by Adam Thorpe
‘Your mother,’ he said.
I swallowed loudly, and found my head to be making tiny, jerky movements all by itself, like my headmaster’s at Flytings.
‘Rather bad news, Hugh.’
The pauses were there for me to fill. She was very ill, of course. A lot of people, not just black people, died out in Africa, where I had my home. My uncle took a gulp of beer and wiped, not his mouth, but his forehead. It reminded me a little of my mother’s old gesture. I thought of my father, and how worried he must be. I pictured him sitting by her bedside, frowning. I hadn’t breathed for a little while but my body did so automatically, letting it out with a quick sigh. My uncle looked at me, then. His gingery eyebrows, thicker and wilder with age, looked like the thatch over some of the cottages’ windows along the lane. I thought of the ogre again. His mug was made of beechwood and leather. He had a dark leather jerkin over his worsted shirt, and thick brown corduroy trousers, baggy enough to pass for plus-fours at a distance. This was a costume (I thought of it as such) quite recently put on, as were the white cloaks he wore on certain days, and the intricate sandals, and the long plum-coloured cape he’d go to town in. It reminded me of both the shepherds and the kings in the Nativity Play that fat Mrs Beeching would put on in the village, or of the courtiers disguised as rustics in some of our dramatic efforts at school, which I went along with; they were usually scenes from Shakespeare or Milton’s Comus or the whole of one of the Roman plays (I’d pretend not to have the lines by heart at first). I knew it was not a costume, however, but a serious thing, as I knew these were not lines from a play.
‘Is she quite ill, uncle?’
‘What?’ he grunted.
I cleared my throat and repeated the question in more than a strangled murmur.
‘Not exactly, Hugh,’ he said. ‘It’s rather worse than that.’
Strangely, I didn’t think of death, then. I imagined the word ‘worse’ as a suitcase full of nasty things, spiders and poisonous fungi and rotting hands and powerful, wriggling curses – the sort of things I had seen under fever in the weeks before. But death, final and cold and definite, didn’t emerge to wipe it all out. I frowned.
‘Can’t think,’ I said, as if my uncle had just posed me a cryptic teaser from the newspaper, or of his own invention. I shivered, without meaning to: it was a cold house, away from the fireplaces or the stove. I was in my dressing gown, but the open door ushered in the frigid air from the hallway. I fancied, just for a second, that my mother was waiting for me there, and that if I didn’t run to her this instant, she would leave without me, and for the last time. But my feet in their slippers refused to move.
My uncle stood. My cocoa was scalding my fingers slightly and I saw that my hands were trembling, spilling it. He came over and took the mug from me and put it on the table. I thought that he was about to hug me tightly, as once or twice he had done over the years, but instead he leaned back against the table and crossed his arms, studying my knees. I felt them go weak, and their bony backs found the rickety chair by the door, with its usual offering of torn envelopes and bills. I sat in a rustle of them, not caring. I looked down at the floor. There was a spent match stuck in the greasy join between two boards.
‘The fact is, Hugh, you’re going to have to be a brave chap, from now on. Your dear mother has disappeared, into the jungle. Just like that. God knows why, old fellow. She’s been missing three – no, four – weeks now. Enquiries made by your father and others, in the villages or whatever, have yielded nothing. Not a single clue. I think we have to presume, dear boy, that she’s never going to come back. Never. I think we should proceed on that basis. Yes. Definitely. Yes. Come on now, chin up.’
My eyes were filled with tears, but they weren’t the tears he thought they were. I was immensely relieved, even joyous. She was not dying from fever, or drowned, or eaten by a croc, or just stark dead. She wasn’t dead, that’s the thing. My uncle’s shadowy form disintegrated as I blinked, light splintering from the wall lamps and dazzling me as the river would in sunlight at home. Of course Mother would come back, eventually. She had gone to the crater lake. She had gone to paradise and soon she would be back to take me there, too. I had no doubt about it at all. We would live together on the shore in perfect love and harmony, for there were no crocs in the deep, black water, and England was beyond imagining there.
