Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? Read online

  20

  In other words, there was more to be said about this role. The things that were to be said were clarifications of and elaborations upon previous thoughts; they were, in other words, Marguerite trying to tie up loose ends from his earlier thinking. He thought of this tying up of loose ends as a form of self-cross-examination. His thoughts would, he thought, be cross-examined at some point in the future by someone other than himself, by someone less kind to himself than himself; now, in order to prepare for this future cross-examination, he brought his mind back to a number of his earlier thoughts as a means of trying to get right to the bottom of them.

  The first thought that he set out to cross-examine was that he ‘knew from previous observations of conductors, and not just on buses . . . that as soon as they entered a compartment or deck that they would say something along the lines of “All tickets please!” ’

  Had he or had he not thought that thought previously?

  He had.

  How did he have access to that thought again now, in exactly the same formulation (leaving aside the ellipsis)?

  Perhaps he had a photographic memory. Perhaps the phrase had been stored somewhere for easy retrieval and editing, eg ease of insertion of the ellipsis in place of a previous phrase that did not pertain to the current self-cross-examination. Perhaps he had employed an attractive (flame haired, he imagined, for some reason, not in the literal sense of flames but in the sense of red-haired) female stenographer who could somehow note down his thoughts as he thought them and could present these thoughts back to him and to that part of himself engaged in this self-cross-examination so that there was an agreed starting point for both sides in their examination, which was only fair.

  Leaving aside the means by which he re-accessed his thoughts in the exact same formulation that they had been thought previously (except . . . as before), he now moved on, with the incisive precision for which he is renowned (this is still Marguerite, remember; even though we have been taken into this new form of ‘dialogue’, we must remember that both sides are, in fact, Marguerite, so both will be characteristic of him, both will have his investigative qualities, as, indeed, does this parenthesis), to the word ‘deck’ in the passage of thought quoted previously.

  What was the passage again?

  He was perhaps playing a trick on himself here, perhaps testing whether he could retrieve the passage for a second time in exactly the same form as that in which it had originally been thought. This he did now: he had thought that he ‘knew from previous observations of conductors and not just on buses . . . that as soon as they entered a compartment or deck that they would say something along the lines of “All tickets please!” ’ This second retrieval perhaps prevented further challenge in this area. Perhaps he would extrapolate from there to the conclusion that he had infinite, that is, perfect repeated retrieval, at least of this phrase, putting to one side catastrophes such as earthquakes, data corruption, or typhoons for the time being.

  What did he mean by ‘deck’ in that context?

  He had extrapolated from the upper and lower deck of a bus to a generic term ‘deck’ in relation to public transport as a whole.

  Would he hold that where a deck existed on a public transport vehicle the potential existed for the conductor or conductress to enter that deck in the way thought?

  He would.

  Would he include the cross-channel ferry in the class of public transport vehicle?

  He could see where he was going with this: towards being cornered into a position in which he had to hold a position that said there were conductors or conductresses on cross-channel (and other) ferries and seaborne vessels. That was plainly absurd, he thought, given that one of the main actions of the conductress (etc) in apprehending a fare dodger was to eject them from the vehicle at the next stop. This was not possible in the case of such vessels given that typically there were only generally two stops in this case with an expanse of deep water in between. This was why, he now thought, that ship, ferry or boat conductors did not typically exist. He wished he had been more circumspect, in other words, in his use of the word ‘deck’ in his earlier thinking.

  Was he saying that fare dodgers did not exist on cross channel ferries and other channel- or sea-going vessels?

  Of course not. He thought that wherever a fare was due to be paid that a fare dodger would appear, given sufficient time. In fact, on reflection, the sea-going vessel was the oldest instance, he thought, of the fare dodger – there was a whole archetype of fare dodging within this mode which was so venerable that it had its own conventions and terms or, at least, term: the equivalent of a ‘fare dodger’ in this regard was known as a ‘stowaway’, and there was a venerable tradition there.

