Seven

By Friday, they were at the Tombs of the Kings. There was a hotel close by, with a view of the sea and—to Harry’s relief—clean towels, room service and fresh air. It was the last stop before the flight home.

Early on Friday morning, Kieran went down to Reception alone. He retrieved the package that had been sent by overnight courier from the States, and took it out onto the long terrace overlooking the sea. With a cup of coffee at his side, he opened it, tearing the Private and Confidential sticker, glanced over the pages of manuscript, and then read the covering letter. Once he had finished, he sat for some time staring out at the ocean, his foot tapping absentmindedly.

Ruth had rung him last night. He had taken the call in his room.

She was always good at reading his mind, and at no time was that more obvious than now, as he sat preparing himself to deliver Lin’s reproach.

‘Kieran, I’ve been up to the house,’ she said, ‘and I can’t find Lin. You do set me the most impossible tasks.’

He found himself smiling. ‘When I ask you to keep an eye on her, I don’t mean like a bloody bull mastiff,’ he said.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

He paused, smiling a little, looking down at his feet. ‘Look, I know this was my idea, but you’d better stay away for a while.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Yes. Look, you know Lin.’

‘What is it?’

‘She claims you have a set of keys.’

Ruth’s laughter was slow in coming, light in tone. ‘Well, of course I have keys.’

‘Since when?’

‘Kieran …’

‘All right. But don’t use them.’

‘I shouldn’t dream of it.’

‘You haven’t let yourself in with them?’

‘Of course not! Kieran, what on earth is this about? I don’t mind dropping in to see if Lin’s OK while you’re away—I know I promised you that—but, really, I have other things to do.’

‘Yes, I appreciate that.’

‘I went there this morning and found Theo’s clothes and toys are missing. Quite a few, anyway. It seemed odd, that’s all. If you know all about it, naturally it’s none of my business.’

‘I know all about it.’

‘Fine.’

‘Look, she’s got a bit concerned—’

Ruth audibly sighed. ‘Kieran, I think I’ve been rather good about this, you know.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘you have.’

Five years since he had first seen Lin.

Since Lin had first come between them.

After he had placed the advertisement requesting an assistant, she had turned up early one morning in his campus room, seeming about twelve years old, swamped in an enormous coat.

She had been nineteen, very thin, medium height, short reddish hair, with a strand of plaited blue and black cotton around some longer strands at the front. He had been very surprised to see her, knowing her already by reputation as an awkward, shy, brilliant girl studying in another discipline. Mathematics was so far removed from history that she might as well have come from another planet.

Yet he recalled, during the first five minutes of interviewing her, that she had been at his last lecture. He remembered how she had drawn his eye by her fidgeting in the second row. She had twitched, she had sighed, she had even whispered to herself. Towards the end, she had sat forward and rested her head in both hands, elbows supported on knees, running her fingers constantly through her hair. It had occurred to him that she had listened to him exactly as if he were on radio and not ten feet in front of her in the flesh.

At the interview he had asked, ‘What did you think of my lecture?’

She had shrugged a self-conscious shrug that belonged to adolescence.

‘Do you have a particular interest in Hasdrubal?’

‘Brothers.’

‘Sibling rivalry, all that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have brothers?’

That brought a flash of contact: a wry, self-deprecatory smile. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘Three.’

‘Younger or older?’

‘Older. A lot older.’ She glanced at the window. ‘I’m the cuckoo in the nest.’

‘Sorry?’

She looked back at him, waved her hand. ‘No … nothing, nothing. It’s a kind of joke.’

She had a Liverpudlian accent. Its faint Celtic charm suited her; he guessed at an Irish connection from the reddish hair. His eyes had ranged over her as she sat with her hands tucked between her knees:. the most unprepossessing of candidates, her self-consciousness revealing the crown of her head more often than her face. He found himself looking hard at the clean, white parting in her hair, at the small bunch of hair that stood upright at the crown.

The coat which drowned her was Persian lamb, a charity-shop reject. Under it she wore boots, jeans and sweater. In the warmth of his office, the coat smelled. She saw his eyes stray to it.

‘Did they pay you to take it away?’ he asked.

She didn’t reply; but she smiled.

‘I hear good things about you,’ he continued. ‘Tell me about your article.’

He already knew that, at seventeen, she had written a piece about the nature of time, which had won an award. Matthew French, her personal tutor, had been to see him only that morning. As they talked about her coming for this interview, French had worn an expression of rebuff.

‘Why is she applying to your department? She’s nothing to do with history.’

‘Perhaps she wants a break from you.’

French had smiled coldly: they were adversaries, not friends. Kieran knew the man well enough—and his arrogance—to realize that this particular student, with her strange brilliance, was a totem, a talisman. Lin had not looked impressive—impressive was the last adjective he could apply—but she was a thing to impress with, a badge, a password.

