by Unknown
They arrive. They watch, in a cool and darkened auditorium, slides; a commentary gives a brief, simplified but lucid account of the colonisation of the eastern seaboard. Not bad, Claudia thinks, not bad at all.
They emerge into the glare and into, evidently, 1627. They enter the stockaded settlement and tour the little fort. They pass out and into the long sloping village street with log cabins at either side. Chickens and geese scratch in the dirt. A figure in a leather jerkin and large-brimmed hat sits mending a hurdle, surrounded by bare-limbed T-shirted onlookers. A sun-bonneted woman chivvies fowls with a broom; someone takes her photograph.
Claudia walks into the first of the log cabins. Within is a fire on which a black cookpot bubbles, elementary furniture, dried plants hung upside-down from beams, a rag-covered bed curtained off by a hanging. And a young man, in breeches and white shirt, who is contemplated in silence by a cluster of visitors. Claudia asks him if he came over in the Mayflower. No, he says, in the Anne, a couple of years later. Why did you come? enquires Claudia. The young man explains his religious convictions and consequent difficulties in England. Claudia asks if he hopes to get rich in the New World. The young man replies that many of the colonists have expectations of ultimate reward, after the struggles of these early years. You stick it out, advises Claudia, I’ll tell you one thing – it works out very interestingly in the end. The young man gives her a quizzical look and says that they have faith in the Lord. You’ll need it, says Claudia. He starts spreading His patronage around in a while, I’ll tell you that too. Ask him if that dried stuff is marjoram, says Sylvia, I’ve never seen it growing over here. Ask him yourself, says Claudia, he speaks English. Oh I can’t, says Sylvia, it feels so silly. The young man is busy mending a fishing-line and ignores her. Well, says Claudia, good luck in the Indian Wars. She leaves the cabin, followed by Sylvia, and stalks down the street and into the next, where Gordon is talking to a burly fellow with an Irish accent. The Irishman is explaining that he was headed for Virginia and fetched up here accidentally. He intends, in the fullness of time, to go south where, he hears, there are good prospects growing this crop tobacco. Gordon sagely nods; you might well be on to something there, he says. Take my advice though, adds Claudia, don’t start importing labour, you’ll avoid a whole lot of trouble later on that way. You’re spoiling the story, says Gordon. Perhaps there’s an alternative story, says Claudia. And what about the theory of manifest destiny? enquires Gordon. Claudia shrugs; I’ve always thought that was dangerous stuff. Pardon, ma’am? says the Irishman. Destiny, says Claudia, overrated, to my mind. I don’t imagine you’re giving it a thought, right now? Well… says the Irishman. Exactly, Claudia continues, any more than I am. It’s only later on that people start preaching about destiny. Oh dear, complains Sylvia, I’m getting out of my depth. Now you people, says Claudia to the Irishman, live in stirring times. Ideologically speaking. Mind, you may feel that sort of thing is passing you by rather, right now, but believe me the consequences are far-reaching. Some might feel it’s downhill all the way thereafter. The Irishman, at this point, is beginning to look slightly alarmed. Other bystanders shift awkwardly. Oh come now, says Gordon, there’s the Enlightenment to follow. And look what that led to, says Claudia. ‘A tide in the affairs of men…’ says Gordon. Another overworked idea, says Claudia. It’s awfully hot in here, murmurs Sylvia. Anyway, it’s a thought, says Claudia to the Irishman, stay with subsistence agriculture and see what happens. Yes Ma’am, says the Irishman, a touch wearily. He turns, with some relief, to a woman who wants to know how he lights his fire without matches.
They emerge from the cabin. Sylvia takes a Kleenex from her bag and wipes her face. Claudia bears down upon the man mending a hurdle under a tree and asks him his name. Winslow, he replies, Edward Winslow. I know one of your descendants, says Claudia. Stop name-dropping, says Gordon. The young man inclines his head graciously. They’re extremely rich, says Claudia. The young man looks disapproving. He’s no more interested in prosperity than you or I, says Gordon. On the contrary, retorts Claudia, he’s very interested. Après moi le déluge is a corrupt and relatively modern notion – you were always short on historical sensitivity. And you, says Gordon, have never been interested in ideas, merely addicted to sweeping and inaccurate opinions. You have always dismissed anything that does not interest you. Ideology. Industrial history. Economics.
Economists, says Claudia to the Massachusetts sky, are academic accountants. And polemical so-called historians, begins Gordon… For goodness sake! snaps Sylvia, people are listening! No they’re not, says Claudia, our friend Mr Winslow here is safely tucked up in 1627 so a twentieth-century family discussion is outside his experience. Oh! cries Sylvia, you’re being ridiculous both of you. Her face puckers. She is, they see, about to burst into tears. I’ve had enough of this place, Sylvia cries, I’m going to have some lunch. And she hastens away up the dusty road between the log cabins, tripping once, a dark patch of sweat across the back of her dress, her hair in a mess.
Oh dear, says Claudia.
