All Souls by Javier Marías

protocol and to intervene in the respective conversations of Clare and Cromer-Blake, his next neighbours along on either side of the table. But seeing that neither of them felt particularly disposed to involve him in their conversations, he took to feigning an interest in the talk of the harpy or the luminary and to playing with the gavel, a frequent pastime amongst bored or drunken wardens at high table. Out of temper and angry, he failed to notice that his initially indolent beating on the stand (he kept up a lazy drumming with the gavel) was becoming a series of hammer blows that grew steadily more violent (he was brandishing the gavel with real gusto now) and were given at sufficiently long intervals to cause both surprise and horrendous confusion, since, on hearing them, some stewards proceeded to remove plates they had only just served whilst others of greater experience, aware that the blows did not form part of the ceremony, tried to retrieve the plates from their less experienced colleagues in order to return them to their intended recipients, who in some cases had barely got a sniff at them. After a couple of plates had crashed noisily to the floor as a result of these struggles, a moment arrived when all five of the stewards serving us stopped what they were doing and gathered in one corner of the refectory for a confabulation during which accusations of ineptitude were exchanged, while protests (albeit only muttered) began to arise amongst the guests, who found themselves amidst a clutter of abandoned serving dishes piledhigh with cold leftovers (a sight never seen at high table), equipped with only fish knives and forks to tackle a sirloin steak, or confronted by plates of food already begun or nibbled at or (most serious of all) with their glasses empty or filled with a mixture of two or more wines. The Warden was completely unaware of all this, and as each distracted blow on the stand or on the table (when he missed the stand) made the fine wood boom and splinter and set peas and mushrooms leaping and several wineglasses rolling, all I could do was calculate the possible trajectory of the gavel, according to his posture or rather his slant (for his huge body was slumping slowly on to the tabletop), were it to fly from his grasp. I leaned back slightly both in order to avoid the flying gavel and in the hope that I would thus increase the likelihood of the projectile braining the young economist Halliwell, for he, oblivious to everything, continued to douse me in sour, stale cider after every respite and breathing-space afforded by my conversational turns with Cromer-Blake, for nothing would have pleased me more than to see Halliwell rendered unconscious.
    "Quite amazing this business about your cider," I was saying. "And this peculiar tax of yours, was it really only in England?"
    "Yes, only in England," replied Halliwell enthusiastically.
    I saw that Clare had noticed my backwards movement (so she was paying me some attention) and that she had too had leaned back, although I don't know if she did so in order that one of her neighbours might bear the brunt of the blow or in order to remove her décolletage and face from the Warden's line of sight and see if that would rouse him out of his stupefaction and bring him to his senses. Instead the intriguer followed suit, leaning his gigantic torso forward (his left elbow sweeping across the table, the front of his gown trailing over his uneaten steak and dislodging the peas from his plate), and would not countenance the eclipse of the gratifying sight he was so determined to gaze on. At one point, his gaze irredeemably lost inher décolletage, the peer was simply not there and what had been until then - as I have described - intermittent, random, arrhythmic blows with the gavel, became a continuous, mechanical hammering, to which he was wholly oblivious. The effect of this on the table was now all too apparent, for, leaping amidst the accumulated remains of the