And as if people in the outside world were not enough, I had inside me too an exemplar of my own, a kind of invigilator, from whom I must hide my lack of conviction. For instance, if I was reading something, an argument in some book or other, and agreeing with it enthusiastically, and then I discovered at the end that I had misunderstood entirely what the writer was saying, had in fact got the whole thing arse-ways, I would be compelled at once to execute a somersault, quick as a flash, and tell myself, I mean my other self, that stern interior sergeant, that what was being said was true, that I had never really thought otherwise, and, even if I had, that it showed an open mind that I should be able to switch back and forth between opinions without even noticing it. Then I would mop my brow, clear my throat, straighten my shoulders and pass on delicately, in stifled dismay. But why the past tense? Has anything changed? Only that the watcher from inside has stepped forth and taken over, while the puzzled outsider cowers within.
Does the court realise, I wonder, what this confession is costing me?
I took up the study of science in order to find certainty. No, that's not it. Better say, I took up science in order to make the lack of certainty more manageable. Here was a way, I thought, of erecting a solid structure on the very sands that were everywhere, always, shifting under me. And I was good at it, I had a flair. It helped, to be without convictions as to the nature of reality, truth, ethics, all those big things – indeed, I discovered in science a vision of an unpredictable, seething world that was eerily familiar to me, to whom matter had always seemed a swirl of chance collisions. Statistics, probability theory, that was my field. Esoteric stuff, I won't go into it here. I had a certain cold gift that was not negligible, even by the awesome standards of the discipline. My student papers were models of clarity and concision. My professors loved me, dowdy old boys reeking of cigarette smoke and bad teeth, who recognised in me that rare, merciless streak the lack of which had condemned them to a life of drudgery at the lectern. And then the Americans spotted me.
How I loved America, the life there on that pastel, sundrenched western coast, it spoiled me forever. I see it still in dreams, all there, inviolate, the ochre hills, the bay, the great delicate red bridge wreathed in fog. I felt as if I had ascended to some high, fabled plateau, a kind of Arcady. Such wealth, such ease, such innocence. From all the memories I have of the place I select one at random. A spring day, the university cafeteria. It is lunchtime. Outside, on the plaza, by the fountain, the marvellous girls disport themselves in the sun. We have listened that morning to a lecture by a visiting wizard, one of the grandmasters of the arcanum, who sits with us now at our table, drinking coffee from a paper cup and cracking pistachio nuts in his teeth. He is a lean, gangling person with a wild mop of frizzed hair going grey. His glance is humorous, with a spark of malice, it darts restlessly here and there as if searching for something that will make him laugh. The fact is, friends, he is saying, the whole damn thing is chance, pure chance. And he flashes suddenly a shark's grin, and winks at me, a fellow outsider. The faculty staff sitting around the table nod and say nothing, big, tanned, serious men in short-sleeved shirts and shoes with broad soles. One scratches his jaw, another consults idly a chunky wristwatch. A boy wearing shorts and no shirt passes by outside, playing a flute. The girls rise slowly, two by two, and slowly walk away, over the grass, arms folded, their books pressed to their chests like breastplates. My God, can I have been there, really? It seems to me now, in this place, more dream than memory, the music, the mild maenads, and us at our table, faint, still figures, the wise ones, presiding behind leaf-reflecting glass.
They were captivated by me over there, my accent, my bow-ties, my slightly sinister, old-world charm. I was twenty-four, among them I felt middle-aged. They threw themselves at me with solemn fervour, as if engaging in a form of self-improvement. One of their little foreign wars was in full swing just then, everyone was a protester, it seemed, except me – I would have no truck with their marches, their sit-downs, the ear-splitting echolalia that passed with them for argument – but even my politics, or lack of them, were no deterrent, and flower children of all shapes and colours fell into my bed, their petals trembling. I remember few of them with any precision, when I think of them I see a sort of hybrid, with this one's hands, and that one's eyes, and yet another's sobs. From those days, those nights, only a faint, bittersweet savour remains, and a trace, the barest afterglow, of that state of floating ease, of, how shall I say, of balanic, ataraxic bliss – yes, yes, I have got hold of a dictionary – in which they left me, my muscles aching from their strenuous ministrations, my flesh bathed in the balm of their sweat.
It was in America that I met Daphne. At a party in some professor's house one afternoon I was standing on the porch with a treble gin in my hand when I heard below me on the lawn the voice of home: soft yet clear, like the sound of water falling on glass, and with that touch of lethargy which is the unmistakable note of our set. I looked, and there she was, in a flowered dress and unfashionable shoes, her hair done up in the golliwog style of the day, frowning past the shoulder of a man in a loud jacket who was replying with airy gestures to something she had asked, while she nodded seriously, not listening to a word he said. I had just that glimpse of her and then I turned away, I don't quite know why. I was in one of my bad moods, and halfway drunk. I see that moment as an emblem of our life together. I would spend the next fifteen years turning away from her, in one way or another, until that morning when I stood at the rail of the island steamer, snuffling the slimed air of the harbour and waving halfheartedly to her and the child, the two of them tiny below me on the dockside. That day it was she who turned away from me, with what seems to me now a slow and infinitely sad finality.
I felt as much foolishness as fear. I felt ridiculous. It was unreal, the fix I had got myself into: one of those mad dreams that some ineffectual fat little man might turn into a third-rate film. I would dismiss it for long periods, as one dismisses a dream, no matter how awful, but presently it would come slithering back, the hideous, tentacled thing, and there would well up in me a hot flush of terror and shame – shame, that is, for my own stupidity, my wanton lack of prescience, that had landed me in such a deal of soup.