Page 10 of Babel

At this point Robin could not help but venture into the sitting room. ‘What about Canton?’

The gentlemen all turned to regard him at once. There were four of them, all very tall, and all either spectacled or monocled.

‘What about Canton?’ Robin asked again, suddenly nervous.

‘Shush,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, your shoes are filthy, you’re tracking mud everywhere. Take them off and go and have a bath.’

Robin persisted. ‘Is King George going to declare war on Canton?’

‘He can’t declare war on Canton, Robin. No one declares war on cities.’

‘Then is King George going to invade China?’ he persisted.

For some reason this made the gentlemen laugh.

‘Would that we could,’ said the man with the deep voice. ‘It’d make this whole enterprise a lot easier, wouldn’t it?’

A man with a great grey beard peered down at Robin. ‘And where would your loyalties lie? Here, or back home?’

‘My goodness.’ The fourth man, whose pale blue eyes Robin found unnerving, bent down to inspect him, as if through a massive, invisible magnifying glass. ‘Is this the new one? He’s even more of your spitting image than the last—’

Professor Lovell’s voice cut through the room like glass. ‘Hayward.’

‘Really, it’s uncanny, I mean, look at his eyes. Not the colour, but the shape—’

‘Hayward.’

Robin glanced back and forth between them, baffled.

‘That’s quite enough,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, go.’

Robin muttered an apology and hurried up the stairs, muddy boots forgotten. Over his shoulder, he heard fragments of Professor Lovell’s response: ‘He doesn’t know, I don’t like giving him ideas... No, Hayward, I won’t—’ But by the time he reached the safety of the landing, where he could lean over the banister and listen in without being caught, they had already changed the topic to Afghanistan.

That night, Robin stood before his mirror, staring intently at his face for so long that eventually it began to seem alien.

His aunts liked to say he had the kind of face that could blend in anywhere – his hair and eyes, both a softer shade of brown than the indigo-black that coloured the rest of his family, could have plausibly marked him as either the son of a Portuguese sailor or the heir to the Qing Emperor. But Robin had always attributed this to some accidental arrangement of nature that ascribed him features that could have belonged anywhere on the spectrum of either race, white or yellow.

He had never wondered whether he might not be full-blooded Chinese.

But what was the alternative? That his father was white? That his father was—

Look at his eyes.

That was incontrovertible proof, wasn’t it?

Then why would his father not claim Robin as his own? Why was he only a ward, and not a son?

But even then, Robin was not too young to understand there were some truths that could not be uttered, that life as normal was only possible if they were never acknowledged. He had a roof over his head, three guaranteed meals a day, and access to more books than he could read in a lifetime. He did not, he knew, have the right to demand anything more.

He made a decision then. He would never question Professor Lovell, never probe at the empty space where the truth belonged. As long as Professor Lovell did not accept him as a son, Robin would not attempt to claim him as a father. A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

He dried himself, dressed, and sat down at his desk to finish his translation exercise for the evening. He and Mr Felton had moved on to Tacitus’s Agricola now.

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.

Robin parsed the sentence, consulted his dictionary to check that auferre meant what he thought it did, then wrote out his translation.*

When Michaelmas term began in early October, Professor Lovell departed for Oxford, where he would stay for the next eight weeks. He would do this for each of Oxford’s three academic terms, returning only during the breaks. Robin relished these periods; even though his classes did not pause, it felt possible to breathe and relax then without risk of disappointing his guardian at every turn.