Equivocator

by Stevie Davies

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Stevie Davies was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, though she lived in Swansea, Wales from a week old, and spent a nomadic childhood in Egypt, Scotland and Germany. After studying at Manchester University, she went on to lecture there, returning to Swansea in 2001. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University.

  Stevie is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. She has won numerous awards for her fiction, and has been long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes. Several of her books have been adapted into radio and screenplays.

  She has written for the Guardian and Independent newspapers, and is a passionate sea-swimmer, cyclist and walker on the Gower. The author of twelve novels, Equivocator is her first novella.

  EQUIVOCATOR

  A Novella

  by Stevie Davies

  To the dear memory of Nigel Jenkins

  atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale

  1

  Have you heard news of my son? Where’s he living now? Perhaps in Orchomenos, perhaps in sandy Pylos

  Or off in the Spartan plains with Menelaus?

  He’s not dead yet, my Prince Orestes, no,

  he’s somewhere on the earth …

  So we stood there, trading heartsick stories,

  deep in grief, as the tears streamed down our faces.

  Homer1

  The face – but more so those expressive hands – unsettles me but I can’t look away. There’s nothing conventionally attractive about him: in fact he appears rather ruined; his features casually dishevelled. But inviting, like a door ajar. Wherever have I seen this man before? In a fluke of light, as he twists his head, his white hair silvers. I see him doubled, in the reflecting window, a conference celebrity surrounded by yearning networkers. I feel oddly young again, diffident, easily wrong-footed.

  Dad flashes into my mind. Not as he was in my childhood but as the litter of bones collected after twenty-nine years in the Zagros Mountains, on the Iranian side of the border with Turkey. Winter by winter fragments of Jack Messenger were reburied in the deep snows of the region; each spring thaw a remnant emerged. And no one saw except the raptors of the mountain that had scattered him. Until last year, when the little that was left of Dad was harvested, identified and brought home.

  Wineglasses are handed out at the welcoming table. Mary Jones yoo-hoos me, the renegade palaeontologist from Montana: ‘Seb! – Sebastian! Catch you later!’ She’s been detained by Jarvis Bates of Norwich, world-class bore and expert on cathedrals. The conference, entitled ‘What Remains?’, has attracted a random crowd of scholars to this shabby Gower college. Little has changed since my earlier visits, except that the gluttonous gulls have made an evolutionary leap, and strut about big as ducks.

  Another sidelong glance. The guy – whose name tickles at my memory, not altogether pleasantly – something Spanish? – accepts a glass of red and sips. He seems to listen more than he speaks, though the networkers hang on every word. I palm salted peanuts into my mouth. Escape, I tell myself. An hour and a half until the evening meal.

  Slipping away, I cross the main road to the circle of the bay. A sandy slope, dimpled with footsteps, leads down to a plane of level sand. The traffic’s roar recedes. In such a gentle space, I think, you can get your bearings. Away from London, breathing salt air, I might find a quieter, less embroiled self to take home to Jesse. Years ago my mother and I would visit the Gower every Easter and summer – and our cottage at Pwll Du seemed far more like home than Fulham ever could.

  This morning, as Jesse silently buttered toast, I thought: why are you still feeding me, after last night? He pushed the marmalade towards me and poured tea. When I kissed him goodbye, Jesse flinched. Had he been weeping? How much does he know?

  The sea’s an opal ellipse, clouded with mist towards the horizon. Across the bay a plume of smoke builds above the steelworks. Someone’s digging for cockles; a woman walks a spaniel over the gleaming flats. From the pile driver at the distant pier comes a booming echo. Calm deepens and I ponder walking the Gower coast, skipping this wretched conference: what will I hear anyway but repetitions of repetitions? What would I contribute but regurgitated pap?

  However long is it since I’ve taken time to myself or rather, time off from my selves? You have to give Jesse the truth, I tell myself, you know that. You have – unwillingly, because you do love him, do respect him – deceived him. And he’s catching up with you. A tree trunk lies beached: sea-scoured, its body silvered by salt. Seating myself on this beautiful corpse, I look out towards the sea. And breathe.

