‘What do you think you’re up to?’ she asked. But he took no notice. He was staring at her foot and gabbling to himself. She recognized the words: ‘… not into temptation, but deliver us from evil –’
‘Dr Johnson, Sir!’
The edge to her voice brought him out of his reverie. He got off his knees and stood swaying and panting in front of her.
‘Dr Johnson, you must pull yourself together.’
‘Why, if I must, Madam, I have no choice.’
‘Do you not understand what a contract is?’
‘By all means, Madam,’ Johnson replied, his attention suddenly focused. ‘It is, firstly, an act whereby two parties are brought together; secondly, an act whereby a man and woman are betrothed to one another; and thirdly, a writing in which the terms of a bargain are included.’
Martha was taken aback. ‘I’ll accept that,’ she said. ‘Now you in turn must accept that your … moodiness, or melancholy, or whatever we choose to call it, is disagreeable to those you dine with.’
‘Madam, you cannot have the warm sun of the West Indian climate without the thunder, the lightning, and the earthquakes.’
Really, how could she get through to the fellow? She’d heard of method acting, but this was the worst case she’d ever come across.
‘When we hired Dr Johnson,’ she began, and then stopped. His great bulk seemed to cast her desk into darkness. ‘When we engaged you …’ No, that wasn’t right either. She was no longer a CEO, or a business woman, or even a person of her time. She was alone with another human creature. She felt a strange and simple pain. ‘Dr Johnson,’ she said, her voice softening without effort as she looked up his line of fat buttons, beyond his white stock, to his broad, scarred, tormented face, ‘We want you to be “Dr Johnson,” don’t you understand?’
‘When I survey my past life,’ he replied, his eyes pointing without focus at the wall behind her, ‘I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body, and disturbances of the mind very close to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults, and excuse many deficiencies.’ Then, with the struggling walk of one confined to fetters, he began to leave Martha’s office.
‘Dr Johnson.’ He stopped and turned. She stood up behind her desk, feeling lop-sided, one foot bare and one shod. She felt like a girl lonely before the world’s strangeness. Dr Johnson was not just two centuries older than her, but two centuries wiser. She felt no embarrassment at asking: ‘What about love, Sir?’
He frowned, and laid one arm diagonally across his heart. ‘There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve pursuit.’
His eyes now seemed to have found their focus, which was her. Martha felt herself blushing. This was absurd. She hadn’t blushed for years. And yet it didn’t feel absurd.
‘But?’
‘But love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look, and that benevolence of mind, which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and successive amusement.’
Martha kicked off her other shoe and looked at him from the level. ‘So it’s all hopeless? It never lasts?’
‘A woman, we are sure, will not always be fair; we are not sure she will always be virtuous.’ Martha dropped her eyes, as if her immodesty were known across the centuries. ‘And man cannot retain through life that respect and assiduity by which he pleases for a day or for a month.’
With that, Dr Johnson rolled strugglingly out of the door.
Martha felt she had failed utterly: she had made little impression on him, and he had behaved as if she were less real than he was. At the same time, she felt light-headed and flirtatiously calm, as if, after long search, she had found a kindred spirit.
She sat down, worked her feet back into her shoes, and became a CEO again. Logic returned. Of course he would have to go. In some parts of the world they’d already be facing multimillion-dollar suits for sexual harassment, racial abuse, breach of contract in failing to make the client laugh, and God knew what else. Thankfully, Island law – in other words, executive decision – recognized no specific contract between Visitors and Pitco; instead, reasonable complaints were dealt with on an ad hoc basis, usually involving financial compensation in exchange for silence. The old Pitman House tradition of the gagging clause still applied.
Should they hire a new Johnson? Or rethink the whole Dining Experience with a different host? An evening with Oscar Wilde? Obvious dangers there. Noel Coward? Much the same problem. Bernard Shaw? Oh, the well-known nudist and vegetarian. What if he started imposing all that on the dinner table? It didn’t bear thinking about. Hadn’t Old England produced any wits who were … sound?
