James glanced again at the books, but the man was still laboriously engaged in signing them out, taking what seemed an age over each word.
‘No.’ Epstein smiled a wistful smile. ‘My last job at the university was as a cleaner. I had to mop the floors.’
‘Oh.’
‘Before that, I was Professor of Greek and Chairman of the Department of Classical Studies.’
‘I see.’ James looked into the old eyes, seeing a terrible sadness and longing. He had read about the ghastly things the Nazis were doing to the Jews; he knew of the laws banning them from the professions, burning down their synagogues and God knows what else. But it was different to meet one in person, to see the human consequences of such barbarism standing in front of you.
The librarian must have grown used to this reaction. ‘Oh, do not feel sorry for me, Dr Zennor. I am very grateful. For my job and for this country. The only country in the world fighting this evil.’
James glanced once more at the pile on the desk between them.
The professor pulled himself upright. ‘I am forgetting myself. Please.’
James picked up the books and shifted over to one of the desks. He turned the first one over. To his surprise, it was a bound volume of journals: The Proceedings of the British Psychological Society for 1920–1. He flicked through it, trying to work out what might possibly have drawn the interest of his wife. This was not her subject after all.
As he turned the pages, he caught a slip of white paper, the tiniest bookmark that had been left inside. Instinctively, he held it close to his face, hoping that he might catch a scent of her. But it carried no trace. Instead it marked an article entitled: ‘A survey of British veterans of the Great War’.
Odd. Florence had no particular interest in the last war. If she was not a psychologist, she was certainly not a historian.
He turned to the next book, written by an American scholar affiliated with Harvard Medical School: Studies in Pediatric Trauma. He flicked through the pages again, looking for one of those tiny white slips. He found it and began reading:
‘… sustained exposure of a non-traumatized child to a traumatized adult can result in secondary or passive trauma. Symptoms range from selective dumbness, melancholia, extreme shyness, impaired development, bedwetting …’
Instantly, he thought of Harry: how he had been slower than the other children to control himself at night, how he had still not mastered it. Florence had been anxious, refusing to be placated by James’s insistence that their son would ‘soon get the hang of it’. Until now James had thought nothing more of it.
He picked up the third book. A Compendium of Advice for Mothers. So very unlike Florence, who usually cursed such things. He didn’t need to thumb through the pages. The book opened automatically, the spine already cracked. The chapter heading: Preparing a child for a long journey or separation.
He read the title again and then once more, the dread rising in him. Any hope he had harboured that this might be a stunt, an attempt by Florence to make a point, was fading fast. There it was in black and white. What his wife had planned for was a long journey. Or, worse, a separation.
He went back to the first volume, to the article on former combatants in the last war, reading a paragraph at random:
‘… subjects in the trial revealed a set of behaviors which recurred. Among them were acute insomnia, including difficulty both falling and staying asleep; excess anger and temper; poor concentration. Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger.’
He skimmed a few paragraphs ahead:
‘… several of those interviewed displayed an extreme reluctance to speak of their wartime experiences, flinching from even indirect reminders. Perhaps paradoxically, many of these same people complained of unwanted memories of the event, “flashbacks”, as it were. The most common complaint, experienced by some sixty-eight per cent of those surveyed, was of distressing dreams, often violent …’
James slammed the book shut, his heart hammering. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He was hungry. He had barely eaten since last night and he had exerted himself strenuously on the river early this morning. The alcohol would not have helped either. The room was beginning to spin.
He stood up and saw Epstein at the desk, the old man’s bespectacled face appearing to shrink and swell, waxing and waning like the moon. He had to get out, into the fresh air. He mumbled an apology, left the books where they were and stumbled towards the exit.
Outside, he gulped down large draughts of oxygen, clutching the handrail by the entrance. Across the street, the Kings Arms was filling up now with the after-work crowd: not students but academics-turned-civil servants.
He needed to think but his head was throbbing. What had he been expecting? He had assumed something more direct: an atlas, perhaps a road map, maybe a train timetable. But this, what he had just seen … he felt nauseous.
Where the hell was his wife? Where had she gone? It unnerved him to imagine that she was living and breathing somewhere – perhaps arriving at a distant railway station or walking down a street or sipping a cup of tea – that she existed somewhere now, at this very moment, and he had no idea where. He told himself he could survive being apart from her, so long as he knew where she was. But he knew that was not true. Ever since those nights and days in Madrid, holding each other as the bombs fell, he felt that nature itself demanded they be together. As a scientist, he was not meant to believe in fate or destiny, so he could not say what he truly felt. Nor did his education have much tolerance for a word like ‘souls’, but that too was what he felt: that their souls had been joined.
Harry’s arrival had only confirmed it. He loved his son with an intensity that had surprised him. He pictured him now, rarely saying a word to anyone, clinging to his little polar bear. The thought of life apart from his son struck sudden terror into his heart.
The words appeared before him, floating in front of his eyes: a long journey or separation. A black thought raced through his mind, like a virus carried on his bloodstream. Could it be, was it possible …
Suddenly and without any warning even to himself, as if his mouth, chest and lungs had a will of their own, he heard himself screaming at the top of his voice. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’
The sound of it shocked him. A group of young men drinking on the pavement outside the Kings Arms looked towards him, their faces flushed, their necks taut with aggression. James wondered if these were the veterans of the Dunkirk retreat – or evacuation, as the BBC delicately phrased it – brought here for treatment at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Florence had mentioned them only yesterday, reporting the scandalized reaction of some superannuated don or other who had been outraged by the soldiers’ constant state of drunkenness. James had shrugged, refusing to condemn servicemen for seeking comfort wherever they could find it.
Ignoring them, he crossed the road, retrieved his bike from outside Wadham and cycled away.
He pedalled maniacally, trying to keep his thoughts at bay. And yet they refused to be halted. He could almost feel them in his head, speeding around his cerebral cortex; as soon as he had blocked off one neural pathway, they re-routed and hurtled down another, shouting at him inside his head, forming into words.
He smothered them with another idea. It was Thursday, nearly seven o’clock in the evening and it was summer. Ordinarily, this was when Florence would be out with her friend Rosemary for the weekly walk of their rambling club. As far as James could tell, most were communists, all but ideological in their zeal for strenuous exercise in the British countryside.
The group would probably be walking back by now and, if they were sticking with their usual routine, he knew just where to find them.
And so, for the second time that day – though it felt like another era – he was back by the river, cycling along the towpath towards Iffley Lock. And, sure enough,