I had my elbows on the table. I felt very tired suddenly. I leaned my head into my palms, closed my eyes. At last, I thought. Some abusive language rose to my lips but went no further. Insults would neither help me nor hurt Nilsen.
A hundred thousand pinpricks of light were flashing behind my eyelids. I would have preferred it if he had patronised me by calling me Alan. Maybe then I could have shouted at him. I felt repulsed, relieved. Ted Nilsen. I wanted him out of the house. I wanted him to say more.
“The irony is,” I heard Nilsen say, “if the flight path had been different—if the plane had headed west a little sooner—we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If it had gone down over the Atlantic.”
“Don’t talk to me about irony,” I said.
“What I’m saying, we wouldn’t have had a trail. But that’s academic. We dealt with what we did have. Complex evidence gathering. The police did pretty well in the circumstances. They combed all that farmland, all those moors and forests, and they got almost everything. Fragments of engine, spoons, razor blades, headphones. It’s astonishing what they got. The sheer impossibility of gathering it all together and rebuilding it. You hear what I’m saying? The impossibility. But it was done. It had to be done, so we could work out the narrative. You know what I mean by the narrative?”
I opened my eyes. First irony, now this. “I teach literature,” I said. “I should know.”
He did that concessionary thing again with his hand. He was going to explain anyway.
“The log of the journey. You start an investigation and you’re starting a journey. Sometimes you set off and you draw the map as you go. You’re looking for some end point but you don’t know what or where it is. And other times you do know, and it’s just a question of how you get there. The narrative is how you get to the right destination.”
For twenty-one years only one narrative, and a broken one at that, mattered to me. The fracture occurred when Emily and Alice were murdered. Everything in my life before that moment stopped, and everything after it began, right then. I too was a victim of their murders. This, of course, is why I have been in regular receipt of the awed sympathy of my colleagues.
I don’t mean to be cynical. But one can absorb only so much.
Nilsen professed faith in an afterlife. I don’t know how that kind of faith works—whether Nilsen had it before and lost it, or picked it up off the street one day, or whether it was always a vague thing inside him that came into focus only when he discovered he was terminally ill—but I have no interest in it. I have an interest in truth—the hoped-for destination at the end of my narrative—and truth and faith are related only occasionally, but then merely by chance. Did Nilsen consider himself “born again”? Do I care? No. I do, however, know that such a thing as rebirth can happen—that a man can be transformed, joyfully reconfigured. I know this because it happened to me.
Once, in another life, in another world, a quiet, polite boy was growing up in a quiet, polite street in a small town on the south coast of England. Alan Jonathan Tealing. I was bright, what they call “academically inclined.” At school I excelled at English. I wrote near-perfect essays that greatly satisfied my teachers—partly, I see in retrospect, because my balanced paragraphs, good syntax and well-regulated imagination gave back to them, ripe and unbruised, the fruits of their own fundamentally conventional wisdoms. I could sit exams without fear or panic and I did so, passing them with ease. There was talk of Oxford or Cambridge but I came from a family uncomfortable with any ambition that might seem immodest, and so the talk came to nothing. Instead, without quite understanding how or why, I found I had applied to, and been accepted to read English Literature at, a young university in an old northern English town sufficiently distant from home to make it seem, when I got on the train, as if I were embarking on a great adventure.
I arrived: the local accents and beers were different, but not much else. I settled in and continued in my unassuming ways, an assiduous taker of notes at lectures, a well-read contributor to tutorials. The university library was a vast brutalist block of six storeys, which I inhabited daily and for a while thought the only necessary place on earth. My tutors, like my schoolteachers, praised my written work. I passed—again without trouble—all my exams. Yet, deep down, I felt fraudulent. This was for two reasons. First, for all that I absorbed the literature I was studying, for all that I could discourse on it with great seriousness, in speech and on paper, I could not clear from my head a small but irreducible conviction that it was not necessary, that it was neither important nor useful. Second, I knew I was not as clever as my tutors seemed to think. My mind was not agile and athletic: it merely strolled. It absorbed everything, retained what was needed, could reshape and regurgitate on demand, but where was the spark of original thought, the sharp points to my questions, the precipice of an idea that I might fearfully or excitedly look over before jumping? They were nowhere. “Have you thought of a career in the Foreign Office?” one lecturer asked. “You’d make a fine diplomat.” She meant it as a compliment but I was dismayed. Diplomacy implied constant compromise: was that what I was best at? I worried that I might saunter through the rest of life and never know what it was to feel anger, or pain, or triumph, or despair, or love.