SIR JACK WAS EXCLUDED from executive meetings, but allowed a decorative presence at monthly gatherings of the upper board. Here he wore his Governor’s uniform: braided tricorne; epaulettes like gilded hairbrushes; lanyards as thick as knotted horse-tails; a washing-line of self-awarded decorations; a scrimshaw swagger-stick clamped in the armpit; and a sword which bounded from the side of his knee. For Martha the outfit claimed no echo of power, not even a whiff of junta; its comic exaggeration confirmed that the Governor nowadays accepted himself as a figure from operetta.
In the first months after Martha and Paul’s coup, Sir Jack used to arrive late for these boards, his timing that of a busy man still in charge; but all he found was a meeting already in progress and a humiliatingly positioned chair. He would try to assert himself by making long speeches from a roving position, even issuing coherent instructions to specific individuals. But as he circled the table, he saw nothing but insolent napes. Where were the fearing eyes, the swivelling heads, the subservience of scratching pen and quietly clacking laptop? He still gave off ideas like a great Catherine wheel; but the sparks now fell upon stony ground. Increasingly, he kept his silence and his counsel.
As Martha took her place, she noticed an unfamiliar figure at Sir Jack’s side. No, not exactly side: such was Sir Jack’s size and sartorial clangour that the fellow seemed more in his shade. Well, one of the Governor’s past conceits had been to compare himself to a mighty oak giving shelter to those beneath. Today he was keeping the rain off a mushroom: soft grey Italian suit, white shirt buttoned to the neck, grey hair cropped short on rounded skull. All pure mid-Nineties; even the spectacles dated from the same period. Perhaps he was one of those big investors still being kept sweet and yet to realize that his first dividend cheque was likely to be made out to his grandchildren.
‘My friend Jerry Batson,’ Sir Jack announced, more to Martha than anyone else. ‘Apologies,’ he added, shaking his head in gross confusion, ‘Sir Jerry nowadays.’
Jerry Batson. Of Cabot, Albertazzi and Batson. The mushroom acknowledged the introduction with a light smile. He seemed a scarcely detectable presence, sitting there mildly, Zenly. A pebble in an ever-flowing stream, a silenced wind-chime.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Martha. ‘I’m not sure what your standing is here.’
Jerry Batson knew he wouldn’t have to answer for himself. Sir Jack rose to his feet with an infuriated ding-dong of shaken medals. His appearance might be operetta, but his tone was Wagnerian, transporting some of those present back to Pitman House (I). ‘Jerry’s standing, Miss Cochrane, Jerry’s standing, is that he thought up, helped think up, was instrumental in helping think up the whole damn Project. In a manner of speaking. Paul will confirm.’
Martha turned to Paul. To her surprise, he held her gaze. ‘It was before your time. Sir Jerry was central to preliminary Project Development. The records concur.’
‘I’m sure we’re all grateful. My question remains: what is his standing here?’
Wordlessly, palms raised pacifically, Jerry Batson levitated himself without o
bvious muscular assistance. With the faintest nod towards Martha, he left the room.
‘Discourtesy,’ commented Sir Jack, ‘heaped upon discourtesy.’
That evening the Governor, now in his simple undress uniform of tunic, Sam Browne belt and spats, sat opposite Sir Jerry with a cocked decanter. His free hand limply gestured at his modest sitting-room. Its five windows offered a clifftop view, but She had stolen his Bavarian fireplaces, and his Brancusi looked devilish cramped beside the cocktail cabinet. ‘Like giving an admiral of the fleet a midshipman’s quarters,’ he complained. ‘Humiliation heaped upon humiliation.’
‘The armagnac’s still good.’
‘It’s in my contract.’ Sir Jack’s tone was for once uncertain, poised between pride that he had forced through such a clause and sorrow that he had needed to do so. ‘Everything’s in a damn contract nowadays. It’s the way the world’s going, Jerry. The days of the old buccaneers are past, I fear. We have become dinosaurs. Do it by doing it, that was always my motto. Nowadays it’s Don’t do it unless you have witchdoctors and market researchers and focus groups holding your hand. Where’s the dash, where’s the flair, where’s the good hard basic balls of it all gone? Farewell, oh ye merchant venturers – isn’t that the melancholy truth?’
