He sat in his usual place – on the floor with his back against the wall, facing Archie. Archie looked at his watch and said, ‘Why bother, Mr Scobie?’ and Shug raised an eyebrow and said gruffly, ‘You tell me, Archie.’ An enigmatic sort of an encounter but nonetheless containing the emotional charge of two rutting stags clacking antlers.
‘You never know, you might learn something,’ Professor Cousins said, smiling encouragingly at Shug and then, to no-one in particular, ‘Dr McCue knows all kinds of things that no-one else does.’
Shug was older than everyone else in the tutorial group. He had already been thrown out of Duncan of Jordanstone Art College (something that was previously thought to be impossible) and had worked on several real jobs in between times – as a road mender, a bus conductor, even in a chicken factory (‘Where the chickens are made,’ Terri told Bob who believed her for all of a minute). Shug had also ‘taken off’ to India and all points east to ‘find himself’, not that I could imagine Shug being particularly lost to begin with. If only Bob would go away and find himself. What would he find? Essence of Bob, perhaps.
Andrea came over all moon and whimsy at the sight of Shug. (A girl in love is a frightening sight.) Since leaving behind the decorous ways of the Church of Scotland, Andrea had, like many before her, developed a crush on Shug and seemed to be under the delusion that she was the woman for whom he would change his ways. If she was hoping to tidy him up and settle him down she was going to be sorely disappointed.
I myself had once had an unexpected, but not unwelcome, burst of sexual activity with Shug, down in the carrels in the basement of the library, next to the periodicals section. We had got as far as some enthusiastic kissing when I was shaken out of my Shug-induced reverie by his voice saying ruefully, ‘You know I cannae shag you, hen, Bob’s ma pal.’ Still, it was an experience I remembered fondly every time I went in search of the
Shakespeare Quarterly
or
Atlantic Monthly
.
‘
With reference to Proust,
’ Archie said, pressing on heroically, ‘
Walter Benjamin reminds us that the Latin word
textum
means web; he further suggests . . .
’
The room sank into a state of settled ennui. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, I felt as if I was suffocating in a warm fug of words. I tried to stay awake because it was important to keep in Archie’s good books as I was several weeks late handing in my dissertation to him. My dissertation (
Henry James – Man or Maze?
) was a degree paper and was supposed to be twenty thousand words long. So far I had fifty-one of them –
A great part of the struggle for James is caused by his desire both to master his subject matter through a rigorous process of fictionalization, and at the same time offer the appearance of reality. The author must never be apparent because his intrusion into the text destroys the carefully wrought—
The hum of Archie’s words carried on in the background of my brain but it could no longer make any sense of them ‘. . .
by enregistering speech, blah, inscription has its essential object, blah, and indeed, takes this fatal risk, blah, blah, the emancipation of meaning . . . as concerns any actual field of perception, blah, from the natural disposition of a contingent situation, blah, blah, blah . . .
’
I tried to keep myself awake by thinking about Bob. More specifically, by thinking about leaving Bob. It was more than three years now since I had woken up that first morning in a tangle of his toast-filled sheets. I had been puzzled as to how to proceed. Bob’s general passivity and iguana-like demeanour didn’t give me any clues, or even encouragement. He grunted when I asked him if he wanted me to stay and grunted when I asked him if he wanted me to go. In the end, I decided to compromise and go, but come back later. I slipped out from beneath his sheets, dyed a streaky purple, wincing quietly at the ache in my plaster-of-Paris wrist, and went breakfastless back to women-only Chalmers Hall and fell asleep in my cell-like single bed.
When I returned at six o’clock, Bob was exactly where I had left him – the bicycling Bob had given me a misleading impression of activity, Bob was merely borrowing the bike from someone else so he could stuff the saddlebags with home-grown grass and transport them across town.
I shrugged my clothes off and got back between the sheets. Bob rolled over, opened his eyes and said, ‘Wow – who are you?’
