Free The Evangeline by D. W. Buffa Page B

glove. He waited while Marlowe thought about his answer. There was always a pause, a silence, while Marlowe took in fully everything you had said. Darnell was convinced that he had unusual powers of concentration. In the months they had known each other—or rather, because that implied a degree of openness, of candour, that didn’t exist, in the months in which they had had occasional conversations—Darnell could not remember a single instance in which he had been asked to repeat something he had said. There was something slow and steady and reliable, something you could trust, about Marlowe. But beyond that, there was something deep and impenetrable about him. He would never lie, but there were things about him, secrets, at which you could only guess.
    ‘We had no agreement among us,’ said Marlowe. ‘None that was ever spoken.’
    Marlowe reached across his chest to tug the lapel of his thick tweed coat. He had been in Darnell’s office at least half a dozen times before, but each time, shortly after he settled into the chair on the other side of the lawyer’s desk, his eyes moved around the room and the same quiet smile broke the even line of his mouth.
    ‘Outside—where the others work—it’s bright as day, and at every desk there is a computer and everyone is busy all the time. But in here, it’s dark and quiet and I’ve never seen a machine. All I see are books, thousands of them, and here and there a picture, a photograph, nothing else.’
    Darnell nodded towards the wall.‘That one has been there since the day I started practice: my class photograph. We looked older than law school graduates look now. In part because we were— most of us had been in the service before we started. The other reason is that in those days we all wore suits. There were nearly two hundred in that class, and only five of them women. All of the women, and nearly all of the others, are now either retired or dead, a distinction without a difference, it always seemed to me.’
    Marlowe nodded in agreement. ‘I never could understand why anyone would want to stop what they did, just to sit around and watch the years slip by. I like this room. It’s like a ship: quiet, dark, out of the way.’
    ‘Out of the way?’
    ‘Of other people and what they do.’
    ‘Is that why you decided to spend your life at sea?’
    Marlowe rose from the chair and walked over to the bookshelves that, from the floor to the ceiling, covered every wall but that which faced the street below.‘I might have been a lawyer if I’d been any good at school. I like to read. It’s what I do when I’m on a ship at night and I don’t have the watch. It’s the way I spend most of the time I have in port—find the library and if I don’t know the language, try to learn it. I read whatever I can find that I think might improve my mind.’
    Marlowe picked at random one of the thick volumes of reported cases, the appellate opinions that interpret and decide the law. He held it in his large hands with the reverence of a serious reader, the respect owed to written words meant to last. ‘They didn’t think I could learn anything when I was a boy in school. I was always falling behind the others.’ Marlowe thumbed through a few more pages, intrigued by the division of the text into double columns.‘I could never get it into my head that you had to move on to the next thing before you had completely understood the thing on which you had started.’
    He closed the book and carefully put it back in place. ‘Time is the trouble—always is. Everyone else was studying the next bunch of problems, while I was still trying to understand why I had gotten a couple wrong on the math test we had had the week before. In the sixth grade, I got tired of it and quit.’
    William Darnell gazed out the window. A shaft of sunlight cut through the thick morning fog. From a few blocks away came the mournful racket of a cable car, tolling its bell, as it jolted its way up