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Back The Man With No Face
Chapters (45)
  1. The Man With No Face
  2. Also by
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. INTRODUCTION
  9. CHAPTER ONE
  10. CHAPTER TWO
  11. CHAPTER THREE
  12. CHAPTER FOUR
  13. CHAPTER FIVE
  14. CHAPTER SIX
  15. CHAPTER SEVEN
  16. CHAPTER EIGHT
  17. CHAPTER NINE
  18. CHAPTER TEN
  19. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  20. CHAPTER TWELVE
  21. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  22. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  23. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  24. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  25. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  26. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  27. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  37. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

It had been a small, cold room high up in the roof of the stone terrace, and he hated it. The dull, damp wallpaper. The miserable view across the canal, the railway line and the dark empty trees. The dirty, threadbare carpet over the blackened linoleum and the smell of stale cooking that drifted up from the floor below where an elderly woman lived in a room you could smell when you passed the door. She peed in a bucket, the students in the room below her said. They would wake up at night and hear the squirt of the old lady’s urine against the side of the galvanized bucket. They hoped she had a good aim, they said. And Bannerman had lain in the darkness, hating himself for all the falseness that he needed, remembering how he had made the girl who loved him cry, how they had fought and he had made her unhappy.

And there had been his own tears in all this unhappiness, there in that room. The tears of a callow eighteen-year-old boy trying to find in himself what others always seemed to find with such ease, but resorting in the end to the hollow pursuit of self-deceit. It had never really occurred to him at the time, in the midst of his own selfish unhappiness, that it was not only himself that he was hurting, but that piece by piece he was also destroying another human being whose trust and love he was betraying.

He had thought of her as a rather foolish, if attractive, girl. And it occurred to him bitterly now that he could not even remember her face, and how he had never seen the child she bore him.

*

They went down into the Métro on escalators, through vast empty marble halls. Sally bought them tickets and they queued on the platform under fluorescent lights.

‘Where do you want to go?’ she said. ‘We can ride anywhere in the city on these tickets.’

Bannerman looked at her. ‘Somewhere to eat and get a little drunk and talk,’ he said.

A shining orange carriage whisked them through the new Brussels Métro, along broad lit tunnels to De Brouckere, where they changed and caught one of the trams that run on the prémétro below the city centre before burrowing upwards like moles to run overground into the suburbs. They ate in a steak house on the Boulevard Adolphe Max; steak au poivre washed down with a rich Côtes du Rhône.