‘That is, of course, if we do stop your disaster from happening, I mean, if it’s stopped,’ added Blakeston. Tomás’s immediate thought was: ‘If it’s not, then I might be stuck here for years, behind bars, behind a wall, living with murderers.’
He noticed that a lock of Blakeston’s reddish hair had escaped from his beret and hung down at the back on the left, giving him the absurd appearance of a Mongol or a Tartar, and there was something rather creepy about that long stray lock. He pointed this out to Blakeston, and the viscount quickly stowed it away again beneath his beret. Tomás also took the opportunity to slip his hand into the viscount’s hood and remove the napkins, which, to the astonishment of the other two men, he then placed, rather queasily, on the table.
‘You say it depends on me. How exactly? What would I have to do?’ Tomás already knew, but he needed to hear it put into words. This was far too vital a decision to be made on the basis of conjectures, although they weren’t really conjectures, but certainties.
‘Not so long ago,’ said Tupra, ‘one of the teachers we share in common made you a very attractive proposition, which, I understand, you rejected. To be of use to the country and to place your exceptional abilities at its service. Ours is a grateful, trustworthy country, unlike yours, at least as far as I know, since I’ve only spent brief periods there. You wouldn’t trust what a Spaniard promised you, would you, Nevinson, or not very much? Still less if it was someone with power and influence, I mean, someone who could bring on black night or part the waters so that you could pass … You could never be sure that he wouldn’t close the waters over your head again, or make the fog lift just when you thought you were safe, but were, in fact, still visible to your pursuers. Here, on the other hand, we keep our word. If you agreed to collaborate with us, you would become Somebody, and poor Janet Jefferys would have to wait a while for justice to be done. We still have the superstitious belief that the dead care whether those who killed them are punished. They may have cared just before they breathed their last, while they were still trying to live and were struggling and fighting or resisting their murderers; but that moment immediately becomes consigned to the distant past as soon as they stop breathing. We superstitiously continue to attribute to them the qualities and responses of the living, that’s all our imaginations can do, but the abyss is far too deep, and they care nothing about their earthly desires, not even their very last one. They are prepared to wait until the end of time if necessary, because they don’t even know they’re waiting and cannot even understand the concept of waiting. In short, they no longer know anything. They cannot feel impatient or have desires.’
‘That isn’t what the poet thinks,’ thought Tom. ‘And what the dead had no speech for, when living,’ he recalled, ‘they can tell you, being dead.’ Those lines remained incomprehensible to him, and, besides, he was in a hurry to get something clear:
‘Janet would have to wait for justice to be done even if I was arrested and charged, assuming I’ve understood correctly what it is you’re offering me. Because I didn’t kill her, I thought you were clear about that. At least our shared teacher is. And he must have told you so.’
Tupra shrugged and smiled, sympathetically, almost proudly. He was a man who was very pleased with himself, with his personality and his appearance, as often happens with those who are successful with women. He was doubtless convinced that his broad pinstripe suit was the height of good taste.
‘It doesn’t matter what he thinks. It doesn’t matter what we think. It doesn’t matter what you say. No one can be certain of anything, except the dead woman, if, that is, she saw her murderer, because she might not have seen him if he’d attacked her from behind; and she can no longer speak. You could have killed her, we don’t know that and it can’t be ruled out, it remains a possibility, and to a judge and jury it would seem probable or even proven. And that is all that counts: what is recorded and what the law decides. In cases where the law makes a decision and where records are kept, of course, because many things go unrecorded, as we ourselves well know. Our work partly consists in leaving no record of our work, but if you continue to be a nobody, Nevinson, you risk exposing yourself to the opinions of a judge and a jury, putting yourself in their hands and meeting a very bad end.’ This was similar to what the protective Mr Southworth had said, and reminiscent of Wheeler’s disdain for the justice system. In Oxford, no one seemed to consider it essential or to hold it in high esteem. Or perhaps that was just the world in which Tupra, Blakeston and Wheeler moved (and Wheeler had a lot of influence over Southworth); perhaps they evaded or passed over it, as if they really were the wind, the black night, the snow or the fog, and were never called to account, their activities deemed to be above the law and left unrecorded. ‘That would be a shame in one so young,’ added Tupra gravely. ‘You’ve barely begun your life, you’re only a beginner.’