  A figure wends its way from the sea’s edge down a zigzag plane of light on water; his, her, reflection travels beneath. The pile driver pulses softly, like the slow heartbeat of some great creature at rest. When I look again, the figure has melted away. No, there he is, seated on another log, with his back to me, gazing out to sea.

  As he rises and stretches – a grey-haired man who is not my father – my heart startles and I place the chap. Some Spanish-sounding name – Santana? Santiago? – or Salvator, Salvatore, something like that. And suddenly I’m a wet-behind-the-ears research student at Manchester all those years ago, ogling a glamorous visiting scholar. Now I’m thoroughly unsettled. How did he beat me to the beach? Didn’t I catch sight of him as I was dodging out of the welcoming hall, wedged in a corner with poor old Bates? Or was that earlier? He picks his way towards me, trousers rolled up, dangling his shoes by their laces. In the old days the guy was no suit-wearer. He had a look of Che Guevara – at least that’s my impression though I doubt if he actually wore the starred beret. I’m sure he didn’t.

  Seating himself on my log, he starts to dry his feet with a handkerchief. ‘I see we had the same idea: far too lovely a day to spend indoors. How are you? We’ve met, of course, Sebastian. In point of fact we go back a very long way. I’ve kept up with you. Just read your intriguing monograph on the tomb workers’ fragments. I visited Deir el-Medina on the strength of it.’

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘Oh yes. Your writing style – it brings that dead world to life. Especially the ordinary men and women.’

  One can’t help but be flattered to have one’s baby admired. The artisans who built at the Valley of the Kings left personal letters and bills and records on thousands of ostraca found dumped in a well, fragments that have furnished my obsessive life’s work. Ordinary voices speaking to me from deep time. My people, they’ve come to seem. So much remains underground. Wherever you tread in Egypt there’s something buried and waiting.

  ‘Well, we’ve met on the page then, Professor Salvatore,’ I reply stiffly. ‘I too am aware of your work.’

  *

  I squirm to recall the callow creature I was in the ’80s when he and I crossed paths. I was a nerdy know-all, living in squalor in Rusholme and given to stalking. Could I really have been so creepy? It was Truth I tracked, I told myself, with a capital T. Why Truth should be found amongst mouldy texts in dead languages, I never enquired. Researching for my doctorate in Egyptology, I cruised for anyone showing signs of holding a thread or clue, who might let me tag along. What I loved about my specialism was the way it was fenced around by enigma, deeply encrypted. Snatches of coded conversation waylaid me as I grubbed around in the university library.

  ‘It’s all a matter of echo and reflection,’ said the earnest student in the lift to his companion. He poked the bridge of his glasses up his nose with his forefinger. It slid down. ‘That’s how I l
ook at it.’

  ‘Oh so do I,’ breathed his obsequious hanger-on. ‘Absolutely.’

  I’d vaguely noticed them here before. When they headed for the Philosophy stacks, I found myself following. They lingered between K and L. The light had failed in the stack; they groped along the shelves.

  ‘Mehr Licht!’ chirped the sage student.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘More light! Goethe on his death bed, calling for more light.’

  The torch beam came from nowhere. As if invoked. It shone straight into the earnest eyes of master and acolyte, who both yelped with shock. The librarian laughed and swept the beam across the rows of books. The lights were forever failing, he said. He’d report it. Yet again. If they came back on this afternoon, Philosophy would be illumined. Or at least a fragment of it. Darkness might well have fallen on whole continents of knowledge in some other aisle. There would only be one fragment showing at a time – and the rest would have to be guessed.

  ‘It’s pesky,’ he said. ‘But there you are.’

  ‘But this is a university library,’ the geek objected. ‘Isn’t it? We are legitimate readers. It’s a travesty.’

  ‘Blame Thatcher, mate, don’t blame me. Blame Keith Joseph and the cuts. Nowt to do with me.’

  ‘We’ll have to come back later then.’

  ‘Yes, well, you can hardly come back earlier.’

