Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

There was not much more to say. I should have guessed that she would know nothing. Perhaps I had only phoned her as a way of stilling my impatience and sharing my astonishment with someone, giving vent to my feelings, possibly to convince myself, or at least to argue it through or to rehearse that argument. I stubbed out my barely smoked cigarette before anyone could call me to order. I paid for the drinks and we left. I offered to accompany her in a taxi to her house, but since we were just across the road from my apartment, she declined. And so I walked with her to Baker Street tube where we said goodbye. I thanked her and she said: 'Whatever for?'

'How's your father doing?' I asked. We hadn't mentioned him since that night in my apartment. She had told me nothing and I hadn't asked. I suppose I did so then because it felt to me as if we were saying farewell to each other. Even though we would see each other on Monday in the building with no name and perhaps on other days too.

'Not too bad. He doesn't gamble any more,' she said.

We exchanged kisses and I watched her disappear down into the underground, which is so very deep in London. Perhaps she envied my decision not to continue with the group, and that it was still possible for me to break away from it, having been part of it for far less time than her. There was, in principle, nothing preventing her from doing the same. But Tupra would certainly want to keep her at all costs, as he would the others, and me. He took whatever steps he deemed necessary and presumably hoped not to frighten us off in the process, and perhaps with that in mind he rationed and measured out the steps to be taken, gauging when we would be hardened enough to withstand certain major upsets. According to Wheeler, there were very few people with our curse or gift, and we were getting fewer and fewer, and he had lived long enough to notice this unequivocally. 'There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo,' he had told me. 'There were never many, very few in fact, which is why the group was always so small and so scattered. But nowadays there's a real dearth. The times have made people insipid, finicky, prudish. No one wants to see anything of what there is to see, they don't even dare to look, still less take the risk of making a wager; being forewarned, foreseeing, judging, or, heaven forbid, prejudging, that's a capital offence. No one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there. No one wants to know; and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror.' And on another occasion, in another context, he had warned me: 'You have to bear in mind that most people are stupid. Stupid and frivolous and credulous, you have no idea just how stupid, frivolous and credulous they are, they're a permanently blank sheet without a mark on it, without the least resistance.'

No, Tupra would not be prepared to lose us so easily, the people who served him. I didn't consider that I as yet owed him any large debts or loyalties, nor had I established any very strong links, I had not become involved, enmeshed or entangled, I would not have to use a razor to cut one of those bonds when it ultimately grew too tight. I had tried to deceive him regarding Incompara, but now, with this Dearlove business, even if it wasn't quite the same thing, we were more or less quits. It was likely, on the other hand, that he had young Pérez Nuix caught from various angles, and that for her there could be no easy separation, no possibility of desertion. I remembered Reresby's comment when he froze the video image of her beaten father, the poor man lying motionless on the table, a swollen wounded heap, bleeding from his nose and eyebrows, possibly from his cheekbones and from other cuts, the broken hands with which he had tried in vain to protect himself-I, too, had broken a hand and slashed a cheekbone with apparent coldness or perhaps with genuine coldness, how could I have done that? Tupra had said: 'As I told you, nothing here gets thrown away or given to someone else or destroyed, and that beating is perfectly safe here, it's not to be shown to anyone. Well, who knows, it might be necessary to show it to Pat one day, to convince her of something, perhaps to stay and not to leave us, one never knows.' Perhaps he would show it to her, saying: 'You wouldn't want this to happen to your father again, would you?' 'How fortunate,' I thought, 'that my family is far away and that I'm all alone here in London.' But maybe he wouldn't need to go that far to convince Pat: after all, she may have been half-Spanish, but she was still serving her country. And I was not.

I slept badly that night, having resolved to get up early the next day. I had no intention of spending Sunday in London doing nothing but ruminate, with barely anything to occupy me (I'd dealt with any work pending before I left for Madrid), and with the television watching me while I waited for Monday to arrive so that I could talk to Tupra. I hadn't been to see Wheeler for a long time and, besides, there was the heavy present that I'd bought for him in a second-hand bookshop in Madrid and carted with me all the way to London: a boxed, two-volume set of propaganda posters printed during our Civil War, some of which-not only the Spanish ones and not all of them cartoons-used the same message as the 'careless talk' campaign or something very similar. And when you've taken the trouble to carry something with you, you feel impatient to hand it over, especially if you're sure the recipient of the gift will be pleased. It was a little late to call him on Saturday night when I returned from Baker Street, and so I decided to go to Oxford in the morning and tell him of my arrival there and then; it wouldn't be a problem, he hardly ever went out and would be delighted to have me visit him in his house by the River Cherwell and stay to lunch and spend the whole day in his company.

And so I went to Paddington, a station from which I had so often set off in my distant Oxford days, and caught a train before eight o'clock, not noticing that it was one of the slowest, involving a change and a wait at Didcot. During what was still more or less my youth, I had, altogether, waited many minutes at that semi-derelict station, and I'd been convinced on one such occasion that I'd lost something important because I'd failed- almost-to speak to a woman who was, like me, waiting for the delayed train that would take us to Oxford, and while we passed the time smoking, the hesitant pool of light surrounding us had illuminated only the butts of the cigarettes she threw on the ground alongside mine (those were more tolerant times), her English shoes, like those of an adolescent or an ingénue dancer, low-heeled with a buckle and rounded toes, and her ankles made perfect by the penumbra. Then, when we boarded the delayed train and I could see her face clearly, I knew and know now that during the whole of my youth she was the woman who made the greatest and most immediate impact on me, although I also know that, traditionally, in both literature and real life, such a remark can only be made of women whom young men never actually meet. I had not yet met Luisa then, and my lover at the time was Clare Bayes; I didn't even know my own face and yet nevertheless there I was interpreting that young woman on the platform of Didcot station.

The train stopped at the usual places, Slough and Reading, as well as Maidenhead and Twyford and Tilehurst and Pangbourne, and after more than an hour, I got off there, in Didcot, where I had to wait several minutes-on that so-familiar platform-for another weary and reluctant train to appear. And it was there, while I was vaguely recalling that young nocturnal woman whose face I soon forgot but not her colors (yellow, blue, pink, white, red; and around her neck a pearl necklace), that I understood what had made me get up so early in order to catch a train and visit Wheeler in Oxford without delay; it wasn't simply a desire to see him again nor mere impatience to watch his eyes when they alighted with surprise on those 'careless talk' posters from Spain, it was, secondarily, a need to tell him what had happened and to demand an explanation. I don't mean tell him about what had happened to me in Madrid, for which he wasn't remotely to blame (to be accurate, nothing had happened to me, I had done something to someone else), but about what had occurred with Dearlove; after all, Peter was the person who had got me into that group to which he had once belonged, the person who had recommended me; he had made use of my encounter with Tupra and submitted me to a small test that now seemed to me innocent and idiotic-and which in no way prepared me for the possible risks of joining the group-and then reported to them on the result. Perhaps he himself had written the report on me in those old files: 'It's as if he didn't know himself very well. He doesn't think much about himself, although he believes that he does (albeit without great conviction)…' He it was, in any case, who had revealed to me my supposed abilities and who had, to use the classic term, enlisted me.