The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  (The devout and despotic king disapproved of his brother because he had refused to follow the career ordained for him, and had instead pursued a worldly and amorous life. Having been appointed cardinal-archbishop of Toledo at the age of seven and archbishop of Seville at the age of fourteen, Don Luis had rebelled against his ecclesiastical destiny, and had gone his own way. The little boy holding the piece of dissected map was to become President of the Regency of Cadiz during Ferdinand’s captivity and has been credited with reining in the activities of the Inquisition. Jigsaws, as I maintain, are good for the character.)

  Paintings celebrating the ideal of the ‘new’ companionate marriage are a good hunting ground for images of children’s playthings. The Duke of Orsuna was the head of another enlightened and progressive Spanish family much loved and much painted by Goya, and his 1788 portrait of the duke with his elegant intellectual wife and four children includes the obligatory small dog and a miniature, beautifully made, black toy carriage on a string. Surely this family must also have had dissected maps in its nursery? Lady Holland (born Elizabeth Vassall, and wife of the third Lord Holland) met the family on her travels in Spain with her husband in 1804, and wrote warmly in her journal of the duchess’s liveliness, her handsome children, her ‘national magnificence and hospitality’, describing her as ‘the most distinguished woman in Madrid from her talents, worth and taste’. She also praised the duke’s exceptional library, ‘chiefly of classics, history, voyages and books of science, which he intended for the use of the public; but this intention he was not permitted by the Governt. to carry into effect’.

  Lady Holland’s Hispanophile husband was, one might note, the nephew of Charles James Fox and of his younger brother Harry, who was reared on fish, fairy stories and Rousseau. Charles James, the apple of his father’s eye, was more spectacularly indulged as a small child by his doting father Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland. This devoted parent, having recovered from the shock of producing a baby with skin ‘all shrivelled’ and staring eyes who looked incredibly ‘like a monkey’, soon fell in love with the company and conversation of his precocious second son, whom he found ‘infinitely engaging & clever & pretty’. He could deny him nothing; he is said to have allowed him to smash his father’s watch, to tear up his state papers, and to ride on a saddle of mutton while paddling his feet in the gravy. (Stella Tillyard, in Aristocrats (1994), has him riding on a patriotic joint of roast beef, and she is no doubt right, but I prefer my saddle-of-mutton version.) In Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977), Lawrence Stone quotes this anecdote from Lady Louisa Stuart:

  A great dinner was given at Holland House to all the foreign ministers. The children came in at dessert. Charles, then in petticoats, spying a large bowl of cream in the middle of the table, had a desire to get into it. Lord Holland insisted he should be gratified, and, in spite of Lady Holland’s remonstrations, had it placed on the floor for the child to jump in and splash about at his pleasure.

  Permissiveness, some thought, could be taken too far, and stories like this (some but not all of them apocryphal) contributed to the Victorian backlash against the early ‘indiscipline’ that had turned Fox into a gambler and a debauchee.

  Fox, as a little boy, was painted by William Hoare, who also painted the Quicke brothers with their dissected puzzle. Fox is shown in a silk dress, wearing a splendid headdress and clutching a King Charles spaniel. Already, as an infant, he looks like a contender who would not be content to play the game of patience.

  XXIII

  Since Mrs Hannas sold her collection in 1984, more early jigsaws have come onto the market. They are not as rare as once thought, and interest in them has increased. The Sotheby’s sale catalogue of the Hannas collection stated that there were ‘only six known Spilsbury jigsaws, four of which are in this collection’. Her map of Europe ‘Divided into its Kingdoms’ had an estimate of £200–£300 and was described as ‘lacking three pieces’. Spilsbury’s ‘England and Wales’, lacking many pieces, plus another better copy, together with ‘two engraved maps coloured by hand, mounted on wood, and cut to form puzzle’, formed a lot also estimated at £200–£300, the same price as that of a further lot consisting of Spilsbury’s ‘The World’ together with ‘a smaller engraved two hemispherical map dated 1762 which is Spilsbury’s earliest known imprint, torn’. A map of ‘Asia, divided into its Empires, Kingdoms and States’, described as possibly the first jigsaw puzzle to have an interlocking border, was included in a lot estimated at £150–200.

