to prevent him from going and no one welcomed him home. The house smelt unclean, the basement dining-room damp and musty, the upper rooms unaired. He had instructed Mrs. Kavanagh to open the windows from time to time but the air, with its disagreeable sourness, smelt as if they had been tightly closed for years. The narrow hall was littered with post; some of it looked as if the flimsy envelopes were adhering to the carpet. In the drawing-room, its long curtains drawn against the afternoon sun as if in the house of the dead, small chunks of rubble and gouts of soot had fallen from the chimney, and were ground into the rug under his unwary feet. He breathed in sootiness and decay. The house itself seemed to be disintegrating before his eyes.
The small top room, with its view of the campanile of St. Barnabas Church and the trees of Wytham Wood tinged with the first hues of autumn, struck him as very cold but unchanged. Here he sat and listlessly turned over the pages of his diary where he had recorded each day of his travels, joylessly, meticulously, mentally ticking off each of the cities and sights he had planned to revisit as if he were a schoolboy fulfilling some holiday task. The Auvergne, Fontainebleau, Carcassonne, Florence, Venice, Perugia, the cathedral at Orvieto, the mosaics in San Vitale, Ravenna, the Temple of Hera at Paestum. He had set out in no mood of excited anticipation, had invited no adventures, sought no unfamiliar primitive places where novelty and discovery could more than compensate for monotonous food or hard beds. He had moved in organized and expensive comfort from capital to capital: Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome. He hadn’t even been consciously saying farewell to the beauty and splendours he had first known in youth. He could hope to come again; this needn’t be a final visit. This was a journey of escape, not a pilgrimage in search of forgotten sensations. But he knew now that the part of him from which he most needed to escape had remained in Oxford.
By August Italy had become too hot. Fleeing from the heat, the dust, the grey company of the old who seemed to shuffle through Europe like a moving fog, he took the twisting road to Ravello, strung like an eyrie between the deep blue of the Mediterranean and the sky. Here he found a small family-run hotel, expensive and half-empty. He stayed for the rest of the month. It couldn’t give him peace, but it did give him comfort and solitude.
His keenest memory was of Rome, standing before the Michelangelo Pieta in St. Peter’s, of the rows of spluttering candles, the kneeling women, rich and poor, young and old, fixing their eyes on the Virgin’s face with an intensity of longing almost too painful to witness. He remembered their outstretched arms, their palms pressed against the glass protective shield, the low continual mutter of their prayers as if this ceaseless anguished moan came from a single throat and carried to that unregarding marble the hopeless longing of all the world.
He returned to an Oxford which lay bleached and exhausted after a hot summer, to an atmosphere which impressed itself upon him as anxious, fretful, almost intimidating. He walked through the empty quads, their stones gold in the mellow autumn sun, the last gauds of high summer still flaming against their walls, and met no face he knew. It seemed to his depressed and distorted imagination that the previous inhabitants had been mysteriously evicted and that strangers walked the grey streets and sat like returning ghosts under the trees of the college gardens. The talk in the Senior Common Room was forced, desultory. His colleagues seemed unwilling to meet his eyes. Those few who realized that he had been away inquired about the success of the trip, but without curiosity, a mere sop to politeness. He felt as if he had brought back with him some foreign and disreputable contagion. He had returned to his own city, his own familiar place, yet was revisited by that peculiar and unfamiliar unease which he supposed could only be called loneliness.
After the first week he telephoned Helena, surprised that he should