  What were his grounds for holding that the sea-going vessel was the oldest instance of fare dodging?

  He thought that the grounds, as he called them, included something about the size of these vehicles or vessels and the historical development of public transport. There had been no omnibuses in hunter gatherer societies as far as he knew; at least, if such public transport vehicles existed, then they were not depicted in any of the cave art of such peoples that was currently extant, nor has any archaeological evidence been found. He thought that perhaps there had not, in the olden days, been an imperative for the public to travel en masse and quickly from one pre-ordained destination to another on paying the necessary fare for the journey.

  Was he content with that as a definition of public transport?

  Yes. Very.

  Good. He may wish to return to it later.

  Fine.

  Please carry on with the . . . what did he call it? Disquisition?

  That was acceptable. He had been saying . . .

  . . . before he’d been interrupted . . .

  . . . that he thought that there had been no imperative for public transport, as so elegantly defined, in olden times. The only exception to this had been seaborne vessels – primarily ships, which he wished now, once and for all, to exclude from the class of public transport vehicles.

  Was he excluding them on the basis of them not being vehicles, as such, or of them not being public, or both, or was he taking the very much more precarious position of holding that ships could not be defined as forms of transport?

  He was certainly not holding the latter position. He wished to hold both that ships (etc) were not vehicles, nor were they public in a certain sense. The non-vehicular position could perhaps be attained by holding that only those means of transportation with wheels could be classed as vehicles.

  Was he saying, then, that sea-going vessels have no wheels?

  Not necessarily. Just that those wheels were not used to propel the vessel in the way that the wheels of public transport vehicles were used for propulsion.

  No contact, then, between ship’s wheels and the surface of the water as there is between bus wheels and the surface of the road, say?

  Precisely.

  Can I refer, now, to Exhibit A, the paddle steamer?

  Damn.

  Did this not have a wheel in contact with a surface, a wheel, moreover, that was used to propel the vehicle, if he could pointedly use that term, towards its destination?

  He had nothing to say to that, but no way of expressing his silence in the context except through words.

  Moving on, then. Was there any steam left in his contention that sea-going vehicles used by the public should not or even could not be contained within the class ‘public transport’ (and he used the word ‘steam’ advisedly as a means of continuing to draw attention to the paddle steamer and the argument flaws exposed by it)?

  Possibly.

  What, then, was the difference between public transport in the sense of buses, trains and trams compared to public transport in the case of ferries, hovercrafts and catamarans? Was it simply that the former grouping included stops on which
the passenger could embark and disembark whereas the latter grouping or, more succinctly, ‘group’ included only the singular stop which was its destination?

  Possibly, although the cruise ship had come into his mind as an example of a seaborne form of (tentatively) public transport, but one that had more than one stop. Part of the pleasure, apparently, of the cruise was the fact that it took in many ports of call, as they were known, allowing the passengers to disembark and take in a casino or simply promenade or gawk at the inhabitants of the port city or town in question – to stretch their legs, as it is known. But he would exclude the cruise ship from the class of public transport for other reasons, as the conductress, seductively or otherwise, continued to approach him down the upper aisle of the bus, the lower aisle being located, as might be expected, on the lower deck of the bus.

  Noted. Moving back to the main thrust (etc), he referred, now, to another earlier passage of thought, displaying again his perhaps infinite ability to retrieve such thoughts, in the absence of the previously mentioned exceptional natural disasters: he had referred previously to the bus conductress as ‘datum’ rather than ‘data’. Would he continue to refer to her in that way given his thinking since this thought?

