The Dust That Falls From Dreams

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘No, madam. Unless there’s a granny to palm them off on.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs McCosh graciously, ‘I do wish you and your policeman every possible happiness. You will of course have to endure a great deal of degradation and humiliation, but I always think it worth it for the children that result, and if one holds out long enough, one’s husband does eventually give up.’

  ‘Yes, madam, thank you, madam.’

  The following day, Christabel announced that she and Gaskell were taking lodgings together in Chelsea.

  ‘But my dear!’ Mrs McCosh had exclaimed. ‘Two young women on their own? In such a very poor and run-down place? Who will have regard to your virtue?’

  ‘We will watch each other like hawks,’ said Christabel, ‘and Gaskell does have a pair of Purdeys.’

  92

  The Incident

  Daniel had gone to Cambridge on the train, and had found himself sitting in the same second-class carriage as someone who looked very familiar. They had for some time been sitting, studiously oblivious to each other as the British still are on public transport. The dapper gentleman was reading a book with the intriguing title Principia Ethica and Daniel was reading Every Man his Own Mechanic. The other occupant was thin and bird-like, but he sported a fairly impressive moustache.

  Daniel noticed that the gentleman was struggling to light matches in order to rekindle his pipe, and Daniel reached into his pocket to offer his petrol lighter, which he still carried with him despite having renounced tobacco, because lighting other people’s cigarettes was so much an embedded part of modern social ritual. ‘Thank you so much,’ said the dapper gentleman, in a voice that was exceedingly clipped and aristocratic, and before very long the two had fallen into conversation.

  ‘I see you have most practical reading matter,’ said the gentleman. ‘It must be very interesting.’

  ‘It is,’ replied Daniel. ‘It deals with just about everything that one could want to do. I’m learning how to harden blades for different purposes. Yours looks intimidating, if I may say so. Is it in Latin? I wasn’t very good at it at Westminster.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be deceived by that,’ said the stranger. ‘It’s written in very clear English, as a matter of fact. Do they still teach Latin in a very peculiar accent at Westminster?’

  ‘They certainly did when I was there.’

  ‘You can always tell an old boy from the peculiar accent. I was educated by a tutor, which may or may not have been a good thing. Which house were you in?’

  ‘Rigaud’s. It was remarkable solely for the thrashings and its appalling latrines. Worse than anything I saw in France. So…your book?’

  ‘Written by a friend, 1903. I’ve read it hundreds of times, just to make sure, but I still can’t approve of it. He’s a charming man, however, a very beautiful and innocent spirit, an Apostle, if that means anything to you. I expect to see him when I get to Cambridge.’

  ‘So…are you a don? At Cambridge.’

  ‘I am a logician, mathematican and philosopher,’ said the gentleman grandly, ‘and I used to be a don, but I was turfed out, not least by my own friends. I am, I feel compelled, almost sorry to say, a pacifist. It didn’t go down well. In fact you will probably not wish to speak to me.’

  ‘I was in the Royal Flying Corps, and then the Royal Air Force,’ said Daniel, somewhat stiffly. ‘However, I am aware of the arguments. And I can assure you that just about all of us frequently wondered if it was all worth it. We didn’t doubt the cause, I don’t mean that for a minute. I mean we doubted whether the cause was worth all that damage. We suffered much exhaustion and despair, and I was often physically sick after I shot someone down, particularly if they went down in flames. In my case it was definitely worth it because I am half French, and I had a motherland to liberate. If I had been entirely British I think I would have had far greater doubts. Are you, by any chance, Bertrand Russell?’

  ‘I do have that mortification,’ said Russell. ‘You do not have to converse with me any further, should you find it repugnant, and I shall not find it offensive should you wish to move to another compartment at the next station.’

  ‘I can admire anyone who goes to prison for their beliefs,’ said Daniel, ‘although not quite as much as those who risk their lives for them.’

  Russell bridled. ‘If I may say so, my objection was certainly not to dying for my country. I have never had any particular fear of death. I am certainly ready to die in a good cause, but I am not willing to kill for it.