Kieran had studied her hard that morning. She had returned an occasional intense glance. She had made no comment on her article, but asked instead what he was paying for the four-week vacation work. She had, to his amazement, gone on to calculate his reply on her fingers.

‘Aren’t you going home for Christmas?’ he had asked.

‘Just for a couple of days,’ she said.

‘It’s a large manuscript. There are graphics,’ he had explained. ‘I write longhand, you ought to know. I’ve had complaints from other secretaries.’

‘I don’t mind.’

Then he had hired her. Not because he had much faith in her ability to type. Instead it was something, most irrationally, to do with her hair: the white parting at the centre, and the paleness of the face under it. It had touched him with its frailty.

Fatal. Fatal.

Lin had worked hard for him, arriving early on the first morning of the vacation. He had given her the four box-files containing the final draft of Carthaginian Kings. He would go in to see her at nine, then leave her while he got on with his other work. He had quickly formed an opinion of her: he thought her rather dull, as clever people often are. And then, one day in the second week—it had been four days before Christmas—he had come back at lunchtime to find her laughing.

‘Hello,’ he had said, closing the door behind him.

‘Oh God, oh God,’ she said, both laughing and groaning.

He had walked over to the table where she was sitting at the computer. ‘What is it?’ he had asked.

She had shaken her head, sat back, dropped her hands from the keyboard. She wiped the corner of one eye, before letting out an enormous sigh. ‘It just annoyed me at first, but this morning it struck me as so …’

‘So what?’

She shook her head. ‘No … no, I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter.’

He had sat down. He had a vast sheaf of paper with him, and he settled it carefully on the desk between them.

She had examined him, staring him full in the face, her eyes ranging over him.

‘How many copies do you sell?’ she asked.

‘Quite sufficient.’

‘Sufficient,’ she had repeated. ‘Look, this is—’ She had stopped. ‘Don’t you know what this is?’ she continued. She picked up the last page she had been typing. ‘You know, it’s so clogged. It’s so heavy …’

He had been writing textbooks for three years. Being an authority on a very narrow field, its very narrowness, perhaps even its impenetrability, satisfied him.

She was still holding up the page. ‘I mean, look at this. The way you phrase things. You’ve got four clauses—look at that, four clauses in that one sentence alone. You’ve lost the thread—and all these men, these men bigger than life, they’ve shrunk. They were so big, and you’ve shrunk them into these dreary sentences …’

Kieran had opened his mouth. He had felt absurdly hurt—hurt to his core. He was the departmental head, the academic, the published author.

‘The prevarication of the elder members of the governing Senate had an adverse effect upon military operations …’ She put down the page, temporarily exhausted by her outburst. Then, quite suddenly, she blushed. ‘Don’t take any notice of me,’ she said.

He stared at the abandoned page as she pushed back her chair. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said. She had stood up, pulled on the terrible coat, and looked down at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘Maybe that was rude.’

He had nothing to say. The criticism had been so unexpected, it completely erased his ability to speak.

Still standing by the desk, she continued, ‘I had to type some verse this summer—by an American making a tour of Europe. He’d written poetry about every city he visited.’ She started to laugh. ‘I’ve never read anything so bad in all my life. It was my shrivelling orbs, they light upon thy wrinkled hills, thou God-given bed blanket of green-swamp sward …’

He smiled.

‘It’s true, honestly—absolutely true. I thought it was some kind of parody, a joke. And he was all classical references, Latin phrases …’ Kieran thought of his own classical references. ‘And he had a publisher in the USA, can you believe it? They published him!’

‘And I remind you of him?’ Kieran said.

‘Oh,’ she said. She bit her lip, then grinned.

Of course, he could have fired her. He should have fired her.

But he took her to lunch.

They had walked across the suspension bridge at the height of the midday traffic, in the middle of the Christmas rush. Halfway across, turning away from the concertinaed bedlam of cars beside them, Lin had leaned over the rail to look at the three-hundred-foot drop. Kieran had never been afraid of heights until that moment, but the sight of her thin frame outlined in its outrageous mothballed coat against the sky, and the winding brown mud ribbon of the river below, sent an electric charge through him. He was abruptly convinced that she intended to throw herself off, that at any second she would hoist herself up.

‘Don’t go any further,’ he said.

She seemed not to hear him but, after gazing at the river, looked from side to side.

‘Do you know that the man who designed this bridge also patented a knitting machine?’ she asked. ‘And a sheaf-making machine, and a pocket copying press, and a process for making leather tougher?’

He was still watching her feet, convinced that she was about to spring.

‘He made bridges and docks and tunnels … Do you know how he got his idea for the Rotherhithe tunnel?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Industrial history isn’t my field.’

She sucked in her breath—like a teacher annoyed at an intransigent child. ‘It was the ship worm,’ she said. ‘The head of the Teredo navalis is protected by two boring shells. They can gradually grind wood—even the hardest oak—into a kind of flour. Behind these shells the worm makes a tunnel of its own excreta.’