  Interestingly, all these items went for far more than their estimates: the map of Europe fetched £1,650; ‘England and Wales’ went for £880; ‘The World’ for £984; and Asia for £352. Prices were rising, and jigsaws were becoming increasingly collectible.

  The dates shift, and the dissemination of puzzles throughout Europe and the rest of the world has not been fully charted. Nevertheless, it was the traditional founding date of 1766, true or false, that introduced me to Kevin. He sent me off on a new wild-goose chase, which was to take me far from the story of the jigsaw, and far from my Somerset evenings with Auntie Phyl. This is how it happened.

  The thrill of my first physical contact with the Spilsbury maps in the British Library was so great that I was fired with eagerness to see as many old jigsaws as possible, as soon as possible. And by soon I meant immediately, that very day. (I am not patient by temperament, which is one of the reasons why I believe jigsaws are good for me.) I returned the wooden maps in their boxes to the appropriate counter in the Map Room and decided to set off at once in search of their Victorian successors. It is not often now that I try to do two things in one day. I knew that the Museum of London had holdings of puzzles, and indeed at that stage believed that Linda Hannas had bequeathed it her collection, so I thought I would go there and see whether I could find them. At that point, I innocently trusted that they would be spread out in glass cabinets, awaiting my eager inspection. I longed to see them. I don’t know how I have preserved this optimism of easy access for so long.

  It is, in theory, easy to get from the British Library to the Museum of London via King’s Cross on the underground, and had I been in less of a hurry I would have gone on the tube, courtesy of my old person’s Freedom Pass. But I knew from past experience that the Barbican is itself a giant puzzle. Its exits and entrances, like those of the reconstructed King’s Cross, are bewildering, its layers labyrinthine. So I resolved to take a cab, which would take me straight to the right hole in the fortress wall. I usually resist travelling by taxi, for reasons that do not involve expense, but I decided to save time and make an exception to my rule. I would ask to be dropped off at the correct entrance, and thus gain at least half an hour of working time.

  This was a lucky lapse of rigour. When I stated my destination, the taxi driver said to me, reasonably enough, ‘Doing London in the day, are you?’ I was mildly offended; I was a scholar, not an ageing tourist from out of town, going from museum to museum with nothing better to do. Did I look like an idler? So I said pompously, ‘No, I’m doing some research.’ He changed gear at once and politely asked about my subject. When I told him, he enquired, ‘So when was the first jigsaw made?’ I was able to reply, with unusual precision if not necessarily with historical accuracy, ‘In 1766.’

  He thought about this for a moment, as we headed east. Then he said, ‘No, that can’t be right. There must be earlier jigsaws. Think about it. What about mosaics?’

  I thought about this challenge, and have continued to think about it. As he spoke, little brightly coloured particles of memory began to scatter and glitter and connect in the back of my brain. Tesserae, tesserae. Click, click, click. Mosaics, patterns, kaleidoscopes, tapestries, pictures. Dispersion, cohesion, mastic, gum, glue. Mimesis, mimicry. Children in antiquity, playing with pebbles and bones and teeth on a cave floor. Tragic children, dying early in their droves, before they had had much chance of any fun. Greek knucklebones, Greek fivestones. Roman pavements, Roman masonry, Roman spolia,
architectural salvage. Hadrian’s Villa and the Doves of Pliny, Florentine table tops, pietre dure, opus sectile, inlay, marquetry, intarsia. Monte Oliveto, Urbino, Gubbio. Disconnected moments of epiphany, moments of recognition. Reconstructions, reassemblings, replications. Collections, cabinets of curiosities. Simulacra, copies, reproductions. Calendar art, conversion art, paper flowers, elves made of gummed paper. The half-arts, die Halbkünste, the compositae.

  The jigsaw model of experience and of the universe.

  The model in which the scattered pieces from the first dispersal are reunited at the end of time.