  ‘I had no personal stake in it, in any case,’ he continued, ‘not until they raised the age of military service to forty-five, and by then I was already in prison, where they forgot they had put me when they got around to trying to recruit me. In other words I was not in prison for anything that could be construed as cowardice, because I was not eligible to serve. I did write an immense amount whilst I was in there, however.’

  ‘Oh, what did you write?’

  ‘Principia Mathematica. A great deal of it.’

  ‘In Latin?’

  Russell laughed and puffed at his pipe. ‘No, but it might as well have been. It concerns the relationship between logic and mathematics. I wrote it with a colleague, Alfred North Whitehead – have you heard of him? No? Well, the book is admittedly vast, and to the taste of very few, but I think it important. Logic is the youth of mathematics, d’you see, and mathematics is the manhood of logic.’

  ‘But does it butter any parsnips?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘This book,’ said Daniel, waving his Every Man his Own Mechanic, ‘butters parsnips. It will tell you how to silver-solder, how to calculate the stresses in girders and how to relieve the stresses in cast iron, and even, at the back, how to make a rabbit hutch and a hen coop. The question is, sir, what difference does it make if logic is derivable from mathematics or vice versa? Does the fact of being derivable imply that that was whence it really was derived? What parsnips are buttered?’

  The philosopher was only momentarily flustered. ‘For me it simply has its own intrinsic interest and fascination. And, of course, when a theoretical advance is made, it is often an extremely long time before any practical ramifications occur to anybody. There are hundreds of examples, all of which have suddenly escaped my memory just exactly when I need them. Ah! Here’s one! In the last century, gentlemen like Gauss and Riemann worked out some of the details of a geometry for spaces that are intrinsically curved. Well, this buttered no parsnips. We did not, after all, apparently live in curved space. And then just very recently Albert Einstein determined that space is in fact curved because of the effects of universal gravity. Suddenly one needed Gauss and Riemann because one needed a geometry of this curved space. Lo and behold! Gauss and Riemann have buttered the parsnips, long after they are both dead!’

  ‘I haven’t caught up with all this new relativity stuff yet,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ve been meaning to. I have a friend who says you can understand it when you’re reading about it, and then when you’ve finished you no longer have the slightest idea what it was saying. You say it’s vast? This book of yours?’

  ‘Well, when it was finished I had to take it into Cambridge in a wheelbarrow. And it’s highly technical. It’s a pity, really. So few will ever try to take it on.’

  ‘Why don’t you write a version for duffers?’ suggested Daniel. ‘You know, the main ideas, as simply as you can, for the reasonably intelligent man who wants to know?’

  ‘It would still be fearfully specialist,’ said Russell, ‘but there would be some merit in doing such a thing for other mathematicians and philosophers who just want to grasp the general points. I’m spending the summer in Lulworth. It might be an excellent opportunity to take such a project on. I shall certainly give it some thought.’

  ‘What about a book for duffers about relativity?’

  ‘Well, Einstein’s little book of 1916 is perfectly good. It was very recently published in English. Still, it’s not a bad idea. I do feel
that far too many people are excluded from understanding science through no fault of their own.’

  ‘Am I right in remembering that Rupert Brooke was an Apostle?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Oh, poor old Rupert. Yes, he was. I always said he was the most beautiful man in England. He had a light about him. Almost a nimbus, one might say.’

  ‘My wife adored Rupert Brooke, partly because she once had a fiancé who looked just like him. He was killed, unfortunately.’

  ‘To be as beautiful and well loved as that, and then to die of a mosquito bite…well, what can one conclude?’

  ‘I conclude that God doesn’t give a damn,’ said Daniel, ‘or that the Devil is in charge and is masquerading as the Supreme Being, or that the Supreme Being is neither good nor omnipotent, or that the universe is an essentially impersonal and mechanical process and that all values are human.’

  Russell gestured with his pipe. ‘I see you have the makings of a philosopher.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, sir,’ said Daniel, much gratified, ‘and with your grasp of mathematics, I dare say you would have made a fine engineer.’