  He had known at the time that referring to the bus conductress as a datum in this way was inaccurate or, at the very least, imprecise, implying, as it did, that she (who, at that moment, Marguerite could see, following a counter-clockwise swivel, was trying to wake up a sleeping passenger towards the back of the top deck of the bus so that she could check that passenger’s ticket) was Marguerite’s only experience of a female bus conductor, the only datum in this context. What he had been trying to think was that he had not recorded previous data on bus conductors in any systematic way and could not say what percentage of female conductors there were in the work force, at least the work force as directly apprehended by him in his travels around the city investigating the disappearance of Harold Absalon. He could say that there were many more conductors than conductresses, but he couldn’t quantify it. He had realised this on seeing the conductress in question and it was in this sense that he referred to her as a datum rather than as part of a wider set of data: her appearance had instigated an investigation in his mind as to the precise proportion of conductresses in the bus conducting workforce in the city; in other words, in strict quantitative terms she was a recorded datum, but this did not mean that he thought that 100 per cent of the city’s conducting workforce was female, nor that she was the only instance of a conductress in that workforce, those, perhaps, being the extremes of the data analysis.

  Point taken. Did he take ‘female conductor’ to be synonymous with ‘conductress’?

  He did. He would use whichever term was clearest within the context of the specific thought.

  So he included conductress in the class ‘conductor’?

  He did, provided conductor was taken in the wider non-gender specific sense.

  Quite.

  He had been pleased that the term ‘conductress’ had appeared when it had, with its echoes of ‘waitress’ and ‘temptress’.

  Let’s not go into that now.

  He wanted, finally, to look at a promise that had been made to come back to the question of the orchestra conductor.

  He had not promised. Furthermore, he thought that the similarities (eg taking one on a journey, emotional on the one hand, and physical and perhaps scenic on the other) and differences (of say, apparel and equipment) would be quite clear to anyone who had half a brain cell in their head. He would leave it to them to work it out for themselves. He was feeling tired and would perhaps have a little rest before the actual conductress expressed the classical imperative, which, as an aide-mémoire he now repeated: ‘All tickets please!’

  21

  The gentleman sitting next to Marguerite asked to get out. Marguerite wondered why the gentleman had not asked to get out much sooner. In fact, he was surprised that the man had not asked to get out soon after Marguerite had sat down next to him. That was, after all, what ordinarily happened when Marguerite sat down next to someone on public transport or on another form of shared public seat, such as a bench in a park or museum, gallery or public library. Depending on the time of day, people would generally stand up soon after he had sat down, and he felt that this must be to do with an unsavoury fragrance that he emitted, one that got stronger perhaps, or less savoury (which is not to say that it got sweeter), or both, as the day progressed, especially if it was a warm day, as that particular day was. Marguerite had concluded, on a number of occasions, that the odour was related to his own perspiration – he had decided that this was the most likely scenario and he would refrain, for the time being at least, from investigating other lines of inquiry in this area.

  But the man sitting next to him had not got to his feet and made his excuses when Marguerite had sat down, Marguerite reflected, as he started the action of swinging his right leg out to join his left in the aisle to open up a side road for the gentleman, as he continued to refer to him, to proceed to the aisle and thence, Marguerite assumed, to the lower deck and disembarkation, rather than to a more distant and more fragrant seat on the top deck, which would have struck Marguerite as particularly heartless in that instance.