Gordon says, Well, you were pushing it a bit, weren’t you? He watches the stumbling figure of his wife, thinks of going after her, decides that she will pull herself together better on her own, knows that is not what he should have decided. Sorry about that, says Claudia to Mr Winslow, genially. You’re welcome, ma’am, says Mr Winslow. Claudia frowns; I’m not sure about that for contemporary speech – I think you may be anticipating a bit. The young man, at this point, betrays a trace of irritation. Excuse me, he begins, but we all take an intensive course in… Claudia, says Gordon, taking her arm, enough is enough.
I’m just getting into my stride, says Claudia, allowing herself, nevertheless, to be led away. I know, says Gordon, that’s the trouble. I said this place sounded promising, says Claudia, and it is. All the same, says Gordon, I think perhaps we’d better come down to earth.
Claudia hangs over a fenced enclosure to inspect a torpid pig, asleep in a patch of shade. Don’t you find the idea of alternative history even faintly intriguing? she asks. No, says Gordon, it’s a waste of time. I thought you were supposed to be a theorist? says Claudia, prodding the pig with a piece of stick. My kind of theory, says Gordon, deals in possibilities, not fantasies. Leave that wretched animal alone. How incredibly boring, says Claudia. And it’s a fact universally admitted that pigs like having their backs scratched. By the way I saw Jasper last month. We took our grandsons to an appalling musical.
What a charming domestic outing, says Gordon. How is he enjoying being a lord? Inordinately, says Claudia. Destiny, says Gordon, has certainly been Jasper’s line – his own. Himself as man of. True, says Claudia. And yours, continues Gordon, would have been a damn sight less fraught if it had never got mixed up with his. Oh, I don’t know, says Claudia – I should think I was doomed to Jasper, or if not him then to someone similar. And I always gave as good as I got, you must admit. Of course, says Gordon. Is he married these days? In a manner of speaking, I believe, says Claudia, even at his age.
The pig gets up and lumbers to the far end of the pen. The stupid thing doesn’t understand tradition, says Claudia. I suppose we ought to go and find Sylvia. Yes, says Gordon, I suppose we ought. They remain where they are. How inconsistent you are, says Claudia, you’re prepared to consider alternative fates within a personal context. I consider that people make choices, says Gordon, though I would concede that some do it better than others. But it is only the irredeemably lumpen who exercise no control at all over their lives. Like this unfortunate twentieth-century pig, says Claudia, condemned to live in seventeenth-century conditions in the interests of tourism and the American national heritage.
They begin to walk, slowly, towards the Reception Center, the present day, and Sylvia. I’ve thought of a new game, says Gordon, only to be played with each other. It’s like Consequences. We each admit Bad Choices and then the other invents an alternative. You concede Jasper and I deal you instead… um, let me see… I deal you Adlai Stevenson whom I
remember you did briefly meet once and took a shine to. By whom you became the mother of a fine son presently running for Governor of Massachusetts. And what do you admit? enquires Claudia. I admit my occupation, says Gordon, I should have stayed with cricket, I’d be retired Captain of England now and command respect where it matters. Don’t be silly, says Claudia, I see this game has one set of rules for me and another for you, I’m not playing. Anyway, I want a drink.
They enter the restaurant. Sylvia sits alone at a table before a glass of iced tea and a very large plateful of salad. Her face is blotched. She greets them with pained dignity. I had no idea when you were going to turn up, she says, so I started. Gordon lays a hand on her shoulder. Sorry, love, he says, we really are. We were dawdling. I hope you feel revived. Can I get you anything else? Sylvia replies, injured and distant, that perhaps she’ll have some ice-cream.
Car parks, reception centres, lavatories and restaurants are superimposed upon the wilderness. And for me that place is several places – real and unreal, experienced and imagined. It becomes a part of my own sequence of references; the collective past becomes private territory. Gordon and Sylvia, on an afternoon a few years ago, move alongside the Plymouth settlers and a bunch of museum officials in fancy dress.
4
‘What’s that?’ she whispers, pointing.
‘What’s what, Miss Hampton?’ says the nurse. ‘There’s nothing – just the window.’
‘There!’ – she stabs the air – ‘Thing moving… What’s it called? Name!’
‘Nothing that I can see,’ says the nurse briskly. ‘Don’t fuss, dear. You’re a bit muzzy today, that’s all. Have a sleep. I’ll draw the curtains.’
The face, suddenly, relaxes. ‘Curtain,’ she mutters. ‘Curtain.’
‘Yes, dear,’ says the nurse. ‘I’ll draw the curtains.’
Today language abandoned me. I could not find the word for a simple object – a commonplace familiar furnishing. For an instant, I stared into a void. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room – a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. And I breathed again.
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles – tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant. Learning by heart, chanting at the top of my voice – ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the Nine Gods he swore, That the great House of Tarquin, Should suffer wrong no more…’ Gloating over Gordon who could not spell ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM, the longest word in the dictionary. Rhyming and blaspheming and marvelling. I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently – it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable. ‘Does anyone know all the words in the world?’ I ask Mother. ‘Anyone?’ ‘I expect very clever men do,’ says Mother vaguely.