For reasons which I didn’t quite understand, my first night with Bob had been enough to leave me strangely attached to him. Later, I wondered if I had lost free will, as if in some strange way I’d merged with Bob’s own (limited) persona. (‘Like a mind-meld?’ Bob mused, quite animated for once by this idea.)
After the bicycle incident, I had moved in stealthily, book by book, shoe by shoe, so that by the time he noticed that I didn’t go home any more, he had got used to the idea of me and I was no longer a surprise when he woke up. I wondered if I could move out the same way. Remove myself bit by bit until there was nothing left to dismember and only the more intangible and enigmatic components remained (the smile, for example, and even that would fade eventually). Finally, nothing would be left but a space where I used to be. How much kinder that would be than walking out the door suddenly and all in one piece. Or dying abruptly.
‘
. . . the autonomous work of art brings into question—
’
‘But don’t you think, Archie,’ Professor Cousins said mildly, ‘that really all literature is about the search for
identity
?’ He made an expansive gesture, ‘From
Oedipus Rex
onwards it’s about the search of man –’ he reached out and patted my hand ‘– and the fairer sex, of course, for the true understanding of himself – or herself – and his – or her – place in the universe, in the whole scheme of things. The
meaning
of life. And God,’ he added, ‘does He – or She – exist and if so why does He – or She – leave us bereft in a cold and lonely world, spinning endlessly through the black infinity of space, whipped by the icy interstellar winds? And what happens when we reach the end of infinity? And what colour is it? That’s the question. What do we see when we stand on the terrace of infinity?’
Everyone sat in silence, staring at Professor Cousins. He smiled and shrugged and said, ‘Just a thought, do carry on, dear boy.’
Archie ignored him. ‘
Not only the role of the creator of the fiction but also his relationship to the work itself—
’
‘Excuse me,’ Kevin said to Professor Cousins, ‘did you mean “What is the colour of infinity”? Or did you mean “What is the colour of the
end
of infinity”?’
‘Is there a difference, do you think?’ Professor Cousins said eagerly. ‘How intriguing.’
‘
End
of infinity?’ Andrea puzzled.
‘Oh, everything has an end,’ Professor Cousins said reassuringly, ‘even infinity.’
Infinity, I happen to know, is the colour of sludge and dead seals, of sunken battleships and their crews, the dregs of Monday mornings and the lees of Saturday nights and of small harbours on the north-east coast in January. But I kept that knowledge to myself.
‘
. . . represents the distance between the world and phenomena, not to mention the—
’
Archie was interrupted again, this time by a neat rapping at the door and Martha Sewell walked in without waiting for an answer. Martha was the recently appointed tutor in creative writing. After one year, Archie had declared the creative writing paper such a success that he had persuaded the department, for the sake of prestige, to appoint ‘a real writer’ to the post of tutor. Bostonian Martha, an Amherst type, was a poet in her forties whom no-one in the department had ever heard of. She wrote poetry with impenetrable syntax about a life where nothing ever happened. Her poems had titles like ‘Abstraction Or [#3]’ (and your hair, blurred with/rain makes me think/of the obliquity of existence) and had just published a new collection called
Cherry-Picking in Vermont
, which she carried around with her everywhere like a passport, as if she might be asked to prove who she was.
Martha was still in culture shock, having come to Dundee thinking that it was part of a Scotland that was built out of lochs and mountains and decorated with moorland and waterfalls, and every so often you could see a pained look cross her face when she had to negotiate a piece of shoddy modern architecture, a gas-lit close, or a hollow-eyed and abandoned jute mill. She was not convinced when Dundee’s many good points were pointed out to her – the glorious parks; the municipal observatory; the view from the Law; the beautiful bridges; the Tay; a radical and seditious history; the almost unnatural friendliness of Dundonians, their concomitant violence; the curiously Dundeecentric press; the inhabitants’ benign indifference to idiosyncratic behaviour (the way, for example, that you could walk down the street in nothing but a pair of baffies with a budgerigar on your head and no-one would think twice of it).