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Now get down off the guard rail.’

She had looked at him in surprise. ‘I’m only resting one foot.’

‘Don’t,’ he insisted.

He had taken her to a very trendy Italian restaurant. As they entered, she commented that she passed it every day but could never afford to go inside. He suddenly felt that his stock had risen, that he had some sort of value at last.

She had ordered pasta, and he fish, with a bottle of wine. He sat back while they waited for their food.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said.

‘Do I have to?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Is it a part of my contract?’

He laughed. ‘Of course not.’

‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘To a doctor?’

‘Yes. A GP.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Oh—very organized. Very calm in a crisis, as you might expect.’

‘Is she pretty?’

‘She’s rather beautiful, in fact.’

Lin had drunk half the first glass of wine. There followed a long silence.

The food arrived. She ate with relish, then asked for a dessert. He indulgently watched her work through a huge slice of sherry-laden cake while he drank his coffee. He ought to have had control of this situation, but felt that he did not. She had the most unsettling, almost dangerous aura. Even now he still expected her suddenly to leap up, or faint, or scream. She constantly fiddled with things—the cruet, the cutlery, the cloth. She stared around at other customers with a gaze that was too frank. The coat lay folded on the chair next to her, and seemed more pungent by the minute. He had seized on it as—he hoped—a neutral topic of conversation. And to distract her from inspecting the painting above their heads.

‘You don’t see Persian lamb anywhere these days.’

She looked back at him. ‘No. Out of fashion, I expect.’

‘My mother used to have a coat like that.’

She seemed interested. ‘Did she? Is she still alive?’

‘No. Is yours?’

A strange expression, rather browbeaten, crossed her face. ‘Yes, very alive.’

‘Your father?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why is that?’ he asked.

She picked up the coat, blushing hard. ‘Could we go?’ she said.

They lunched again before Christmas Eve, when she went home armed with his gift to her, a small Roman amulet. She had been astonished to receive it, and he even more astonished to give it. Clearing through his desk early that morning, he had found it. Bought from a tourist stall on a trip to Israel: a green copper band decorated with two curved snakes. He had wrapped it in tissue paper and presented it to her.

‘But I haven’t got you anything,’ she had protested.

‘It doesn’t matter in the least. This is … well, hardly a tremendous gift.’

To his complete surprise, she had lifted her face from her inspection of the band, and shown him eyes filled with tears.

‘Are you looking forward to going home?’ He was suddenly rather desperate to change the subject.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if looking forward is a good description.’ She had carefully rewrapped the amulet, folding the tissue precisely over it before putting it away in her bag.

‘When will you be back?’ he had asked.

‘In three days.’

On the day after Boxing Day, he had gone into the refectory closest to his department, and found her eating breakfast. For some reason the sight of her hunched over a bowl of cornflakes, looking so cold, had struck him to the heart.

He had walked over to her. ‘Did you have a nice time?’

She put down the spoon and pulled the cup of tea towards her. Her hand on the cup was frail, blue-veined, almost transparent.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think I’ve got flu.’

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

She had not. They walked to his office together, but it became apparent as the morning wore on that she was not well.

‘I’ll take you home,’ he had said.

‘There’s no need.’

‘I’ll walk you halfway, at least.’

In the event, he went with her to her room. It was in one of the residential blocks, a Victorian house that had been renovated. She had walked up the stairs very wearily, and opened the door without a word. He couldn’t hear anyone else in the house, and presumed that most of the occupants were still away.

‘My God, it’s freezing in here,’ he said.

She lay down on the bed, still wrapped in her coat. ‘I used to have a nice top flat with a dotty landlady called Edith,’ she whispered, shivering. ‘Then the girls here persuaded me to share.’ A pause. ‘I wish I hadn’t come. It’s always cold.’

‘Why isn’t the heating on?’

‘There’s a meter.’

He went over to look. There was no money in it. Glancing back at her, he saw that she had closed her eyes. He put several pound coins into the slot.

‘Have you got any food?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘In the kitchen.’

He had gone down the corridor, found the kitchen, and looked in the fridge. On her shelf—marked with her name on a Post-it note—were two tubs of yoghurt and a carton of milk. He looked in the cupboards. Another personal shelf, marked with another Post-it note. Three cans: soup, tinned fruit, tuna. He went back to her.

‘There isn’t very much.’

She didn’t reply. He walked to the bed.

On the table next to it was a small photograph in a wooden frame. He was surprised to see that it wasn’t of a person, but showed clouds of gases, points of blue light, a formation in the foreground that contained blooms of white, an explosion of heat.

‘Lin,’ he said.

She seemed to be asleep. He leaned down and looked hard at the narrow, pale face, the hands drawn up to her chin. He felt a rush of compassion so strong that it unnerved him—and he had drawn back.

It would have been quite natural to tell Ruth that same night that the girl was ill and that he had taken her home. But, for a reason that he didn’t quite understand, he did not.