David Szalay - All That Man Is

Signs for Dover draw him deeper into the maze of south-east London. The maze marvellously unpeopled — the low high streets with their tattered shops. The sun shining on their grubby brick faces. Dirty windows hung with curtains. Only at the petrol stations are there signs of life. Someone filling up.

Someone walking away.

He has so much time, he thinks he might make the earlier ferry. His own ‘sails’, as they still say, just after eight. So yes, he may well make the previous one — it is not yet five thirty and already he is in the vicinity of Blackheath, already he is merging onto an empty motorway, its surface shining like water. Speed. There is a tangle of motorways here. He must keep an eye out for signs.

Yes, Macintyre has several kids. No wonder he seemed so threadbare and fed up. So tetchy. Some little house somewhere in outer London, full of stuff. Full of noise. He and his wife at each other’s throats. Too worn out to fuck. Who wants it?

Canterbury , says the sign.

And he thinks, with a little frisson of excitement, This is the way Chaucer’s pilgrims went. Trotting horses. Stories. Muddy lanes. And when it started to rain — a hood. Wet hands .

His dry hands hold the leather-trimmed wheel. Through sunglasses he eyes the wide oncoming lanes. He has the motorway to himself.

Wonderful to imagine it, though. The whole appeal of medieval studies — the languages, the literature, the history, the art and architecture — to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was here . Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here. They were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass. We don’t actually believe that, though, do we? We are unable to believe that our own world will pass. So it will go on for ever? No. It will turn into something else. Slowly — too slowly to be perceived by the people living in it. Which is already happening, is always happening. We just can’t see it. Like sound changes, spoken language.

‘Some Remarks on the Representation of Spoken Dialect in “The Reeve’s Tale” ’.

The kick-ass title of his first published work. Published in Medium Ævum LXXIV . Originally written for Hamer’s Festschrift — Hamer who had supervised his doctoral work when he first turned up at Oxford, that first year. A tall, bald man with spacious elegant rooms in Christ Church. Would literally offer you a sherry when you arrived — that old school, that English. The author of works such as Old English Sound Changes for Beginners (1967). Professor Hamer lived, it had seemed, in a fortress of abstrusity. Asleep at night, he must have dreamed, so his young foreign pupil had thought, sipping his sherry, of palatal diphthongisation, of loss of h and compensatory lengthening.

And he had envied him those harmless dreams. Something so profoundly peaceful about them.

Something so profoundly peaceful about them.

Everything so settled, you see. It all happened a thousand years ago. And the medievalist sits in his study, in a shaft of sunlight, lost in a reverie of life on the far side of that immense lapse of time. The whole exercise is, in its way, a memento mori. A meditation on the effacing nature of time.

He likes the little world of the university. Some people, he knows, hate it. They long for London.

He likes it. The fairy-tale topography of the town. A make-believe world of walled gardens. The quietness of summer. The stone-floored lodge, and the deferential porter. Yes, a make-believe world, like something imagined by a shy child.

Somewhere to hide.

Dreaming spires.

Sun sparkles on wide motorway.

It is just after six and he will be at Dover, he estimates, in an hour.

Yes, he likes the little world of the university. He likes its claustral narrowness. Sometimes he wishes it were narrower still. That the world of the present was even more absent. He would have quite enjoyed, he thinks, the way of life of a medieval monastery — as a scholarly brother, largely exempt from manual labour. He would have enjoyed that.

With, naturally, the one obvious proviso.

Without noticing, he has pushed the car well into the nineties. It manages the speed without effort. He eases off the accelerator and the needle immediately starts to sink and for the first time this morning he feels sleepy — a mesmeric sleepiness induced by the level hum of the engine and the monotonous, empty perspective in front of him. It seems, for long moments, like something on a screen, something spewing from a CPU. Just pictures. Without consequences. He shakes his head, moves his hands on the wheel.

Yes. The one obvious proviso.

Last year, during the Hilary term, he had done the thing he had long wanted to, and had an affair with an undergraduate. It had been something he had had in view since his arrival in Oxford to finish his doctorate. It had taken years to achieve — and the affair itself, when it finally happened, was in many ways unsatisfactory. Just two weeks it had lasted. And yet the memories of it, of her youth…

He was sad in an abstracted way, for a day or two, when she ended it with that letter in her schoolgirl’s handwriting, that letter which so pathetically overestimated his own emotional engagement in the situation. And he understood that he had also overestimated her emotional engagement in it. As he had been intent on enacting his own long-standing fantasy, so she had been enacting a fantasy of her own, in no way less selfish. Except that she was nineteen or twenty, and still entitled to selfishness — not having learned yet, perhaps, how easily and lastingly people are hurt — and he was more than ten years older and ought to have understood that by now.

Only when he saw her, soon after, in the arms of someone her own age — some kid — did he experience anything like a moment’s actual pain, something Nabokovian and poisonous, seeing them there in the spring sunlight of the quad.

And by then he was already mixed up with Erica, the medieval Latin scholar from Oriel. That didn’t last long either.

The days he has just spent in London have exhausted him. Not only the meeting with Macintyre. He also had a meeting with his publisher. And a symposium on Old English sound changes at UCL, for which he was one of the speakers. Various social things. He had seen Emmanuele, the short, snobbish, scholarly Italian who had finished his DPhil a few summers ago and was now a lawyer in London. Emmanuele had asked after Waleria, what was happening there? It was at a party of Mani’s, last September, that he had met her. ‘I don’t know,’ he had said. ‘Something. Maybe. We’re seeing each other. I don’t know.’

—

Solitude, freedom. There is that feeling, still, on the ferry. This in spite of the other people; they are transient strangers, they do not fix him in place. They know nothing about him. He has no obligations to them. Sea wind disperses summer’s heat on the open deck, hung with lifeboats. The floor see-saws. Is sucked down, then pushes at his feet. England dwindles. The wind booms, pulls his hair. Inside, in the sealed warmth, people eat and shop. He wanders among them, nameless and invisible. Sits at a table on his own. His solitude, for the hour it takes to travel to France, is inviolable. He stands at a window, golden with salt in the sunlight. He watches the playful waves. He feels as free as the gulls hanging on the wind. Solitude, freedom.

—

As soon as he has driven off the ship he puts on the A/C and Vivaldi’s Gloria — pours into the French motorway system with that ecstatic music filling his ears.

Dum-dee