the end sent a revised version of my letter to Margery Fisher, in which I asked for details of Marian’s death, but said nothing of my fears.
Arriving in the city by train, I began to hunt around the Place de Clichy, but I found nothing. No one at Marian’s old address had ever heard of her; Jean, the barman in her local, had moved on too, no one even remembered him, though strangely, in that frustrating way in which memory often behaves, after ten years I had been able to recall his name when before I couldn’t.
I went out to Saint-Germain, to the street where Verovkin had had his practice, and though my heart began to pound even at the end of the road, it was an unfounded fear. The little brass name plaques were still there, but Verovkin’s had gone. There were even four little holes and a rectangular patch of stone of a different colour where it had been, yet that strange nothing comforted me, let me know I was not imagining it all, because it meant he had moved on.
I set out to find him, but I failed.
All my searches came to naught and I had to return to Cambridge before Monday’s round of lectures.
A week slipped by, a week more, and I sulked in an uneasy mood, downcast and angry at my impotence. I ghosted my way through my working day and every night I sat in a chair in my living room, staring at the hearth, though there was no fire lit, listening to the Third Programme and whatever it chose to broadcast into my home.
I heard none of it. All I could hear and see in my mind were a series of voices and images, memories of Marian, and dreams of what might have become my life, had she not been killed. This state of affairs continued without an apparent end, until one night when I got home from work and found, at last, a reply to my letter to Marian’s mother.
Slipping off my coat and shoes, I carried the letter into the kitchen, and tore it open.
It was much shorter than the first one and, I felt, less friendly. I wondered if I had given some offence, but I put that aside, because Margery Fisher gave me the name of a Parisian cemetery.
As I read the letter, I felt something warm tap my stockinged feet.
I looked down, and saw that the toes of my brown sock were dark and wet, and for a moment I stood staring stupidly at them, until I saw another drop of blood fall. I turned my hands over and saw I had given myself a large paper cut along the side of the left ring finger. I must have done it as I opened the letter, and in my state of mind not even noticed.
Another drop welled from the cut and slid down my wrist now that I had turned my hands over. I dropped the letter on the table and shoved my finger in my mouth, only now noticing that I was in pain.
With my finger still in my mouth I went to the cupboard under the stairs and awkwardly, with my right hand, fished out the box where I kept first aid; and as I did so I sucked the blood.
I remembered something we’d been told when I was a medical student, that the taste of blood – that supposedly metallic taste – only arises when blood comes into contact with skin, as an oxidation reaction occurs between the fats of the skin and the iron in blood. What then is the natural taste of blood? our lecturer had put to us, telling us it would be different, and I remember darkly wondering how he knew, because who has drunk enough blood to be free of that metallic reaction with the skin?
A strange thing, though, I thought, as I moved back into the kitchen with the first-aid shoebox: why are we happy to taste our own blood, when other bodily fluids we do not rush to taste? And yet to Dante, so Hunter and Marian had told me, these other fluids – mother’s milk, to nourish the newborn; semen, the seed that creates the newborn in the first place – were but the various distillations of that one divine substance, sangue perfetto . Blood was at the heart of it all. At least for Dante, and Aristotle, the source of his theories.
But it made me think: who has not put
Arriving in the city by train, I began to hunt around the Place de Clichy, but I found nothing. No one at Marian’s old address had ever heard of her; Jean, the barman in her local, had moved on too, no one even remembered him, though strangely, in that frustrating way in which memory often behaves, after ten years I had been able to recall his name when before I couldn’t.
I went out to Saint-Germain, to the street where Verovkin had had his practice, and though my heart began to pound even at the end of the road, it was an unfounded fear. The little brass name plaques were still there, but Verovkin’s had gone. There were even four little holes and a rectangular patch of stone of a different colour where it had been, yet that strange nothing comforted me, let me know I was not imagining it all, because it meant he had moved on.
I set out to find him, but I failed.
All my searches came to naught and I had to return to Cambridge before Monday’s round of lectures.
A week slipped by, a week more, and I sulked in an uneasy mood, downcast and angry at my impotence. I ghosted my way through my working day and every night I sat in a chair in my living room, staring at the hearth, though there was no fire lit, listening to the Third Programme and whatever it chose to broadcast into my home.
I heard none of it. All I could hear and see in my mind were a series of voices and images, memories of Marian, and dreams of what might have become my life, had she not been killed. This state of affairs continued without an apparent end, until one night when I got home from work and found, at last, a reply to my letter to Marian’s mother.
Slipping off my coat and shoes, I carried the letter into the kitchen, and tore it open.
It was much shorter than the first one and, I felt, less friendly. I wondered if I had given some offence, but I put that aside, because Margery Fisher gave me the name of a Parisian cemetery.
As I read the letter, I felt something warm tap my stockinged feet.
I looked down, and saw that the toes of my brown sock were dark and wet, and for a moment I stood staring stupidly at them, until I saw another drop of blood fall. I turned my hands over and saw I had given myself a large paper cut along the side of the left ring finger. I must have done it as I opened the letter, and in my state of mind not even noticed.
Another drop welled from the cut and slid down my wrist now that I had turned my hands over. I dropped the letter on the table and shoved my finger in my mouth, only now noticing that I was in pain.
With my finger still in my mouth I went to the cupboard under the stairs and awkwardly, with my right hand, fished out the box where I kept first aid; and as I did so I sucked the blood.
I remembered something we’d been told when I was a medical student, that the taste of blood – that supposedly metallic taste – only arises when blood comes into contact with skin, as an oxidation reaction occurs between the fats of the skin and the iron in blood. What then is the natural taste of blood? our lecturer had put to us, telling us it would be different, and I remember darkly wondering how he knew, because who has drunk enough blood to be free of that metallic reaction with the skin?
A strange thing, though, I thought, as I moved back into the kitchen with the first-aid shoebox: why are we happy to taste our own blood, when other bodily fluids we do not rush to taste? And yet to Dante, so Hunter and Marian had told me, these other fluids – mother’s milk, to nourish the newborn; semen, the seed that creates the newborn in the first place – were but the various distillations of that one divine substance, sangue perfetto . Blood was at the heart of it all. At least for Dante, and Aristotle, the source of his theories.
But it made me think: who has not put
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