I felt my uncle’s heavy hand on my head and wriggled free. I must have been smiling, because as I ran up the stairs he shouted after me, ‘My, you’re a queer little fellow, Hugh!’
His voice was more fearful than amazed – the only time I ever heard it like that, high-pitched. He was certain she was dead but I was certain she wasn’t. I lay that same night with my cold sheet taut to my chin, plotting the gentle curve of my existence with her in the coming years in a hot, green paradise by the lapping waters of the crater until sleep lapped over me quite easily too.
3
Saturday, 4 September
Hamlet – still green and fresh after eight weeks. My actors are like racing-drivers: the roar of lethal passion is icily controlled by technique, formal gesture, the second-to-second changing of gears, liquid oratorical movements, a precise dance with danger, with inward heat and explosion and death. Alan G. went chalk-white at the sight of the Ghost tonight, as Betterton once did. It has taken him – us – twenty years to arrive at that blenched face. Blood draining right out. Yet no loss of control: the hand gestures still precise, not a metrical beat muffed. Audience quite hypnotised. Sheer enchantment. Will I ever be as happy again? As now, writing this in the empty theatre, my cheeks still smeared with their make-up, with their kissing joy? All these silent seats. All that sound suspended, not quite gone.
Tuesday, 7 September
Nothing but boxes for the last two days. Turned down offer to front a series for the BBC on the ‘Great Tragedians’. I cannot delay the book any longer. Awful day of meetings, admin., minor balls-ups. I felt like one of those nineteenth-century actors who watched Charcot’s patients for examples of hysterica passio – only the patients were all around me, fussing about nothing. Snatched lunch with Linus F., who asked me if my actors were literally possessed. Of course, I replied, but they also know it and control it. Without technique, they would either look ridiculous or go mad. He is writing a biography of Garrick and can’t understand how I’ve managed to make the old style work. But Garrick replaced the old style when it was hollowed of all meaning, mere stiffness and declamation. I have pumped the blood back in, the vital spirit. He nodded diplomatically. I got so excited that the tall menus couldn’t take the wind from my gesticulations.
Wednesday, 8 September
Clearing the study. Found at Sumerian level my childhood memoir rolled up in a ribbon, like an old map. First few pages missing: begins in medias res with the ‘gorilla incident’ – never quite sure what that was, in the end. Thirty-odd years ago I was writing about my life thirty-odd years before that – and in thirty years’ time? I will be a hundred.
Listless interview with the Telegraph. They’ll get it all wrong.
Thursday, 9 September
Morris called. Appalled by how much I am not throwing away. And I thought I was being ruthless.
I would give the rest of my life (after the book’s done) to stand among the apprentices and artisans and dusty soldiers in the Globe in 1604 and watch, say, Othello. I think I would still be surprised and astonished by what they did with it – for all my efforts, my fidelities. Morris called me an obsessive, when I admitted this. ‘Isn’t Shakespeare our contemporary, like that Polish guy said?’ Shakespeare is a monster, I replied, a monstrous genius of the past whom we strive to comprehend from inside whatever tiny present we inhabit. Put it another way: we wade towards him through thick time. It is a battle against time. A terrible battle against time.
Friday, 10 September
A throat from the dust off the tops of the books, which leaves permanent spots. Morris said should use a feather duster regularly. En
ormous yellow skip almost full by teatime. Jamming things in on my tiptoes, was chatted to successively by a red-faced Irish woman, a Cockney bag-lady, a dapper little Indian and a wrinkled African-Caribbean with white hair. Like a bad sketch. These people have all lived around here for years yet we only talk when I’m leaving. When it’s safe to, I suppose.
Saturday, 11 September
Last night of King John and big party after. I gave a speech that made everyone cry – ‘Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises,’ etc. John G. on very good form, told a couple of Larry jokes relatively new to me. Got back inches before dawn with Diana changing lanes each time she roared with laughter at something I’d meant to be serious. Old memories. End of an era. Feel suitably frayed. Or ‘overripe’, as Ronald Watkins used to say of himself when I was still firm and green.