Lisa, as a child, most interested me when I watched her struggling with language. I was not a good mother, in any conventional sense. Babies I find faintly repellent; young children are boring and distracting. When Lisa began to talk I listened to her. I corrected the inanities encouraged by her grandmothers. ‘Dog,’ I said. ‘Horse. Cat. There are no such things as bow-wows and gee-gees.’ ‘Horse,’ said Lisa, thoughtfully, tasting the word. For the first time we communicated. ‘Gee-gee gone?’ enquired Lisa. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Gone. Clever girl.’ And Lisa took a step towards maturity.
Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.
I used to take Lisa for walks in the woods near Sotleigh when she was five and six, shedding Jasper’s mother and the bovine Swiss au pair girl. She amused and intrigued me – this small unreachable alien creature locked in her amoral preliterate condition with no knowledge of past or future, free of everything, in a state of grace. I wanted to know how it felt. I would question her, craftily, with adult sophistry, with the backing of Freud and Jung and centuries of perception and opinion. And she would slip away from me, impervious, equipped with her own powers of evasion, with Indian lore, with techniques of camouflage.
Claudia and Lisa, five foot eight inches tall and three foot seven, forty-four years old and six, wade through bluebells, wood anemones and leaf mould. The trees resound with bird-song. An old labrador shuffles ahead, nosing toadstools. Coins of sunlight fall down through the trees and lie on feet, on branches, on arms and legs, on the dog’s back. Claudia hums. Lisa squats, from time to time, to extract minute objects from the undergrowth with tiny, meticulous fingers.
‘What have you got?’ enquires Claudia.
‘A thing,’ says Lisa.
Claudia bends to inspect. ‘That’s a wood-louse.’
‘It’s got legs,’ says Lisa.
‘Yes,’ says Claudia, with a faint shudder. ‘Lots of legs. Don’t squash it like that. You’ll hurt it.’
‘Why doesn’t it want me to hurt it?’
‘Well…’ Claudia struggles, frowning. ‘You don’t like people hurting you, do you?’
Lisa stares at Claudia expressionless. She drops the wood-louse. ‘You’ve got funny eyes.’
Claudia, whose eyes have attracted much favourable comment, loses her expression of benign interest.
‘They’ve got black holes in them,’ Lisa continues.
‘Ah,’ says Claudia. ‘Those are called pupils. You’ve got them too.’
‘No I haven’t,’ says Lisa, laughing lightly. She walks on, immediately in front of Claudia, who has to modulate her step so as not to fall over her. Claudia feels oddly disadvantaged, both because of the inconveniently short paces she is having to take and for another, less identifiable, reason. She stops humming and thinks about this. Presently she says, ‘Do you remember when I took you to the beach and you went swimming?’
‘No,’ replies Lisa, at once.
‘Of course you do,’ says Claudia sharply. ‘I bought you a yellow rubber ring. And a spade. It was last month.’
‘It was a long time ago not as long as all that,’ says Lisa.
‘There! You do remember.’
Lisa is silent. She turns to look at Claudia, who sees that her eyes are hideously crossed.
‘Don’t do that – you’ll get a squint.’
‘I’m making a face.’
‘So I see. It isn’t a very nice one.’
A robin sings, piercingly. The wood shivers and quivers and sways around them. Warm summer Devon breezes stroke their faces and their limbs. The dog defecates on to a cushion of moss. Lisa observes, without comment. Claudia sits down on a fallen branch. ‘Why are you sitting down?’ asks Lisa.
‘My legs get tired.’
Lisa rubs her calf. ‘Mine aren’t.’
‘They’re shorter,’ says Claudia. ‘Perhaps that’s why.’
Lisa stretches out a le
g and contemplates it. Claudia watches. The dog lies on a patch of grass, nose between paws. Lisa says, ‘Rex has got short legs too. More legs.’
‘If he’s got more legs,’ says Claudia, ‘do you think he’s more tired?’
‘I don’t know,’ replies Lisa promptly. ‘Is he?’
‘I don’t know either. What do you think?’
Lisa is now picking the heads from a clump of buttercups and assembling them in a heap. She ignores Claudia, who takes out a cigarette and lights it. The smoke that Claudia exhales mingles with the yellow shafts of sunlight and hangs there, a soupy churning density in the clear air of the wood. Lisa gets to her feet and wades through this to reach the dog; she scatters the buttercup heads on to his back. The dog does not move. Lisa kneels beside him and mutters something.
Claudia says, ‘What are you talking to Rex about?’
‘Nothing,’ replies Lisa, distantly.
The trees are singing. They also make whooshing and hissing noises and eyes stare from their trunks, shapes of big cruel eyes at which you must not look or creatures might pounce out and get you – ghosts and witches and old men like the old man who sweeps the street outside Claudia’s house in London. If she can count to ten before she gets to the tree, that one whooshing and shushing and watching her, if she can count to ten without going wrong nothing will get her, the horrid eyes will vanish; she does, and they do.