‘Who, then, would keep their word?’ Tomás asked suddenly. ‘Who? If you don’t represent anyone? If you are but don’t exist, or exist but aren’t or whatever. What was it you said? If you act but don’t act, if you’re both somebody and nobody. According to you, this is a grateful, trustworthy country, but I don’t know who in this country I’m speaking to, who it is making this promise to get me out of trouble. How can you expect me to give you an answer if no one is going to call you to account, if no one has sent you or given you orders? Who am I speaking to, then, a ghost?’
‘What on earth are you going on about, Nevinson?’ said Blakeston impatiently. ‘You’re speaking to Mr Bertram Tupra, and the only reason he agreed to this meeting was in order to help you.’ And he pronounced the name of his boss in a tone bordering on idolatry, as if he were a kind of institution, a totem. It was very striking, that admiration for someone much younger than himself.
‘Oh really?’ answered Tomás rather irritably. ‘I’m just as likely to be speaking to Mr Ted Reresby, as that Beckwith woman thought she was. Not even your name seems very stable.’
Tupra seemed amused or pleased by Tomás Nevinson’s attentiveness to such details. It must have tickled him that Tom had been listening so carefully when he introduced himself to the pneumatic lecturer from Somerville. He ignored his remark, however, and went on:
‘Do you still not know, Nevinson? Do you really still not know who you’re talking to? Come on, our shared teacher was quite explicit, or so he said. As explicit as you were in your rejection. He was very disappointed, by the way. But to continue with the examples: if the fog does get you out of your predicament, you’re not first going to demand guarantees or to know how long it will last. You’ll just take full advantage of it, won’t you, hoping that it will conceal you long enough for you to get away. More than that, you’ll wrap yourself in it, blend in with it, and from then on, you, too, will be fog, English fog, which has, for centuries, been so famously dense. And you’ll trust it absolutely, I’m sure of that, because now you’ll be part of it and will go with it wherever it goes. You will become part of all the accidents or coincidences, all the illnesses, all the events fortunate and unfortunate. And in time, you’ll be the same as us: you will simply happen. Something that is so utterly indistinguishable from you couldn’t ever leave you in the lurch or abandon you, because you would never abandon yourself, would you? Are you following me?’
He was following and not following. He got the general drift, but became lost in those metaphorical disquisitions in which he sensed the influence of their shared teacher, Professor Wheeler; it was highly likely that Tupra had also once been a favourite student of his, and that, in his day, Wheeler had even recruited him to perform the vague, phantasmal tasks to which he now devoted himself. If so, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to persuade Tupra or Reresby, because Tupra’s life prior to Oxford would probably have been not just a life of action and improvisation and difficulties, but of delinquency too. The more Tomás talked to him, the more he noticed in his face – coarse in origin and gradually refined – and in his diction – perhaps common a
t first, now artificially impeccable – a past life of unscrupulousness and drastic, even violent solutions, which he would not have fully renounced despite the – still incomplete – process of civilisation and determined refinement he had undergone. He was probably a man who had struggled to improve himself not out of conviction, but out of convenience, in order to become more presentable to the world and to facilitate his rise; he would have realised that he needed to learn to walk the corridors of power to achieve his aims, but his utter scorn for them and for offices and salons would have remained unabated. He would have been forged in the street, and doubtless knew that the street is what lasts and what counts, the thing to which one always has to resort in order to get ahead and solve problems and overcome obstacles, especially when situations turn nasty. Tupra would not have had a cosy early life, a straightforward life that he could leave behind or discard. Getting involved in what he was involved in, blending in with the fog, to use his words, would have been a kind of salvation for him, a resolution, a clean slate or legitimation of his twisted impulses.
