All Souls

by Javier Marías

  Within the rules governing the steps to be taken in diaphanous conversations about the future (steps that are mere formalities) I had two options then: I could ask (I looked across at the beach) if she would never leave Ted because in spite of everything she loved her husband (but on that Saturday night in June in Brighton I didn't want to run the risk of hearing that or of having to try to deny it by resorting, inevitably, to boasting); pretending that the former possibility didn't exist, I could reproach her with her lack of daring and her bland acceptance of the status quo (I turned round and looked out at the domes: I threw my cigarette out of the window - like a coin - and kept my back turned to her while I talked), with her acceptance of things that I had never witnessed and for which I felt neither responsibility nor respect. Whether or not I chose the second option became a matter of indifference, however, since Clare answered as if I had decided on the first.

  "I'm not going to give you a speech about how I'm still in love with Ted because I don't know if I am or, if I am, in what way I am, and on the other hand I do know that I'm not in love with him the way I was years ago, when we got married, or before or since then. The truth is I don't think about it much, I'm not used to asking myself that question. But even if it were true that I am and I were convinced of it, I wouldn't say so to you. It's absurd for a woman to say that to her lover, or for a man to say it to his, and even less to someone who's not just a casual affair, but someone one has known and cared about for some time. I couldn't say it to you with any conviction, even if I were sure. But it's not necessary. It's enough that I tell you that I like living with him, you know that already. It's not just that it's pleasant, it's that I'm used to it. It's the life I chose, and I continue to choose it out of all the other lives I could choose to have, let alone those I couldn't. Having a lover doesn't contradict any of that, nor would it even if I were to be a little ridiculous and tell you that I loved Ted more than anything else in the world."

  I said: "Lovers take time, we're wilful and over-enthusiastic, isn't that it?" and thought that though I had certainly taken up Muriel's time and been wilful with her, I could never have been accused of being over-enthusiastic.

  "You're a fool," said Clare as she had that fifth of November in her room in All Souls, in Catte Street, across from the Radcliffe Camera, and it was therefore the second time she'd called me a fool (without my taking offence on either occasion): she was annoyed by my remark and doubtless annoyed because I'd interrupted her when she was all ready to take the floor and conduct an infantile conversation with me (when she was all ready to put an end to the whole wearisome business), to go through the whole process: the approaches, the consummations, the estrangements; the fulfilment, the battles, the doubts; the certainties, the jealousies, the abandonment and the laughter. "You're a fool," she said. "Yes, lovers do take time, yes, they are wilful and over-enthusiastic, but not for long, and that's just as it should be. That's your function and also your charm. Mine too, don't forget, as your lover, and even though you're not married. Our role in life is not to last too long, not to persist or linger, because if we stay too long, the charm fades, the suffering begins and tragedies happen. Stupid tragedies, avoidable, self-inflicted tragedies."

  I said: "I can't say I've noticed many tragedies happening nowadays," and thought that between Clare and me no such tragedies were possible, in Oxford or in London, in Reading or in Brighton. Not even on Didcot station.

  "It doesn't matter if they happen now or used to happen in other times, one time is much like another, even though it may not seem like it. And anyway, who can know any time other than their own? Thirty years ago, that is during my own lifetime, I did see a tragedy, doubtless a stupid one, and since then, or perhaps since I realised I saw it, I've spent my whole life trying to make myself invulnerable, to be pessimistic and cold enough to prove invulnerable to just such stupid tragedies; to be immune to them and not to inflict them on myself. You've seen nothing and so there are still many things you can afford to think, but I can't. And I don't want to."

  That was when Clare, lying on the bed with, to one side, the beach and the water and, to the other (in the background) the outlandish imitation Indian palace and (in the foreground) the man who'd been her lover for sixteen months and was in the process of becoming her ex-lover, that was when Clare (as if she were a man), decided she was ready to recall out loud things from the distant past. That was when the conversation between lovers stopped flowing over flat ground, through all that is diaphanous and all that is yet to be and to judder instead over rough and rugged terrain, through all that is opaque and all that is already past.