I went to classical concerts and the film club in winter, and in summer rowed clumsily on the river or took long walks through the soft, buzzing countryside. I had friends—and they had me—just conventionally unconventional enough to perpetuate the belief that our existence might actually be exciting. We smoked some pot. We drank fine ales in old country pubs. Sometimes—we were students, after all, with the obligations of students—we drank too much and behaved badly. I had a girlfriend in first year, but we parted at the end of it; I had another, and we parted at the end of second year. Both times I was sorry but not hurt. After a while I wasn’t even sorry, and neither, I am sure, were they.
I sat my final exams, passed them, and graduated summa cum laude. Ah, now, my lecturers said, spreading their hands, the limitless possibilities! Research, a PhD, an academic career—the path of my future was laid out before me. I could become one of them! They used the word “limitless” without irony. I listened and understood. The ease with which they spoke made me uneasy. Despite my success I still felt, only now not so far below the surface, a fraud. I was twenty-one, but feared I might wake any morning and find myself fifty. This did not stop me applying, successfully, to return in the autumn as a postgraduate. I did wonder if this was really what I wanted to do with my life, but, unable to think of an alternative, I did not hesitate for long. The man who agreed to be my supervisor made helpful suggestions as to what areas of research I might find interesting. “Don’t narrow your options too soon,” he said. “You can specialise later.” It seems that I have, consciously or not, followed that advice ever since.
I went home for the summer. My parents were proud of my achievements. My sister, Karen, three years younger, had steadily and carelessly underachieved at school, left at sixteen and got a job as a checkout girl in a supermarket. Sometimes I felt I was achieving for two. This did not make me dislike Karen, or even feel superior to her. Despite having only our parents in common, she and I got on pretty well. Neither of us, I think, felt threatened by the other.
Our parents didn’t seem disappointed in Karen: she went out at weekends, she had a boyfriend, she was happy, and they were happy that she was happy. Dad worked in pensions and life assurance; Mum in the county council’s finance department. They left the house together at eight o’clock, she came back at five, and he came back at six. They had been doing this for years. I didn’t know, really, what they did in their jobs. In the evenings and at weekends they cooked, cleaned, gardened, did the shopping, went for walks, read the papers and watched television. Life was one routine task or leisure activity after another. As a family we did our best, in the best tradition of middle-class England, not to upset one another, and for the most part we succeeded.
It could not be
said, at that point in my life, that there was anything at which I had totally not succeeded. And then, that summer, there was. My parents bought me a dozen driving lessons—a present in honour of my first-class degree—and a week before returning to university I took the driving test. The instructor advised against it: he said I wasn’t good enough, but I wanted it out of the way. I booked one last lesson immediately before taking the test in the instructor’s car. “Good luck,” the instructor said without a smile. He handed over the keys and went off to buy himself a coffee, leaving me vaguely amused by his pessimism. I shouldn’t have been. I failed. Not marginally; not because I nudged the kerb or miscalculated my stopping distances or forgot to indicate while turning left. No, I failed spectacularly, stalling the car half a dozen times, kangarooing down the street in first gear, nearly bumping the car in front of me at a junction, then narrowly missing a cyclist when I pulled out without checking my mirrors. This was when the examiner ordered me to park and switch off the engine. The test was over. I didn’t argue. I moved to the passenger seat, stunned and humiliated by defeat. The examiner drove back to the test centre, and handed the keys to the instructor. “I did warn you,” the instructor said. “Never mind. We can try again.” I said I would phone him to arrange more lessons the next time I was home. I had no intention of doing so.
