‘You had an I.Q. of 135. I shouldn’t be telling you this but I saw it on your school records.’
‘I didn’t want to go to university. I didn’t want to do Science.’
‘I didn’t care. It didn’t need to be Science. It could have been any subject. You threw yourself away. You went to work in a wee office. And then you got pregnant. And now you say you are married. To a Catholic. And you’ll have to be a Catholic too. I know them. And your …’ He couldn’t bring himself to say that her child would be a Catholic.
She couldn’t stop herself. ‘I thought a scientist wouldn’t care for these things. I thought a scientist would be unprejudiced.’
He smiled grimly. ‘That’s the kind of remark I would have expected from you. It shows that you have a high I.Q. You should have used it. You threw it away. You ignored your responsibilities. You went off to London, to see the bright lights.’ She sensed envy in his voice.
After a while she said,
‘I couldn’t stand school. I don’t know how I can explain it to you. The books didn’t mean anything after a while. It was torture for me to read them. Can you understand that?’
‘No.’ His mouth shut like a rat-trap.
‘I tried,’ she continued. ‘I did try. But they didn’t mean anything. I would look at a French book and a Latin book and it didn’t connect with anything. Call it sickness if you like, but it’s true. It was as if I was always tired. I used to think it was only people in non-academic classes who felt like that. I was all right in the first three years. Everything seemed to be interesting. And then this sickness hit me. All the books I read ceased to be interesting. It was as if a haze came down, as if the words lost any meaning, any reality. I liked music but there was nothing for me in words. I’m trying to explain. It was a sickness. Don’t you understand?’
‘No, I don’t understand. When I was in the upper school I wasn’t like that. I read everything I could lay my hands on. Books were treasures. When I was in university it was the same. I read because I loved to read. I wanted to have as much knowledge as possible. Even now …’ He paused.
She probed: ‘Even now?’
But he had stopped speaking, like a watch run down. She continued,
‘Yes, I admired that in you, though you were narrow-minded. I admired your love of books and knowledge and experiments. I admired you for thinking out new ways of presenting your subject. I admired your enthusiasm, though you neglected your family. And then too you went to church. What did you find in church?’
‘In church? I found silence there.’
‘It was different with us,’ she continued. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t try. I did try. I would lock myself in my room and I would study my Virgil. I would stare at it. I would look up meanings. And then at the end of an hour I hadn’t moved from the one page. But I tried. It wasn’t my fault. Can’t you believe me?’
‘I don’t understand.’ Then he added mercilessly, ‘It was idleness.’
‘And there you would be in the other room, in your study, preparing your lesson for the following day, smoking your pipe, thinking up new ideas like the time you made soap. You were the mainstay of the school, they said. So much energy. Full of power, boyish, always moving, always thinking. Happy.’
A smile crossed his face as if he were looking into another world which he had once loved and in which he had meaning and purpose.
‘Yes, I gave them a lot,’ he said. ‘A lot. I tried my best with you as well. I spent time on you. I wanted you to do well. But I couldn’t make a favourite of you. And then you said you were leaving.’
‘It happened one night. I had been doing some exercises in English. I think it was an interpretation passage. I was sitting at the table. There was a vase with flowers in front of me. The electric light was on, and then I switched on the radio and I heard this voice singing “Frankie and Johnny”. It was Lena Horne. I listened to it. At first I wasn’t listening to it at all. I was trying to do my exercise. Then, after a while, the music seemed to become more important than what I was doing. It defeated what I was doing. It was about real things and the interpretation wasn’t about anything. Or rather, it was about the lack of trade unionism in Japan. I’m not joking: that’s what it was. How the bosses wouldn’t allow the workers any unions and how they kept their money for them. It had no meaning at all. It was like…It was like some obstacle that you pushed against. Like a ghost in a room. And I laid down my pen and I said to myself, What will happen if I stop doing this? And then I did stop. And suddenly I felt so free. It was as if I had lightened myself of some load. I felt free. I listened to the song and I didn’t feel any guilt at all.’
He looked at her almost with hatred.
‘If you didn’t feel any guilt why are you here then? Why didn’t you stay with your Catholic? By the way, what does he do?’
‘He has an antique shop. Actually, he’s quite scholarly. He’s more scholarly than you. He knows a lot about the Etruscans. He’s very enthusiastic. Just like you. He’s got a degree.’ She laughed, bubbling.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘why didn’t you stay with him?’
‘I came to ask you,’ she said ‘what it all means.’
He said, ‘I remember one morning at a lecture we were told about Newton. It was a long time ago and it was a large lecture room, row upon row of pupils, students stretching to the very back and rising in tiers. There was sunlight and the smell of varnish. And this bald man told us about Newton. About the stars and how everything was fixed and unalterable and the apple falling to the ground in a garden during the Plague. Harmony. He talked about harmony. I thought the sky was full of apples. And that the whole world was a tree.’
There was a long silence. In it she felt the child turning in its own orbit.
‘What use are the books to you now?’ she said. The words sounded incredibly naive almost impudent and inhuman but she didn’t mean them like that. And yet…
‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that my life was useless. That I spent my days and nights on phantoms. Is that what you want? Did you come to gloat?’
‘No, I want to know, that’s all. I want to know if it was something wrong with me. Perhaps it was something wrong with me all the time.’
She imagined him walking in the middle of the night, listening to the silence of the wards, watching the moonlight on the floor. She imagined him looking into the eyes of nurses for reassurance, without speech. She imagined him imagining things, the whispers, the rumours, the laughter. Sometimes a man would die and his bed would be empty. But there would always be another patient. She imagined him thinking: At what hour or minute will I die? Will I die in pain? Will I choke to death?
She thought of London and of this small place. She thought of the anonymity of London, the death of the rainy days. The lostness. The strangeness. Had she chosen well? She thought of Sean, with his small tufted beard, vain, weak, lecherous. He was her only link with that brutal city. All else flowed, she could only follow him, the indeterminate atom.
‘You don’t know what duty is,’ he said at last. ‘You live on romance and pap. I’ve seen you reading Woman’s Own. You think that the world is romantic and beautiful.’ (Did she think that? Was that why she had run away? Did she think that now? What had she not seen? Into the heart of the uttermost darkness in that room where at night the lights circled the ceiling, and nothing belonged to her, not even the flat, not the Etruscan soldiers with their flat, hollow sockets.)
‘You don’t know about trust and loyalty. You knuckle under whenever any difficulty crops up. Your generation is pap and wind. You owe allegiance to nothing. I have owed allegiance to this place. They may forget me, but I served. What else is there to do?’
She said in a low voice,