“Hang on to the goods,” he said, with a slight touch of gall.
Katherine leant forward again, grasping the back of my seat. “How’s it going?” she said, looking over my shoulder.
“Oh — fine.” I gave the briefcase a meaningless caress.
“No,” she said, in a softer, more solicitous, more all-embracing tone. “I mean — how’s it going?”
It was strange. It was like a question spoken out of her husband’s presence. Her lips were almost in my ear. It was as though at any moment she might have ruffled my hair or put her arms round my neck. Potter looked at us both, like some foxy chauffeur. To my surprise, I found myself suddenly glad of the briefcase lying across my lap, screening the state of things between my legs. Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if she had seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe she had seen the bottle of perfume. Maybe that’s how things were.
“Oh — okay,” I said.
We headed back towards the Meadows of Dalliance and the True Path of Knowledge. Potter slowed down near the spot where he had hijacked me earlier. The day had warmed. The wet road was now a dapple of damp and dry patches. It would not have surprised me if, as I made to get out, Katherine had suddenly kissed me or pinched my cheek — like a mother saying goodbye to a son departing for school. Instead, she sat back — not bothering to move into my place beside Potter, giving me a sort of bold-but-beleaguered look.
“Bye, Bill.”
“Happy hunting,” Potter said.
Whoever designed our University Library must have known what they were about. It is variously likened to a fortress, a prison, a power-station. Alcatraz. Fort Knox. It stands in geographical and architectural scorn of the cosy huddle of colleges some half a mile distant across the lawn-fringed river. And the inference, I suppose, is that it will continue to stand so — with all those books, all that compacted civilization, still safe inside — when the fragile colleges and tranquil lawns are no more. Even inside, it is not exactly inviting. You have the impression that books are stored here as ammunition is stored in readiness for some awesome, cataclysmic conflict. All day long, along mysterious passage-ways and up and down secret lift-shafts, they are shifted and trundled like shells in the bowels of a vast dreadnought.
I sat, belatedly, at my desk, Lyell’s 1853 edition in front of me. Also before me, the 1855 (enlarged) edition of the Elements of Geology. Yes, I knew, all right, which were the proper editions. But I couldn’t concentrate (any more than the Rector). I couldn’t feel whatever it was Matthew had felt. What was I doing, a hapless civilian in this arsenal of learning? I fingered the phial of perfume in my pocket. Yes, I admit it, I took it out, unscrewed the gold cap and sniffed. It is as well that library-goers are generally used to each other’s eccentricities.
She would be here, somewhere in this building. The girl in black. Gabriella. I should find her, return the bottle. This, after all, was the classic way in which Romance began: the misplaced article, the trinket retrieved. This, after all, was the way life worked, the way it took its chances and began again, especially on a May morning when sunlight penetrated even the thick bulwarks of the University Library and fondled the dusty racks of books. What was I doing in this necropolis? What was I doing, bent over a book about the antiquity of rocks?
We are prepared, therefore, to find that in time also the confines of the Universe lie beyond mortal ken.…
A simple matter. All I had to do was wander the premises. The History section was a good bet. I would happen upon her, as if by chance. We were, after all, half introduced. I would whisper, in this place meant for whispering, that perhaps, if she could spare a moment from her studies, a cup of coffee … Better still, a bite of lunch … Over coffee, or lunch, I would venture a disclosure or two (why not?) about the Pearce manuscripts. She would say (let it go, let it pass) how much she had admired Ruth. Then, at a certain point, with the deft timing of a practised intriguer and wooer of women, I would produce the bottle of perfume: “I think this is yours.…”
It didn’t happen, of course. That is, I didn’t find her. So how do I know, if I didn’t find her, that—?
(But how could it have happened?)
A library is equipped so that any book within it may be located precisely; but people — that is a random matter. And, of course, in so vast a complex as our University Library, it would be perfectly possible for two people, wandering independently along different routes, to elude each other for ever. I toured the building. I patrolled the corridors. I peeped along shelves and at the hunched forms at rows of desks.
A mad aberration induced by my having survived my ride with Potter? (He could really have done it.) A portent of things to come? This other life; these leases of life.
January and May.
I loitered on stairs and by the populous Main Catalogue. At the exodus for lunch I lingered by the main entrance, sun streaming through the tall doors. Gabriella. A name like a flower. And from Verona. Balconied city of love. The name was inseparable in my mind from something dark-haired, dark-eyed and slender. I couldn’t imagine a blonde called Gabriella. I couldn’t imagine Katherine being called Gabriella.
When I returned to my college room I still possessed the little bottle. I put it on one of the glass shelves in my bathroom. It is still there now, a source of perpetual speculation, I imagine, to Mrs Docherty, who cleans for me. But then its curiosity value has been far surpassed by other, recent events. It was Mrs Docherty, after all, accompanied by a porter, who “found” me. In the “old days,” she has since comfortingly told me, college cleaners were regularly stumbling upon suicidal inmates. There is something about this contemplative life. But she herself had never had the misfortune …
I could have thrown it away. But then it was not my property to dispose of, and in theory the opportunity might still have arisen to return it to its rightful owner. Though, had I done so, it’s true, the little bottle might by then have lost its strategic charge, the aura of cunning gallantry that it had possessed for a few, fond hours on a bright spring morning. So it stayed on the shelf.
It was on that May afternoon — only two months ago — as I put the perfume on the shelf — a gathering rain-cloud was squeezing the last rays of the sun over the college rooftops and onto the tiles of my bathroom — that I realised with sudden acuteness how little trace there was of anything feminine, let alone of Ruth, in these new rooms I inhabit. I had brought my two favourite photographs, one or two other things, that’s all. Besides John Pearce’s clock. A sort of self-denying instinct had made me not wish to embarrass others, or myself in front of others, with too many icons of remembrance.
And perhaps I clung to the illusion that I would go back. These rooms were only a temporary expedient, therefore deserving a sort of Spartan, bachelorly restraint (how many Fellows before me? How many muttering old fools?) When the lawyers and accountants had sorted things out, when this short-term shelter, courtesy of Ellison Plastics, had served its turn, then I would go back — to my former life. Like some soldier completing a tour of duty, I would return home. It would all be as it was.
I would never go back. This is what I realised, standing in front of the mirror. I was in my place now. A place which wasn’t my place. I was institutionalised. I had been in it for nearly a year. This was where I was.