Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 2 - Dance and Dream

Yes, perhaps Wheeler would have declined to speak on that famous last day: he would have scorned setting out his case and overwhelming the weary Judge with his carefully honed arguments and a list of his most notable deeds or with his entire history since birth, he would have scorned asking for or expecting justice or a mercy that he would doubtless find offensive, had he lived and died in a time when the majority of people still believed in such a day. Perhaps he would have preferred to avail himself of the Miranda law applied to anyone arrested in America (it was once recited to me, albeit imperfectly), I mean to create it avant la lettre and, of course, give it a different name in the midst of that great dance, so that its benefits or disadvantages would not, in any case, have spread beyond the living (although, on that day, I realised, there would be no one living, and everything would be apres la lettre). Wheeler might have kept silent and thus saved the Judge a drink or two, or half a pipe of opium, leaving him, instead, the task of ordering and recounting, after all, he had seen everything and heard everything, why bother telling him your story and enduring the inevitable shame and effort, it would be a waste of time even though there would be no time or only a kind of absurd time that would have a beginning but no end. And had he been questioned, or if the Judge had urged him to defend himself or make some kind of allegation – 'What have you got to say to that, Peter Rylands and Peter Wheeler of Christchurch in New Zealand?' – he would not even have answered 'Nothing', but would have remained silent, avoiding until the very end any careless talk, even his own and even when surrounded by it, because that would be the supreme day of careless talk and imprudent conversation, of loquacity and verbiage and full-scale confessions, a day made for reproaches and total justifications, of accusations and defences, excuses, appeals, furious denials and biased testimonies, for the odd bit of naive perjury and much telling of tales ('I didn't want to, I had nothing to do with it', 'You can search me if you like', 'It wasn't me', 'I only did it under duress', 'They put a gun to my head, I had to do it', 'It was his fault, her fault, their fault, everybody's fault but mine'); the ideal day to offload all those infinite deaths and to blame them on someone else. Yes, perhaps Wheeler would have refused to participate in that worldwide wittering, and decided not to play any trump card in that unequal game: 'Keep quiet and don't say a word, not even to save yourself. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it chokes you, pretend the cat's got it. Keep quiet, and save yourself.’

That is what Sir Peter Wheeler had done, kept silent from the start, when I finally asked him and Mrs Berry, over Sunday lunch or, rather, afterwards, just before I got up from the table and left for the station to catch the train back to London, about the bloodstain at the top of his stairs.

'Before I forget,' I had said, taking advantage of a pause, the kind that heralds or brings about farewells, 'last night I cleaned up a bloodstain on the stairs, at the top of the first flight, when I went up to my room.' And I pointed backwards with my thumb at the first few stairs. In fact, it had happened when I was coming downstairs, carrying From Russia with Love as if it were a treasure, the copy dedicated to Wheeler by the former Commander Fleming of the Naval Intelligence Division ('… who may know better. Salud!"), but that didn't matter and I didn't want Peter to take me for a tattletale, or a chafardero, as they say in the Castilian spoken in Catalonia. 'I don't know where it came from, but it wasn't a small drop. Do either of you have any idea?' It was Mrs Berry who answered, the odder the question is, the more immediately a reply is required, although this one consisted only in repeating a word: 'A bloodstain?' she said, and her eyebrows arched of their own accord and not apparently in response to any previous command. And then she added, slightly annoyed: 'How could I possibly not have seen it on my way up to my room, especially if it was a large stain,' and thus she appeared to deflect the matter and turn it into a possible act of negligence on her part. 'At the top of the stairs, you say, Jack? How odd.' And she eyed with disgust the lower steps I had pointed to, as if the thing I had told her about were still visible – although I had also told her that I had cleaned it up – and in such an unfortunate place too. 'I'm so sorry to have put you to all that trouble, Jack.’

I glanced at Wheeler, who had opened his eyes very wide and his mouth just a little, a look of sufficient surprise to warrant the expression 'left speechless'. Or was it merely a look of partial incomprehension, as if the occasional slowness of his years were processing my question or news with bewilderment and even difficulty; as if he were thinking: 'Did I hear correctly, did he say blood? Did he mispronounce it, or did he actually say bloodstain? He may be foreign, but his pronunciation rarely lets him down, except in the case of strange or unusual words that he has perhaps never heard and only seen written down, but then he is conscious of his own uncertainty, and he hesitates and asks before saying them. Or was it me, perhaps I wasn't concentrating and didn't understand.' Those, at least, seemed to be his thoughts, but they couldn't have been because Mrs Berry had immediately repeated 'A bloodstain?' and there could be no doubts about her pronunciation.

'Don't worry, Mrs Berry, it was no trouble at all, besides, I wasn't tired,' I replied. 'It's just that I can't understand where it could have come from. I thought it must have come from me, that I had inadvertently cut myself, but I felt myself all over and I hadn't. So you've no idea either?' I insisted somewhat hesitantly.

Mrs Berry looked at Wheeler in perplexity, as if asking him a question with her eyes, or, it occurred to me, that glance might merely have been one of consultation or even of concern for me, because there I was claiming to have cleaned up some peculiar and highly improbable stain in the middle of the night. Peter, however, remained silent, with his metallic or mineral eyes very wide (in the daylight, they were like chalcedony) and his lips still parted (but not so much as to merit the description 'open-mouthed').

'Not really,' she replied. 'Perhaps a guest cut himself when he went up to the bathroom on the first floor, I saw several people go up there during the evening… Where was it exactly?' I stood up and so did she (‘I’ll show you'), I led her to the stairs, went up the first flight two steps at a time, and she followed more sedately behind.

'Here,' I said, and pointed to the approximate place. I couldn't be more exact because spatial memory is imprecise unless there is some established, unchanging reference point, and not a trace was left, you couldn't even see where I had rubbed, everything was smooth and immaculate, I had done a good, thorough job, I would have made an excellent servant in another life, or a conscientious, although probably not very illustrious, cleaner. 'It was more or less here,' I added, 'about an inch and a half in diameter, perhaps two. And what's so odd is that there was no trail, just that one drop. Like a single footstep.' Mrs Berry bent over to study the floor more closely. I had crouched down and was tapping on the wooden boards with my five fingers, my hand in the shape of a claw, as if trying to summon up something from the wood, only there was nothing to invoke and nothing that could burst forth from it. 'I knew it,' I thought fleetingly, 'I should have left a bit of the rim, there was a reason why it resisted being erased.' Peter had also got up from the table now, rather more calmly, and had followed us to the foot of the stairs, but he did not come up. He stood there with his hands resting on his walking stick as if it were a sword stuck in the earth in a moment of temporary rest, looking up, looking at us with that gaze one often sees in the old even when they are in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far off back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean, sometimes even the old and blind have this gaze, like the poet Milton in his dream, and it is not an absent look, but a very focused one, focused on something a very long way off. And Wheeler was still saying nothing.