But then again, I’m wrong. It isn’t like that. I’m trying to say something, perhaps, that I don’t really feel at all. It’s in the nature of routine not so much to make things ordinary as to numb you against recognizing how remarkable they are. And you’d be surprised at some of the things contained in our files. You’d be appalled at the black and desperate picture of the world they sometimes offer. In certain corners of our office there are some gruesome little collections — which we have to consult quite often — which consist of police pathologists’ findings and coroners’ reports on cases in which there has been police interest. I have dipped into these files too many times to think much about them; and yet sometimes I am suddenly startled — the bubble of routine bursts around me — when I actually stop to contemplate some of the things that pass through my hands.
Here, for example, is a piece of ‘routine’ that I dealt with only last week. The police, of course, closed the case. The whole thing was handed over to psychiatrists — and it’s a psychiatrist (psychiatrists are some of our most frequent customers) who wants to dig it out again now. It seems that a woman, who has since died, had to nurse her husband, at home, during an illness that eventually proved fatal. The husband had been — I shan’t mention names — a figure of some renown in his field. During the later stages of the illness the wife refused to have the husband admitted to hospital and, after a certain time, to allow any medical supervision whatsoever. As well as the husband and wife, there was a son, aged eleven. When the husband died, the wife not only failed to inform the authorities or to do anything with the corpse but adamantly believed that her husband was not, in fact, dead. Furthermore, she turned viciously against the son, accusing him of being responsible for what had happened to the father. Some days after the death, the wife locked the boy up with the corpse and told him he would not be let out until he had brought his father back to life again. What the boy thought, shut up like this with his dead father, is conjecture. What he did was clear enough when the matter came to light two days later. He found a penknife, belonging to the dead man, in one of the bedroom drawers, and with it — for reasons never established, though according to the boy himself, ‘to find out what his father was made of’ — systematically disfigured and mutilated his father’s body.
And all this you have to bring home to a wife who tends house-plants and two healthy kids whom you take out on the common at weekends to play with frisbees and cricket bats.
[3]
I travel home on the Tube. The Northern Line: seven stops to Clapham South. Up, out of the ground, and then down into it again. I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other’s arses and nuzzle each other’s fur. But animals do this innocently and — who knows? — with affection. What goes on in the Tube is done with suspicion and menace. It is as if everybody is trying to search out everybody else’s story, everybody else’s secret, and the assumption is that this secret will always be a weakness; it must be something unpleasant and shameful which will make it possible for its owner to be humiliated and degraded. The fact that I am making these observations makes it clear, of course, that I am guilty myself of the activity I am describing. But look at any group of people in an Underground train. You won’t see much laughter, smiling, or even talk. Not nearly as much, at least, as you’ll see in any bus or railway carriage travelling through the genial daylight. Ignore the people whose faces are conveniently sunk in books and magazines. Watch the eyes of the others. Am I right? Everyone is trying to strip everyone else bare, and everyone, at the same time, is trying not to be stripped bare himself. Oh yes, I know, in one sense, this is almost literally true. Half the men in the carriage are mentally removing the clothes of the girls who are strap-hanging near the doors. They are titillated by their stretched arms, by the little ovals of sweat which appear at the armpits on their blouses. But, beyond this, something deeper, something darker, is going on. Am I right?
Now and then, when I travel on the Tube, I get this feeling that something terrible and inevitable is going to happen. All those bodies crammed together, all those furtive faces searching each other. All this mystification. And I can’t help thinking of the populations of animals which live in burrows — rats, lemmings — which (I read somewhere) exist in far greater concentrations than any human population. When I get out at Clapham South, up into the air, past the newsstand and the florist’s, I breathe a deep breath of relief. Opposite the station is the common — criss-crossed and encircled by incessant chains of ill-tempered traffic — but it is the common. It’s spring. There are daffodils nodding near the bowling-green on my walk home; the sticky-buds are opening on the chestnuts, and there are catkins on the silver birches. There is no doubt what commons are for. They are proof that, huddled as we are in cities, we couldn’t live without trees and grass, at the expense of no matter what urban convenience. And this need crops up in many ways. Marian, for example, as I’ve already mentioned, keeps indoor plants. In the winter, when the garden is dead and colourless, our house still sprouts with leaves. And whenever I am in one of my moods, Marian talks to her plants. It’s true. Going round with her plastic watering-can, she has whole conversations with them.
Have I described my wife? She is thirty-two. She has sandy-blond hair, straight and light so that when the wind catches it, it blows, in a rather clichéd but, for all that, artless way across her face. She has a slender, supple and still provocative figure, even though she has been a mother for ten years. I am particularly grateful that she hasn’t slumped as some women do after they have had their children. You could say that my wife has her share of beauty. Why does that statement half catch me unawares? Her face is a little on the long side, but because her mouth is full and her eyes large (blue, with little chips of green in them), you wouldn’t notice this. She has a way of lowering her eyes and then raising them and suddenly opening them wide when someone speaks or when something claims her attention, as if she spends all her life far away, in a trance — which is not to say that she cannot be alert, even athletic. This blank, startled expression sometimes makes me feel (it is a strange thing to say, I admit) that she doesn’t know who I am. Before we were married and we had Martin and Peter she worked as a physiotherapist in a hospital. She likes pale colours, but I prefer her in dark ones. Her complexion is smooth, on the pale side, and is one of those complexions which never change very much with mood or emotion — which suggest passivity or concealment. But the thing I like most about Marian (excuse me again if this sounds odd) is her malleability, her pliancy; the feeling I get that I could mould and remodel her (she must have learnt a thing or two at that physiotherapy clinic), contort and distort her, parcel her up and stretch her into all kinds of shapes, but, just as you can work a piece of clay a thousand times but still have left the same piece of clay, she would still, at the end of it all, be Marian. Marian.
[4]
When Quinn called me in yesterday I should have taken my opportunity to confront him about the missing files. When he said, ‘We don’t want things to get mislaid, do we?’ and gave that knowing smile, that was surely a hint. I should have taken my cue and said, ‘Talking of mislaid files …’ What a cowardly man I am.