10
So there it was, that line of legs, and it seemed to me that Flavia's were not among those sixteen much younger legs, almost all of whose feet were very well shod – that I did notice: they were wearing party shoes -I was particularly struck by the elegant high heels of the woman who was not wearing tights or had taken them off along with her knickers before sitting down – there was nothing around her ankles, they were bare – obviously I only had a very quick look, the women by the mirrors were not protesting or hurtling out of the door, I sensed behind me more expectation or curiosity than indignation or alarm, the opportunistic people who govern us have made people so afraid that we have rapidly grown docile, especially when confronted by someone wielding the terrifying, omnipresent word – 'Security' – that justifies everything, even supposedly ironic uses and abuses of it and humiliations that pretend not to be humiliations, but, how can I put it, purely functional.
Perhaps I did not think this then, but only afterwards, when I finally went to bed much, much later that night or, rather, that morning, but the germ of those thoughts did surface then, during that urgent, absurd visit to the Ladies' toilet, sometimes such thoughts come to us in a flash and we put them off because we haven't time to consider them at that precise moment, and then we recover them afterwards and develop them at our leisure and in a spirit of false calm; and yet it could be said that such a flash is already the thought, concentrated or almost unacknowledged (or perhaps it is a kind of prescient prescience).
'I would have recognised Luisa's legs out of sixteen or twenty-one other pairs of legs, even though I haven't seen them for a while now and they seem sometimes to fade and become muddled with other legs in the here and now that will certainly prove transient and will, in time, be forgotten,' I thought. 'I might also be able to pick out those of Clare Bayes, my former lover in Oxford, but it's years since I've seen them and they might have changed, they might be scarred or she could be lame in one of them like Alan Marriott or they might have become puffy and swollen or there might be only one of them, just as there were only three on the dog whose fourth leg was not cut off by the gypsy Jane – I have constantly to remind myself of that, that she did not cut it off, because whenever I recall her and the dog, that, initially, is what I always believe and what always assails me, for the hypothesis, the invented story with its horrific couple and horrible conjunction of ideas is more vivid to me than the true story with its train station and its drunken Oxford United fans – the young florist who was there when Clare Bayes used to visit me with her strange collection of purchases, with her constant need for fragments of eternity or her expansive notion of time about which there was always something utilitarian, I can say that now without feeling hurt by the word or the fact, for that was in another country and who knows, who knew, what might have happened to the wench (and that other country is once again this one), all it takes is a car accident and that can happen to anyone, the amputation would come later and then she would have to use the spacious, deserted toilet for the disabled. But it's hard to imagine Clare Bayes without a leg, because both were so very striking, with their feet always shod in Italian shoes or else barefoot, she took them off when indoors, a kick, one for each shoe, would send them flying, and later we would have to hunt for them.' I thought all this as I stood before the closed cubicles with their eight pairs of shining shoes peeping out from beneath the doors, and also before I went to sleep weighed down by the terrible unease I took with me to bed; I must have done both things – relived the scene in the Ladies' toilet and recalled the story, so furled in mists, which my mother used to tell me – in order to drive from my mind everything that happened later and to ease the pinprick pressing into my chest. And I even managed to go on to think: 'On the other hand, I wouldn't recognise Perez Nuix's legs, not yet, if that word "yet" has any intention or meaning.’
What I said next was quite unnecessary, it was clear that the disappeared couple were not there and that I should hurry off to look for them elsewhere, I still could not believe that they had left altogether, but neither could I risk angering Tupra, still less Manoia, 'Don't linger or delay', that had been Tupra's recommendation or instruction, and the order had been 'Bring her back here'. But I did linger a little, although only a little. I suppose the sight of those eight doors and those sixteen legs was too much of a temptation for me to abandon it as soon as I had discovered it, without even spending the necessary seconds looking at it in order at least to fix and retain it in my memory, like someone memorising a vital phone number or learning a few lines of poetry ('Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that once clung together, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work…' Or these lines: 'And indeed there will be time to wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, with a bald spot in the middle of my hair…'; and a little later comes the question that no one asks before acting or before speaking: 'Do I dare disturb the universe?', because everyone dares to do just that, to disturb the universe and to trouble it, with their small, quick tongues and their ill-intentioned steps, 'So how should I presume?'). Perhaps it attracted me because of that childhood reminiscence – there must be some reason why an image described to us but never seen, should remain with us our entire life – or perhaps there was in it also a prosaic element to do with secretions and humours, to use Sir Peter Wheeler's words after I had spoken out in praise of Beryl's unusual and very sexual smell and of her magnificent and amply displayed in no thighs that had so exasperated and maddened the same wretched attache who had now slipped away with the person who had, that night, been placed in my extremely careless care.