Vanishing by Gerard Woodward

Author:Gerard Woodward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

‘Mr Brill, I have called you in here because I am rather concerned about what has been happening in the life room recently. Can you offer an explanation?’

There were more books in the professor’s study than I had been expecting. One entire wall was given over to shelving, and the mostly small, fussy-looking leather-bound volumes gave the room a sterile atmosphere, in a way that I have never observed books to do in any other room.

‘How do you mean, sir?’

Professor Schwabe did not seem comfortable with enforcing disciplinary matters. His notorious stammer was aggravated by the tension of the situation. When this became obstructive, he would take up his pencil and scribble something on a sketchpad on his desk, a quick rendering of himself issuing the desired word in a speech bubble.

‘Well, I’ve been told that on two separate occasions you have been taken seriously ill, that on one occasion you f-fainted, and in so doing sustained for yourself a nasty gash on the chin, whose scar is still quite distinct, I can now see,’ the professor peered at me, ‘and that on the second, you were overcome with nausea to the extent that a major clean-up operation had to be carried out and the life class postponed for the afternoon. Now, are you telling me that those incidents did not occur?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So – an explanation?’

‘I can only say that, by pure chance, I have felt a bit queasy on both my sessions in the life room so far. I would suggest it is something to do with the ventilation, and those paraffin stoves …’

‘That would only satisfy me as an explanation if other students had been similarly afflicted. Yet they haven’t, neither now nor in the past. In fact I cannot recall a single incident, in all the years that I have been here, when a student has been taken ill, in the way that you have, quite so suddenly and violently.’

We were silent for a few moments while I tried to think of something to say, but could do nothing except shrug and smile in an apologetic way.

‘I’ve been looking at your record,’ he said, lifting a buff cardboard folder. ‘There is no mention of any medical predispositions. I think it is very unlikely that your adverse reactions are anything to do with the air supply in that room. I am more concerned that you have some sort of moral queasiness about the arrangements there.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Well, let me put it this way. We are not living in Caravaggio’s Italy or Homer’s Athens. For the last hundred years the sight of a naked body has been rarer than at almost any other period in human history. You are more likely to see a ghost or a visitor from another world than you are to see a naked human being, outside the confines of a marriage – and even then the spectacle is not necessarily c-commonplace. As such it can be a shock to the system when one is confronted by such a sight.

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