What struck me most forcefully, in the fields of Ruth’s penmanship on either side, was how much like fields they appeared: the grasses of her alphabet swaying in the soft breath of her eloquence, always forward, a little forward, as she thought of a new thing to write. Trees and hedgerows grew where a date stood out; names occasionally appeared in capitals, alongside the titles of plays attended, and, as we soon discovered, performed. Little hills rose when she was drunk, I believe: large letters gave scope to her wandering hand, to slip and find its course after all, and a few lines filled the page, and comforted her with the thought that a day had not passed by unreflected upon. Grass in a graveyard was not a more natural crop of human life than the written word. Like a harvest half-finished, her letters were scattered about the walls, bundled into sheafs of words, and laid out to dry. They stretched even into those dark corners where the slant of the roof met the floor; for which, as Inge had predicted, we would need the boys.
‘Come on, boss,’ Susie declared, setting her hat on the rug, and rolling her stockings in little bundles down to her shoes, ‘tell us what we’re looking for. (If we may, Frau Muller, if we may.)’
‘Mention of Sam,’ I said, as Ruth kept her journal in German, and only names would do, ‘or Syme, or the Professor; or Highgate, or Tom, or Jenkyns, or Phidy, or Friedrich; or,’ Pitt added, spitting slightly, ‘Geognostisch, Wissenschaftlich, Abraham Gottlob Werner. Genius. But mostly Sam Syme, Sam Syme, Sam Syme.’
‘Come on, boys,’ Susie said, and bent to her knees and pressed her perplexed forehead to the slant of the wall, and began to read; and thus inspired, we did.
*
We found, of course, mostly red herrings. Herrings, after all, are a plentiful fish. And we learned, naturally, more of Ruth than of Sam. The boys lay on their backs and pushed themselves into the corners; they were covered in dust when they rolled back, their bottoms brown, and the rolls in their socks thick with dirt. There was in general a great deal of sneezing, in which Inge Muller led the field, protesting she always sneezed, she delighted in it, she used to pinch snuff for the pleasure, never to think of it, dears; and she sat on her bed, delighted indeed, and clapped her hands when anyone called out, to ‘come, come quick, Dad, and look’. Slowly the walls grew pink and then red indeed, with the sun in setting, before a fine shadow, almost gold, fell across them when it dropped below the trees.
Ruth grew clear. Though the boys and Susie barely understood a word of what they read, they called out from time to time a question, and Inge answered them in that slow-burning drawl, with her eyes closed, and her white-bunned head now propped against the back of the bed. ‘The Staatsaengerfest’, she intoned, ‘was a festival of music, of German music, held in the summer every year at Fredericksburg. I suppose you’ve found the bill for it, Thursday to Saturday, isn’t that right? And fifty cents at the door? Ruth played piano, until her fingers got too stiff; and then there are two blank years – in her journals, too, she used to fill them with music, and they dried up, when she stopped performing. I would have thought it was the other way around, but no – you need to be a little bit happy to write – a little will do. And then she appears again, in the plays. Every year the Staatsaengerfest (say it slowly, boys) put on a play and Ruth, as she says herself, took on “die olle Greisin”, the old hag, whoever she was.’
There were sketches, too. Little pencil drafts of the house we crawled about in now, standing on an emptier road; two or three neighbours scattered among trees until the lights of Market Avenue appeared, glowing in criss-crossed scratches against the page. An outline of a hand (perhaps her own)? A boy in a plump frock (Inge’s father)? And the land itself: the swift, slight Campo River at the edge of town, long clear since the red wine spilled and famously drunk by her son, in Roland’s Toast; hill-country in spiky flower; broken slabs of rock at the foot of a cliff; and the enormous skies, too big for the page, a cloud stretched wide between two stars that signified how impossible it would be to sketch the entire firmament.
It was Aaron, in the end, who discovered Phidy’s letter. He cried out, ‘Sam!’ but there had been other Sams before, and I sighed, as I bent to the floor beside him and rolled over on my back to inspect. He did not flinch from me then, but pressed his finger, across his father’s rib, to the spot on the wall where the scribble from a different hand, and life, lined the slanted paper: Friedrich’s, as I recognized at once.
*
I sit now at home, in the blow of the air conditioner, under the telegraph slots hung on the bedroom wall. Susie leans upon my shoulder and peers. She has reproached me, as a father and a scientist (these, I believe, were her words), for a lack of enthusiasm – in Pitt, of all people, of all things! – at Aaron’s discovery, at his break through. Merely because I had questioned – I had ventured to question – I had made bold to venture to question – its greater significance to the task at hand. To wit: Syme’s revival, founded upon that proof of his genius, the New Platonist itself. Because I had questioned that, in front of the boy, in the first flush of his excitement, as he stubbed his finger, there, there, upon the wall.
