“Now, follow me closely, here. Listen up.”
People had regretted asking me to do that, before now. Should I tell him that? Or did he also know that, too?
“You see,” he said, “Reynolds was actually under orders to retreat if he came across the enemy. Meade did not wish to advance. He wanted to wait, elsewhere, seventeen miles away from Gettysburg. It was Reynolds who forced Meade’s hand by pulling Lee into a fire fight before Lee was fully ready to spring his trap. Reynolds called up more infantry and engaged the enemy. Meade then had to march to the sound of the guns, and the destiny he feared.
“Enough,” he said. “Enough. That’s all just events and I promised you a backstory. The backstory is that of John Reynolds. Why did he bring it on? In defiance of Meade? Why? Because he was a native of south-central Pennsylvania. This was his soil that was being invaded. The time had come. It was a mirror image of Lee, who fought for Virginia more than he did the South, and who wanted, if he could manage it, no more suffering on Virginian soil. Bring it on, indeed. And when it was done and Lee, broken and guilt-racked, pulled back across the mountain gaps into the Shenandoah Valley, Meade, consensual and nervous, did not follow. His backstory. All backstories are inescapable, you just have to know how to read them.”
Like you’re assuming you can read mine, I thought.
“All endings have their origins,” I said.
“But,” I said. “Not all beginnings have to be found in those endings.”
He straightened his back. He cocked his head to the side.
“That,” he said, “is where you and me may be at this very moment.”
“But what is this moment, exactly?” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
“It’s now, of course,” he said, “but it’s also what can be avoided, or induced. You have no choice, other than to leave or stay. It will be how you will meet this moment. My point has been, and I know you see it, that if you choose to stay you take on the backstory that begins again, the one you cannot avoid after you act, the one that will sweep you on. Believe me, I know. I’ve been there. I’ve even seen this moment coming. For me, I mean. Not exactly like this, but close enough to recognise it. The luck is you woke me so that, chico, I can show you what it means. I think you’ve seen it coming too. What will it be, an end or a beginning?”
I moved towards him. He didn’t seem concerned. I extended my left hand, the one still holding the Beretta, so that the gun barrel centred on the middle of his forehead. If he flinched, I didn’t see it. I lowered the gun. I transferred it to my right and held it so that the stock was turned towards him. I waited. He made no move. He seemed to have considered what would have been, truly, an unfeasible choice. He was right. I would have finished it. So, I nodded and I walked away from him with my back turned. I waited, an instant, one last time. I said “OK then”, and I put the gun down on an occasional table set in the corner of the room. It lay there, posed, amongst a scatter of glossy magazines. I turned to face him. He was puzzled for the first time. Me, I was certain for the last time.
“You forgot something, old man,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. Irritated.
“Enlighten me, punk,” he said.
“That General Longstreet,” I said.
“Yes?” he said, as if I was really an eager pupil.
“He could have made Gettysburg different, couldn’t he?” I said. “I mean if he’d persuaded Lee not to attack against the guns in those positions. If he’d found alternative, defensive positions. If he’d made Meade fight only when Lee was ready, and where Longstreet wanted. If they’d left Gettysburg behind them and outflanked Meade, and if they’d kept their invasion going …”
“If, if, if”, he said, and “maybe”.
“Then”, I said, “there would have been no backstory to trap them. No backstory to haunt and hurt and define and confuse and destroy.”
“There’s always a backstory, sunshine,” he said. “You haven’t been listening, have you?”
“Yeah, I have,” I said.
“And,” I said, “my humble conclusion, not being so book-read as you, is that we don’t, ever, have to pick up on the only backstory there is, or seems to be. We can make our own up. Some of the time anyway. And this time will be mine, old man.”
“Don’t patronise me, you fuck”, he said.
“I’m leaving”, I said. “But the gun stays. I’m leaving. But you aren’t going anywhere, are you? Your backstory has to have the ending you’re going to give it, doesn’t it? Or something like. But thanks, Teacher, you’ve made mine different now. And complete, too.”
I backed away from him, more cautiously this time, towards the door. I’d made sure I was still nearer to the gun when I touched the door handle than he was to the side table where the gun still waited.
“If not you today, who tomorrow?” he said.
“If not me tomorrow, why not you today?” I said.
I opened the door and stepped into the corridor. I locked the door, as if it mattered. I walked down the thickly carpeted corridor to the lift at its end. I pressed the Down button on the wall. I waited. I heard the elevator arrive and its doors make a clunky, opening sound. I stepped in. Down the corridor, back from where I’d come I heard a single, muffled shot. I said “Croeso, butt” out loud, and then I pressed the Ground Floor button to take me down to the foyer. I walked across the bluey slate floor, my high heels clicking in rhythm with my sway. I went out into the night,just another night or, just maybe, one that was becoming a different kind of dawn.I didn’t bet on it.