‘So they say.’ Batson had always found that neutrality brought Sir Jack more quickly to the point than active comment.
‘But you see what I mean?’
‘I hear where you’re coming from.’
‘About her. About … Madam. She’s letting it slide. Taking her eye off the ball. A woman entirely lacking in vision. When she … when I appointed her CEO, I had hopes, I admit. Hopes that a man who is no longer as young as he was’ – Sir Jack held up a hand against a protestation that was not in fact coming – ‘might rest his weary bones. Take a back seat. Make way for younger blood and all that.’
‘But.’
‘But. I have my sources. I hear of things taking place which a firmer hand would not countenance or sanction. I try to warn. But you saw for yourself the insolence with which I am treated at board level. There are times when I feel that my great Project is being undermined out of sheer envy and malice. And at such moments, I admit I blame myself. I humbly do.’ He looked across at Batson, whose bland expression implied that he might reluctantly be willing to agree with such apportionment of blame; or, on the other hand, after further reflection, he might not. ‘And the service contracts drawn up by Pitco were in certain respects ill-drafted. Not that these things are necessarily as binding as they appear.’
Jerry Batson gave a soft shudder which might have amounted to a nod. So Sir Jack’s philosophy of business had developed a flaw. You did things by doing them – except when you didn’t. Presumably because you couldn’t. Eventually, Jerry murmured, ‘It’s a question of what we want to rule out and what we want to rule in. Plus the parameters.’
Sir Jack gave a mountainous sigh and gargled his armagnac. Why did he always have to do all the work with Batson? Smart enough chap, no doubt, and at his prices so he ought to be. But not one to delight in the cut-and-thrust of fine, masculine conversation. Either mute as a ginger biscuit or yakking away like a seminar. Ah well, to the point.
‘Jerry, you have a new account.’ He paused just long enough to wrong-foot Batson. ‘I know, I know, Silvio and Bob handle all the new accounts. Which is very clever of them in view of what you would probably call their lack of existential reality. Not to mention the existential reality of their bank accounts in the Channel Islands.’
Batson’s acknowledging smile turned into a soft chuckle. Perhaps the old rascal hadn’t lost his touch. Had he known all along, and deliberately held back, or only found out since having more time on his hands? Not that Jerry would ask, as he doubted Sir Jack would tell him the truth.
‘So,’ the Governor concluded, ‘that’s enough footsie and foreplay. You have a client.’
‘And does this client want me to dream some more?’
Sir Jack declined the cue, and the memory. ‘No. This client requires action. This client has a problem, five letters, beginning with B, rhymes with itch. You are to find the solution.’
‘Solutions,’ repeated Jerry Batson. ‘You know, I sometimes think that’s what we’re best at, as a nation. We English are rightly known for our pragmatism, but it’s in problem-solving that we display positive genius. Tell you my favourite one. Death of Queen Anne. Seventeen whatever. Crisis of succession. No surviving children. Parliament wants – needs – another Protestant on the throne. Big problem. Major problem. Everyone in obvious line of succession is a Catholic, or married to a Catholic, which was equally bad karma at the time. So what does Parliament do? Passes over fifty – more than fifty – perfectly good royals with best, better, and good claims, and picks an obscure Hanoverian, dull as ditchwater, can barely speak English, but one hundred and ten percent Prod. And then they sell him to the nation as our saviour from over the water. Brilliant. Pure marketing. After all this time the mind still boggles. Yes.’
Sir Jack cleared his throat to terminate this irrelevance. ‘My own problem, I suspect, you will find very small beer in such exalted company.’
ALL MARTHA’S TRAINING told her to treat the Johnson regression as a purely administrative matter. An employee in breach of his contract: dismissal, the first boat out, and a quick replacement from the pool of potential labour held on file. Public chastisement, as with the smugglers, was inappropriate. So just get on with it.