Mum and Dad, separately and together, tried to persuade me back behind the wheel. I would regret it if I didn’t master this particular skill, they said, not to mention—although, delicately, they did—the waste of money if I gave up. But the experience had shaken me. I couldn’t face the thought of a second failure. Only Karen, who didn’t then show any interest in driving but would later learn with no difficulty at all, offered comfort. “You think about things too much,” she said. “What does it matter if you can drive or not?” Her question lodged. I began to construct a defence: just why did I need to be able to drive? There were buses, trains, bicycles. I was an accomplished pedestrian. Anyway, I couldn’t afford a car and wouldn’t know what model to buy even if I could. Cars were antisocial, dangerous, polluting. I made a badge of honour out of my inability. Who needed a car? Alan Tealing didn’t.
Two years into my postgraduate study, the condition of being carless seemed simply to reinforce the idea that being an academic, pursuing knowledge of no practical purpose in an out-of-the-way place, was my natural state: I could barely imagine myself as anything else. I led some tutorials; gave presentations at seminars; buried myself in research for my PhD. I read and read and read. I absorbed a lot of literary theory and forgot most of it. I understood what the theorists were saying but they were saying very little. What the writers they were writing about said was much more interesting. But would I be able to survive in this world if I didn’t speak the language of theory? I would find out, no doubt.
Seeing a notice about an international conference on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction, the very period of my research, I brought it to the attention of my supervisor, who urged me to submit a proposal for a paper. It was accepted. The conference was to take place in Philadelphia. I had never been to the USA before—had never been further than France and Spain on family holidays—but, with the assistance of the department, I raised the funds to go. And it was in Philadelphia that I met Emily.
She was at the registration desk, handing out welcome packs, when I arrived on the first morning of the conference. I can still picture her, her shape in the plum-coloured sweater, her smile, her efficiency, the way her black hair fell across her face when she bent to find my lapel badge. This, I now know, was the moment of rebirth. This was the moment of love at first sight—a concept detestable in fiction (too clichéd, too random, too unreconstructed) but which, on the basis of my own experience, I have to accept is possible in real life.
“Wow, haven’t you come a long way?” she said.
“I’m giving a paper,” I said, thinking that this easily justified the distance.
“Isn’t everybody?” she said.
I felt foolish, but she said it so pleasantly that I didn’t care. “Are you?” I asked.
“Me?” She laughed, and smiled again, and I forgot that anyone else was in the queue behind me. “I’m not even majoring in Literature. I’m just here to earn some money to pay my school fees.”
“But you could sit in on some of the sessions?”
“I have to sit out here,” she said. “But even if I could, wouldn’t they bore the pants off me?”
“No, I don’t think so. Well, not all of them.”
She looked at me sceptically. “Which ones would you recommend?”
“Well …” She confused me. I waved the welcome pack at her. “I’d need to show you in the programme.”
“How about yours?” she asked, and when I started to make some excuse she interrupted me. “You surely haven’t come all this way to give a boring paper?”
Someone shuffled impatiently behind me and I took flight. “I’d better go,” I said. “I’m holding everybody up.”
“See you later, Mr Tealing,” she said.
“See you later,” I replied.
And I did. Every time I came out of the conference theatre or one of the nearby seminar rooms that day, which I did as often as I could, Emily was there at the desk. Nearly all of the name badges were gone, and she was seated, somehow looking relaxed on the hard, small, black chair, reading a paperback. I went over to her. I had nothing particular to say, I just wanted to talk to her, be around her. She had folded her book back on itself, something that I with my reverence for books never did, yet somehow it seemed fine that she should. I asked what she was reading and she showed me the cover. It was a detective novel, by an author I’d never heard of. This was fine too. Her irreverence in the context of the conference, with its distinguished speakers and erudite themes, made me want to laugh.