  The pair squeezed past me. ‘The lights don’t work,’ they chorused, as if I were deaf. ‘Come back later.’

  I glimpsed the pair again when the fire alarm sounded and mole-eyed readers were evicted into the glare of day. Bright flocks of shirt-sleeved men and girls in skimpy dresses littered the summer lawns like picnickers. The library’s dim vault was my home from home, ghosting around among the friendly dead. With my peers, my mask failed to fit. Nothing would have fitted the shapelessness of me, forever twisting out of true.

  Am I substantially different now? Jesse puts my caginess down to my fatherless condition: unfathered or defathered rather, he says. He makes it sound like ‘deflowered’. It was when Dad’s remains were repatriated that Jesse’s unease intensified. Now you’ve laid him to rest, you can … surely, Sebs … move on? Find out who you are and, well, just – be it?

  The fire alarm had disturbed my worship of Justin. I’d gleaned his name from some drop-dead gorgeous pal of his who’d bent over whispering, hand on his shoulder. I’d never spoken directly to Justin. Sitting obliquely to him in the reading room, I’d track him with my eyes as he hid Art History text books from other readers, wedging them behind textbooks on probate law. A couple of days before the fire alarm episode, I’d excavated a stash from this mortuary. One volume held a slip of paper. It was how Justin’s handwriting would have to be: slant italic, with flamboyant ascenders and descenders. I envied his graceful and old-fashioned arabesques. Perhaps I should take a course on calligraphy.

  ‘See p. 245,’ it said. ‘Saint Sebastian, the beauteous martyr – tied to a tree and shot full of arrows, ah ha.’

  Bloody hell, I thought, and throttled off a laugh. A punctured saint. That’ll be me. A virgin with acne scars. Face burning, I leafed through and found the colour plate (bloody hell again) by the painter known as Il Sodoma. The artist apparently swanked about Renaissance Siena and Rome in gaudy gear, trailed by lascivious boys, and kept a menagerie of freakish pets at home. The picture showed a nearly nude androgynous lad draped against a tree, with shoulder-length hair like mine. He’d been deeply penetrated by a trinity of arrows – through neck, ribs and thighs. The tree, with its inevitable allusion to the crucifixion, was also pierced. Above the ecstatic saint’s head an angel hovered in a light-burst, offering a crown for Sebastian’s tender pains.

  Justin must have observed me inspecting his stash. Was this his joke at my expense? I’d bolted, head down.

  Now I scanned the crowd milling outside the library. Justin would stand out in any company, a head taller than most, with his sombre face and dark blond hair. The way he held himself reminded me of a washed-out ballet dancer between performances: a louche Nureyev, too languid to launch into the dancer’s suspended leaps. He was gay and easy with that. When I spied on Justin, what I searingly suspected about myself – and it killed me, as perhaps something similar had killed my father – became an intuition with which it might be possible to live. But how? I lacked the élan to share his world. No graces or style.

  Dad had been charismatic, a class act. An adventurer, wayward and charming but – I’d heard my mother say – too needy to be trusted. Whether his travel-writing career was a cover for espionage had never been ascertained and seemed just another tall tale. Jack Messenger’s only child had unfortunately turned out a runt. Still, Dad wasn’t around to deplore me.

  Outside the library someone touched my elbow, lingeringly. ‘Excuse me – what’s the alarm, do you know?’

  ‘A bomb scare, I heard. Mind you, they’re always saying that.’

  The enquirer had the look of a professor. If he was not a prof now, he would be. Probably next week. There was something compelling about him. I recognise you, I thought, racking my brains. But where from? It was as if some newscaster had alighted from the television screen, to announce that he’d been watching me.

  He gave back my stare, locking into my eyes.

  ‘We’ve met before,’ he said. ‘You must remember.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Are you on television?’

  ‘Well, I have been. Randomly.’

  ‘Oh.’ I didn’t like to ask what that was supposed to mean.