  "Listen," she said, lighting a fresh cigarette and leaning her head on one hand, her elbow resting on the bolster on the double bed (that's how she prepared herself to recount to me the melodramatic episode involving a particular death with its several witnesses and about which the only surviving one could remember nothing). "Listen," she said and I turned round again to face her when she said that, turning my back on the inland-facing window again; as I did so, I couldn't help noticing that with that sideways shift towards me her skirt had ridden up even more: it was almost as if she wasn't wearing one. "Listen," she said, "my mother had a lover who stayed too long. His name was Terry Armstrong and I don't know who he was or what he did, it all happened when I was three, and I only found out about him long afterwards. He left no trace. Only when I was old enough to ask more about my mother could I ask others, although since I was only ever given one version or one answer, I've had to assume them to be correct simply because they're the only ones I got. My father's always maintained an aggrieved silence about it, and perhaps not just because he doesn't want to talk about it, but also perhaps, I sometimes think, because he may not know the whole story; he wouldn't be able to tell me the whole story. The only person who wanted to tell me about it, after a while, was Mrs Munshi, Hilla, my nanny, the nanny who looked after me in Delhi. My father, on the other hand, has always refused to answer me when I've asked him about or accused him of something, which means that he's never actually denied anything, he's never denied what I told him the nanny told me. Every time I raised the subject, he'd get up and leave the room, a black look on his face. I'd follow him right to the door of his bedroom, insisting that he tell me, but he'd just shut himself in and not come out until hours later, for supper, as if nothing had happened. But it's been ages now since we engaged in those struggles, now it never even occurs to me to insist on answers or to have it out with him, I never talk about it or even attempt to do so, with him or with anyone else, and Hilla died years ago, here in England where she'd moved to be with her sons and her grandsons. I don't even know if I should talk to you about it, but it doesn't matter, and anyway you'll be leaving soon," and I thought that, although it wasn't strictly necessary, it was nice and something of an honour to be given explanations by Clare as if on that night in Brighton they were necessary; and I thought too: "It's true. Once I've left, what possible importance can what is happening now have? I'll leave no trace. Like Terry Armstrong." And I paused over that name: "Terry Armstrong." But while I was thinking this, Clare had continued talking, her gaze growing ever more abstracted, ever more fixed, the gaze of one reminiscing or telling a story. "According to my nanny, Terry Armstrong, of whom she never knew anything more than his name, was, like all good lovers, over-enthusiastic and wilful. One of those men who write letters and poems with just the right mixture of seriousness and irony, who are full of infectious energy and vitality and engender laughter and hope in the person who feels loved by them. He'd come and go and no one ever quite knew when he'd reappear, he was stationed in Calcutta, possibly in the diplomatic corps or just there on his own account, probably the latter, since his name doesn't appear in the files of the diplomatic corps; I wrote to them for information when my curiosity about the subject was at its height, at its most urgent. Perhaps it wasn't his real name, I don't know; perhaps only my mother knew that, or perhaps not even she did. In any event he must have
been in India for some time or had been there before, because he spoke a little Hindi to the nanny, just to flatter her, she said. He flattered the nanny and flattered my mother, that seems to have been his main function. For the nanny he was never more than that, a flattering presence and a name, she never tried to check up on him, that wasn't her place, it was enough for her that he was Mr Terry Armstrong or Armstrong Sahib just as my father was Mr Newton or Newton Sahib and I was Miss Clare, the child of the house, it didn't matter to her what else we were or even if we were anything else. The secret affair between my mother and Terry Armstrong lasted about as long as ours has to date, a year and a half, and although it took my father a while, it seems that nonetheless he did find out about it some time before it ended, and that he tolerated it, put up with it, perhaps in the hope that he'd be transferred somewhere else, or that Armstrong would, assuming he belonged to the diplomatic corps or worked for a company; diplomats don't stay anywhere long, nor do foreigners with no established marital links, just as you won't be staying here much longer. Any burden is easier to bear if it's only intermittently there, and who knows, if Terry Armstrong came and went, if he was hundreds of miles away and only travelled them when he could, then perhaps the situation was not so very unbearable for my father and he was prepared to wait, as perhaps Ted, if he's suspected anything during all this time, is waiting now for you to go. Perhaps I'm waiting too. I don't know. I long ago gave up trying to find out anything through my father, I tormented him quite enough at the time, and he must have felt pretty humiliated if what Hilla said is true. And it must be true." "What else did your nanny tell you?" I asked from my post by the window (the inland-facing window); but