‘My life is certainly straightforward and on track,’ thought Tomás, ‘and yet it seems that I’ve lost it, that it’s suddenly slipped away from me and become irrecoverable, relegated to what’s past. How stupid the days are, how stupid any day can turn out to be, without your ever knowing which day; instead you plunge blithely into a day you should have avoided, had there been any way of guessing which one would be the accursed day of block and fire, of the sea’s throat, the day that destroys everything … And how stupid, how futile, will be the steps you take on the day when you should never have taken any steps at all or even left the house. You get up as you always do, you visit a bookshop, you enjoy a quick fumble with an intermittent lover of no importance and arrange to meet her later on that night, out of boredom or out of perfectly controllable and trivial desire, or so as not to feel alone or a pariah, it would have been far better to stay at home and save yourself the subsequent troubling thought: “Now that it’s so joylessly and rather sadly over, it really wasn’t worth it; if I could go back, I wouldn’t bother.” And that stupid date and that superfluous fuck ruin the planned and established trajectory of your life. What I had planned to do is now irrelevant, my future vanished or replaced, perhaps I’ll have to give up Berta or any kind of normal life with her, a more or less harmonious life with no dark secrets; or perhaps secrets will be the foundation and the rule and what controls us. In its place they offer me two options, neither of which I want (but the ability to choose what I want is a thing of the past). In the worst case, prison and an uncertain trial, with a possible sentence and more years in prison; or a murky, unimaginable task of indefinite duration and for which I’m not prepared: passing myself off as someone else and dealing with unpleasant strangers, with enemies with whom I’ll have to make friends so as to betray them later on, that’s what Wheeler was suggesting, because he did mention the word “infiltrator”, I didn’t dream that. “You would make an excellent infiltrator”; “You could pass for a native in quite a few places,” he said, then tried to sweeten the pill: “No mission would last very long”; “Your family or friends wouldn’t find this odd or unusual. Everything would carry on as normal when you were in Spain. When you weren’t, well, I won’t lie to you, you would live fictitious lives, lives not your own, but only temporarily: sooner or later, you would always leave them and return to your own self, to thy former self.” Yes, he had been quite clear and explicit, and I’ve tried to forget it, but a proposal made by him when everything was still fine, a proposal I could reject, is not the same as what these two, Blakeston and Tupra or Montgomery and Reresby or whatever they’re called, are wanting to impose on me. But prison would be even worse, worse than anything, and besides, my life would still be ruined when I left prison, at what age, with what expectations, in what state of mind: who would want me, who would employ a man convicted of murder, an outcast? Berta would have gone her own way and married someone else and had his children and not mine, she might not even want to see me again or know anything about me or hear my name, but erase me from her life like someone shaking off an oppressive nightmare or a shameful mistake. If I accept, I won’t lose her, although it will mean a dark, confusing life together, plagued with silences and deceptions and absences, and, in the best-case scenario, with half-truths and vast shadowy areas; if I reject their offer, I could be found not guilty or I might not even have to go on trial, and simply continue along my path as if that stupid day had never happened; after all, I didn’t kill Janet or anyone else. But the risk is too great and who knows, who knows; I’m afraid, and fear clouds both eyes and reason, fear is unbearable and I want to be rid of it …’
‘I’m thinking,’ he said at last, and he could sense in the air the growing impatience of those two men. ‘I just need to think a little.’
‘About time too,’ said Tupra, and he drummed on the table to emphasise his impatience and fluttered his feminine eyelashes. ‘We haven’t got all day. We’re offering you a way out, Nevinson, you’d better grab it while you can. It’s up to you, but be quick about it.’
