All Souls by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online

timing on the part of their neighbours and been left momentarily with no one to talk to, a most unfortunate, not to say vexatious, situation in which to find oneself in Oxford. Oxford dons are, therefore, expert at simultaneously talking, eating, drinking and keeping track of the time, the first three activities at extraordinary speed and the fourth with great precision, for, according to a sequence ordained by the Latin phrases and gavel blows of the capricious Warden, the stewards will speedily remove the plates and wineglasses of all the guests regardless of whether the former are scraped clean, empty, half full or even untouched. I hardly ate a thing at my first high tables, preoccupied as I was with counting the minutes and keeping up a pretence at conversation in strict symmetrically duodecimal time to my right and my left. Course after course, the stewards wrested from me both my untouched plate and my wineglass, the latter in fact empty, indeed drained to the lees, since, plunged as I was into chronological and conversationaldespair, the only thing I did manage to do in between talking and clockwatching was to drink incontinently.
    At my second high table, Clare, seated almost opposite me, observed me out of the corner of her eye, half amused at and half pitying my despair at the disappearance of yet another plate groaning with food that I hadn't even had time to look at let alone eat, despite my increasing drunkenness and growing hunger (I can picture myself now, knife and fork in hand, both implements in a state of permanently frustrated readiness, for every time I went to cut into or spear a piece of food I would remember to look at my watch or notice how the guest to my right was beginning to mutter unintelligibly, curses and swear words no doubt, or to eat more noisily than usual – I'm sure on occasions I even heard someone gargling - to warn me that his turn with his previous conversational partner was over and he was now impatiently waiting for me). During the first stage of the supper there were three, four or five main courses (according to the munificence or meanness of the college) and, as I have said, the consumption of these took about two hours, a time dictated more than anything by the long pauses between each course (during which we were left utterly alone with our glasses of wine). Thus, during these first two hours one was condemned to speak to only two people, of whom one - seated to your left - was always the colleague who had invited you whilst the other was determined by fate or, rather, by the usually malevolent intentions of the Warden who was in charge of seating arrangements. At that particular supper my host was Cromer-Blake, and he warned me that to my right I would have a promising young economist whose main defect (at least at high table) was that he had only one topic of conversation, the subject of his recent doctoral thesis.
    "But what was his thesis about?" I asked while we searched and jostled for our place in the queue before going into the refectory.
    As usual before answering a question, giving an opinion or telling an anecdote, Cromer-Blake stroked his greying hair and replied with a smile: "Well, let's just say it's most unusual. I'm sure you'll have more than enough time to find out."
    The economist, Halliwell by name, was an obese young man with a bright red face and a small, sparse military moustache, either premature or being given an overhasty first public airing, who showed not a flicker of curiosity about my person or my country (my country being normally an excellent subject to fall back on for high-table talk) so that I had to initiate a polite interrogation which, after only four questions, led, as I had been warned, into the extraordinarily original topic of his doctoral thesis, namely: a certain and, it would seem, unique cider tax that existed in England between 1760 and 1767.
    "It was just a tax on cider then?"
    "Just on cider," responded the young economist