more than anything I was turning the name of Terry Armstrong round and round in my mind, although still not daring to think beyond that, beyond the mere name. "Terry Armstrong," I thought again. Names tell you a lot. "My nanny said my mother became pregnant," Clare replied, "and that she thought the new baby would be Armstrong's, although she wasn't sure, or perhaps she was but didn't want to be. Whatever it was, that false or genuine doubt was more than my father could bear or tolerate. I do know that my father was aware of her doubts because Hilla heard snatches of what must have been their last conversation. Their last argument." Clare turned round and changed her position: her feet on the pillow now, her chin resting on her hands, both elbows at the foot of the bed. Now what I could see were the backs of her thighs and the curve, covered by her tights, where her buttocks began. And I thought: "You're only that relaxed about revealing so much when you trust the person watching, when it's a brother, or a husband, when it's a family member. I'm not her husband or her brother, but her foreign lover who's about to become her ex-lover. But tonight she's entrusting me with a family secret." "One night, when I was about three years old, when I'd already been asleep for hours and Hilla had only gone to bed some minutes before, she heard me crying. She got up and came to me as she had on other nights, to calm me and console me and sing me a song to lull me back to sleep, and that was when she heard what must have been the real reason for my waking up and for my tears: my parents had just got back and from their bedroom, close to mine, came shouts and now and then the sound of something being hit, of a blow on the floor or on a table. Frightened, my nanny immediately started to sing in order to drown out the shouting and to overcome her own fear, and it was her singing combined with my sobs that prevented her from hearing the conversation, although there were times when the voices grew so loud, that they startled her again, so that she stopped singing and, without wanting to, overheard the odd phrase. Just a few phrases, eight in all, four isolated pairs of phrases, which, on my insistence, she repeated to me so many times that now it's as if I myself remembered them. For I must have heard them too, though I can't possibly recall them. I can barely remember my mother. Nevertheless, I do remember those phrases that at first I wrote down until, effortlessly, they became part of my memory and have stayed with me ever since, and I know that one of the things Hilla told me my mother said that night was: 'But I'm not sure, Tom, it could be yours.' And I know what my father replied: 'The fact that you're not sure means that it can't and won't be mine.' And I know that later my mother said: 'I don't know what I want, I wish I did, I'm worn out with not knowing.' And my father replied: 'And I'm worn out with knowing what I do want and not being able to get it.' My mother's third sentence was this: 'If that's what you want, I'll leave tomorrow, but I'll take the girl with me.' And my father said: 'You're in no position to take any more with you than the clothes you stand up in and what you're carrying inside you, and you'll probably never see Clare again.' And later the nanny heard the last thing my mother said: 'I can't take any more of this, Tom.' And my father replied: 'Neither can I.' Hilla sang me back to sleep, more and more softly as the voices quietened, and when I'd gone back to sleep and the voices had fallen silent, my nanny told me that the door of my room opened and she saw the figure of my father silhouetted there. He didn't come in. 'Has the child gone back to sleep?' he asked. The nanny looked at him and raised a finger to her lips, and my father, lowering his voice, added: 'Mrs Newton is leaving very early tomorrow morning to go on a journey. It's best the child doesn't see her go. Take her to sleep in your room for the night.' The door closed again and then the nanny, very carefully, in the dark, without waking me, obeyed his orders and gathered me up in her arms and carried me to her room to spend the rest of the night with her. She gave up her bed to me and, still watchful, went to sleep in a chair." Clare fell silent, paused. She got up from the double bed that she alone occupied and went to the bathroom, and although we were in an intimate situation we were not so intimate that she left the bathroom door open. Even so I couldn't help hearing the fall of liquid on liquid and while I did so (without wanting to), I thought about that name again: "Terry Armstrong," I thought, letting my thoughts go further this time. "Armstrong's a very common name, so is Terry. For women it's the diminutive form of Theresa and for men of Terence. But Armstrong's very common, there are thousands of them in England and always have been, as many as or more than there are Newtons and almost as many as there are Blakes, although the double-barrelled form, Cromer-Blake is rare. And Terence or Terry are equally common, although not as common as John or Tom or Ted (short for both Edward and Theodore). But Armstrong," I thought. "A strong arm." And when Clare came back, she sat down on the bed, put a folded pillow in the small of her back and leaned against the wall. She lit another cigarette and tucked her legs under her so that her skirt rode up again. She'd splashed her face with water and though her gaze was less fixed, she hadn't lost the thread of her story. "The next morning my mother was no longer in the house, they said she'd gone away for a few days. I still had my nanny