Thumped the skip as I passed and it sounded hollow. By dawnlight from my window it is. Even the awful polka-dotted lampshades. I feel dispersed.
Sunday, 12 September
Mostly asleep in my bed in a strange, bundled-up place that was until yesterday my dear home. A dream: I am in New York, in an abandoned block-turned-theatre, watching a famous hippy theatre group taking all day to set up, the show changing as members have rows and leave, or new ones join. The name of the group is Swan God Feel Like Missionary, but I persist in calling it Swan God Merein Missionary. I am desperate to be given a part, the teeniest-tiniest part.
I will miss London, yet I can’t wait to tear free. Of course I might even come back for good. Though a cottage in the country, a sort of Pascalian existence full of pensées and pruning, has its lure.
Monday, 13 September
Two large wheezy men in fluorescent overalls came and carted everything off to Morris’s huge attic in between police-like conversations on a mobile phone. The flat looks even more estranged from me, empty, walls much less white than I thought – except where the furniture’s blocked the pollution. The panic of being in your own home without the means to make a cup of tea. Fifteen years and the only familar note is next door’s mindless dog, yet not a day has passed that I haven’t wished its painful death. My last entry here, on my knee, looking out at the top of the turning linden. O mea cella, vale.
Later. Writing this in the hotel in the village, late. Dropping the keys off at the estate agent was definitely the pulling of the anchor. Train down with two large suitcases and my box of reference books opposite an area sales manager for Spud-U-Like and I said I didn’t, though she was young and bonily attractive.
Taxi to the village. Looks as if someone’s run off with the real thing, leaving a fake. The Old Barn Hotel where once the Jowett rusted, full of chickens, has carpet for wallpaper and lavender pot-pourris everywhere, though home-owned and friendly: pleasant room up in the beams overlooking the square, church tower, glimpse of the mild downs. The country is so fresh, but always looks as if it’s been rather indifferently waiting for you. London never does; you have to hop on as on to a moving train.
The house broods as ever: a maiden aunt in rictus of sexual fervour or slow, agonising death. Most of its windows still blocked by Aunt Rachael’s strips of carpet and squares of lino: she used so many nails it looks like stitching. Garden a scramble to explore. Aunt Joy’s champion rose bushes a mess of blown thorns, summerhouse a clump of nettles and a sandwich of window-frames. Beechwood glorious in the setting light. The cows in the same old field next door (but not the same cows) all huddled in a line the far side – as far away from the house as they could get, it looked like. Sensible, sensitive creatures. Though the wildwood’s fence is down I didn’t go in, just hovered on the edge. Conjuring her, as she was.
Then – this is absolutely true – a sudden, pungent smell of wild garlic.
Isn’t it much too late for ramsons?
The key worked in the back door and I ventured in as far as the stairs. Trod on a few sweetpapers, but otherwise saw very little and had to grope, stupidly without a torch. The sitting-room appears to have a hole in the window so I suppose recent visitors have entered by that. Musty smell and droppings of rodents everywhere. A bottle of gin, empty. Chilly place, still. Could hear Aunt Rachael say, in that sodden, tobacco-blasted voice, So here you are.
Not literally, of course.
Tuesday, 14 September
Awful night full of wrong trains. Groping for a piss I brained myself on one of the beams, once high up in a dusty darkness.
Visited the house again with my pocket torch and this time made it to ‘my’ room. Pulled away the lino from the window and the old view appeared but as if it had come back from the dry-cleaner’s not quite the same: garden, woods, field, tumuli like two breasts on horizon, blank white sky. The house is stripped bare but on peeping into the attic I saw where it had all gone to or not been removed from: a choppy sea of junk. I have to confess to a vague feeling of being watched, throughout.
I will just tell someone to open a plug and empty out the junk, swirl it away. I don’t even want to see it.