‘Quick now, here, now, always …’ Tomás thought, remembering that quick line in the final part of Little Gidding. ‘What is now will be always, and it’s odd because whatever decision I take, I will probably become an outcast of the universe; the thing Wheeler urged me to avoid is precisely what awaits me. I will be who I am not, I will be a fiction, a spectre who comes and goes and departs and returns. And I will simply happen, as Tupra says, I will be sea and snow and wind.’ He realised that he had already decided, but he preferred not to acknowledge it out loud, he preferred to keep it to himself for a few seconds, in his mind; you can always turn back as long as you keep silent. ‘Dust in the air suspended marks the place where a story ended.’ Those two lines rose up again. ‘What’s mine ends here. What awaits me, because I’m still here now, and now is always. This is the death of air.’ He had caught that line too. ‘But one survives. What good fortune and what ill luck.’
III
* * *
I married Tomás Nevinson in May 1974, in the church of San Fermín de los Navarros, very near the school we both attended, and where we first met when he arrived there, a latecomer, at the age of fourteen. We were not yet twenty-three when we emerged from the church, absurdly arm in arm (we had never gone arm in arm before, nor did we afterwards), with me dressed all in white, carrying a bouquet, my veil lifted and a triumphant smile on my lips. I suppose this was the fulfilment of a decision made years earlier, one of those ambitions you fix on in childhood and adolescence and which are so hard to eradicate – or even moderate – regardless of how circumstances may have changed. And regardless, too, of how feelings may have changed, but, in order for us to be able to observe and acknowledge this, a great deal more time has to pass, and, besides, it seems important to complete old projects before even considering abandoning them. You have to cross a line that cannot then be uncrossed in order to understand and repent, to be able to accept that you’ve made a blunder; no, you have to make that mistake very thoroughly before realising it was a mistake, and then, when you try to extricate yourself, it’s already too late to do so without causing harm, without wreaking havoc. To me, separating from Tomás would have been unthinkable even before I bound myself to him so completely and in full knowledge of all the consequences, which, in a country where divorce did not yet exist, were seen as pretty much definitive, although there were already some couples living separate lives; sometimes you have to tie a knot very tightly before you dare untie it, if it comes to that. It’s as if we had a weakness for the most enormous and impossible of tasks, indeed, some people spend their entire lives wrestling with such tasks, because they cannot conceive of any other way of living their lives except in agony, struggle, conflict and drama: they become entangled in order to disentangle themselves, and thus they fill their allotted time on Earth.
That isn’t why I got married, of course, that would have been
cynical. On the contrary, I thought marriage would put an end to the anomalies and oddities I’d begun to notice since he finished his studies at Oxford and returned to Madrid, or, rather, to which he did not entirely return, or not as I’d expected he would. Things were going really well for him, apparently; it was clear that an Oxford degree brought with it many advantages, because, despite his youth, he had immediately gained a position at the British embassy, working with the cultural attaché and earning a reasonable salary that allowed us to live very comfortably, especially when I, too, began to earn a modest but complementary amount as a teacher at our old school, which frequently took on responsible ex-pupils when there were still vacancies to fill at the beginning of term. They clearly thought highly of Tomás at the embassy and perhaps in still higher places too, which is why he was regularly sent to England for periods of a month or sometimes longer, so that he could undertake some kind of semi-diplomatic or semi-commercial training, teaching him protocols, crisis management, people skills, budgeting and so on, all of which I found tedious in the extreme and which, besides, didn’t seem particularly relevant to his current post nor to any future post he might occupy. That, at least, is what he told me. If they were giving him all that training, it could only be because they thought he had a bright future and were intending to promote him and use his talents to the full; and, even though he had never actually done a degree in diplomacy and international relations, I was inclined to believe that perhaps, later on, some English ministry would claim him, the Foreign Office for example, where he would be an intelligent, efficient civil servant with an extraordinary gift for languages and for getting on with people. Us moving to the UK therefore remained a possibility, as did being posted to another country where he could be of most use, possibly in the Americas.
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