Lonely Hearts

Twenty-Nine

If there was one thing worse to read than computer print-out, it was microfiche. Patel had been moving between the two for hours already, alternating between the main catalogs on the ground floor and the more specialized information that was kept up on the second floor. Annotations spiraled over his notebook: publications, articles, conferences, papers. All against the constant hum of the central heating and, below, the criss-cross of students between the issue counter and short loan, the photocopying machines and the coffee bar.

Patel realized that when he had gone to university, he had been so overjoyed at simply being there, buoyed up by the pride and enthusiasm of his family, that he had never been able to put the experience into any context. The first to arrive at lectures, one of the few to stay behind for the obligatory and bored, “If there are any questions afterwards, of course I’d be very happy…,” Patel had filled block after block of loose-leaf paper without his imagination ever truly becoming engaged. Revising, panicking, he had been unable to read most of his frantic scrawling, had difficulty in remembering the sense of what he could. Fortunately, for his family the degree was enough-he had needed to bribe no fewer than five fellow graduates to obtain sufficient tickets for the ceremony-the grade immaterial.

The police recruitment officer had paid almost as little attention. “One of them bright little buggers, eh?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, not really, sir.”

Patel still flushed at the memory.

He stood in a short, animated queue and tried not to listen to the argument, detailed and specific, the couple in front were having about the relationship between alcohol and orgasms. Sitting with his styrofoam cup of instant coffee and his Kit-Kat, he hoped for a chance remark about Professor Doria, but was unrewarded. A student with blond hair sleek as a swimming cap took her place in the queue, smack in Patel’s eyeline. A university scarf was wrapped several times around the top of her short blue duffle coat; there appeared to be nothing below the thigh-length hem but long legs and yellow and white running-shoes. Chocolate melted over Patel’s fingers as he hurried away, back to the stacks.

“I was wondering, sir, well, about a transfer…” Naylor stood back from Resnick’s desk, feet together, fingers fidgeting with the notebook held against his stomach.

“Best give Graham Souness a ring,” Resnick said, not looking up. “He’s buying anything that moves for Rangers these days.”

Naylor blinked. The last thing he’d expected or wanted had been a joke-that had been a joke, hadn’t it?

“It’s Debbie, sir. You see, now that she’s…now that the baby’s…well, it’s a matter of where’s the best place for it to grow up and…”

Resnick contained a sigh and set aside his pen. Sleep was something he hadn’t had a lot of, his working hours seemed to be yielding less and less time, the superintendent was ever more disinclined to let him go his own way.

“It’s a backwater, Charlie,” Skelton had said. “That’s my worry.”

“Up the creek again without a bloody paddle!” Colin Rich had laughed.

Now this.

“I don’t want you to think I’m not happy here,” Naylor was stumbling on. “I am, and I’ve learnt a lot, from you, I mean, and if it was up to me…”

“Kevin, Kevin,” Resnick waved him into silence. “A minute. All right?”

“Yes, sir.” Naylor was looking at the far wall, the words he hadn’t been able to get out continuing to steeplechase around his head.

“First off, if it’s a matter of loyalties, you owe more to this kid of yours than to me. Clear?”

Naylor nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Second, there’s a specific transfer procedure and, while it’s good manners to inform me, I’m not the person you should be talking to at this stage.”

“Sir.”

“And, thirdly, and for what it’s worth, what you and Debbie might give some thought to is this-maybe the where of bringing kids up is less important than the how.”

“Yes, sir.” Naylor’s toes were wriggling inside his shoes. What had he been doing, coming into the inspector’s office and starting all of this?

“Now,” Resnick said, matter-of-factly, “how’ve you been getting on with that list of Doria’s assignations?”

Lynn Kellogg had found a pair of bottle-green dungarees near the bottom of her wardrobe; a bulky sweater that, when you held it to the face, still carried the smell of poultry; a soft black beret; worn-down ankle boots and a pair of striped leg warmers. All right, it wasn’t what this year’s students were wearing, not exactly, but it had that magpie quality which told of jumble sales and hand-me-downs. After which, the first students she got into conversation with all had hooray voices, sports cars their daddies had bought them as eighteenth-birthday presents, and were actually terribly disappointed not to be at Girton.

A couple of days of drifting along corridors and about the campus, sitting in the canteen over pie, chips and beans, and apricot crumble, browsing the shelves in the bookshop, hadn’t yielded much more than a sense of frustration. She heard Professor Doria’s name directly once, loitering by the Linguistics section. The student, tall with bad breath, responded to the first of her smiled questions, then bolted midway through the second, leaving an unpaid-for pile of books in his wake.

Linguistics and the After-Text. New York and London. Oxford University Press, 1975.

“A New Look at Poetry and Repression.” Critical Inquiry, v (1979).

“Coming out of the Unconscious.” Modern Language Notes, xcv (1980).

Nietzsche and Woman: Provocation and Closure. Chicago, III, and London. University of Chicago Press, 1983.

“(You said all you wanted was) A Sign, My Love. Deconstruction and Popular Culture.” University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1984.

Deconstruction and Defacement. New York and London. Methuen, 1986.

Patel took a break from Doria’s list of publications and rested his head in his arms. The words were beginning to jump and blur. Until now he’d been the only one of his family not to need glasses. He wondered about taking a break; the rain had eased off and he could walk between the trees and down the hill to the Sports Center, take a shower. He ought to do something before two-fifteen. Doria was lecturing to the combined second- and third-year groups of his course and Patel had every intention of being there. He had been into the student shop and bought a new A4 pad for the occasion.