Hilla and she stayed at my side from that day on during the several years we remained in Delhi, without a transfer, despite what had happened. She had no way of re-establishing contact with my mother nor of course with Terry Armstrong, whose whereabouts she had no way of knowing. Moreover, during those first few days, my father kept a discreet watch on her, obliging her to remain at home with me all the time, not leaving me for an instant, and that's how it was from then on, she just stayed with me all the time, never leaving my side, until years later, when we at last left Delhi, she chose not to come with us. Hilla never found out what happened to my mother during that time, but one imagines that she went to Armstrong and hid with him in some hotel or in the house of someone he knew in Delhi, some Indian, certainly no one from the British colony, she would have had a difficult time explaining her situation to them. My mother's pregnancy was already becoming noticeable, Hilla said, in a certain blurring of the features, a bulkiness about her figure, perhaps that's why she had to talk to my father, to tell him about it, on that night that ended with her departure. My nanny didn't even know if Armstrong was in the city when my mother left the house, if he was there that night and was waiting for her somewhere the next day or if he came to her later, as soon as he could after she'd called him, which would mean that at first my
mother must have been completely alone. My nanny said Armstrong never struck her as a practical or resourceful man, more of a dreamer, that's how she described him, a dreamer, that's the word she used. What she remembered most about him was his unfailing good humour, his continual joking. She told how, often, he'd take a metal flask out of his pocket and, amidst much laughter, hold it to my mother's lips, even to Hilla's, but both always declined, laughing, and then he'd hold the flask high and spout on about something or other, toasting to English names that meant nothing to my nanny and drink long and cheerfully, although she never saw him drunk. My mother was always laughing, she laughed at everything he said or did, the way young people do, the way Armstrong did: he was always joking, Hilla said, that was what she remembered him for, his endless laughter." And while Clare spoke of the man of whom she knew nothing except his name and that one character trait, I changed position at last and left the window to go and sit on the floor at the foot of the bed in order to listen better and think less. But I still listened to my thoughts, which were in fact urgent and succinct, for all I could think of (as I approached the bed and noticed the sand in my socks and at the foot of the bed) was a name: 'Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong." "Four days after the argument, we saw him, Terry Armstrong that is. We all saw him, Hilla, me and possibly even my father, although he's never admitted he did and I can't remember it at all, just as I can't remember what it was they said that woke me up and made me cry on that other night. Or perhaps for a long time I forgot what I'd seen and only much later, when I was told about it and was told that I'd seen it, did I regain a kind of memory of what, according to Hilla, I too saw with my own eyes. The likelihood is that if I'm telling it now as if I remembered it, it's only because now I know about it and have spent the years since imagining it. But, you see, I can't avoid knowing what I saw, and although I may not have understood it then nor am I able to remember it with my memory, I think I remember it now with my mind." And while Clare Bayes, who was once Clare Newton, talked to me about her knowledge or memory of the first Clare Newton, who must have had another name before, unknown to me (that is, while the child Clare talked to me about her dead mother), I continued to think about the name of Armstrong and this time I thought (at the same time as I heard the story of that melodramatic episode from the lips of one of the witnesses): "It can't be, it wouldn't be, it isn't, Armstrong's such a common name, so's Terry, there must be thousands of Terrys and thousands of Armstrongs and hundreds of Terry Armstrongs, and anyway there's no way of proving it because no one knows anything about the Terry Armstrong who left no trace after returning to Calcutta in the 1950s as he returned to Vasto at the end of his life; perhaps he went back to Calcutta for 'one last drunken binge' that got too complicated for him and that held him there and lasted a year and a half (it was more than a drunken binge) and took him to Delhi; 'a final drunken binge', even though it took place fifteen years before his actual death." "Only four days had passed and I was in the garden with my nanny, watching the river and waiting for the last trains of the late evening to pass; as I've told you before, that was something I did ever since I was a little girl and continued to do until we left Delhi. My father was standing at the other end of the garden, near the house, and that's why while it's possible that he saw everything, it's equally possible that he saw nothing. But I did see what I know I saw but don't remember, what I didn't remember later nor even at the time, not even immediately after it happened, because that night, four nights after my mother's departure, while I was waiting for the mail train that came from Moradabad and always arrived so late, two figures appeared, a woman and a man, walking along the iron bridge that spans the river." "The bridge over the River Yamuna or Jumna that Clare has described to me