All Souls by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online Page B

veil whenever he managed to tear his eyes away from Clare's décolletage and face), the offensive lustfulness of his gaze was obvious to mine, which, when it detached itself from Clare's face or décolletage, was manifestly agonised (because of the hard time Halliwell was giving me) or furious (at the animal lust I saw mirrored in the Warden's eyes). The main problem, however, was that Clare's own gaze was not totally English either, perhaps because (as I learned later) of a childhood spent in Delhi and in Cairo where one looks at others neither as one does in the British Isles nor as one does on the Continent; and so she was in a position to perceive not only the bestially salacious gaze of the Warden but also my own admiringly sexual one. The second (though minor) problem was that at the other end of the table, on my side and next to the other head of table, a famous literary scholar close to retirement age of whom I was very fond and of whom I will speak later, was her husband Edward Bayes, like Cromer-Blake a member of the host college; and although his gaze was always purely insular, it's possible that the fact that the only two unveiled gazes at the table were directed at his wife might in turn have obliged him to remove the habitual veil from hisown gaze in order to keep abreast of the desires, untamed or otherwise, of others. But I'm not being quite accurate, for, given his position on the same side of the table as me, while Edward Bayes could not see my gaze at all, he had an uninterrupted view of Clare's and the Warden's. He must have noticed that at times his wife was on the verge of blushing but presumably attributed this to the wine or to the drooling and unworthy attentions of the Warden, a gigantic man with strangely tight skin - I imagined him as being completely hairless - and now much the worse for drink. And if Edward Bayes noticed his wife occasionally looking in my direction, he must have thought she was looking at her friend Cromer-Blake (seated, as I have said, immediately to my left) in search of protection or at least complicity. But there was a fourth gaze too - possibly a fifth if Edward Bayes' own had in fact dispensed with its layer of English tulle - that had no reason to remain veiled, and that was the gaze of Dayanand, the doctor of Indian origin who was Cromer-Blake's friend, seated to the left of Clare and therefore immediately opposite me. Although he had lived in Oxford for decades, his eyes retained the luminous, diaphanous quality of his native land and, in the context of that supper, they seemed positively aflame. Every five or six minutes, whilst he passed calmly from his conversation with Clare to a laconic silence with the one guest not wearing a gown (a hideously ugly lecturer in mineralogy from the University of Leiden whose gaze, despite being foreign, was also veiled by the two great rectangular magnifying glasses he wore in the guise of spectacles), his black, rather liquid eyes would rest on me for a moment and look me up and down with a clinical expression, as if my way of looking openly to right and left but above all at Clare were a symptom of some well-known complaint, easily cured, but long eradicated from those lands. It was impossible to hold Dayanand's gaze and every time my eyes met his, I had no choice but to turn back to Halliwell and pretend I was still absorbed by his exhaustingchatter. Dayanand's eyes flashed fire when he turned them in Clare's direction and the Warden at the head of the table thus entered his field of vision; the latter, however, experienced no difficulty in holding Dayanand's gaze, since quite probably - believing himself unassailable - he barely noticed it. The Warden, forced to talk to his immediate neighbours, who visibly irritated him (to his right sat the warden of a women's college, a real harpy; to his left, a supercilious, pontificating luminary of the social sciences called Atwater), gradually began to free himself from the bonds of