  Why particularly heartless in that instance, he wondered, as his right leg continued moving to join his left, which was still in the aisle remember, this move meaning that his genitals, which had been freshened by the legs akimbo stance that was a side benefit, in a sense, of him using his left leg as a stabiliser, in effect, for the turning of his head and torso to look over his shoulder as alluded to previously, would now be encased, he feared, almost completely by his converging legs, if they could be called ‘converging’ when, in fact, the left leg continued moving out slightly further into the aisle as the right approached it? Marguerite was not thinking that it would have been heartless for the gentleman to take up, as it was known, another seat on the same bus on another occasion, for example on the way home from work later that day when that same bus re-emerged from the depot to convey passengers once again. In other words, in implying that it would have been particularly heartless to take up another seat on the bus, Marguerite wanted to rule out the situation of the man taking up another seat on that particular bus but after having disembarked from that particular journey. He was only thinking about the situation where the gentleman deliberately took up another seat on that bus having asked to be excused but without disembarking. Clarifying his terms in this way, almost to his satisfaction, Marguerite proceeded. The heartlessness related to having to be asked to be let out in the way described. One did not typically have to be asked in this way when sharing a bench in a park, museum, library or gallery for reasons of space: in the case of the park bench, for instance, there was generally an expanse of space in the form of the park itself for the person that you had hitherto been sharing with to enter into whilst negotiating your body, so to speak; one was not, in other words, constrained, typically, by other furniture in the way that one was on a bus, train or, in the future no doubt, space shuttle, but leaving to one side ferry, hovercraft and catamaran as still being too problematic to Marguerite’s mind. The gentleman had drawn attention to himself by having to ask to be excused; this did not happen – at least not in the same way – when one was moving away from the other benches listed. In other words, your erstwhile bench companion could move away from you much more discreetly in the case of benches in the park, gallery, etc, and could thereby salve your feelings. This was more difficult in the case of the bus and other shared public seats, such as those in court, because of the need for the momentary verbal exchange.

  The gentleman would need to squeeze past Marguerite; if he were then to move to a seat a few seats away, implying that he couldn’t bear to be in Marguerite’s vicinity any longer, then it would seem rude at least, and, as has already been noted on a number of occasions, heartless, to Marguerite’s mind. And that
was all he had wanted to say, or rather think, in that regard.

  22

  Why, he wondered, had he chosen this ‘remain seated and swivel’ action to allow the gentleman to get out, rather than the more traditional (and, it has to be said, more polite) action of standing up and moving into the aisle to allow the gentleman the room to move into the aisle himself and thence to any location he chose (within reason)? In launching this inquiry into his actions during those split seconds, Marguerite had no preconceived verdict to hand down – he did not know why he had chosen this course of action over the other course outlined. It would be a poor substitute for justice if he did pre-judge his investigations in this way. He knew which questions to ask, then – the questions, in short, that he believed would lead him to unearthing the circumstances (etc), and he believed this to be one of those questions, the investigation into which, in short, would lead him a step closer, so to speak, to unravelling the twisted web of clues leading to Harold Absalon. Having moved through such thoughts as a preamble to substantive investigations in this area, he moved on to what he hoped would be substantive investigations in this area.

  He didn’t want to draw attention to himself for what he hoped by now were obvious reasons. He feared that standing up in the aisle and folding his newspaper noisily under his arm like a disgruntled city gent would draw attention to himself. Given these premises, the conclusion should be clear to anyone with even just an elementary schooling in the classics, he thought, as the gentleman in the seat next to him started to stand, gripping his umbrella in his right hand with his newspaper, whilst his left hand gripped the back of the seat to help effect his ascent into the standing posture. Marguerite wondered, also, whether having focused so much attention on the function of his own left leg as a fulcrum – yes, that was surely the word – that it was a natural extension in reasoning and in bodily action for his right leg to attempt to join it. In other words, perhaps it had been a rather unthinking instinctual response given what had gone before for Marguerite to swing his right leg out to meet his left having heard the words ‘Excuse me, please’ from the gentleman sitting next to him. Some observers – rookie recruits, say, watching Marguerite’s recorded (for training purposes) actions on the surveillance cameras that the bus must contain, or which one of his fellow passengers engaged in counter surveillance may have in the peak of their cap or in the right arm of their spectacles or in their newspaper, may comment on the situation in this way, but Marguerite would not countenance it; any rookie who came to this conclusion whilst watching the master in action in this way during their training would be failed, certainly if Marguerite himself were their examiner and hopefully too if one of his trusted lieutenants following clear guidelines that Marguerite had himself lain down were the examiner. It was the word ‘unthinking’ that Marguerite particularly objected to. The detective must never be unthinking. One’s quarry was always trying to outwit one and one must always have all of one’s wits about one if one were to succeed. That is what he would tell the rookie who he was sending down. It might be the most useful life lesson that they would ever receive or it might not be.