before," I thought. "The long bridge of crisscrossing iron girders, deserted for the most part, in darkness, idle and shadow)', exactly like one of those faithful but ancillary figures from our childhood who grow dim then blaze into life again later, just for a moment, when they are called, only to be instantly plunged back into the gloom of their obscure, commutable existences, having done their brief duty or revealed the secret suddenly demanded of them. Just like Hilla or the old maidservant who used to accompany me and my three brothers along calle de Génova, calle de Covarrubias, or calle de Miguel Ángel: the Indian nanny Hilla and the old Madrid maidservant, whose lives are commutable and exist only in order that through them, whenever necessary, the child may once more emerge." And while Clare was telling me what she'd seen but remembered now only with her mind, I thought it all myself from my position at the foot of the bed, looking at the front view of her strong, slender legs that offered a glimpse of her knickers: "The English girl is looking at the black iron bridge waiting for the train to cross it, to see the train lit up and reflected in the water, one of the brightly coloured trains full of light and distant noise, that from time to time cross the River Yamuna, the River Jumna that she looks patiently out at from her house high up above when night falls. But the train has not yet appeared and, instead, along the dark bridge two hesitant, tearful figures appear, stumbling perhaps on the rails, skidding on the gravel, two figures who are John Gawsworth and the mother of the watching child, Clare Newton, a woman who is still young, younger than her daughter on this night in Brighton. They're walking hand in hand, with Armstrong leading; they're leaning on the crisscrossing iron girders, clinging on to them as if they feared slipping and falling into the water, although it's possible that that is precisely why they've gone to the bridge, to fall in and drown, or perhaps not, perhaps they're simply crossing the bridge on foot, with obvious difficulty, perhaps they're in flight or stunned or troubled or drunk or ill, perhaps they don't know what they're doing. The child immediately spots the two figures in the darkness because they're both dressed in white and because one of them is her mother (and because the person who will become Clare Bayes only has eyes for the iron bridge and its promise of brightly coloured trains). There's Mummy,' says the daughter, pointing at the bridge. The nanny takes no notice of her at first, she doesn't even look up but goes on crooning some trifling song while she sews or does nothing and simply sits with her hands folded in her lap watching over the child left in her charge. The girl sees how the man, who is perhaps Gawsworth, walks to the middle of the bridge, still pulling the mother behind him, and although the daughter does not know it yet — her nanny will whisper this to her during her future childhood, not telling her everything until much later, not telling her until it is demanded of her - they're standing on a bridge from which many a pair of unhappy lovers have thrown themselves. But perhaps they're not going to throw themselves in, although that night they are doubtless unhappy, perhaps they're on the bridge for some other reason, who knows, it might be that Gawsworth himself, who leads the mother, does not himself quite know what that reason is. Armstrong takes out the metal flask from the pocket of his white jacket, but he doesn't toast anyone now or spout on about anything or proffer it to the lips of the first Clare Newton, who laughed so much (to the lips he had so often kissed), but takes a few hurried swigs, almost as if concealing the fact from the woman he loves and who follows behind him. She looks down, while he looks up, possibly she suffers from vertigo and cannot help looking down, down into the broad river of blue or rather black waters (since it is night) and because that is the only way of accustoming herself to them, because perhaps the mother does intend throwing herself in, and perhaps she is the more decided of the two and wonders if Gawsworth, or Terry Armstrong, will jump too, as they've promised and planned to do. It doesn't escape the first Clare Newton's notice that he keeps drinking from his metal flask, perhaps that's his way of accustoming himself to the liquid fate that awaits them; and it doesn't escape the nanny's notice either ('Look, there's your mummy with a man'), although she watches in astonishment and still without understanding what she's seeing. Perhaps the mother and the man made their promises and plans and reached their agreement the night before or during the day in some hotel room, and have agreed (Clare Bayes doe
sn't know, no one knows) because no other solution other than ending it all occurs to them. Gawsworth is one of life's unfortunates, easily perplexed, never serious, he just makes jokes, plays games (his thinking is erratic, his character weak) and he cannot accept that life has caught up with him, that it has finally closed in on him. The King of Redonda can't have an heir or take care of a child, he can't even take care of the woman he loves and who carries his child, perhaps he couldn't even if she wasn't. And Clare Newton has agreed this with him (Clare Bayes doesn't know, no one does) because she's afraid and desperate, she's been alone and homeless and possibly penniless for three nights and four days spent in cheap hotels or perhaps wandering the inhospitable city while Armstrong still does not come and there's no one to take care of her, three