They talked a lot about England, Doctor Ellesley’s other home, which he greatly missed. Mihály too was very fond of England. He had spent two very serious, dreamy years there, before going on to Paris and home. In London he had wallowed in an orgy of solitude. Sometimes he went for weeks without speaking to anyone, just a few working men in suburban pubs, and then only a few words. He loved the appalling London weather, its foggy, watery softness, in which one can sink as low as the temperature in solitude and spleen.
“In London November isn’t a month,” he said, “it’s a state of mind.”
Ellesley readily agreed.
“You see,” Mihály continued, “now it comes back to me: in London one November I also experienced something which, with people like yourself, would no doubt have strengthened their belief that the dead somehow survive. In me it only strengthens the conviction that there is something wrong with my nervous system. Listen to this. One morning I was working down in the factory (as I said, this was in November) when I was called to the telephone. An unknown woman asked me to go without fail that afternoon, on important business, to such and such a place, and gave me an unfamiliar name and address. I protested that there must be some error. ‘Oh no,’ said this unknown female voice, ‘I’m trying to contact a Hungarian gentleman who works in the Boothroyd factory as a volunteer. Is there another one of that description?’ ‘No-one,’ I replied, ‘and you have my name correctly. But tell me, what is it about?’ She couldn’t say. We talked about it for some time and eventually I agreed to go.
“I went because I was curious. Is there any man who wouldn’t respond to the dulcet tones of an unknown woman on the telephone? If women really knew men they would ask us for everything over the telephone — in unfamiliar voices. The street, Roland Street, was in that rather forbidding bit of London behind Tottenham Court Road, just north of Soho, where the painters and prostitutes live who can’t afford Soho proper or Bloomsbury. I don’t know for certain, but I think it very likely that this is the part of London where you find the founders of new religions, Gnostics and the seedier kinds of spiritualist. The whole area gives off an aura of religious dereliction. Well, anyway, that’s where I had to go. You have to understand I am incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere of streets and places. As I made my way through the dark streets looking for Roland Street in the fog — it was mist rather than fog, a white, transparent, milky mist, typical of November — I was so overcome by this sense of spiritual abandonment I was almost seasick.
“I finally found the house, and a plate beside the door with the name given me by the strange voice on the telephone. I rang. After some time I could hear shuffling, and a sleepy slattern of a maid opened the door.
“‘What do you want?’ she asked.
“‘Well, I’ve no idea,’ I said, and felt rather embarrassed.
“Then someone shouted down, as from a long way off. The maid pondered this and for some time said nothing. Then she led me to a grubby little stairway and said, in the usual English way, ‘Just go straight up.’ She herself remained below.
“At the top of the stairs I found an open door and a room in semi-darkness. There was no-one in it. Just then the door opposite closed, as if someone had just that instant left the room. Remembering the maid’s instructions, I crossed the room and opened the door that had just closed. I found myself in another semi-dark, old-fashioned, dusty and tasteless room, with no-one in it, and again the door across the way closed, as if someone had just that instant gone out. Again I crossed the room and entered a third room, then a fourth. Always a door quietly closing before me, as if someone was walking ahead of me. Finally, in the fifth room … well, it’s an overstatement to say finally, because although there was no-one in that fifth room, there at least was no door closing before me. In this room there was only one door, the one I had come through. But whoever had been walking ahead of me was not in the room.
“There was a lamp burning in the room, but no furniture apart from two armchairs. On the walls pictures, rugs hanging everywhere, every sort of worthless old-fashioned lumber. I sat down rather hesitantly in one of the armchairs and prepared to wait. Meanwhile I kept glancing restlessly about me, because I was quite sure something very strange was happening.
“I don’t know how long I had been sitting like that, when suddenly my heart began to knock horribly, because I had realised what I had unconsciously been looking for. From the moment I entered this room I had had the feeling that I was being watched. Now I had found who it was. On one of the walls hung a Japanese rug, depicting various sorts of dragon and other fantastic animals, and the eyes of these animals were made of large coloured-glass buttons. I now saw that one of the animals had an eye that wasn’t glass, but a real eye, and was staring at me. Presumably someone was standing behind the rug looking at me.
“In any other circumstances it would have seemed to me like something out of a detective novel. You read so much about foreigners vanishing in London without trace, and this seemed just the sort of start you would imagine for such a story. I tell you, the natural thing would have been for me to panic, suspect criminal intent, and put myself in a defensive posture. But I didn’t. I just sat there, stock-still, frozen with terror. Because, you see, I recognised the eye.”
“What do you mean?”
“That eye was the eye of a friend of my youth, a certain Tamás Ulpius who died young in tragic, although rather unclear, circumstances. For a few moments my fear was suspended, and a sort of pallid ghostly happiness filled me, a sort of ghost of happiness. I called out, ‘Tamás,’ and wanted to rush over to him. But in that instant the eye vanished.”
“And then?”
“Properly speaking, that’s all there was. But what happened next is quite inexplicable. An old lady came into the room, a strange, old-fashioned, repulsive, large-eyed woman, and with a fairly expressionless face asked me something. I didn’t understand, because she wasn’t speaking English. I tried her in French, German, even Hungarian, but she just shook her head sadly. Then she said something in a strange tongue, with much greater expression, besieging me with more and more questions. I listened hard, if only to try and catch what language she was speaking. I have a good ear for languages, especially those I don’t speak. I decided that what she was talking was not Latinate, Germanic, or Slav. It was not even Finno-Ugric, because I had studied Finnish at one stage at university. And then suddenly I just knew that she was the only person in the whole world speaking that language. Where that idea came from, I really don’t know. But I was so horrified I jumped up, rushed out of the room and back home.”
“And how do you explain it all?” asked Ellesley.
“I can think of no other than that it was November. I had got into that house through some strange random mistake. Our lives are full of inexplicable coincidences … ”
“And the eye?”
“The eye was surely in my imagination, an effect of the situation I was in and the London November. Because I am unshaken in my belief that the dead are dead.”
IX
HIS TIME was up. Mihály was well again and due to leave the hospital. No thief released after twenty years’ prison could have felt more cut off from everything, or more devoid of purpose, than Mihály did when, with his little suitcase (his only possessions were the few frugal purchases he had put together on the day of his escape) he made his solitary way between the low-roofed houses of Foligno.
He was in no mood to go home. It would have been impossible to appear among his family after his desertion, which he would be unable and unwilling to explain. And he could not bear the thought of returning to Pest, going in to the office, involving himself in the firm’s business, and relaxing over bridge and small talk.