Tall and thin and as sensual as a cod, Martha had large beloafered feet that were designed for pounding the paths and trails of New England. She gave the impression of being extraordinarily clean and groomed, as though she curried herself thoroughly every morning. Her smooth hair, somewhere between blond and grey, a colourless colour, was worn in a tidy bob, kept in order by a black velvet Alice band.
Martha had been accompanied to Scotland by her husband, Jay – a professor at Ann Arbor and a Whitman specialist – who had taken a sabbatical to accompany his wife. The Sewells spent a lot of time – certainly more than the average Dundonian – visiting Edinburgh, where they purchased cashmere tartan travel rugs, Caithness crystal, and rare malt whiskies and daydreamed about renting a house in Ramsey Gardens.
Martha and Jay belonged to the class of people who run economies and design legislation, who arrive alive in the polar regions and survive in the equatorial, who invent chronometers and barometers, and mend clothes and darn stockings and never run out of milk or clean underwear. They led the kind of life I could never hope to, especially if I stayed with Bob.
Today Martha was wearing black courts, a grey flannel skirt and a rat-coloured woollen wrap that came down almost to her feet and was carrying a heavy, serious-minded, leather briefcase. Although not directly involved in the war of the departmental succession, Martha seemed to have become a trophy figure and the various candidates vied to have her on their side.
‘You’re busy,’ she said to Archie. Archie denied this self-evident fact, waving his hand dismissively at his students as if we were a figment of Martha’s imagination. Andrea made a gagging gesture as if she was about to throw up.
‘Are you looking for the toilet?’ I asked Martha kindly, but she had caught sight of Professor Cousins in the corner and a shadow of confusion passed across her granite-smooth forehead.
‘He’s sitting in,’ Archie said, making Professor Cousins sound like a student protester. Professor Cousins leant so far towards me that he nearly toppled over in the chair. He jabbed a finger in Martha’s direction. ‘Remind me who she is again,’ he said, in a loud whisper.
I shrugged. ‘Some woman.’
‘Ah,’ he said as if that made everything clear. He folded his hands over his old man’s soft belly and nodded benignly at Martha and said, ‘Sit down, sit down,’ gesturing towards a chair next to Terri. ‘You might learn something,’ he laughed. ‘I know I have.’ Martha looked to Archie for guidance but he just raised his eyebrows as if to say it was nothing to do with him and so Martha reluctantly folded up her awkward grasshopper limbs into the chair, all the while keeping a wary eye on Terri.
Seeing Martha was a blow, I was hoping to avoid her for some time. The creative writing assignment I owed her was another degree paper I was probably going to fail, and to make matters worse my assignment,
The Hand of Fate
, was a crime novel, the least reputable genre there was, according to Martha (‘Why? Why? Why?’) and I had to pretend to her that crimewriting was a postmodernist kind of thing these days, but I could tell that she wasn’t convinced. Things would have been going better with Martha if I’d had more words on the page, rather than in my head. (How much easier life would be for the poor writers if they didn’t actually have to write their books.) So far I’d got little further than a rudimentary character introduction and a hint of plot –
After several more cigarettes, and a rather prolonged toilette which included Madame Astarti’s constant struggle with one of the world’s eternal dilemmas – how to apply mascara when she couldn’t even see her face without her spectacles on – she was finally ready.
The telephone rang but when Madame Astarti answered it the line went dead with a purposeful click. ‘Went dead’ – that was a curious phrase, wasn’t it? she mused thoughtfully. Things that go dead, in their various tenses. Electricity, telephones, not people, they didn’t go dead they just were dead. Things that go dead in the night – no, that wasn’t right, was it? Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t in the early stages of dementia. But how do you tell?
She locked up carefully behind her, reasoning it was better to be safe than sorry, even though Madame Astarti had lived most of her life according to the opposite philosophy. ‘Time to go,’ she said to no-one, although—