  ‘And buttered plenty of parsnips,’ said Russell.

  It was the day after his return from Cambridge that Daniel said after dinner, when the family was gathered in the withdrawing room, ‘You’ll never guess who I ran into on the train to Cambridge.’

  ‘Oh, who? Do tell,’ said Ottilie.

  ‘Bertrand Russell!’

  ‘Really? Is he out of prison?’ asked Mrs McCosh. ‘I hope you gave him a good drubbing!’

  ‘A good drubbing? What on earth for?’

  ‘Such a nasty, drivelling little man. He did absolutely nothing during the war.’

  ‘He did protest against it, Mama,’ said Ottilie. ‘And he went to prison.’

  ‘I can see why a Christian might refuse to fight in a war,’ said Rosie, ‘because it does say “Thou shalt do no murder”, and Quakers won’t go to war, and they are frightfully good people, aren’t they? I just don’t think that when a soldier kills for a cause it’s actually murder. It’s something else, horrible, but not actually wrong, unless he knows it’s a rotten cause. But Bertrand Russell isn’t a Christian, is he?’

  ‘I thought it was “Thou shalt not kill”,’ said Ottilie.

  ‘It’s hard to know the exact translation,’ said Fairhead. ‘The original is, I think, very ambiguous.’

  Daniel had felt his hackles start to rise, not at what Fairhead or Rosie had just said, but at what her mother had. Having lost the art of talking sammy during the war years, and seemingly unable to restrain himself, he turned and said to her, ‘I thought you must be a pacifist yourself.’

  ‘What? Me? A pacifist? Why on earth would you think such a dreadful thing?’

  ‘Because, by all accounts, you did virtually nothing yourself during the war.’

  A shocked silence took hold of the room. ‘I was prepared to die,’ said Mrs McCosh at last. ‘I went frequently to Charing Cross to welcome in the wounded, and I even learned to shoot. I had many Belgian ladies to tea. I took fruit to the Cottage Hospital. And it is no small thing to run a house. And I kept a niblick by the door in case of invasion. I was quite prepared to brain a German with it.’

  ‘You shot pigeons and rats, and one chicken, I believe,’ said Daniel shortly.

  There was a long embarrassing silence, and then Mrs McCosh said, ‘Our lost son would never have spoken to me like that.’

  ‘Has anyone any idea of what the weather will be like tomorrow?’ asked Ottilie brightly.

  Later, when they were going to bed, Rosie said, ‘You shouldn’t have been rude to Mother like that. It was very bad of you, especially in front of Mary. I really think you should apologise tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I will apologise,’ said Daniel, ‘and all I’ll get in return is more provocation about being French and not being her lost son. Rosie, you must move out of this house and bring Esther with you to live with me. I won’t take this any longer. I ride for hours every Friday night to get here from Birmingham, often in freezing rain, having to mend punctures on the way because of all the horse nails, and I lose every Sunday afternoon driving back again. I’m too much on my own. I want to be with Esther; I don’t want to make do with trying to talk to her on the telephone down a bad line. You don’t know how it cuts me up having to leave her. And I’ve had enough of your mother. You see for yourself how appalling she is, and how badly she behaves towards me. Yes, I know, she’s got excuses. I understand all that. We’ve talked about it a hundred times. But it’s not fair on me. You must move out to the house in Wootton Wawen, and we can start to have a proper family and a proper marriage.’

  ‘Esther’s very happy here,’ replied Rosie. ‘She loves Caractacus, and she adores her grandfather.’

  ‘Well, of course she does. We can take the cat with us, can’t we? And I love your father too. He couldn’t be a better father-in-law. I don’t have a father any more, remember? Having him is quite some consolation. That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? It’s your father you don’t want to leave.’

  Rosie flushed. She felt the anger of someone who has been told an uncomfortable truth, and has to deny it or evade it. Rosie chose evasion. ‘Well, I do worry about him. He puts himself under terrible strain with all his speculations and investments. Sometimes we’re actually broke for weeks at a time and he’s almost at his wits’ end. Then the money comes back in. It always does in the end, but it’s killing him, I know it is.’