Pitter-patter of rain out of a white sky. Leaves dropping, rain dropping. They’ve stuffed a bungalow into the orchard, but a few of the trees are still up one end, all mossed. Returned here with a wet collar and am ensconced again in this lounge, alone. Fake log fire but old comfy chairs and an antique school desk on which I’m writing this. Lots of time for you now, dear fitful diary. Hotel frigid but comfortable. So far in my sorties I’ve met no one I once knew but then I’ve not sought them out. Village Stores still there, new butcher’s, Bint’s Bakery now something called England Made Me with squadrons of lead farm animals in an elegant whatnot, old grain-measurers, mahogany stools, swathes of printed throw-overs hung like a harem: always shut. People passing almost recognisable and then turn out not to be, or are much too young though not young at all. The warty old pavement in front of the Post Office almost frighteningly familiar down to the last fissure, but about to be ripped up, from the look of it.
Reading my childhood memoir like watching a man and his son fishing on the opposite bank. Forty was such an awful age, but then things got going and I didn’t think about age until about last week. Did Dr Wolff ever read what I wrote, in the end? Wet, steaming red earth of Africa: smell it as I read. Otherwise, it’s all happened to someone else before recorded time.
Wednesday, 15 September
Netherford Public Library just the same with colourful posters and carpets instead of lino but people looking like they’ve drifted in from the bus-stop. Aunt Rachael’s solicitors have vanished in the intervening twenty years since her death. Too lazy or tired to find out why. Can’t even recall why the will wasn’t enacted immediately. Some turgid legal reason with no one bothered enough to push. Am I bothered enough now? But hardly a day has passed over the last twenty years when I’ve not pictured the place ‘deteriorating’, as estate agents put it.
Took my shoes off and pretended Reference was all a wing of my château, then detected awful smell from my shoes which of course I washed in the bath last month. Someone came up to me thinking I was someone who was dead, but not Hugh Arkwright. Someone he knew personally, drowned in grease. In grease? Or did he mean Greece? Reminds me of a friend of Jean’s who really did think I had died but quite a few years ago. Convinced he’d read my obituary. I think the same about Bernard Levin, then he pops up again.
Browsing, fell upon a thick report of Keiller’s Windmill Hill excavation. Ah, I remember Keiller. He came to dinner at Ilythia several times, with dirty fingernails. Gained his fortune in marmalade, Aunt Joy would say, which made me think of him as sticky. She kept pronouncing his name wrong, it came out like ‘Killer’ and Nuncle would tell her off in front of the poor chap. She was so pale yet she blushed so deeply, like an electric ring. Drawing of chalk phallus on one page that I’m sure I remember turning in my little hand. Shaped like an hourglass or a pair of testicles. Made me feel peculiar – today, I mean, looking at the drawing. I would hear Nuncle and him rumbling on about witches through the study door, but he wasn’t in
any way creepy.
Thought inevitably of the book, though Morris advised me not to until after Italy. A fortnight here, some six weeks among the cypresses working through Bulwer, Heywood, Greg, Granville-Barker et al, then David’s cottage in Cornwall until sheer loneliness drives me to finish. Of course it must be done: otherwise after my death there’ll be no blueprints. But I hate writing. Like being a composer but having to tune the piano, too.
Had a drink in what was the New Inn, now officially the Never Fear – its old nickname. The disgruntled locals now call it the New Inn, of course. Interior completely unrecognisable: could have been in Chertsey. Ghastly soft music like an airport. This man I took to be Indian at the bar said, ‘Hello Mr Arkwright. I know you. I knew Mrs Arnold, too. The second one, that is.’ He said the last with a sort of leery grin on his podgy face. He wasn’t Indian at all but a coalman, semi-retired, dyed dark by his trade. He delivered coal to Aunt Rachael for many years and they always shared a pot of tea. My eye-patch usually gives me away like this. Didn’t know him from Harry, and can’t even remember his name now. Perry? Potter? Another old boy claimed he knew me as a nipper, so I pretended to recognise his sunken cheeks and warty nose. One had the feeling this happened every day and they’d all been slumped there in silence since I left in my teens a few hours ago.
