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).