Not Anna
The class met at eleven every Thursday morning. She had to take two buses to get there, one leaving the valley at nine and the other from the city centre at 10.15, then a five minutes walk to be on time. She was always on time. She had never missed a class. They met in one of the older buildings still left on the campus. It was a single storey, pseudo-Gothic affair, a kind of extended gallery in locally quarried and block-hewn stone which had been tacked onto the Romantic pile, turrets and towers, which the Copper King had commissioned for his parkland in the 1850s. The pile was now a warren of pokey offices and draughty reception rooms, and the gallery had been sub-divided into class rooms for seminars. Each room was separated, along the length of a parquet-floor corridor, by lath-and-plaster walls with half-glass doors set at intervals into the corridor wall. The furnishings inside each room – liberal arts teaching only – were minimal. A scatter of wooden chairs with desk-arms, a table and chair at the front and behind them a whiteboard on an otherwise bare wall. External light came from two long, original and mullioned windows looking out onto a terrace set slightly above the rolling slopes of the campus, whilst a fitful internal illumination came from a fly-specked fluorescent tube fixed to the ceiling.
Christine was the first to arrive. She clicked the switch to put the flickering overhead light on against the outside wintry gloom. Christine liked being early. She liked sitting there alone, her chosen chair positioned to be slightly to one side, waiting for the others. There were usually around eight of them, depending on illness or family commitments or holidays, and, of course, there was the Tutor, Derek Holdsworth B.A (Cantab), D.Phil (Oxon). Christine had had to look up the meaning of the letters put after his name in the university’s brochure for Lifelong Learning. Now she knew them, and their meaning, as if by heart and she said them to herself, quietly and warmly, by respectful rote. Cantab and Oxon. Oxford and Cambridge. From the photographs she had seen in the coffee-table books she’d borrowed from the library, she felt she could almost touch, in her mind, that blend of the antique and the aesthetic which the images of colleges and quads and rivers and punts and gowns and spires laid before her in their page flattened dimension. Perhaps a coach trip would be possible in the summer if she could find someone to stay with her mother for a couple of days. Or rather if she could persuade her mother to agree to it. Christine looked out of the windows of the classroom at the jumble of uniform glas
s and steel boxes and residential tower blocks strewn across the campus. It had begun to snow. Christine liked the waiting. She savoured the anticipation of what was to come.
Ten people had originally registered for the weekly two hour long class on ‘The Realist Novel: Love and Society in the Nineteenth Century’. Two of them, both men as it happened, had dropped out after the second of the twenty sessions scheduled over two terms. The eight who remained were all women, mostly in their late sixties or, like Christine, just into that decade of life with only Diana Lewry still in her, rather striking they all agreed, mid-forties. Oddly enough, Christine considered, she was more at ease with Diana than the others who were all wives or widows of former faculty staff and seemed to her proprietorial, almost as a collective, about the existence of such a class in the first place. Something perhaps to pass the time they had no choice now but to pass. Together. Christine knew that this was no choice for her, but a chance like no other she had ever had. She sensed how her serious intent was not, by them, so well regarded. Not so by Diana Lewry though who stood out for other reasons. Relative youth and undeniable good looks for a start. Coal-black hair and hazel-flecked eyes, and a trimness of figure her short skirts and tightly-hugging jumpers were not devised to disguise, was a part of it, but also because, like Christine, she had, from the start, engaged with the literature. The faculty women were rapt enough in their attention but quiescent in response. Christine had thought, at first,that she would be too shy, too inexperienced, too intimidated, to rise to the tutor’s bait of question-and-answer, yet the tug of her interest was, she found, irresistibly strong and especially when Diana led the way with common sense replies to Derek Holdsworth’s compound of acerbic wit and intellectual commentary. Over the first term the pattern became set and then accepted. Diana and Derek, with Diana invariably ready to concede the point, would bat this or that thought or consideration back and fro until, to a general sense of amused relief, Christine, flustered but persistent, would make it an unlikely threesome. The others, put out to winter grass in this extra mural tradition, just as they would putt or bowl on other grass courses when summer released them, would murmur or titter, always appreciatively, depending on who was currently speaking. The relationship between them and their tutor was well-established for they had attended his classes before, and over coffee in the break after the first hour, he would ask, pleasantly enough, how his Grass Widows were doing, and of the health of any of the husbands who had lived on into retirement after the rigours of academic life. That was not as it was, they all agreed. Whereas, Diana Lewry as the wife of a G.P recently moved into the area and Christine Verity as a recently retired local government officer were indeed different, welcomed but on the edge of the group and its own particular purpose.
When the class first met, Derek Holdsworth had told them of the novels he had chosen for study and the inexpensive paperback editions he wished them to buy. They were to read the editor’s explanatory Notes but, for the present, to ignore the fuller Introductions or Forewords. “Too prescriptive,” he’d laughed and, smiling at Diana, added “Even for a Doctor’s wife, Mrs Lewry.” There were, nonetheless, other hand-outs from him, of contemporary quotations and criticism, along with a page-long bibliography of texts meant to establish,he said knowingly as if he was speaking in inverted commas,the “all important context”. The essence of the novels, he stressed, would be for them to discover for themselves. The text was itself the adventure, the journey, on which they were, and here a wink to show his awareness of the cliché he would only use as such, “now embarked”.He was sure,he said,that the insights they would bring to the works by being themselves women in an unresolved contemporary setting would reveal the feminist struggles and patriarchal stifling of the past as laid out in “these great novels”. Perhaps the two male attendees felt themselves superfluous after this, and left the group shortly after it had begun to explore the fictional world of four famous women.
