Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

And yet he was not a man who asked direct questions, or did so only rarely, offering instead statements to which one was expected and on many occasions compelled to respond.

‘Now, this one,’ he said, swirling his glass, ‘you probably won’t have heard of. It’s from the Isle of Mull’s Tobermory distillery, called Ledaig, made with burning peat. Distinctive, I think you’ll agree.’ His eyes popped a little as he nodded, taking a sip. ‘Saline, gracefully peaty, almost dainty, like a bright little dancer, almost a very fine sherry, walnuts and the scent of pine forests, charred at the edges and regrown. Call me perverse but when I sip this whisky I think of that young colleague of ours, Bethan. A fine young scholar, very bright, quite intelligent, a little burned at the edges. Attractive, I should suppose, to those attracted by such types.’

I wondered if he already knew of my brief relationship with Bethan or if he merely suspected, or was entirely innocent, although Stephen Jahn gave no impression of being innocent of anything, no matter how little known or unexpected. Worldliness was his abiding character. I knew his area of expertise was the Middle East, particularly Arab-Israeli history and relations, and he was, by reputation, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic as well as Persian, French, German, Yiddish, Turkish, and Kurdish, and claimed to be conversant in Italian and Spanish as well. Such people are less uncommon in Oxford than elsewhere, and no doubt he had groundings in Latin and Ancient Greek, perhaps also — one never knows where the limits of such a person’s mastery may end — even more arcane languages like Balochi and Azerbaijani.

‘Yes, she is attractive, in her way.’ Though I was conscious of not wanting to be drawn into deriding her, my relationship with Bethan had been professional if chilly since I fled her family’s home that New Year’s morning a few years earlier. We had devised an elaborate dance that meant, in the intervening months, we managed never to sit next to each other at a College meal, and if one of us entered the Senior Common Room to find the other the only person there, we would both pretend as if no one at all had appeared or been present. In America this would have been extremely strange, but in Oxford, in Britain more generally, it is possible, even common, to ‘blank’ people one knows, either out of an avoidance which is predicated on a fiction of not having noticed the presence of the other person and is therefore regarded as being polite, or out of a studied and unveiled desire to let the other person know that she or he simply does not signify, is not worth noticing, must be reminded of her or his subordinate place. It was a custom to which I could never wholly adjust, even in moments of falling back on the behavior myself, but in Oxford I had to learn — at least in the realm of the College — to raise my eyes discreetly, and if it was Bethan or someone else I wished to avoid, lower them again into whatever book, newspaper, or journal I was taking a few moments to read in those semi-public spaces and wait until the person had departed.

Stephen continued to swirl his glass, inhaling and sipping. ‘Leather and cigars,’ he said, as if I had not spoken, and then, once he had swallowed, ‘I left this open for a week after acquiring it. You would not imagine the difference it makes. I believe some women are like that, Bethan for instance. If allowed to breathe, in the right company, with the right degree of. . openness. . she too might become sublime.’

‘I don’t think I would put it like that, Stephen.’

‘No? You’re so politically correct, Jeremy. I can see how unwilling you are to talk about your women as if they’re anything less than equals.’ So he did know, I thought, he knew exactly what had happened between us, perhaps from Bethan herself. ‘It’s admirable but rather exhausting, don’t you find? Not every person one has sex with need necessarily be one’s equal. It is fine, I would suggest, to seduce one’s social and intellectual inferiors, knowing the act of seduction and resulting congress gives them just as much pleasure as it gives you. Your very superiority is what makes you alluring.’

‘That’s an unpleasant way of seeing it. I don’t remember ever going to bed with a woman I didn’t regard as my equal or better.’

Stephen clicked his tongue. ‘Politically correct and modest. We’ll have to do something about that. I have a young Egyptian friend, Saif, you don’t need to know his surname, who works for the government there, you don’t need to know in what capacity, but he was assigned to me as a minder on a visit I made a couple of years ago and during the course of last year we spent a considerable amount of time together, though you understand that in such societies, and given my own position as well as Saif’s, one has to be very careful.’

I was unsure whether Stephen meant for me to understand that Saif was a lover. It seemed somehow unlikely while also being the only possible conclusion I could reach.

‘We’ve become very close friends. He’s even taken me to meet his mother, French, a lovely woman, very elegant, an excellent family, quite wealthy, to whom I must have appeared something like a doting uncle. The father is impossible, but that is no surprise.’

I must have nodded, or perhaps just took another sip of the whisky, which despite Stephen’s description and grandiloquent claims I found rather acrid, taste so often being subjective, and yet I forced myself to finish the glass he had poured and perhaps because of this I drank it too quickly and then tried to conceal the empty glass in my hand, thinking it was time to go home, back to Divinity Road and the house I had recently bought, which I was still in the process of redecorating and remodeling, turning the dingy old kitchen into a bright airy space with a dining room at the end and doors opening onto the long narrow garden.

‘Of course, Saif works for the Egyptian government and while Egypt is a friend of the West there are, necessarily, some problems we would wish them to improve, in respect of democracy and human rights, although really these are quite minor concerns when measured against the value of a stable and cooperative Egypt, if you see. But of course you see. Anyway, how did I get on to Saif?’ He paused, glanced up to the ceiling, and then fixed me with his odd little smile. ‘I see your glass is empty. Let us move on to something rather more interesting. Poit Dhubh, from the Isle of Skye, twenty-one years old, and thus fully legal,’ he smirked, taking a tall bottle with a black label from his sideboard and pouring a large measure into a new glass. ‘Sweet and soft, only slightly peaty, I saw you grimace at the first one, peat is too strong for some less seasoned palates, I made a mistake with the Ledaig but this you will find sublime, and very drinkable. In fact it’s a vatted malt, various ones mixed together. Aged in sherry casks, which helps neutralize some of the sharper peatiness. This is a little candy bar of a whisky you can chew and suck, nutty and fruity with a tender note of vanilla. Sixty pounds a bottle, so still very, very respectable. Inhale.’

I raised the new glass to my nose but by this time I was beginning to feel quite seriously drunk and impressionable so that the aromas wafting up to my brain suggested some strange combination of fruit and caramel and roasting nuts and wood fires in old houses with stone floors and vanilla puddings cooking in the tops of double boilers. I sipped and although it was not a true single malt Stephen was right, it was sublime and comforting and almost as substantial and pleasing as an entire meal, a whisky as if invented by Willy Wonka for connoisseurs with only enough for a single good bottle that might satisfy them for many a night without ever having to go in search of anything more refined.