All Souls Read Free Page B

a bracelet. I got up from time to time, partly to peer out at the dark rails in the distance and partly in an attempt to see something more of the woman who sat — with her legs now crossed, now uncrossed — smoking and tapping out that unknown rhythm with her illuminated feet. I took two or three steps in her direction and then returned to my place, having managed to see nothing beyond the English shoes and her ankles, made perfect by the penumbra. At last she got up and walked slowly along the platform, just a couple ofminutes before the slow, sluggish appearance of the delayed train and the announcement by a slurred, amplified voice (with such a marked Indian accent that a foreigner could only guess at what was being said) of the arrival of the train in Didcot and its subsequent stops: Banbury, Leamington, Warwick, Birmingham (or was it Swindon, Chippenham, Bath, Bristol? I can't be bothered to look at the map; my memory contains both series of destinations and perhaps one has now become confused with the other). She remained standing now, swinging her small bag while she waited. I opened the carriage door for her.
    I've completely forgotten her face but not her colours (yellow, blue, pink, white, red), yet I know that during the whole of my youth she was the woman who made the greatest and most immediate impact on me, although I also know that, traditionally, in both literature and real life, such a remark can only be made of women whom young men never actually meet. I can't remember now how I got talking to her, nor what we talked about during the less than half-hour journey between Didcot and Oxford. Perhaps we didn't even have a proper conversation but just exchanged three or four casual remarks. On the other hand, I do remember that, although not young enough to be a student, she was still very young and therefore not particularly elegant, and that the collar of her raincoat was open just enough for me to see the pearl necklace (cultured or real I couldn't say) which, in the fashion of a few years back, the best-groomed English girls thought the thing to wear even though the rest of their outfit was informal or apparently casual (she herself was neat rather than elegant). The other thing I remember about that woman, with her bobbed hair and forgotten features, was that she looked as if she'd just stepped out of the 1930s. Perhaps to Will the porter all women looked like that on the days he found himself in that particular decade. Anyway, whatever it was we talked about, it was not personal enough for me to ascertain any concrete facts about her. Perhaps herclear eyes finally closed with tiredness and I didn't dare do anything to prevent it. Perhaps during that thirty-minute journey my desire to look at her was stronger than my curiosity or my capacity for conjecture. Or perhaps we spoke only of Didcot, of the dark, cold station we'd left behind and to which we would both have to return. Like me she got off at Oxford but, since I was unable to do any preparatory groundwork, I couldn't even offer to share my taxi with her.
    For the next ten days, I walked all over Oxford with the aim or rather with the unconscious hope of meeting her again, which was not that improbable assuming she'd not just gone there on a visit but lived in Oxford. I spent even more time in the streets than usual and with every day that passed her face became more blurred, more confused with other faces, as tends to happen with the things one struggles to remember, with all those images memory shows no respect for (that is, before which memory does not remain passive). It's no wonder, then, that today I can recall none of her features - just an unfinished portrait, an outline drawing with the colours barely blocked in, not painted -despite my having with certainty seen her a second and, I think, a third and possibly even a fourth time. But the one definite sighting I had of her — ten days after that first encounter — occurred on a terribly