Grasp

The best of him was his mind. The thought came to me as I stood in his front room, turning over the pages of the book I’d found on the coffee table. It was the Collected of a Polish poet, and filled with images and ideas that seemed glittering but distant. It was exactly the sort of thing he would have reached for to work himself into greater consciousness. I almost saw him there, in his large white chair, nodding at my meaning, chuckling at my means of expression. It had been two days since he died.

I’d heard from the news. “Senior academic killed by muggers” ran the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen; later, his face over the reader’s shoulder - not a photograph I knew, probably given to them by UCL, or one of the other institutions. The sound in the bar was turned down; he lingered there a while, was replaced by sheeted bodies in Afghanistan .

He’d only become well known in the last couple of years, appearing on things like Newsnight, introduced as “Professor Brian Deschamps, leading expert on the psychological effects of consumerism”. The first time I saw him there, I nearly jumped out of my seat - that familiar face extracted from its place and drifting across my vision. “Consumerism” wasn’t quite it. He was a sociologist who studied purchase and possession in a range of societies. “Leading expert” was right, though. He could have had a post at any university in Britain , the US , anywhere. He enveloped his subject. He also wrote on music, literature, philosophy… His mind was always working.

The night he died, I couldn’t bring myself to think of him. If I opened my curtains I would have seen his house directly opposite. For all the international teaching, the conferences, the television, he loved to come back home. “My home,” he would say, as he settled into his chair, having got me a whisky. “Mine.” Then he’d laugh at his “irruption of possession” (the phrase he was mocked for in The Moral Maze). His home was a storage place for his mind. He wandered through the books, remembering, thinking.

I’d bought my house long before he came. This quiet mews off Kensington Church Street had been an ideal retreat for me from the intricacies of tort law. Later, I came to think of it as what it was - a cul de sac, into which I’d sunk. Brian’s mind was my tunnel back out.

I paced round his house with the sense of him hanging around me. He’d given me a key long ago, to come and go as I pleased, borrow books, milk and so on. Often I suspected that really it was to watch over his things while he was away, to keep his possessions calm in his absence.

Was what I was doing illegal? Tort law didn’t cover this circumstance. I had no formal connection with him - his family would no doubt be here soon, to take everything away, sell the house. But I had my key.

All those pages closed. Each ornament in its place. The garden’s red and yellow imperfectly visible through half-drawn curtains. Everything would have a new owner, I supposed, but I wanted Brian to be able to pick objects up, bring to his own things his own understanding. It seemed too sad that the significance he attached to each of them would soon be overwritten, some interpretation superimposed over that of such a far-reaching mind.

I moved from room to room. I imagined I saw him step quietly from the bedroom, heard a creak on the stair, a clatter of knives in the kitchen as if he’d gone down to make some toast. At first I put it down to the settling of an old house. My own had its groans and shifts at night.

The sounds went on. Every so often my skull prickled. I picked up a blue glass vase that stood on the landing table. It seemed to twist in my hands. Brian liked to rearrange my hold on such things, when he wanted to draw my attention to a particular detail. But this wasn’t like that. It was a yank, angry. I put the vase down. Imagined.

On through the rooms I went, following ideas of him. The sounds continued. After the incident with the vase, I avoided touching things. But pad, pad, pad, suddenly behind me there was weight and movement. Cold, then hot with adrenalin, I turned. Just the smooth wooden floor, leading off into the hallway.

No one else had been here since he had locked the door behind him two days ago. The house had stood by itself, his memory in it undisturbed. Imagined.

In the next room I lifted a book from the shelf. It jolted from my hand, as if slapped. My fingers stung. The book sprawled on the floor. I ran from there.

In the corridor I stopped, clutching at my throat, breathless. The door key, which had been hanging from my fingers, was pulled to the floor. I heard, or felt, something pause behind me.

No heat came from it, but its weight, its presence was as real to me as if I gripped it tightly. Slowly I turned my head, was halted by the image in the mirror on the opposite wall.

Two toad hands close together, a shadowy torso, and the face of my friend with a look of urgent greed. Barely knowing what I was doing, I moved to turn further, to call him by his name, bring him back to himself. As I did, the figure opened its mouth with a long wail of rage. There was not a shred of intelligence in the sound.

When I came back from Europe , his house was empty. It is still. The new owner has never needed it.