The Professor of Truth Read Free Page A

kitchen felt as hot as a laundry. It even looked a little like one as I had clothes drying on the pulley above our heads. I had taken off my gloves and jacket, but left on my boots because I felt that in my socks I would somehow be more vulnerable. The American hadn’t taken his boots off either. He’d removed his coat and laid it across another chair. He kept the woollen hat on, but pushed it back to reveal part of a tall, sloping forehead. He was very thin: the coat had bulked him out greatly. A beard that hardly was a beard flecked his grey, gaunt cheeks. His hands and fingers were long and bony. He wore a dark-blue ribbed jersey with a round neck, out of which his own neck grew like the trunk of a scraggy tree. The eyes were black and intense. He had the look of a man who might recently have returned from a long expedition, in the Antarctic perhaps, on which many things had gone wrong.
    His name was Nilsen. He’d had the grace at least to step aside and let me open my own door and go in first, and I’d turned and told him that if he was coming in he should introduce himself first. “Ted Nilsen,” he said. I put the “Ted” to the back of my mind at once. I didn’t want to be on first-name terms. I wanted some distance between us.
    Nilsen looked around the kitchen but he didn’t speak. He waited. I thought it likely that he had spent many hours of his life not speaking, waiting. In that respect, we were alike. Our feet pooled snowmelt on the linoleum.
    “You telephoned,” I said.
    “Yes, I did.”
    “To see if I was here.”
    “That’s right.”
    “You can’t have been far away.”
    “No, not far.”
    He wasn’t too voluble. Just when I felt that I would have to say something else, Nilsen spoke again.
    “I was out at the University this morning.”
    “You wouldn’t have found me there. I’m on sabbatical.”
    “I know that.” He was a man, I sensed, whose whole existence focused on knowing things about other people. “I had a look around, but they were closing the campus. Because of the weather.” He said this as if it were just the prissy kind of attitude you’d expect. “I got the last bus back into town and had a look around there instead. Then I came to see you.”
    Another pause. Then, “A town like this, you get a sense of continuity from the buildings. I went into that old church up by the castle. That must be, what, four hundred years old?”
    “More,” I said. Then, like a grudging tour guide, I added, “The nave dates from the fifteenth century.”
    “Another world,” Nilsen said. He glanced up, as if he were seeing not the clothes pulley but ecclesiastical arches. “I spent some time in that church. It was very quiet. You know the thing I like? When you’re in a place like that, you’re on your own but you’re not alone. You hear occasional footsteps, maybe a hushed conversation, disembodied voices, you’re aware of somebody else in a pew, head bowed, praying. Shared solitude. I like that.”
    I poured the coffee. We both took it black, no sugar. I didn’t offer lunch. I didn’t so much as break open a packet of biscuits.
    “Although in fact I was alone,” Nilsen said. “Just pushed the door and went in and had the place to myself.”
    “Can we get to the point?” I said.
    The dark eyes looked out from under the long forehead. It was like being watched from some shaded observation post. He said—and it wasn’t clear if he was answering or ignoring my question—“It’s important to experience moments of quiet intensity. It helps to clarify things.”
    Perhaps he wanted to be asked what things. If so, I disappointed him. But probably he didn’t need any prompting. He was going to have his say anyway.
    “The point,” he said. “Okay, let’s get to it.”
    The bony fingers of his right hand made a claw round his coffee cup. He seemed somewhat fascinated that the fingers belonged to him. He did not drink from the cup. He said, “Are you ready to meet your