At what point had I realised that she was married, that her husband wasn’t with her? — when she had said something and looked at me candidly, pushing her hair backwards over each ear in the quick movements I was afterwards to become so familiar with, fingers moving from the parting in the middle of her forehead, raking the dark strands sharply several times either side as though seeking a way through undergrowth, looking for a path which she had to follow urgently. There was something of a hurry in her. The eyes always moved, were always swinging or lifting, like a commander at the head of an armoured brigade pressing into new country. She was commanding then? Yes, but with a deprecation, almost an apology, as though she had taken over the lead perforce, simply because the other officers had fallen by the way. Something around five feet nine inches, then, in a red and gilt brocade Kashmiri waistcoat, a smock dress with a lace bodice. Why not?
In the days that followed, in the empty spaces of grey and uneventful ocean, in the short times between one meal and another, in the good moments after dinner when I was by myself in one of the six bars, I passed the time by living the on-and-off incidents of the affair, building detailed pictures of the abrupt times we had spent together. This after all, I thought, was a story I had been licensed to invent. Luckily she and I had never managed to spend long in each other’s company — I should have needed a world trip to deliberate that — so there was no need to construct a continuous tale, with its flats and soggy shallows. I need invest only in quick and startling snapshots of desire, swinging the glass hurriedly over the bad times, quickly isolating the heart that mattered. I could indulge the slender moments, the thefts from ordinary time, which are the flavour of such secret appetites. I didn’t bother with the corollary: the husband rifling through her desk and laundry, the detective lurking in the laurel driveway. I contrived a properly salty and reckless scenario, such as any proper affair demands.
… we were eating together, somewhere outside London, an inn not far from the river which we’d been out on in a boat that afternoon. She had grazed her finger on the gunwale, or a splinter from the oar had pierced it just below the knuckle, and she’d bandaged the cut, from the hotel’s first-aid kit, wrapping up the fine bone of her long middle finger in a neat cocoon. And that night, lying on her back, hands raised across the pillow as in some vicious hold-up, the white cotton roll stood out awkwardly, temptingly, the last piece of clothing in a long desired nakedness.
For most of the first two days at sea I played with this woman, trying to piece together her relationship with Graham, with me — unwilling to free her from my imagination until I had properly completed her, fulfilled her destiny as a real person. Her reality had come to obsess me.
But then on the third evening, with more wine than I needed for dinner, I realised it was pointless, useless. I could invent only her physical traits, and some few imagined circumstances in which she had her being — nothing more. She was as void of any actual character as Graham was of his own identity. Only I was real. I had spent so long inventing affection and involvement in the isolation of Durham jail that I had been unable to stop the process in my first days outside.
Blue weather came half-way across the ocean as we cut through the gulf stream on the southerly route. I spent the first part of the morning walking the deserted decks and the second on a deck chair reading some of the books Graham had packed for his journey. Anthony Burgess’s Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, proved rewarding; Joyce Cary’s The Case for African Freedom I found less easy going. I kept well clear of organised ‘games’ in the afternoon and the casino in the evening. Instead I visited the cinema, the swimming-pool and the sauna, and rode much on a mechanical bicycle in the gym.
And I realised that the first few days out from Durham had been the dangerous time, when the sense of freedom had almost overcome me, inducing impossible visions, of falconry and bright women. I had gone on, as I had done in prison, imagining life, reaching out for it in places where it could not have existed: I had let my imagination run away with me. Now, gently, I was learning to see and take things as they were, to be happy in reality — alone, slipping off the skin of the past as we sighted land and glided through the Narrows towards Manhattan, a free man for the moment on the ship; unattached, unencumbered and unobserved.
Alexei Flitlianov had watched the man carefully, from a distance, during his last days in London, when he had seen him taking over Graham’s identity, and throughout the voyage across the Atlantic. He could see him again now, standing up with a crowd of other passengers by the starboard rail as the huge ship slid beneath the Verrazzano bridge, the city rising brilliantly in the distance.
Who was he? What was he up to? What would his contacts be? He would go on following him very carefully until he found out. For in him now, not Graham, lay all the dangerous keys to his future.
Book Four
1
The city had climbed up in front of us long before, when we’d passed under the Verrazzano bridge eight miles out; the towers, the points, all the steps and cliffs of Manhattan growing up on the horizon, poking gradually into the sun, like an ultimate geography lesson — some final, arrogant proof in steel and concrete that the world was round. From a distance the city was a very expensive educational game, a toy not like other toys.
And one had seen those towers so often in so many images — in polychrome and black and white, moving or with music — that all of us standing on the forward deck that morning had the expression of picture dealers scrutinising a proffered masterpiece, leaving a polite interval before crying ‘Fake!’
These preconceptions were a pity since, from a distance, in the sharp light over a gently slapping metal-blue sea, the place looked better than any of its pictures, like the one advertisement layout that had escaped all the exaggerated attentions of the years, come free of Madison Avenue, the press, all the published myths and horrors of the city.
Sharp winds had rubbed the skyline clean, light glittered on the edges of the buildings and all I saw was a place where I was unknown, where unknown people bore ceaselessly up and down those cavernous alleys, between bars and restaurants and offices, all busy with an intent that had nothing to do with me.
The city stood up like a rich menu I could afford at last after a long denial.
The first feeling in the streets was like meeting a girl somewhere, in a group, swapping something, giving and taking, creating an appetite, sharing a look and a mood which you know will take you together before nightfall. There was something inevitable and long-expected, something one had missed, in New York.
The noise and rush from the cab, the filth of the dockside streets, were words quickly spoken, suddenly desired intimacies, saying it was right, and right, we wanted it now. The clatter was like whispers, the flashing signs sure signals of an impending affair. And there was nothing of the ugliness of an old whore for someone who would take anything, but the true excitement of coming to a new land, a territory of undiscovered tribes.
We had been sailing for many days about an uncharted sea when on the feast of St Brendan, towards noon, an island appeared set in a metal bay. We found it to be place of the carob tree, with vines and sweet water, a land different from all our knowledge. And being soured in the known world, and anxious in our time, and fraught with journeying, we took rest in this new place …
The island was an empty map as I crossed it that afternoon. All I had heard or learnt, everything I had imagined — the scalps of other people’s experience, the rag-bag of guidelines that we rattle on our belts throughout most of life — all these received notions disappeared at the cross-park exit above the Plaza Hotel, waiting for the lights to change. I was looking at two men in homburgs and thick-soled brogues talking on the sidewalk. The collars of their straight black coats were turned up under their ears, their faces almost completely hidden from the wind. They stood there quietly, firmly, communicating: two slabs of black marble. And I realised I couldn’t imagine what they were saying, couldn’t invent a language for them, couldn’t invest any of my experience of mankind in them — to tell me what their business might have been, or anything of the fabric of their lives. It was as if an anthropologist had been given the opportunity of observing the nature, the language, the social rites of a tribe so far removed from his own experience, and all the learning of the world, that he was forced to conclude that their society was not only unique but linked directly with pre-history.