The Memory of Love Read Free

own rest . Julius. It had been a habit of his, typical of the man, to enter marginalia into a borrowed book. I closed the page, took a few minutes to bring control to my breathing. I leaned over the desk and let the book drop into the cardboard box by the side of the desk.
    The next volume I picked up was Lethbridge Banbury’s book on these parts. Now this one was actually worth something. A handsome deep-red volume. On the cover a gold-engraved image of an elephant and a palm tree. Hand-cut leaves. Black-and-white illustrated plates, each one protected by a leaf of tracing paper.
    I can quote the first lines by heart, still: Why I went to S is neither here nor there: perhaps I took that step from that insatiable wish to ‘see the world’, which so ardently possesses many Englishmen; or perhaps I was actuated by an ambitious desire of obtaining promotion in a service in which success is popularly supposed to come specially to those who depart from the beaten track in search of it .
    A tutor who knew my love of books gave it to me, a visiting fellow from a Scottish university. A first edition, published in 1888. It arrived in the post some months after he completed his research and sailed out. I remember that when he drank he liked to recite a rhyme, one about the last colonial Governor.
Beresford Stuke makes me puke,
But in the Protectorate
they expectorate .

    I laughed to humour him. And later again because he would urge me into drinking, behaving as though sobriety on the part of either of us was an insult.
    That January evening I watched her, she and her husband. They moved through the party with ease, never alone for more than a few moments. Once I stood on the fringes of a group, beyond the edges of the circle, out of the light but so close I could have reached out and touched her. Her husband was recounting some incident, there was laughter – from everyone, except me. I hadn’t been following his words. Instead I’d been watching her. Watching her as she in turn watched him. Our eyes met once. She smiled and looked away.
    I remembered later where I’d seen him before. One lunchtime in the lecture theatre, a meeting convened by the students. To discuss the expulsion of one of their number, as I recall. I had been sent by my dean and took a seat in the back. My presence went unremarked, which suited me. A couple of paragraphs typed up and placed in the Dean’s pigeonhole. Duty done.
    In the minutes before the meeting was officially convened I noticed how they gathered around him, the students, breathless and eager. Some way into the meeting the speaker called him to the stage. At first he was reluctant, smiling and waving a piece of paper as if to dismiss the notion out of hand. At the murmured insistence of the room he rose to his feet, suddenly energised, jumped on the stage and delivered a few words. He stood with his elbow on the lectern, leaning forward, gazing directly into the faces of the audience members. The air trembled with the sound of his voice. A flurry of excitement. Clapping, like birds taking off.
    What was it he had said to them? It’s gone.
    I spent the rest of the morning and the best part of the afternoon searching. My search was, by necessity, both slow and painstaking. When Babagaleh arrived back from the mosque, I asked him.
    ‘Where are my notebooks?’
    In answer he gazed at me, as was his way, his first instinct to conceal all knowledge, all evidence of intellectual process, to turn his expression into a smooth rock face upon which no accusation could gain purchase until he knew exactly where my question was heading. He left the room and returned with a cardboard box marked Milo Milk .
    ‘Where were they? Why did you move them?’
    ‘Storeroom, Master.’ He gazed at me, a look of blank innocence.
    ‘On the desk, please.’ I could no longer afford to become overheated. I knew it. Babagaleh knew it too.
    That night I sat up late, going through my notebooks. There was no power;