“What I don’t understand, sir,” Naylor was saying, “is what he’s doing with someone like this-what’s her name? — Sally Oakes? I mean, I know there’s nothing wrong with working in the Virgin Megastore, but that’s all she does, and on top of that she’s…”

“Young enough to be his daughter,” Resnick finished for him. “It isn’t unknown, Kevin. Older men and younger women, young women and older men.”

“I know, sir. But take a look at the others. A fifty-year-old Anglican deaconess and this one, a Local Studies librarian who spends all her spare time clambering over rocks in the Peak District, and the manageress of one of them posh clothes shops along Bridlesmith Gate.” He wrinkled his nose, perplexed. “There’s no pattern to it.”

“Likes variety, the professor.”

Naylor pushed two sheets of typing paper, sellotaped together, across Resnick’s desk. “Look here, sir. Eighteen months, four different women, each of them he takes out at least three times.”

“Sally Oakes, five,” observed Resnick. “That’s the most.”

“He’s not waiting until he’s through with one…”

“Or they’re through with him…”

“Before he’s on to the next. Look at the way they overlap.”

“With Oakes threaded through the middle, neat as you like, once every, what, six weeks?”

“Just about, sir.”

Resnick sighed and leaned backwards, taking the chair on to its rear legs. “The last time she saw him was between two and three months back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why nothing more?”

“She told him she didn’t want to see him again.”

“She told him?”

“Yes, sir,” said Naylor positively.

“Did she say why?”

“Got a regular bloke, sir. Didn’t see any way she could go on meeting the professor.”

“Did she say how he took that?”

Naylor’s eyes darted quickly away. “No, sir.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t worry.” Resnick stood up and walked round the desk. How long was the gap between Sally Oakes finishing their intermittent relationship and the first murder? Without working it out exactly, Resnick figured it would be somewhere in the region of six weeks.

“Well done, young Kevin,” he said. “You’ve done good work. Next thing, I think we should go and have another chat with Sally Oakes.” And he turned away to avoid the most excessive of Naylor’s blushes.

The lecture room was steeply sloped, with curved rows of bench seats and writing surfaces focused upon a blackboard, a screen, twin easels peppered with a flourish of names in many colors, a podium. The room was three-quarters full: students whose pain of comprehension showed on their faces, those who wrote continuously, others for whom the briefest of notes sufficed; a balding young man with acne and an Aran sweater spent the whole hour designing an intricate spider’s web with the finest of art pens; a girl, redheaded, front and center, kept her eyes closed, an expression of bliss on her face.

Patel’s attention seldom shifted from Doria.

The professor’s technique was to speak in moderate tones from the podium, referring from time to time to a stack of five by three cards, each one moved to the bottom once used. This was interrupted again and again by a sudden swirl towards the matching easels, a name writ large across an A1 sheet, left for several moments before being torn away, screwed into a ball and hurled aside. Lists of books and articles that had been on the board when the lecture began were pointed at, prodded, underlined, extolled as essential. At inconsistent intervals, Doria deserted the podium to sit on or lean along the front bench, his delivery becoming more familiar as he dispensed anecdotes about the Late Quartets of Beethoven, the solos of Thelonius Monk, stories by Borges, Karl Schwitters, the pervasive influence of Brian Clough upon English football in general and the Forest midfield in particular.

Along with the others, Patel enjoyed these, laughed and at the same time struggled to understand their relevance.

Once, moving swiftly away from one of these brief alightings, Doria allowed his hand to brush against the red hair of the student seated in the middle. Patel could not see her face clearly, could only imagine that, if anything, it became more blissful.

“Remember, for Derrida, ‘writing’ has a special meaning. For him, it denotes ‘free play,’ that part of any and all systems of communication which cannot finally be pinned down, which are ultimately undecidable. Writing, for Derrida, does not codify, it does not limit. Rather, triumphantly, wonderfully, it displaces meaning, it dismantles order, defies both the safe and the sane. It is,” Doria sang out, one arm aloft, “excess!”

The last word echoed from the ceiling before fading to a slow silence. Seats went up, students shuffled out. At the podium Doria was reassembling his note cards into sets and placing each within a different-colored envelope.

Patel’s head was buzzing. He looked at the top sheet of his pad, at phrases he had written down because they had struck him as important without clearly understanding why. It had been exhilarating, as he imagined skiing must be, diving beneath the Barrier Reef.

The girl with red hair had thanked the professor softly for his lecture but if he heard her then he gave no sign.

Patel was one of only three or four students dawdling behind. He was almost at the bottom step and heading towards the door when Doria’s voice stopped him.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you at these classes before.”

“No,” said Patel with deference. “No, that’s correct.”

“You are not taking one of my courses?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Another in the department, perhaps?”

“Mechanical engineering,” said Patel hopefully.

Doria was looking at him keenly, smiling now with his eyes. “I have long argued for a less rigid approach to inter-disciplinary studies,” said Doria with a tone of regret. “Alas, breaking down such rigid barriers…” He smiled at Patel suddenly. “What we want is a deconstructive approach to the formalism of the academic syllabus, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” said Patel. “Yes, I would.”

He was conscious of the professor’s eyes watching him to the door and he made himself turn, careful to take his time. “Thank you for the lecture, Professor Doria. It was really interesting.”

Doria made a short bow of the head and shoulders and Patel left the room.