“What does ‘epistemological relativism’ mean?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t apologise,” she said. “It’s not one of yours.” I reached for her novel and she batted my hand away. “Don’t be silly, it’s not in there either. How about ‘textual reflexivity’?”
“Well—” I began, but she cut me off, and read from the conference programme.
“The paper right before yours tomorrow is called ‘Manifestations of Epistemological Relativism and Textual Reflexivity in the Narrative Structures of Three Novels by Conrad.’ I just wondered what the heck it meant.”
I had wondered too. I thought about trying to explain it to her, but then saw that she didn’t want it explained. Anyway, I couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you have to turn up to find out.”
“Don’t know or don’t care?” she said. It must have shown on my face. “Oh, I see, both. Will you have to turn up?”
“I think it would be rude not to,” I said, “since I’m on straight after.”
“I think I’ll skip it but creep into yours,” Emily said. “At least I understand your title. Tomorrow at eleven, then. Look, I have it marked.” And she showed me her copy of the programme, and there was my name, Alan Tealing, circled. I felt famous, and rich beyond measure.
“What about tonight?” I asked. “There’s a reception. Are you going to be there?”
“No way,” she said. “I’m out of here at five. Somebody else is doing the waitressing. Good luck to them.”
“I thought you might be hosting it.”
“God, no! What an idea!”
“What are you doing instead, then?”
“I’m not doing anything instead. I’m going home.”
“Well, would you let me buy you a drink before you do?” I couldn’t believe I’d asked her. I couldn’t believe I sounded so confident either, because inside I was terrified she’d say no.
“What about the reception? Shouldn’t you network?”
“Shouldn’t I what?”
“Circulate. You know, like blood.”
“I’d rather go for a drink with yo
u.”
“Well,” she said, “that would be very nice. There’s a crummy little bar I know where nobody else from here will go.”
“That sounds perfect,” I said.
That was it, then: Alan and Emily. I can still recite that exchange word for word, as it happened. Or I believe I can, which is almost the same thing. I can’t, however, remember what we discussed over several drinks in the crummy little bar that evening. We could have talked until dawn, but I had to get up early to rehearse my paper. And she did creep in, telling me later that she’d enjoyed it and that I was a natural lecturer. Other speakers simply read their papers out, often very badly, then sat down again. What was the point of that, she demanded. They might as well have mailed them. But I had only glanced at my text, and had spoken with passion, and she’d felt that what I had to say was important.
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“But you said you didn’t sit in on any of the sessions, so how do you know about the other speakers?”
“I lied,” she said, and she showed me her programme again. “See, you weren’t the only one I marked. But you’re the best—so far.”
I always knew what attracted me to Emily—her smile, her eyes, her face, her figure, her warmth, her openness, her vivacity, her American can-do attitude, her not caring what other people thought. I was attracted by her name too, Emily. She was named after the poet Emily Dickinson, and that was fine, she said, because she happened to like Emily Dickinson’s poems. “Presumably your parents do, too?” I’d asked. She seemed less sure of this. “You know what, I think they liked the idea of her. Mom kind of admired her isolation. And her poems are very short, mostly. I think that helped.” “Do you have a favourite?” I asked. “I have lots of favourites,” she replied, and would not be forced to choose one above the rest—which endeared her to me still more. I can think of a thousand other reasons, but what attracted Emily to me?
Perhaps my quietness, my politeness, my diffidence, even my accent. Like our voices, our humours—in the medieval sense—were different but complementary, I thought. She was sanguine, I phlegmatic; she was spring to my winter, air to my water. I put this to her and she said, “In the medieval sense! What about in the twentieth-century sense? You like my jokes and I like yours.” It was true. When we quarrelled, which was seldom, it blew up in a moment and then was gone. Sometimes, I know, I irritated her with my cautiousness, but with one exception I never found her enthusiasm anything but inspiring. She thought I was passionate, brilliant, funny. And I was, or I could be with her urging me on.
The Professor of Truth Page 5