But her heart still resisted. The Project’s rule-book was inflexible. Either you worked or you were sick. If you were sick, you were transferred to Dieppe Hospital. Yet was he even a medical case? Or something quite different: like an historical case? She wasn’t sure. And the fact that the Island was itself responsible for turning ‘Dr Johnson’ into Dr Johnson, for peeling off the protective quotation marks and leaving him vulnerable, was also irrelevant. The sudden truth she had felt as he leaned over her, wheezing and muttering, was that his pain was authentic. And his pain was authentic because it came from authentic contact with the world. Martha realized that this conclusion would strike some – Paul, certainly – as irrational, even lunatic; but it was what she felt. The way he had twitched off her shoe and started gabbling the Lord’s Prayer as if in expiation; the way he had talked of his disorders and deficiencies, his hopes of salvation and forgiveness. By whatever means this vision had been put in front of her, she saw a creature alone with itself, wincing at naked contact with the world. When had she last seen – or felt – anything like that?
The church of St Aldwyn lay half-overgrown in one of the few parts of the Island still unclaimed by the Project. This was her third visit. She had the key, but the building, now sunk in scrubby woodland, was unlocked and always empty. It smelt of mould and rot; it wasn’t a snug sanctuary, more a continuation, even a concentration, of the dank chill outside. The petit-point hassocks were clammy to the touch; the foxed hymnal pages reeked of second-hand bookshop; even the light which struggled through the Victorian glass seemed to get slightly wet in the process. And there she was, fish in a stone-bottomed, green-walled tank, inquisitive and bobbing.
The church didn’t strike her as beautiful: it had neither proportion, lustre, nor even oddity. This was an advantage, since it left her alone with what the building stood for. Her eye skimmed, as on her previous visits, the list of rectors dating back to the thirteenth century. What was the difference between a rector and a vicar – or a curate, or a parson, for that matter? Such distinctions were lost on her, as were all the other intricacies and subtleties of faith. Her foot scuffed at the uneven floor where long ago a monumental brass had been removed, taken off for secularisation in some museum. The same list of hymn numbers looked down on her as last time, like some regularly winning line in the eternal lottery. She thought of the villagers who had come here and, for generation upon generation, had sung the same hymns, and believed the same stuff. Now the hymns and the villagers had vanished, as surely as if S
talin’s men had passed this way. That composer Paul had talked about when they first met – they would have to send him down here to invent some new hymns, some authentic piety.
The living had been chased away, but not the dead: they were reliable. Anne Potter, beloved wife of Thomas Potter Efquire and mother of his five children Esther, William, Benedict, Georgiana, and Simon, also interred nearby. Ensign Robert Timothy Pettigrew, died of the fever in the Bay of Bengal, 23rd February 1849, aged 17 years and 8 months. Privates James Thorogood and William Petty, of the Royal Hampshire Regiment, killed at the Battle of the Somme within two days of one another. Guilliamus Trentinus, who died in Latin of causes incomprehensible and with lamentations lengthy, 1723. Christina Margaret Benson, whose generous bounty permitted the restoration of the church in 1875 by Hubert Doggett, and who is commemorated in a small apsidal window featuring her initials intertwined with acanthus leaves.
Martha did not know why she had brought flowers this time. She could have guessed there would be no vase to put them in, nor water to fill it. She laid them on the altar, turned, and perched herself awkwardly in the front pew.
For thine is the wigwam, the flowers and the story …
She ran through her childhood text again, long forgotten, until revived by a mutter from Dr Johnson. It didn’t seem blasphemous anymore, just a parallel version, an alternative poetry. An airy, transportable wigwam made as much sense as a damp stone church fixed in a solid place. The flowers were a natural human offering, symbol of our own transience – and hers a quicker symbol given the lack of vase and water. And the story: an acceptable variant, even an improvement on the original. The glory is the story. Well, it would be, if only it were true.
If only it were true. At school her fretful scorn and clever blasphemies had come from precisely this fact, this conclusion: that it was not true, that it was a great lie perpetrated by humanity against itself. Thy swill be scum … What brief thought she had given to religion in adult years had always followed the same sleek loop: it isn’t true, they made it up to make us feel better about death, they founded a system, then used the system as a means of social control, no doubt they believed it themselves, but they imposed faith as something irrebuttable, a primal social truth, like patriotism, hereditary power, and the necessary superiority of the white male.
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