Free All Souls by Javier Marías Page A

long-winded visiting card. The worst of it is that he never gets beyond that because no one will ever give the poor chap a second chance."
    'That was hardly the worst part...," I began, but Cromer-Blake, who clearly considered that the best part of those high tables consisted in large measure in the after-dinner postmortems, left me no space to tell him what I thought had been the worst part.
    "Oh, the worst part was Dayanand," he said.
    I was going to mention the Warden's salacious and reckless behaviour and take the opportunity to ask Cromer-Blake about Clare and Edward Bayes, but that clearly held neither novelty nor interest for him. I watched him taking tiny sips of port, his long legs crossed, the skirts of his gown cascading about them, his black figure crowned in white and framed by shelves full of books in Spanish and English, as if his own attitude, his appearance, his posture and his surroundings were nothing more than an aesthetic disguise. But he wasn't at all a ridiculous figure and I thought: "Women and any of the feelings they might arouse have no importance for Cromer-Blake, even when they might well be the mother-, father- or even daughter-figure he needs. For, indispensable though those figures are throughout one's whole life, they're incapable of causing conflicts or major upsets and are, therefore, unworthy of after-dinner comment. Clare Bayes might well be such a figure for Cromer-Blake whereas for me she could be so, at best, only very incidentally or only if she one day definitively ceased to be that other figure, whatever conflictive, disturbing identity I decided or rather will decide to attribute to her. One's enemies, on the other hand, are worthy of these exhaustive, obsessive after-dinner commentaries. One's greatest enemies are those who are also one's greatest friends. Cromer-Blake has always introduced Dayanand, the Indian doctor, as a great friend which, of course, equips him -indeed is the ideal qualification - to become the most bitter ofenemies. As for the Warden, Cromer-Blake is doubtless used to him by now."
    "I didn't get a chance to talk to him."
    "So much the better for you. Didn't you notice the way he kept looking at us all through supper?"
    "I certainly did. I was on the receiving end of one of his scorching looks; I suppose he didn't approve of my overt admiration of your friend Clare any more than he did of the Warden's."
    "I don't think that's what it was about. He glowered at all three of us, at the Warden, at you and me. You don't imagine he cares what His Lordship gets up to at these suppers, do you? He's been much worse than that: once, during dessert, he insisted on decorating the bosom of the Dean of York's wife with a necklace made out of mandarin segments. It happened in plain view of everyone there, we didn't know where to put ourselves, but no one said or did anything to let on that any of us had even noticed our imaginative Warden's sudden interest in the ornamental possibilities of fruit. The Dean, it must be said, showed astonishing sang-froid, fortitude and possibly restraint, observing the scene from the other end of the table with an impartial eye, almost as if he could only see the positive side of the affair, as if they were helping him out with some future task or furnishing him with a good idea. The next day Dayanand laughed out loud every time he remembered the Dean of York's profound impassivity and the even more praiseworthy example set by his buxom lady wife, who allowed herself to be hung with jewels, offering no more than a blushing smile and a few demure words of protest. And do you imagine that Clare didn't know what she was doing when she chose to wear that particular dress? Winding up His Lordship is one of our oldest pastimes. No, Dayanand was glowering at you because you were my guest tonight and at the Warden because he knows that at the moment I'm doing him a few favours, or rather, we're doing each other a few favours. He and I have been working