All Souls by Javier Marias

Author:Javier Marias [Marias, Javier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

also at times plain Fytton Armstrong or J.G. or even just G, has his eyes closed now, with no expression visible in them. The folds of skin beneath them are now unmistakably bags, the lines across his forehead are muddled (his cranium grown convex) and he looks as though he had thicker eyelashes now, perhaps just the effect of those sealed shut eyelids. His hair appears white — but that might just be because the mask is of white plaster — and his hairline has receded a little since the 1940s, the boundary of his youth, since the war against the Afrika Korps. The

moustache looks thicker but more flaccid, it's simultaneously bristling and limp, that of a retired soldier grown weary now of grooming it. His nose has grown larger and broader, his cheeks flabby, the whole face is puffy, with a false plumpness, with despair. He has a double chin. There's not the slightest doubt that he is dead.

But it was with this final face that he must have wandered the streets of London, wearing one of those coats or jackets that beggars always manage to obtain. He would have brandished bottles and, to the incredulity of his peers, pointed out in the bargain boxes of Charing Cross Road books he had written but that he could not now afford to buy. He would tell them about Tunis and Algeria, about Italy and Egypt and about India. Much to their amusement, he would declare himself to be the King of Redonda. It was with that face that he slept on benches in parks or went into hospital, as that dictionary specialising in the literature of horror and the fantastic said, and with that face he would perhaps have been incapable of holding out the hand that had wielded a pen and piloted aircraft. Perhaps, as British beggars tend to be, he was proud and fierce, brutal and shy, menacing and arrogant, and would not have known how to beg for himself. He was doubtless a drunk and at the end of his life he did not spend years in Italy but only a few weeks in the Abruzzi, in Vasto, for one final drunken binge of which I know nothing. "One final drunken binge", that's what it said in the letter from the man in Nashville with whom I've had no further contact. There was no Gawsworth to save Gawsworth, no promising, enthusiastic young writer to try to bring him to his senses and make him write again (perhaps because there's nothing very admirable about his work and no one wanted him to continue), to go and beg and wheedle a pension out of the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was once an elected member, the youngest ever. There was no woman, of the many he had known, to curb his wanderings or accompany him on them. That's what I believe, anyway. Where do those British-born or colonial women live? Where did they find their last resting

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