by H. G. Parry
XVIII
I was surprised at how bright the English department looked in the light of day. Perhaps it should have been obvious, but in my mind, it was the backdrop against which I had chased Uriah Heep in the dead of night. My memories were of corridors and shadows, of knives and transformations and the city glittering far away.
Now, I could see that those same corridors were cream yellow, and tree branches clustered outside the windows. As I stepped out of the elevator, I nearly collided with a cluster of chattering adolescent girls, clothed in colorful summer dresses despite the bite in the air. From behind a closed door I could hear the soft murmur of a tutorial taking place, and somewhere the whir of a photocopier. It was a dreamy, daytime building. It did not look as if it ever had the kind of nightmares I had seen in its rooms.
“Hello,” I told the woman at reception, who was probably wondering why my business suit and I were here. “I’m looking for Charley Sutherland.”
“Charles?” It was the voice I spoke to on the phone when I called to chase down my brother. I had paired it, unconsciously, with an older lady in tweed; in fact, she had a ginger crew cut, and a leather jacket. “I think he’s just finishing a lecture right now. Is he expecting you?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “I’m his brother.”
Her face cleared. “Oh, of course.”
I wondered how she’d been picturing me.
A man working the photocopier beside her paused in the act of leaving. “Rob, right?” he said. “I’m Troy. We met at Charles’s place, last Thursday.”
“Of course—I remember.” I shook his offered hand on reflex. Up close, he looked to be in his midtwenties, with the kind of lanky physique that seems to require twice the usual number of knees and elbows. He was strikingly tall; by way of compensation, he had combed his hair as flat as possible. “Is he all right?”
“I just saw him on the way to his next class,” Troy said. “He said he was feeling much better. He looked all right. Well, embarrassed.”
That didn’t sound too dire. Charley spent half his life embarrassed, and the other half not noticing he should be. “What actually happened?”
“Well, I wasn’t there,” Troy said cautiously. “But apparently he just lost consciousness for a few seconds in the middle of taking a lecture. On Kipling, I think. He woke up right away.”
“Beth should be in her office,” the receptionist put in. “She doesn’t teach on Fridays. Do you want me call her?”
“I’ll take you, if you like,” Troy volunteered. “I was going to drop by on her anyway. She borrowed a book from me a few days ago, and I need it back.”
From what I’d seen, this seemed to be the perpetual state of the English department.
We found Beth sitting at her computer, in an office both larger and neater than my brother’s. Troy knocked perfunctorily on the wall outside, but she’d already caught sight of me and got to her feet. Her cardigan was green this time.
“Thank you so much for coming.” The firm, precise voice steadied me somewhat; I’d been more worried, in truth, than I’d let myself realize. “I hope you didn’t mind my calling? It was only that after what we discussed on the phone…”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve just been hearing about what happened.”
She shook her head. “It was a bit of excitement for the students, I must say. I was hoping you could drive him home. I’d take him myself, but I have a class this afternoon.”
“Of course I’ll give him a lift.” There’s a difference between driving someone home and giving them a lift. I didn’t want to pick at that difference too closely, but I heard myself reach for it. “Is he willing to go, though?”
“Not precisely,” Beth said, with a smile. “I must admit, Robert, part of my reason for calling was that I thought he would be far more willing to go home if you were there to take him. I know he listens to you. He’s a good deal more stubborn with his colleagues.”
“He’s pretty stubborn with family as well,” I told her, managing a smile. “I’m starting to realize he just doesn’t tell us what he’s up to, so we can’t stop him.”
“Oh, we’re used to that here as well,” Beth said dryly. She took me by the arm, a surprisingly old-fashioned gesture. “Come; his class should be finishing any minute. Troy, you wanted your book, didn’t you? It should be on my desk. Help yourself.”
Frankly, I was sick of the sight of books. They were starting to look like grenades lying about to be triggered.
We took the stairs. As I passed the storage closet near Charley’s office, I couldn’t resist a quick look inside. The pile of books that Charley had kicked over was still half on the floor, and, to my annoyance, a long sword that had to be Excalibur lay along the bottom shelf. I’d have to do something about that. It did look like a prop sword, but not to those that knew, and they existed now.
I heard my brother’s voice a second before Beth opened the door.
I’d never seen my brother in a lecture hall. I saw him lecture once. He’d been back in the country for a conference, when he was about fourteen, and our parents insisted we make a family outing of it. The room here was larger—and draftier—than that glossy conference room, but Charley was older now, and far more confident. He stood in front of the lectern, and if he had any notes, he seemed to have abandoned them a long time ago.
“So, the two most important figures in Pip’s life turn out to be linked by blood,” he was saying. The projection above him displayed the cover of Great Expectations. Another one I had to read, after I finished David Copperfield. “Magwitch, the criminal he meets in the marshes, and Estella, the aristocratic woman he loves, are in fact father and daughter—yes? Waving hand at the back?”
The hand belonged to a bespectacled Asian boy. “Charles?”
“Jacob.”
“Isn’t that a massive coincidence?” he said. “That just about everyone in the book turns out to be related?”