  XXIV

  I first went to London with Auntie Phyl. She took me and my sister Susan to see the sights. I had never been further south than Bryn. I was about eleven, I think, with a centre parting and little brown plaited pigtails, and a hopeful smile and Clark’s shoes and wrinkled knee socks and a nice cloth coat with a nipped waist and buttons and lapels. We stayed for a few days in Bloomsbury, in the Kenilworth Hotel (or was it the Ivanhoe?), and I found every moment of our sojourn extraordinarily stimulating and exciting. London was wonderful to me. There were moments of terror, like the moment at breakfast when the waiter asked me, ‘Black or white?’ and had to repeat his question several times. I had no idea what he was talking about, as he hovered threateningly over my cup of coffee with a heavy silver-plated jug of hot milk. And Auntie Phyl had to tell me that in a hotel I didn’t need to make my own bed. I had never stayed in a hotel before. I found it hard to believe that somebody else would make my bed for me. At home, we always made our own.

  London, the greatest city in the world, was known to me through books, and through the Monopoly board, and as the destination of the parlour travellers in Belisha. I knew of Mayfair and of Marble Arch. Auntie Phyl had been whetting our imagination for years, with tales of the zoo, and Kew in lilac time, and St Paul’s cathedral, and Trafalgar Square, and the British Museum, and Madame Tussaud’s, and the lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the underground, and the Lyons Corner Houses. All these things we now saw and sampled. We fed the pigeons and went to the zoo. Auntie Phyl was tireless in those days, and thought nothing of climbing the Monument, or the stairs up to the Whispering Gallery. We had our supper in the Corner House on the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, where, if I remember rightly, there was a live orchestra playing for us. She and I usually ordered the same dish, which was called omelette aux fines herbes. I thought this the height of sophistication. The speckling of green on the neatly folded yellow flap, all reposing like a quiet oval fish on an oval silver salver – this was a luxury, yet a luxury that did not make us feel uncomfortable or outclassed.

  I do not think that Auntie Phyl referred to the Corner House waitresses as ‘nippies’, as others knowingly did, for I do not recall hearing the word at that age, and I remember being slightly surprised by it when I first came across it. I suspect she might have disliked its familiarity and its condescension. Like me, she was a little nervous with waiters, waitresses and other figures of authority, whom she considered to be more than her equals. Like me, she much preferred public transport to taxis. Like me, she was not a good employer and did not enjoy bossing people about or giving instructions. In her later years she came to rely heavily on Joyce, as cleaner, carer, confidante, neighbour and friend, and on Joyce’s husband Eddie as handyman, mechanic, gardener, neighbour and friend, but she relied on their good nature rather than on any contractual relationship. I used to worry that neither of them ever got paid.

  Joyce had looked after my grandmother at Bryn in her last illness, and after Grandma’s death she inherited the care of Auntie Phyl. I remember Auntie Phyl saying to me once, after some slight tiff, ‘I’d better keep on the right side of Joyce. I’d be sunk without Joyce.’ I often think of that phrase, and see Auntie Phyl sinking, heavily, helplessly, beneath the waters.

  But when she was in her thirties, she was tireless. She was overawed by upmarket restaurants and fancy department stores, but she relished the adventure of staying in a hotel, or taking a journey across Europe, or catching a liner to Scandinavia, or a tourist coach to East Germany. In her own way, she was enterprising. One year, astonishingly, she drove to Istanbul. (She shared the driving with my father, and, unlike my mother, she did drive.)

  Our week in London was a treat. I wish I could remember more of it. We liked the little zoo-born polar bear, Brumas. That year at Christmas we bought each other little white Brumas replicas, made of soap. Auntie Phyl allowed us to indulge these childish longings without making us feel silly. Both my parents often made me feel silly. They wanted us to grow up. They didn’t really like children. They didn’t dislike them, but they found them tiring and tiresome. My mother said she liked babies, but she was impatient with noisy, dirty, independent, uncontrollable youngsters. Their company bored her. Neither of my parents had been very happy as children, and, unlike Auntie Phyl, both had longed to escape from South Yorkshire. My mother saw childhood as a state to be endured, a time of hard work and study, of pleasure deferred. We were praised for high marks and passing exams, but nothing else we did seemed to be of value. A disappointing university grade (an Upper Second instead of the expected First) was mourned like a death in the family.