nights and four days of being bewildered, terrified, unable to believe what is happening to her: her will has wandered off somewhere, she doesn't know now how to hold on to it, to delay its going, it's no longer entirely hers, like the will of an invalid or an old man or one troubled in mind. He drinks, she looks at the water. The two stop in the middle of the bridge. They stumble. Gawsworth puts his arm - his strong arm - round her shoulders, as you put your arm around those you wish to protect and love, and with the other hand he grasps hold of an iron girder. In his first hand he still has hold of the flask, which, though he hasn't realised it yet, must be empty by now. It's Armstrong's turn to look down, whilst the mother looks up, trying to make out the garden of her house to which she will never return and her daughter, wondering if she'll still be watching, hoping that she won't be, that the nanny Hilla will have put her to bed and be singing her to sleep because the mail train from Moradabad will have passed already, marking the end of the child's day (Clare Newton doesn't know that as usual the train is running very late). The two lovers, who have only been unhappy lovers for a short time, stand still, they don't continue their walk, they don't cross the whole bridge. And it is then that from around the corner the Moradabad mail train appears, the train for which, as on every night of her present and future foreign childhood in the south, the little English girl is waiting, the train that always arrives incalculably late (no one can ever tell how late it will be, and that night is no exception) and that's why, although it's almost reached its destination, it seems as if it will never slow down. Gawsworth looks towards the oncoming train whose approach the mother hears without having to look up (the metallic noise inaudible to the child), instead she looks down again into the water. The fickle, mellow moon is now just a sliver. And then Armstrong raises the arm encircling the first Clare Newton's shoulders, frees himself and frees her, and now with both hands - with those hands that piloted planes and that will one day beg for alms - he grasps hold of and crushes his body against the crisscrossing iron girders, his drunkenness suddenly evaporated, his flask fallen from his hands, his eyes wide open and fearful like those of Alan Marriott's dog just before the football hooligans at Didcot station severed its back leg. There are so many things that hold us here,' Gawsworth is perhaps thinking, 'and anything might still happen.' Or perhaps he doesn't think it, he knows it. The mother must know it too, but nevertheless she holds out until the last moment, with her body so perilously close to the rails - her body that is beginning to swell with what is not yet and will never be Clare Bayes' younger brother or sister - and she does not follow Armstrong's example, the two lovers do not do the same thing, and instead of holding tight to the iron girders, the mother falls or jumps between them, in her white dress (as white as Rylands' hair, as white as the breasts of the not-so-plump girl from Wychwood Forest, Muriel) Clare Newton throws herself into the water. And while Clare Newton jumps and Terry Armstrong does not jump, the train passes, filling the entire length of the iron bridge, lighting up the river with its windows (the men on the barges below look up at the train and grow dizzy) and that is the image that helps the girl to go to sleep and to come to terms with the idea of spending another day in a city to which she does not belong and which she will only perceive as hers once she has left it and when her only chance to recall it out loud will be with her son or with a lover, for lovers serve the same function as children do, to listen to our story. The mother falls, with her slow downhill feeling, with her feeling of being burdened down, of vertigo, of falling, gravidity and weight, with her swollen body and her blurred features, with her false plumpness and her despair. And Gawsworth's eyes - that have been closed and void of any gaze for years now - see how the body of the person he loved falls and drowns; and the child Clare observes from high above how the body of the person she loved - the mother she cannot remember on this night in Brighton - disappears into the blue waters of that river gleaming brightly in the blackness; and perhaps the father, from the other end of the garden, near the house, also sees how long it takes for the body of the person he loved to surface and sees that it does not surface. (All three see the person they love kill herself.) And it is the nanny, Hilla, who sees how the men in the barges fail to find the body of the beloved, which is swept away on the current, it's she who will reveal the secret, because neither Armstrong nor the father nor the iron bridge over the River Jumna will. And when the train has passed and Clare Bayes who was then Clare Newton loses sight of the swaying lantern on the last carriage and waves goodbye to it, a goodbye that is never spoken in expectation of any response because there is no one there now to respond, the bridge is once more deserted, in darkness, idle and shadowy. The other white figure remains there for only a few seconds, perhaps he vomits into the River Yamuna like an Oxford beggar into the River Isis, before fleeing, terrified, the last King of Redonda, the writer John Gawsworth, the Real Writer, who will never write again nor leave any trace behind him. Except possibly a metal flask that has perhaps been there ever since that night, crushed and rusty and empty between the rails."