They had started with Madame Bovary and followed it before Christmas, with Middlemarch. Christine had read neither book before, and had not even heard of the latter whose sheer size daunted her as she weighed it in her hands. She had been excited by the Flaubert, initially disturbed by so much that remained startlingly illicit in its sexually charged undercurrent, but the Eliot confounded her by its intellectual challenge set alongside its drab accounting, or was it more its accounting for the drab. Under Dr Holdsworth’s guidance they had been taken down paths of style and intent, through by-ways of characterisation and contemporary context until, piece by piece, Christine saw, for the first time, things as a whole and fragments as mosaics to place how and where she could. The more she understood the more, to her surprise, was she personally moved. The mystery of understanding at all was not taken away by the education, as she had half-wanted, it was given a depth and force that made its power all the more mysterious, almost unattainable or perhaps undesirable as a finished object. Her emotions, confronted by reading and discussing and re-reading, switch- backed from sympathy to empathy, from dislike to despair, as Charles and Emma and Dorothea and Casaubon and Lydgate and Rosamund , performed and re-played their fixed, or was it fated,marital destinies. In their presence Christine had never felt more sensitive to both the pulses and the deadened nerves of her own past and continuing life.
Now, waiting and alone, in late January at the beginning of the second term, with snow falling yet more heavily, each fresh fall making the icy slush beneath more treacherous, she tapped the laminated cover of the next masterpiece with the bitten nail of her right-hand index finger. She drummed a beat on the lovely face of Anna Karenina, or rather on the portrait of the society beauty chosen by the publisher to represent Anna, and she looked forward, with the Russian novel already finished, to Zola’s Nana, yet to come. But that could wait. The Tolstoy, which had been opened on New Year’s Day and consumed within three weeks, had, and she did not quite know how as yet, worried her. She was rarely disturbed by anything anymore. Yet now she was, and her anticipation of how that might be explained was acute. She had not been able to counterpoint her feelings with the kind of discussion which had ordered such matters so distinctly for her before the Christmas break. Adrift from the class and the fierce clarity of Derek Holdsworth’s knowledge, she had had only herself to consult. She could not, of course, discuss it with her mother who, in any case, resented any moment she saw Christine sitting down to read, not being useful as she’d always put it. So she read of Anna and of Karenin, and of Vronsky, in between preparing meals for the two of them, and cleaning and shopping. She read in bursts when her mother, satisfied and silent at last, sat transfixed by a soap or reality show on television. She read mostly in bed, holding the bulky paperback as steady as she could above her counterpane.
She saw herself as someone in training, like a sportsperson almost, for the new season when the Coach, the tutor, Dr Holdsworth, Derek of Cantab and Oxon, would take the whole team on a strategic tour of the circumstances around the whole book before canvassing individual opinion and queries. The ground laid out in this way he would then, she knew, tease out, week by week, their understanding of his own sophisticated, and complete, rendition of the great work he would, if they cared to,allow them to possess for themselves. Though she had been flummoxed at first by this method of teaching – his pedagogical penance , he’d called it with his customary wink to the class – Christine had come to feel as privileged as a novitiate being prepared to enter an exclusive Order. Nothing was made easy after the easy, assured eloquence of his opening foray into life and times and culture. Once that clutter, his irony again they intuited , was cleared away he would sit before them, his expressive and tapered fingers drumming gently on the plain deal table at which he sat, until he drove them, forced them, or was it that he seduced them, into breaking the silence. The others were more than happy to allow him to raise an eyebrow and glance in Diana Lewry’s direction. She would make the dialogue less that of a supplicant before a master, more like a playful bout of
badinage with the result never in doubt. Christine, however hard she tried to rein in her eagerness, could not help but sound a querulous tone in her genuine impatience for an answer. This time, with this book, her anxiety was becoming more acute, her expectation more strained. She could scarcely wait. She had a question to ask about Anna.
Christine had not thought, when she signed up for the literature course at the University’s Lifelong Learning Centre upon her retirement from the Council’s Planning Department, that the formal study of literature, or Great Books as she had put it in explanation to her complaining mother, would lead her to questions. She had hoped for information. For answers to her lack of it. For discovery of knowledge. And maybe, perhaps, enjoyment. All to be received, she had assumed, in dutiful and grateful silence. But Derek Holdsworth’s ardent probing and his patent commitment to the life-changing properties of his subject had quite altered her perspective. Christine, as if a switch had been thrown, began to view her own life, its evasions and its end-stops, through the lens he had held up before them. It was not as clear as that for her all the time, and nor did she always see the connections, moral and life-enhancing he stressed,which she vaguely discerned were there to be made. Yet the questions were increasingly insistent, and troubling. Everything old was to be re-assessed. Everything new was to be tested. Every lazy assumption was to be quizzed. Every conclusion reached too easily was to be overturned. Her question, the one she had for him about Anna, was, she saw now, a question for, and so about, herself. It was an educated question.
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