The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [120]
– Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Lights blossomed in the distance, painting the skyline of a city in the air like the façade of an enchanted castle. Oxford. He felt disorientated, his head thick with halfremembered dreams. There was something Trollope once wrote: "Oxford is the most dangerous place to which a young man can be sent." Perhaps Trollope didn't travel much.
He sat back with a sigh and rubbed his eyes. For some reason they were wet. It must have been some rain that came in through the window. He'd slept – what had he dreamed of? Ships and gunmen and a woman falling to her death… He reached into his pocket. He still had Mary's book in there. He took it out, looked at it. It was not her book, he thought. It was the Bookman's. Another of his tools, one more detail in his plans, that led to his mother leaving her home only to die in a foreign city, killed by yet another tool.
He opened the window. The wind howled in, bringing wetness with it. Hedges passed outside.
He tossed the book out of the window. Its pages opened and rustled in the blast of air, then the wind snatched it and it was gone.
He closed the window and sat back. His face still stung with wetness, and he let it, not blinking through the moistness: the world beyond his eyes wavered and threatened to disappear. He longed for it to do so, to fade away beyond impenetrable fog, leaving him alone, free in nothingness.
"Next stop, Oxford," announced a booming, unseen voice, and Orphan was thrown back into the now.
Enough, he thought. He looked beyond the window as the train slowed down and the lights outside grew brighter and more numerous.
Oxford. And he thought, It ends here.
He had been on his feet already when the train stopped. He hurried to the door and stepped onto the platform.
Ahead of him a group of four men, clad entirely in black with wide, low-lying hats that hid their faces in shadow under the light of the electric lamps, were standing around a coffin-shaped object.
Orphan hung back and observed them. They seemed to confer amongst themselves, yet he could not hear their speech, if indeed they used any. After a moment they picked up the coffin, one at each corner and, like pallbearers, began to walk down the platform, towards the Exit sign.
Orphan followed them.
There were those of his contemporaries, his fellow poets, who liked to speak of Oxford's "dreaming spires". He was not one of them. Orphan, in his turn, simply hated the city. The tall edifices of dark-grained buildings rose only to block off what sun there was, their oppositeness serving to cancel any possibility of light or warmth penetrating into the avenues below. Oxford was cold, the wide avenues channelling fierce winds that ran through them like hungry rats in a maze.
Now that they were out of the station, the men he was following seemed to be in no hurry. They carried the coffin on foot, with no noticeable difficulty, and Orphan followed them at a suitable distance.
Passing over Hythe Bridge, he looked over onto the Oxford Canal. It was different here, a country river overgrown with reeds; weeping willows bent towards the murky water and the rotting leaves that covered the surface. As he watched, a body of water was displaced, startling him: and even more so when he saw the small whale that emerged from the dark water and stared up at him with mournful eyes.
The whales! So far inland?
He could hear the whale singing now, a brief and quiet sound, and then it disappeared into the water. Orphan felt the ebbing of a tension inside him he had not been aware of. He was glad to see the whale.
Onwards, and onto George Street; the broad avenue was conspicuously empty, the shops shuttered and closed. Only the few pubs were open, and Orphan looked longingly through their windows: inside was warmth, company… beer. The smell of tobacco wafted through the closed doors. Oxford was shut for the night, but not in panic, not like