“Oh — I see. I think the 1850.”
“And are we talking about the Principles or the Elements? You know the difference?”
(Matthew had both. Companion volumes. He lent the Rector both. Over a thousand pages.)
“Ah—”
The lights changed. We drove off.
“It’s my subject, Bill.” The voice took on a more frenzied note. “The spiritual crisis of the mid-nineteenth century is my subject!”
Uttered in the late twentieth century and emanating from that dark-vizored, cigarette-clenching face, these words, if they had not carried such urgency, would have had a comic splendour. Perhaps he realised their preposterousness. We careered round a roundabout. Why should a man whose principal interests seemed to be a dubious bid to become a TV personality, and the exploration of ever-varying female flesh, care at all about scholarship, let alone the spiritual crisis of the mid-nineteenth century? But then why should I—?
“You have a monopoly?”
“You have credentials?!”
If he hadn’t suddenly started to drive like a madman, I might even have begun to feel sorry for him. I had encountered him at a bad moment. He had had a lovers’ tiff, poor man, and been witnessed in the process. Now, with me as a hostage to his spleen, out was coming all his deeper discontent.
And why was I so immovable? If I owned the Notebooks, did I own Matthew? I might have said, “All right, stop the car,” and handed over the briefcase. I admit that on this bright morning, three days after my interview with Sam, I came close to doing just that. “Here you are”—with a sweet and compassionate smile—“What does it matter? If it means so much to you.”
And how does anyone find “their subject”?
We had driven out of town and turned on to a minor road that led across flat, glistening farmland, threaded by willow-fringed ditches. It was then that he began to behave like a frustrated rally-driver. Admittedly, there was a virtual absence of traffic, and visibility was perfect, but there was the problem of the sharp bends the road took, after long straights, round the corners of ancient, inviolable fields. Also the problem, on occasion, of an oncoming car. I clung, reflexively, to my briefcase. I thought: he means to scare me into surrender. I fleetingly but seriously indulged the fantasy that all this was a deliberate exercise: Plan B, or Abduction. I was being whisked away to some secret hide-out, where the price of my release would be the contents of my briefcase. I would be found, a day or so hence, wandering dazed and dishevelled by the roadside.
But there was a moment — I swear it — when all speculation seemed beside the point. As we headed towards a right-hand bend which the expression on Potter’s face seemed grimly to disregard, I thought: he means to kill us both, him and me, on this spring morning. He could really do it. And as we hurtled towards this possible outcome, I was conscious of the vibrant green of the fields, of little, individual larks trilling somewhere, unseen, above us, and I had a distinct vision of the ghost of Matthew Pearce (he wore a black frock-coat and was wondering just what it was he had started) coming to visit the scene of the crash, coming to ponder these two dead men who had died locked in mortal argument over his own lifeless remains.
“Why don’t you stick to poetry, Bill?”
“The terms of the Ellison Fellowship,” I jabbered, “clearly allow me—”
“Fuck the Ellison Fellowship. The Ellison Fellowship’s a fucking joke. You know that.”
“Michael, I think you should slow down.”
“What do you want, money or something?”
“I think you should slow down.”
“You want to sell the Notebooks, is that it?”
“I think you—”
“Okay, okay—”
He slowed down, braking hard and just in time for the bend. A cold smile squeezed his lips. He drove with exaggerated caution and gentleness.
“There’s no need to hang on to that briefcase like that — I need my hands for the wheel, you know.”
I had to admit this was so.
We took a turn back towards town. I felt the blood in my veins, the air in my lungs. He could have done it. He lit another cigarette. I refused. We reached the centre in stiff silence. How strange, how incongruous is an ancient university city. These age-grimed walls, these modern people; this hoarded learning, this mindless sunshine.
The traffic thickened. Posses of cyclists weaved around us.
“So — the Library, then,” he said, with sudden, bizarre amiability. “Let’s take you to the Library. It won’t have gone away.” Then he added, as if we were back at our point of departure, as if the last twenty minutes simply hadn’t occurred: “Yes — a sweet girl, Gabriella. Does this and that for me. Very bright. Very — hard-working. You know—” he turned and glanced at me “—if ever you need a research assistant.”
He watched the denimed rump of one of the passing cyclists.
I thought: Plan C, Seduction by a Female Agent.
Then, as we came to a halt in the line of cars, he said, “Christ!”
I had seen her too, at almost precisely the same moment — Katherine, walking towards us on the opposite pavement (carrying that straw bag), so far not having spotted us. He was plainly caught between the incriminating hope that she might not notice us at all and the difficulty of justifying to me why he should let his own wife walk right by without greeting her. We were at a standstill and — for a variety of reasons — I considered making a quick exit. Then Potter lowered his window and called out, with a sort of clotted brightness: “Katherine!”
She stopped, gave a perplexed smile, then, since her side of the road was clear and we remained stationary, walked over towards us. At some point she took in the fact that I was sitting beside Potter, and her smile became more perplexed. She stooped by Potter’s door.
“Hello,” she said. “How was London? Hello Bill.”
“Fine,” Potter said. “London was fine.” The repetition seemed to come sideways out of his mouth, expressly for my benefit. “Thought I’d drive back early. Beat the traffic. I bumped into Bill here on the way in. Just giving him a lift to the Library.”
Katherine looked at me. Her puzzled smile turned into one of undisguised intrigue. “But you’re a long way from the College, Bill.”
“Exactly,” Potter said, quick off the mark and seeing his escape route. “What is our Bill doing on the other side of town so early in the day, yet supposedly on his way to the Library? A question he hasn’t answered.” He darted me a look. Then he said to Katherine as the traffic began to move, “Why don’t you hop in? You’re on your way home? I’ll take you there, after we’ve dumped this reprobate here.”
Katherine got in, scrambling across the back seat. Then she leant forward, a hand on each of the front seats, so that her face was almost between us. She seemed suddenly all alertness and amusement, as if this chance encounter had brightened an unpromising day.
“Well, Bill,” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell us?”
Plainly, the joke was on me, and, plainly, Potter was relishing the twist in the situation. I might have been more discomforted if it hadn’t been for the little bottle of perfume still lying under the dashboard (and for a kind of dazed thankfulness for still being in one piece). I thought: it is quite simple. All I have to do is nothing. All I have to do is leave the bottle of perfume just where it is. But I couldn’t do it.
“You’d be surprised if you really knew,” I said. I gave a quick sideways glance at Potter.
“Ah — a man of mystery,” Katherine said.
I don’t think she had seen the bottle. She sat back. I shifted in my own seat in such a way as to make my briefcase slip, as if by accident, from my knees. Leaning forward to retrieve it, I contrived at the same time to scoop up the bottle, then transfer it, hidden in my hand, to my pocket. Potter glanced from the road ahead to me. Maybe he hadn’t seen it. I don’t think so. Maybe the moment of my secreting it was the moment of his realising it was there in the first place. I couldn’t tell, with his eyes hidden by those glasses.