  The face was arresting, attractive in a craggy way, but wolfish, which I liked. And hungry. He was the kind of man who focuses his entire attention on you. You are the most interesting person in the world, even if he’s only asking the time. He looked like an intellectual rebel, unprepared to tolerate the crap the powers-that-be like to ladle out. His voice was pure public school: what we used to call a hwa-hwa accent. On the other hand, his dishevelment implied he’d just got up after a night of roiling dreams, hurling on his clothes any old how – cords and an earth-coloured sweater. His abundant hair was all over the place, in a romantic way, I felt, as Byron’s might have been.

  Did I know a good place for coffee? Or rather, a place for good coffee? When one has travelled in the East, one craves real coffee, he observed. That seemed exotic – and a bit precious. A lecturer in our department had spent a decade in Iran and, hearing that my father was the Jack Messenger the Orientalist, invited me regularly to his soirées with other sociopathic unfortunates. Dr Arrowsmith seated you cross-legged on Persian rugs and served exquisite glass cups of tea and coffee. Flushed and miserable, you prayed he’d spare you from describing the coffee – its bitter lisp or its burnt almond tang. You prayed there’d be no far-away-eyed reciting of the poets Rumi or Hafez in the original tongue. Oh no, I thought as the stranger asked about coffee, he’s one of those. Nowadays it’s easy to find good coffee: then, there was Real for toffs and Instant for students.

  Pitying my awkwardness, the visitor offered his hand. ‘Rhys Salvatore. Princeton.’ His grey-blue eyes searched into my face as though it interested him deeply. How flattering. ‘You are, of course …’

  ‘Sebastian Messenger. Seb. Researching. Egyptology. But – you don’t sound American.’

  ‘Valleys Welshman. From a village you’ll not have heard of. Nantymoel.’

  I didn’t like to mention that he didn’t sound like a Welshman either, nor was his surname remotely Welsh.

  ‘Is that where Richard Burton comes from?’

  ‘No. That’s Pontrhydyfen.’

  ‘Oh, right. What’s your subject?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah well, you have me there. I’m a bit of this and a bit of that. A philosophical dabbler. A student of comparative cultures and literatures, notably the Cymric, the Chinese and the Persian. A pirate, really, a traverser of boundaries.’

  ‘Really?’ Such postmodern eclecticism was utterly beyond a dumbfounded student of broken pots
and hieroglyphs, hunkering in a sandpit with his bucket and spade.

  Salvatore smiled. ‘Right now I’d settle for halfway decent coffee.’

  I pointed out the way to the Senior Common Room and when he invited me to join him, found myself consenting. I doubted whether the professor would find many intellectuals to converse with there. The SCR, haunted by emeritus dons nodding off over journals, was one step away from a nursing home.

  As we advanced together over the quad, the visitor’s fame and charisma acted as a magnet. Youngish lecturers swivelled in mid-stride and headed across the concourse, gliding in his wake, stray ducklings cleaving to a long-lost mother duck. When I tried to slip away, Salvatore started introducing me: ‘I don’t know if you’ve met Sebastian Messenger. He is an up-and-coming Egyptologist, researching into … I’m sorry, Sebastian, I didn’t quite catch?’

  Scarlet, I mumbled something about the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And that I’d just remembered I had an appointment. To discuss it. The Book, that is. Of the Dead.

  The guy appeared oddly reluctant to let me go – and fond, like an uncle. He’d catch up with me, he said, and we’d talk properly. We knew each other, he repeated. From way back.

  I felt, as I loped back to the library, that I had obscurely disappointed the stranger, starving him of some nourishment he craved. And that, if I turned my head, I’d see him gazing after me.

  ‘Oy, watch where you’re fucking going, wanker.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I realised I was running in an arc, dreamily skewed. I slowed down to a walk.

  That afternoon there occurred a luminous interlude in the stacks. All the lights were functioning but the two earnest young truth-seekers weren’t around to luxuriate in it. I ran my eyes over venerable volumes under K-L and wondered what the self-appointed sage had been looking for. Kant? Kierkegaard? Lacan? Lavater? Or perhaps, nothing in particular. Perhaps it was all show. He might have been a hollow vessel with a yen for disciples. Or an ambitious competitor spreading disinformation.