Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘I knew it, I knew that would be the one, but don’t worry, we won’t stop there,’ he laughed, pouring himself a glass of the same and doing a scurrying jig as he came back across the room, pausing for a moment to glance out the window overlooking the Thames. ‘Oh, please, won’t you excuse me,’ he said, and abruptly left the room.

I took the opportunity to stand and examine his bookshelves. As I was doing so I happened to turn and also looked out the window, across the river, to the island and the tall yellow house upon it, where, on the middle floor, lights were on and the curtains open and a young man and a young woman were having sex on the floor, he on top of her, both of them athletic, almost certainly university students, undergraduates or graduates, perhaps postdoctoral Fellows, but it was clear that whatever their rank they felt no qualms about being watched, or perhaps were so lost in the moment of passion they had forgotten the curtains were open and the lights on and the hour was so late they might have imagined the rest of the city was asleep and assumed they were not being observed.

By instinct I turned away and tried once more to study the bookshelves, but found my head kept turning and the couple were still very much engaged every time I checked over my shoulder. Stephen remained absent, though I had no sense whether he was in one of the bedrooms or in the bathroom, on the side of the flat facing away from the river and the copulating young couple. Fifteen minutes passed, the couple finished, and I heard the flush of the toilet down the hall. Stephen returned, acting as if he had been absent only a moment. ‘How is your drink?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine, thank you, Stephen. I should be heading home. Do you have the number of a taxi?’

‘What’s the rush, my dear? We still have to move on to the thirty-year-old, which, I assure you, is quite unmissable. And in the meantime I think you should have another drop of the Poit Dhubh.’

‘I can’t, really, I’ll never get up in the morning if I do.’

‘But tomorrow is a Saturday, so no need. It would be an insult to refuse what I so generously offer.’

‘Just a drop, then.’

‘A wee dram,’ he smiled, speaking in a broad caricature of a Highland accent. His eyes disappeared into folds of lean skin as he smiled and I noticed he had rolled up his sleeves, exposing his forearms, which were hairless, muscular, and roped with thick blue veins, as if, in his absence from the living room, he had been doing vigorous pull-ups. ‘Are you still having a relationship with Bethan?’

I choked. ‘You’re being very indiscreet, Stephen.’

‘I shall take that as a yes .’

‘No! It’s none of your business, but no, I had a brief fling with her but it’s over. Entirely finished.’

‘And does that mean the two of you have a difficult working relationship?’

All of a sudden I could see Stephen Jahn was heading somewhere, with a specific destination in mind. What he wanted, though, I could never have predicted. Above all, you must understand that whatever has happened subsequently, I was, at least initially, Stephen Jahn’s dupe. ‘It’s a cordial relationship, but we don’t allow ourselves much opportunity to interact.’

‘You avoid each other?’

‘Not by any agreement. It just. . ended up that way.’

‘You were badly behaved?’

‘Listen, Stephen, I like you and respect you as a colleague, but this is none of your business.’

‘I ask as a friend.’

I was unsure whether Stephen Jahn was the kind of friend I wanted, but he smiled with such ingenuousness I found myself persuaded to speak, or perhaps it was merely the whisky. ‘I didn’t end it as elegantly as I should have.’

‘You left her for someone else? You dog ! I knew you were a dog!’

‘No, it’s not that. I just left. But I didn’t say I was going. I was visiting her parents and left without telling anyone.’

Stephen clicked his tongue and wagged a finger at me, but beneath the disdain there was a smile that said he had found the information he wanted.

‘I want you to do me a favor, Jeremy. Make it up with Bethan. Not romantically, don’t worry, just professionally. Go and apologize. Women appreciate a sincere apology even if they do not, initially, seem to accept it. And tell her you know you were badly behaved but frankly since the two of you have to work together for as long as she’s at the College, which will be until next summer, and undoubtedly she’s the kind of young woman who will find a permanent place here in the Faculty and in one of the other Colleges, it only makes sense that you should have a cordial working relationship. Get on your knees if you must, but make her see the apology is sincere.’

I was baffled by this request, since it demanded a kind of self-abnegation out of keeping with my character. Also, I did not see how a few glasses of expensive whisky put me so deeply in Stephen’s debt. ‘Why should I?’

‘Because, as I said, I need a favor.’

‘To do with Bethan?’

‘Bethan is merely a component force in the performance of the favor. You and she are interviewing candidates together in December.’

It was true, though I had allowed my mind to draw a veil over this small irritation in my academic life, for it meant a rather tedious two days spent interrogating bright and not so bright adolescents who wanted to study History in the College and by bad luck — or perhaps, I now think, by Stephen’s design — I had been paired with Bethan for the interviews. In practical terms, it only made sense that I should try to patch things up with her in advance. I nodded and held out my glass, which was empty.

‘Time for the thirty-year-old. This is a very special whisky. I’m not going to tell you where it comes from or what it is, because it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway, but I have never quite had its equal myself, and I pour you this drop,’ he said, filling the bottom of yet another new glass, ‘with liquid of great rarity and expense. It is, quite literally, worth its weight in gold.’

I took the glass and raised it to my nostrils and was instantly overcome with an almost hallucinogenic vision of a great library, such as Duke Humphrey’s in the Old Bodleian, full of exquisite leather bindings, but a library that is also a gentlemen’s club, with a whiff of fine cigars, excellent tobacco, and perhaps, wafting round the edges of the room, a sublime and subtle perfume, like those made by Santa Maria Novella in Florence, such as the scent of ambergris and pomegranate blossom, and then, as I tilted the edge of the glass between my lips, those scents merged together and were transformed into an astonishing and dizzying rhapsody of taste that coated my tongue and filled my mouth and floated again into my nostrils, going down my throat with an absolute smoothness and clarity unlike any alcohol I had tasted in the past.

‘My friend in Egypt, Saif, he has a younger sister, whose name is Fadia. She will be coming to the College to interview for a place. Her marks are unspectacular, but she is bright. She will be impressive in interview but perhaps not as impressive as some and not quite as impressive as she ought to be to make up for the marks. Nonetheless, I want to be certain she does not leave this College without an assurance that she will be able to come here to study. You and I will head up the two interview teams and it is, therefore, as much in your hands as in my own that we end up with the proper result.’

I inhaled the aromas of that extraordinary whisky and let Stephen’s request settle, though as I did so I was conscious that what he had just done was to give me a gift (fine drink) in expectation of me doing something to merit his generosity, and that this act of meritorious behavior prospectively rewarded would, quite likely, compromise my own position in the College and the Faculty if this Fadia proved to be embarrassingly ill-equipped to study at Oxford.