Charley smiled. “Well… yes, you’re right, is probably the short answer? The Victorians don’t mind coincidence—they wanted the world to make sense. They love people turning out to be related, especially people with titles. Seriously, if you bump into a kind aristocrat in a Dickens novel, he will turn out to be your uncle by chapter fifty-seven, so aim well.”
There was a scattering of laughter, and the boy—Jacob—smiled.
“Forget about the short answer, actually,” Charley added. The light that kindled in his face was the one I’d always resented. “It’s a good observation. Let’s chase it for a while. There are coincidences in life, not in books. Everything in a book is placed there for a reason. What’s the reason for this one?”
Silence greeted the question. Then, one by one, hands started to raise.
“It’s more satisfying,” someone hazarded.
“Satisfying just means something works,” Charley said. “Why does this work?”
A dark-skinned girl in the front row put her hand up. I knew, before she spoke, that she had found it. Her face held the same glow that I’d seen on my brother’s. “Because they’re connected,” she said. “Aristocrats and criminals. What Pip wants to avoid and what he wants to be. The child of a criminal looks like an aristocrat when you dress her up.”
“Exactly.” It was as though a new country had been discovered. “Pip’s gentlemanly clothes are bought with a convict’s money; the great lady he wants to marry is a convict’s daughter. They’re entwined. It’s not just a coincidence. It’s a moral precept. And it’s a radical one, for the nineteenth century. It’s the darkness at the heart of Dickens’s world. Underneath all the fun stuff—and that fun stuff’s important, don’t misunderstand—these books are angry: about children being forced into workhouses and indentured servitude, about people being hanged or transported for stealing to feed their families, about ignorance and cruelty and complacency. About failure to recognize common humanity.”
They were listening; I could see that. Charley obviously saw it, too, becau
se he almost bounced from the lectern to the whiteboard. “What are some of the things Great Expectations is angry about, specifically? Anyone?”
There was silence for a moment, then someone called out, “People getting hanged?”
“Okay,” Charley said, writing it on the board. “How do we know that?”
I listened to the responses grow louder and more confident. Charley’s scribble began to cover the whiteboard. Injustice. Public execution. Magwitch’s death. Poverty. Transportation. Newgate dust. Hypocrisy. Betrayal. Perhaps I was too attuned to Charley’s particular brand of wordsmithery, but I had a sudden impression of the darkness at the heart of Dickens as a real and tangible thing. I hadn’t read Great Expectations, but I could see it creeping through David Copperfield, in children cast away to work in factories, and women used and betrayed. And in Uriah Heep, who wanted revenge on a world that tried to keep him down. This, right here, was how Eric was born.
I resisted the urge to put up my hand. That would have been embarrassing.
“Okay, we’ll talk more about this next week,” Charley said finally, with a glance at the clock. He raised his voice over the rustle of students packing up their notes. “On Wednesday we’re starting on Victorian poets, so read the Tennyson and the Arnold in your course books over the weekend and impress your friends at parties.”
The girl from the front half raised her hand to catch Charley’s attention, and went to talk to him as the rest of them began to stampede around us. I found myself hanging back. This had been my university, not even a decade ago; suddenly, though, I felt as alien and unwelcome as I always had on the Street. Given half a chance, I would have turned and left.
Beth, though, didn’t give me that chance. As the room emptied, she started forward, beckoning me to follow. “Charles?” she called.
The lingering smile from talking to his student fell away as he caught sight of me. Despite knowing what was behind it, that hurt.
“Rob, what’re you—?” he started to ask.
“I invited him,” Beth said firmly. “Charles, you need to go home.”
“I will.” He turned back to the lectern, and started to gather the papers there. “I just have one tutorial at three, and then a supervision. Look, honestly, I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
I could see what she meant, though. Without the adrenaline surge from being in front of a hundred teenagers, he didn’t look good. I was used to him being pale and interesting after a reading; this time, he looked almost transparent.
“Brian’s offered to take your tutorial,” she said. “And I saw Troy in my office only moments ago; he knows not to expect a supervision meeting. Anything else you need to do—particularly if it’s that paper you promised me—you can do from home. And I wanted someone to take you there. You’re not riding on that death trap of yours.”
Apparently, my opinion of Charley’s moped was universal.
“That’s my decision, isn’t it? I’m not a child, Beth. It’s not your job to send me home from school.”
“I can’t make you go,” Beth concurred. “But I think I speak for the entire department when I say we’re concerned about you. And since your brother’s here—”
“He’s only here because you called him here!” Charley glanced at me quickly. “I mean—sorry, Rob, thank you for coming, but—”
“Come on, Charley,” I said. Charles. They all called him Charles here. Dr. Charles Sutherland. It made him into a slightly different person, and one I felt suddenly less comfortable shoving into my car and telling off for being an idiot. “I’ve come all this way. You may as well let me drop you off.”
“You had no right to call anybody,” Charley said to Beth. “Especially not my brother.”
“Not as your colleague,” Beth countered. “But I have every right as your friend. You can be as angry with me as you like tomorrow. All I ask is that you humor me for this afternoon. Go home.”
