“Only human. Not all the time.”
“Are you sure? I mean, supposing he really is watching, are you sure it is you?”
“Quite, quite certain. He follows. Last week I went to London for the day. I saw his taxi follow mine to the station. Thursday I went to Stoke-on-Trent to give that lecture. He came, too. Don’t say I should tell the police.”
“No, I wasn’t going to.”
“There’s been no threat, you see, no nuisance. He never tries to talk to me. Never comes even very close. But he’s always there. Why?” She said slowly, “And yet I don’t feel any malice in him. He’s just interested. In me.”
“Well, so are a lot of people, Marion.” Ezra was thinking hard. So this was the basis behind all the rumours. Somehow it had got out. “Who have you told, Marion?”
There was silence.
“I have told no one. I swear. I have told no one at all.”
But this rumour was all over the town. Marion must have let it out. Or perhaps the neighbours had noticed.
“What about the neighbours?” he asked. “Do you think they’ve noticed? Or have you told them?”
Marion looked surprised. “I don’t know them.”
Ezra was half irritated, half amused. “You must know them, Marion.”
“Why? I’ve never even seen them.”
“Oh, you must have seen them. In the garden, digging or something.”
“Oh, but I never go in the garden,” said Marion, looking placidly at the jungle beneath her window. “Can’t stand it. No, I tell you the neighbours are out. I haven’t told them, and I don’t believe they’ve noticed.”
“People do know, though.”
Marion had walked to the window. “Look out there.”
Ezra pulled back the curtains and looked across the road to the junction of Chancellor Hyde Street and Little Clarendon Street. The wind that nipped that corner was usually chill and he was not surprised to see the figure standing there put its collar up. It was a small dark man with spectacles; he was wearing a mackintosh and underneath it a neat blue suit.
“He doesn’t look like a detective,” murmured Ezra.
“I’m sure he’s not that.” Marion spoke with decision.
Ezra looked round her quiet, green book-lined room. It was so difficult to associate Marion with all this.
“You stay here,” he said. “I’m going out to have a closer look at him.”
He shut Marion’s front door behind him, shutting in a stray creeper or two as he did so. As he pushed his way through the massed vegetation to the gate, it occurred to him that while Marion might not know her neighbours, the neighbours almost certainly knew Marion and her weeds.
In the street, a lorry was drawn up discharging a load of coal and Ezra was able to come round the back of it and get close to the man before he had a chance to observe him.
The man was standing there, his feet planted a little apart, and his hands in his pockets. He was making no pretence of having a purpose in being there, and yet he was very unobtrusive, he slipped neatly into the background. There was something vaguely familiar about him, some quality that Ezra thought he knew. But it remained elusive. As Ezra watched, the man shifted his feet, scratched his hair, and settled his hat more comfortably on his head. Clearly he meant to stay where he was.
“I suppose he is watching Marion?” wondered Ezra.
At that moment a window slammed in Marion’s house and the man swung his head round promptly to see.
Ezra stepped out from behind the coal lorry, and walked down Chancellor Hyde Street. The man watched him indifferently, although he must have observed him come from Marion’s house and had probably been watching him. Ezra saw that the hands now rolling a cigarette were neat and not swollen by manual labour, there was a gold ring on the left hand; they trembled slightly.
At the corner Ezra turned and looked back. The road was quiet and empty except for the lorry and the watcher. A little ginger kitten ran across the road, it was calling out in shrill kitten’s shrieks. It halted unsteadily in the gutter. The man called it to him, and stood for a few minutes with it in his hand, looking at it and stroking it. Ezra watching from a distance could have sworn there was liking, even affection, in the movements of those hands.
Till the kitten screamed. Ezra could not help thinking of Marion’s narrow bones beneath those hands.
It was true, although Marion would not admit it, that she had from the first been much more aware of the man than had been apparent. She had noticed him before anyone else. She had such a quiet constricted life that a new face stood out at once. Besides, there was another reason.
It was not the first time: he was only one in a succession of such people. In her life she had had an inconvenient trick of picking up hangers-on in a way she could not quite account for.
There had been the man in Monte Carlo. An unlikely place for Marion the austere to be, but she had been on a visit to an old sick aunt. In the intervals between listening to Auntie’s reminiscences of the Prince of Wales (she meant Edward VII, of course) and administering her medicine, she had escaped for long walks by the sea. The sea in spring there could be lovely and this had been in 1939 when people’s nerves were on edge and perhaps inclined them to do odd things, but she did not think this quite explained the man. She had noticed him looking at her first in the rose garden by the Casino: he had been looking at her expectantly as if he waited for her to speak. The oddest thing about him was that he knew where she lived; he was back there before she was, loitering again, expectantly. Expectant of what? Marion asked herself. Nothing that she was prepared to give anyway: he was a more rakish, selfish-looking man than Marion would have ever trusted herself to.
And there had been others, faces in queues that had grinned and nodded at her; hands waved from doors that she had never opened; feet that seemed to expect hers to fall in step with them.
Probably it was her appearance: Marion considered that she had a very usual, humdrum appearance; she was simply mistaken for someone else.
Even Ezra had his place in this queue. She recalled the young earnest Ezra wearing his scholar’s gown over a duffle-coat so that he looked as square as Tweedledee. He had waited outside the lecture-room to speak to her after her justly celebrated, and often repeated, lecture on “The Myth of Guthrum”.
Then she laughed.
Perhaps it was unfair to number Ezra among them: admittedly he had seemed to know exactly what he wanted from her. A reference to a book she had mentioned in her lecture; was she certain she had got it right? Marion was certain; faced with such unusual assurance she was at first angry, then amused, and finally friendly. Afterwards she had understood that it was the assurance of utter ignorance; once Ezra had learnt the way around his world he would never have dared approach a lecturer with such a comment. By nature he had too little assurance, not too much.
Marion shook her head; no, Ezra was something else again, and not one of the strange people who seemed to pop up in her life. After all he was still in her life, and the marked thing about the others was that after a time they disappeared. They lost heart, gave it up, and went.
Or they had done so far. Unhappily this man seemed more persistent. She tried to laugh it off, to see it in its proper proportions. She told herself that some people had allergies, others had second sight, or what their best friends wouldn’t tell them, or some other social drawback; she had this.
Only it had not happened for some time, indeed had never before happened in Oxford.
Perhaps this was why for the first time she was taking it seriously instead of half dismissing it, as she had always done up to now, as imagination or coincidence.
And