  When I tried to have some fun as an adolescent, I would be told, ‘Wait until you get to Cambridge, you can do that when you get to Cambridge…’ It never seemed to occur to them that any of their children might not get into Cambridge. I distrusted this attitude. I had the sense to know that the competition for places was fierce, but they seemed to expect I would be offered one as of right. The pressure to follow in their footsteps was unquestioned and intense, so intense that none of us actively rebelled against it. It seemed to be the only way to get away. Cambridge had liberated them, and in turn it was expected to liberate us.

  Auntie Phyl never imposed such expectations on us, because nobody had expected much of her. She let us enjoy ourselves.

  I can’t remember whether Auntie Phyl took us into the National Gallery, but I have a photograph of us amongst the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

  I loved the underground, and the famous map of it, from which we could work out how to get to anywhere from anywhere. (The maze-loving Georges Perec, of course, saluted this map.) It all seemed too good to be true. The names of the stations enraptured me – Regent Street, Chalk Farm, Swiss Cottage, Russell Square, Earl’s Court. The map was so clearly marked, its routes so logical, so reassuringly easy to follow. We always knew where we were when we were underground on the underground. We could not get lost. It made visitors feel at home, in control of a vast strange city, which was our own and not our own. It was an immense romance.

  I don’t think we can have done Hampton Court on this visit, for how could there have been time? But I do remember taking Auntie Phyl there, many years later, when she was staying with me in London while recuperating from her cataract operation in Moorfields Eye Hospital. We had a lovely day out, wandering in the gardens, sitting in the sun in an outdoor café taking tea and cake, and talking to another couple of elderly idlers at the next table. She did appreciate an outing.

  Hampton Court, like East Hardwick, is a bright and sunny place in my memory. It is festive and light-hearted, a palace built for pleasure. Sometimes, when I am in very low spirits and beset by troubles, I think that I might cheer up if I were to take a trip to Hampton Court. And in the blazing hot summer of 2006, in so many ways a bad year for Michael and me, I did just that. I went for a day out to the Hampton Court Flower Show, where my son Joe was presenting show gardens for the BBC programme Gardeners’ World. He sent a car to collect me from the Lion Gate. I watched him, proudly, as he spoke to camera, and I wished that my father could have seen him. A keen gardener himself, my father would have been so surprised and pleased to find he had a gardening grandson. Auntie Phyl and Joyce often saw Joe on telly, and Joyce and her friends in Long Bennington continue to follow his career with interest. But my father died too early to know of Joe’s meta
morphosis.

  Joe refused to have much truck with higher education or university. He probably thought there’d been too much of that kind of thing in the family. He did his A-levels, in his own relaxed and laid-back fashion, and then he found his own way. He seemed to know what he was doing. His father and I didn’t interfere. We were and remain full of admiration for his independence.

  XXV

  I like being a tourist and seeing the sights. So I shouldn’t have reacted in that defensively hoity-toity manner when Kevin asked me whether I was up in London for the day. But I’m glad I did, for otherwise I might not have started to think about mosaics, and the mystery of patterns and composites. I might not have seen that they, too, are part of the plan.

  I made a date with Kevin, who agreed to take me on a tour of London in his cab, starting from the City of London, to look for mosaics and other jigsaw analogies. We met at Farringdon Station, and he chose our route. He showed me the new buildings and the old, the complex infill and patterning of Roman London, and the succeeding waves of two thousand years of overbuild and underpass. We gazed at Minster Court in Mincing Lane, and at the sparkling isometric diamonds of the windows of the Gherkin, and at the rugged brick remains of the Temple of Mithras, and at Tivoli Corner at the Bank of England. We drove over Holborn Viaduct, beneath which the shops of the printmakers, mapmakers and puzzle producers of Holborn Hill have long been buried. He described to me the legendary Knowledge that London taxi drivers are obliged to acquire. London is a jigsaw, and he knows better than to most of us how the pieces fit together.