Charley sighed, and I saw him give up. “Okay.” He rubbed his forehead wearily. “I’m sorry, I’m not angry, I know what you’re trying to do. I just wish you hadn’t… Tell Brian I’ll do one of his tutorials next week, okay? I’ll do them both if he wants—he hates Tennyson anyway.”
“I’ll tell him,” Beth said. “But he told you not to worry about it. You’re something of a celebrity, you know. We’ve never had a lecturer collapse in a lecture hall before.”
“God, it’ll be all over social media by now, won’t it?” Charley said, with more of a smile. “There were about two hundred students there. No wonder that class just now was suspiciously full for a Friday lunchtime…”
He glanced at me, and his smile died again. I don’t know what I was projecting, but it probably wasn’t terribly amused.
“I’m sorry,” Charley said as soon as I got in the car beside him and slammed the door. I’d stopped to put Excalibur in the trunk of the car.
“I’ll bet.” Already, he seemed smaller than he had in the lecture hall, and a good deal more defenseless. “Tell me you didn’t actually summon anything in the lecture hall.”
“No—it was this morning. Before I came to work; I didn’t even put them back. It just knocked me out more than I was expecting, on top of everything else that’s been happening. At least I missed teaching the rest of the Kipling section. You know the worst thing about Kipling’s poems? They stick in your head, and it’s as though you have a racist bigot following you around talking to you about Mandalay.”
“Charley—”
“I’ve actually been to Mandalay, for a conference. It was very nice. And I know Kipling was a genius, and his influence over twentieth-century literature is about as far-reaching as any writer in the canon. I just wish that either his speaker were less of a racist bigot, or his meter were less earwormy. That’s all.”
I was still catching up to the start of the explanation. “Charley. What do you mean by ‘them’?”
“Someone stole the summoner’s book last night,” he said. “And it had to be someone on the Street.”
“Probably Uriah Heep,” I said. “I told you, you can’t trust him.”
“We don’t,” he said. “But we don’t know it’s him. That’s what I was trying to find out. Whoever it was needs to leave the Street if they’re going to pass the book back to the summoner.”
“So stop people leaving the Street.”
“We don’t want to stop them. This is the closest thing the summoner’s made to a mistake since we broke into Lambton Quay—he’s revealed that he has someone in the Street. We want to follow them. That’s what Millie and I arranged this morning. I read out a host of butterflies from Aesop’s Fables, and asked them to wait outside the wall and follow whoever leaves. If one of them meets the summoner, we should know about it by the end of the day. I had to go to work—Millie’s stayed home, but she still thinks the summoner’s from the university, and if that’s the case I should be here so as not to arouse suspicion. And to keep an eye on things.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You’re using fairy-tale butterflies as spies?”
“Fable, not fairy tale. I needed something simple. There had to be a host of them—people come and go from the Street all the time, one or two wouldn’t be enough—and I wanted to make sure I could read out enough. These were just basic allegory. They have the power of speech, really, and that’s it. I—”
I backed the car out of the lot, and he broke off and closed his eyes as we started to move. He really did look pale, even by his post-reading standards—no wonder Beth had been alarmed.
“Deep breaths,” I advised him, and he nodded tightly. I did a quick calculation in my head. “Before you came in—that has to be at least four hours now. You’re still not recovered?”
“I’m just dizzy,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s mostly the motion of the car, I think. And it’s a bit stuffy in here.”
I rolled down the window on his side for him. The wind roared in, speckled with rain. The clouds had rolled in while w
e were in the building.
“There you go,” I said. “Do you want to come back to my place, or am I going to yours?”
“You can just drop me off at home.” He opened his eyes, and straightened in his seat. “I don’t need anyone to keep an eye on me, honestly. Beth only said that because she didn’t know about—”
“Aesop’s Fables?”
He smiled a little. “Exactly.”
“Okay.” I turned the corner, and the university disappeared from my rearview mirror. I might have argued once. For now, I was more concerned about what he’d been doing than what it was doing to him. “I heard about last night, you know. Eric told me. He said he paid a visit to the Street, and he told you to back down.”
He frowned. “Why would he tell you that?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t mention the fear that had been on his face. It would only give him something else to chase. “Is it true?”
“Did he tell you I brought out Charles Dickens? Because I did. Well, Dickens the implied author of David Copperfield, not the historical person. But still, he was there. I didn’t even need the book. I was face-to-face with your Uriah Heep, the one from the office, and—”
“What are you doing experimenting with that stuff?” I demanded. I didn’t care about Charles Dickens; I didn’t care about a host of bloody butterflies. All my pent-up worry and frustration of the last few days was threatening to break its dam. “Is this really what you’ve been up to all week? Deliberately using the abilities you’re supposed to have been suppressing all your life?”
“It’s important,” he said, which answered my question.
I groaned. “Was this Millie’s idea?”
“The butterflies? No. Some of last night was. Not Dickens, but earlier—we tried calling up Magwitch and Fagin, just in case they could glimpse the ones with the other summoner, but the other summoner must have put theirs back. They had nothing—or said they didn’t, and I don’t think they were lying.”
