Graham Swift - Ever After

“I think you—”

“Okay, okay—”

He slowed down, braking hard and just in time for the bend. A cold smile squeezed his lips. He drove with exaggerated caution and gentleness.

“There’s no need to hang on to that briefcase like that — I need my hands for the wheel, you know.”

I had to admit this was so.

We took a turn back towards town. I felt the blood in my veins, the air in my lungs. He could have done it. He lit another cigarette. I refused. We reached the centre in stiff silence. How strange, how incongruous is an ancient university city. These age-grimed walls, these modern people; this hoarded learning, this mindless sunshine.

The traffic thickened. Posses of cyclists weaved around us.

“So — the Library, then,” he said, with sudden, bizarre amiability. “Let’s take you to the Library. It won’t have gone away.” Then he added, as if we were back at our point of departure, as if the last twenty minutes simply hadn’t occurred: “Yes — a sweet girl, Gabriella. Does this and that for me. Very bright. Very — hard-working. You know—” he turned and glanced at me “—if ever you need a research assistant.”

He watched the denimed rump of one of the passing cyclists.

I thought: Plan C, Seduction by a Female Agent.

Then, as we came to a halt in the line of cars, he said, “Christ!”

I had seen her too, at almost precisely the same moment — Katherine, walking towards us on the opposite pavement (carrying that straw bag), so far not having spotted us. He was plainly caught between the incriminating hope that she might not notice us at all and the difficulty of justifying to me why he should let his own wife walk right by without greeting her. We were at a standstill and — for a variety of reasons — I considered making a quick exit. Then Potter lowered his window and called out, with a sort of clotted brightness: “Katherine!”

She stopped, gave a perplexed smile, then, since her side of the road was clear and we remained stationary, walked over towards us. At some point she took in the fact that I was sitting beside Potter, and her smile became more perplexed. She stooped by Potter’s door.

“Hello,” she said. “How was London? Hello Bill.”

“Fine,” Potter said. “London was fine.” The repetition seemed to come sideways out of his mouth, expressly for my benefit. “Thought I’d drive back early. Beat the traffic. I bumped into Bill here on the way in. Just giving him a lift to the Library.”

Katherine looked at me. Her puzzled smile turned into one of undisguised intrigue. “But you’re a long way from the College, Bill.”

“Exactly,” Potter said, quick off the mark and seeing his escape route. “What is our Bill doing on the other side of town so early in the day, yet supposedly on his way to the Library? A question he hasn’t answered.” He darted me a look. Then he said to Katherine as the traffic began to move, “Why don’t you hop in? You’re on your way home? I’ll take you there, after we’ve dumped this reprobate here.”

Katherine got in, scrambling across the back seat. Then she leant forward, a hand on each of the front seats, so that her face was almost between us. She seemed suddenly all alertness and amusement, as if this chance encounter had brightened an unpromising day.

“Well, Bill,” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell us?”

Plainly, the joke was on me, and, plainly, Potter was relishing the twist in the situation. I might have been more discomforted if it hadn’t been for the little bottle of perfume still lying under the dashboard (and for a kind of dazed thankfulness for still being in one piece). I thought: it is quite simple. All I have to do is nothing. All I have to do is leave the bottle of perfume just where it is. But I couldn’t do it.

“You’d be surprised if you really knew,” I said. I gave a quick sideways glance at Potter.

“Ah — a man of mystery,” Katherine said.

I don’t think she had seen the bottle. She sat back. I shifted in my own seat in such a way as to make my briefcase slip, as if by accident, from my knees. Leaning forward to retrieve it, I contrived at the same time to scoop up the bottle, then transfer it, hidden in my hand, to my pocket. Potter glanced from the road ahead to me. Maybe he hadn’t seen it. I don’t think so. Maybe the moment of my secreting it was the moment of his realising it was there in the first place. I couldn’t tell, with his eyes hidden by those glasses.

“Hang on to the goods,” he said, with a slight touch of gall.

Katherine leant forward again, grasping the back of my seat. “How’s it going?” she said, looking over my shoulder.

“Oh — fine.” I gave the briefcase a meaningless caress.

“No,” she said, in a softer, more solicitous, more all-embracing tone. “I mean — how’s it going?”

It was strange. It was like a question spoken out of her husband’s presence. Her lips were almost in my ear. It was as though at any moment she might have ruffled my hair or put her arms round my neck. Potter looked at us both, like some foxy chauffeur. To my surprise, I found myself suddenly glad of the briefcase lying across my lap, screening the state of things between my legs. Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if she had seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe she had seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe that’s how things were.

“Oh — okay,” I said.

We headed back towards the Meadows of Dalliance and the True Path of Knowledge. Potter slowed down near the spot where he had hijacked me earlier. The day had warmed. The wet road was now a dapple of damp and dry patches. It would not have surprised me if, as I made to get out, Katherine had suddenly kissed me or pinched my cheek — like a mother saying goodbye to a son departing for school. Instead, she sat back — not bothering to move into my place beside Potter, giving me a sort of bold-but-beleaguered look.

“Bye, Bill.”

“Happy hunting,” Potter said.

Whoever designed our University Library must have known what they were about. It is variously likened to a fortress, a prison, a power-station. Alcatraz. Fort Knox. It stands in geographical and architectural scorn of the cosy huddle of colleges some half a mile distant across the lawn-fringed river. And the inference, I suppose, is that it will continue to stand so — with all those books, all that compacted civilization, still safe inside — when the fragile colleges and tranquil lawns are no more. Even inside, it is not exactly inviting. You have the impression that books are stored here as ammunition is stored in readiness for some awesome, cataclysmic conflict. All day long, along mysterious passage-ways and up and down secret lift-shafts, they are shifted and trundled like shells in the bowels of a vast dreadnought.

I sat, belatedly, at my desk, Lyell’s 1853 edition in front of me. Also before me, the 1855 (enlarged) edition of the Elements of Geology . Yes, I knew, all right, which were the proper editions. But I couldn’t concentrate (any more than the Rector). I couldn’t feel whatever it was Matthew had felt. What was I doing, a hapless civilian in this arsenal of learning? I fingered the phial of perfume in my pocket. Yes, I admit it, I took it out, unscrewed the gold cap and sniffed. It is as well that library-goers are generally used to each other’s eccentricities.

She would be here, somewhere in this building. The girl in black. Gabriella. I should find her, return the bottle. This, after all, was the classic way in which Romance began: the misplaced article, the trinket retrieved. This, after all, was the way life worked, the way it took its chances and began again, especially on a May morning when sunlight penetrated even the thick bulwarks of the University Library and fondled the dusty racks of books. What was I doing in this necropolis? What was I doing, bent over a book about the antiquity of rocks?