  ‘I’m not giving you much longer.’

  ‘Don’t try to bully me. I won’t have it. If I’d known you were a bully I wouldn’t have married you.’

  Daniel looked at her balefully, and she cast her eyes down. ‘A bully, eh? And there’s me thinking I’m a man who loves his daughter and his wife and wants to live with them.’

  ‘I think I’d better sleep in my own room tonight,’ said Rosie quietly.

  ‘I won’t sleep at all,’ said Daniel, ‘so I might as well be sleepless on my own. Goodnight. Close the door when you leave, would you?’

  Rosie turned and left, closing the door softly behind her. She stood there for a while, stock-still in the corridor, wanting to go back, but then she went to her own room with a leaden heart.

  93

  Mr Hamilton McCosh Learns a Lesson

  One morning Mr McCosh stood on the top doorstep of the house, berating the grocer, Mr Ives, who stood before him at the bottom of the steps with his brown shop coat and apron on and his cap in his hands. Mr McCosh was in an uncharacteristically bad temper because both the Malay Rubber Company and the Argentine Railway Company had failed to pay dividends on time, and consequently he was temporarily in a state of deep financial embarrassment. Mr Ives was a solid fellow with a glossy chestnut-brown moustache, and one of his ears flopped over where it had been creased by a bullet.

  ‘Ives, how dare you?’ bellowed Mr McCosh. ‘How dare you come here demanding money in broad daylight? Have you no respect, man?’

  ‘I have respect for those who pay their account when it’s due, sir. Those who don’t, sir, I consider to be thieves and scoundrels.’

  Mr McCosh was astonished. ‘You are calling me a thief and a scoundrel, man?’

  ‘You owe me for six months’ provisions,’ replied Mr Ives. ‘I have four employees, a wife and four children. You are not doing your duty by them, sir, when you force me to put them off work, or when my children get no meat and can’t have shoes. You either pay me, sir, or you will oblige me to instruct a bailiff.’

  ‘A bailiff? A bailiff?!’

  ‘The bailiff, sir, will enter your property, by force if necessary, and remove goods to the value that you owe, sir.’

  ‘I know what a bailiff is, Ives. You are threatening me with a bailiff? Do you know who I am, my man? Do you know what I do? I am an investor, a speculator! I build ships and railways and invest in rubber and gas masks and gadgets! Sometimes I have no money at all and sometimes I have an absurd amou
nt. I move it around the world. For six months I have had nothing, and next Monday I will have an absurd amount.’

  ‘Next Monday, sir?’

  ‘Yes, next Monday. Now get out of my sight, before I call the police.’

  ‘You are welcome to call the police,’ said Mr Ives.

  ‘Away with you, man, away with you!’

  Mr Ives turned and walked away, with considerable dignity.

  When he returned the following Monday, Millicent fetched Mr McCosh, who emerged moments later carrying an envelope. Instead of touching his cap and leaving, as expected, Mr Ives tore open the envelope and inspected its contents.

  ‘You have overpaid, sir,’ said Mr Ives.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ retorted Mr McCosh impatiently, ‘I’ve paid not only the account but the outstanding interest on the money owed.’

  ‘That’s very good of you, sir,’ said Mr Ives, ‘but I would rather have the debts paid on time. In my business cash flow is everything. Without the flow, everything seizes up, sir.’

  ‘Quite, quite.’

  Mr Ives withdrew an unsealed envelope from his pocket and handed it to Mr McCosh. ‘Be so kind as to deal with this now,’ he said.

  Mr McCosh opened it and unfolded the paper within. He read: ‘ “I Hamilton McCosh promise henceforth to pay Mr Ives for his provisions promptly on the due date at the end of each month.” A contract?’

  ‘Yes, sir, it’s a contract. You sign and date it immediately, sir, or you will kindly take your business elsewhere.’

  ‘This is outrageous! It’s unheard of!’

  ‘You have the choice, sir. If you do not pay on time, the following week your kitchen will receive my third-quality box, and the week after it will receive nothing.’