disappeared. Nobody in the house could remember seeing her lately, and her bed, according to Mrs Sharp, the caretaker’s wife, had not been slept in all week.
When more than eight days had passed in this manner, Robert found that he could stand it no longer: he would have to leave the house and look for her on campus. An hour and a half’s exhausted trawling of the Library, the Arts Centre and the Union building yielded nothing, however, and finally he took a bus into town and made for the only other place where a student might conceivably be found on a wet Saturday morning: the Café Valladon. Here he discovered no customers at all apart from his old friend Terry, sitting in the corner with a chaotic spread of essay notes laid out on the table in front of him.
First-time visitors to the Café tended to expect something quintessentially Gallic and sophisticated, all café noir and pain au chocolat. Instead they found heavy pine tables and benches, old milk bottles thick with candle wax, and walls covered with antique nautical instruments and row upon row of hardback and paperback books purchased from jumble sales. They found almost inedibly chunky oatmeal cakes, slices of granary bread with cheddar cheese and honeyglazed ham, and huge mugs of black coffee and sweet aromatic tea. They found a perpetually dim, cavernous interior, with Slattery sitting behind the counter and never rising to his feet to serve the next customer until he had finished the latest sentence of whichever philosophical volume he was then immersed in. And they usually found, it has to be said, something more vibrant in the way of social and intellectual life than this thin, pasty, earnest-looking film student, who glanced up when Robert entered and signalled his greeting by pushing out his three-quarters-empty mug, grunting, ‘Same again, will you?’ and returning to the contemplation of his papers.
Robert had not seen much of Terry this term, and noticed, when he came back to his table with the refilled mug, that he looked if anything even more unhealthy and bloodless than usual. His eyes were puffy, and as he scribbled away manically on his notepaper he would have to pause every twenty orthirty seconds in order to let out an enormous yawn which would momentarily suspend the operation of all his other faculties. Terry – as Robert had come to know during their two years’ friendship – abhorred sunlight and could only really be happy in one of three locations: the inside of a cinema, the Café Valladon itself (where the habitual gloom suited him down to the ground) and, best of all, within the darkened interior of his own bedroom, which is where he would, by choice, spend most of the day: for it was Terry’s claim, during this period of his life, that he needed an absolute minimum of fourteen hours’ sleep, without which he was good for nothing. Not that he found sleep in any way a relaxing experience, or even that rest was his primary object whenever he sought it out. The business of sleeping was, in his case, tantamount to setting out on a nightly quest, and it was this, presumably, that accounted for the hungry and careworn look which haunted his endlessly tired eyes. For Terry was plagued by dreams: dreams, he insisted, of nearparadisal loveliness; dreams of sun-dappled gardens, heavenly vistas, ambrosial picnics and perfect sexual encounters which somehow combined physical ecstasy with prelapsarian innocence. Dreams which took on the quality of the most pristine and idealized childhood memories, which were beyond the inventive powers of the most fertile, accomplished and assiduous fantasist. Every night he was visited by these dreams. Every night they seduced and tormented him: this much, at least, he knew. But at the same time he was never able to supply any specific details, because it was their peculiar characteristic, every morning, to slip from the reach of his grasping memory in the few fatal seconds it took him to regain
When more than eight days had passed in this manner, Robert found that he could stand it no longer: he would have to leave the house and look for her on campus. An hour and a half’s exhausted trawling of the Library, the Arts Centre and the Union building yielded nothing, however, and finally he took a bus into town and made for the only other place where a student might conceivably be found on a wet Saturday morning: the Café Valladon. Here he discovered no customers at all apart from his old friend Terry, sitting in the corner with a chaotic spread of essay notes laid out on the table in front of him.
First-time visitors to the Café tended to expect something quintessentially Gallic and sophisticated, all café noir and pain au chocolat. Instead they found heavy pine tables and benches, old milk bottles thick with candle wax, and walls covered with antique nautical instruments and row upon row of hardback and paperback books purchased from jumble sales. They found almost inedibly chunky oatmeal cakes, slices of granary bread with cheddar cheese and honeyglazed ham, and huge mugs of black coffee and sweet aromatic tea. They found a perpetually dim, cavernous interior, with Slattery sitting behind the counter and never rising to his feet to serve the next customer until he had finished the latest sentence of whichever philosophical volume he was then immersed in. And they usually found, it has to be said, something more vibrant in the way of social and intellectual life than this thin, pasty, earnest-looking film student, who glanced up when Robert entered and signalled his greeting by pushing out his three-quarters-empty mug, grunting, ‘Same again, will you?’ and returning to the contemplation of his papers.
Robert had not seen much of Terry this term, and noticed, when he came back to his table with the refilled mug, that he looked if anything even more unhealthy and bloodless than usual. His eyes were puffy, and as he scribbled away manically on his notepaper he would have to pause every twenty orthirty seconds in order to let out an enormous yawn which would momentarily suspend the operation of all his other faculties. Terry – as Robert had come to know during their two years’ friendship – abhorred sunlight and could only really be happy in one of three locations: the inside of a cinema, the Café Valladon itself (where the habitual gloom suited him down to the ground) and, best of all, within the darkened interior of his own bedroom, which is where he would, by choice, spend most of the day: for it was Terry’s claim, during this period of his life, that he needed an absolute minimum of fourteen hours’ sleep, without which he was good for nothing. Not that he found sleep in any way a relaxing experience, or even that rest was his primary object whenever he sought it out. The business of sleeping was, in his case, tantamount to setting out on a nightly quest, and it was this, presumably, that accounted for the hungry and careworn look which haunted his endlessly tired eyes. For Terry was plagued by dreams: dreams, he insisted, of nearparadisal loveliness; dreams of sun-dappled gardens, heavenly vistas, ambrosial picnics and perfect sexual encounters which somehow combined physical ecstasy with prelapsarian innocence. Dreams which took on the quality of the most pristine and idealized childhood memories, which were beyond the inventive powers of the most fertile, accomplished and assiduous fantasist. Every night he was visited by these dreams. Every night they seduced and tormented him: this much, at least, he knew. But at the same time he was never able to supply any specific details, because it was their peculiar characteristic, every morning, to slip from the reach of his grasping memory in the few fatal seconds it took him to regain
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