‘Write it,’ she says, ‘write it, put it all in, all of it. The whole bit. I’ll stand and watch to see you do it.’
She is a lady of passion and great insistence, Miss Pitt. Her round face bright with the heat of her persuasion; her hands, still childish and warm, only the palms, ever so faintly etched with the criss-cross of age, upon Pitt’s cheek, in threatening tenderness. ‘If you put everything else in,’ she says, ‘put that in too – for that’s the heart of the story, if you ask me, and you don’t.’
I have mentioned her boyish nose, thick and straight; her cheeks, broad and pinchable, soft and plump enough to fill thumb and forefinger; her lips, wide and full; and her eyes, blue rings, bright as gas flames in her anger now. And dare a husband say how plain he finds his wife, in the best sense, a face like the beginning of faces, the pattern upon which all other countenances are based, those cluttered corruptions, weakened sophistications, degenerate embellishments upon her original – which, Pitt hesitates to say, might serve equally as the foundation of woman or man (as it shall serve for her boys, who grow every day into her beauty), so simple in its lines and rich in various expression, that Pitt feels every visage, stripped to its essence, would resemble her again, and look the better for it.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘what I can’t bear is that you get to the heart of the matter, and turn away. What I can’t bear is that you take the joy out of it, to prove a point; just when Aaron was about to be happy for you, too. But do what you like,’ she says. And leaves him, there, poised above the laptop.
No, Susie, never say Pitt is joyless. Not with fingernails, two days clipped, the shell snug upon the nibs, no longer red or raw, but perfectly formed, to fill the hollow of the keys. Not when the patter of thought runs so happy through his fingers, steps among the perplexity of punctuation, leaps cascading at the edge of paragraphs, to the next bank, a breathtaking inch below, while the faint tip, tip, tip of the key falls and the next black mark appears on the white glow of the screen. Not to mention, most wonderful of all, that breathless caesura before a difficult thought. There is a break in the patter, while the perfect word forms upon his tongue, and Pitt waits, waits, to see it form, like a bead of water at the nose of a tap, and waits, waits, then claps his hands – once, briefly, thus, for sheer interrupted joy – to dislodge it, whereupon the flow returns, gushing to the end of sense and sentence, and Pitt is away once more.
Never say that Pitt, short in many things, is short of joy.
But perhaps he shall do as she says and mention Aaron’s discovery, Phidy’s unfortunate letter (or rather a piece of it), papered to the bedroom wall of his great-great-niece – though Pitt has his reasons (and Syme’s) for … suppressing it:
though you are some years dead, since Tom’s letter found me in that Berlin garret. I was desperately in love with – or, as I should say, passionate for – an illiterate Jew girl, with a most
vulgar faith in sophistication, whom I met once at Varnhagen’s salon. She loved me for my gentile manners and literary conversation (both of which she borrowed freely)-and how little else, I dare not guess, though I persuaded myself – an easy convert, always a willing audience to my own arguments – that I should shoot myself, etc. unless she quit her husband and shared my bed – a piece of logic best contradicted by practical experiment. But I ramble, my dear Sam, and you could never abide anyone’s digressions but your own; though you are dead now, though you are dead.
The news of which struck such a blow to my head and heart, I stank of the grief, of the wounds of grief, and scarce crept into the sunlight for a month – demonstrating what you had in a sense devoted your life, both in precept and example, to proving: how much we live in possibility. (In the event the girl mistook my mourning, and came at last, sincerely believing I loved her sincerely, to my darkened bed, where I accepted her chiefly in order to empty my heart of you.) For your death changed little else in my circumstances (a fact unhappy in itself). I had not seen you – in a quarter-century – since those swift sad days at the close. Had not Tom written me directly, the rumour of ‘the great Syme’s end’ should never have reached me, so little greatness remained, and such as had survived confined entirely to your own thoughts and extinguished with them. In the back of my mind, I had never doubted that we should be reconciled at last, yes, with your fame established, and my faithlessness forgiven. (Odd, the convictions we carry with us and never guess that we possess until they are disproved. Well, no one can prove your greatness now; and my forgiveness has run dry at its only source.)
And yet how often I interrupt the past in its progress through my memory! Here and here, crying, hold, an amendment – for an error has slipped into the print-works, and threatens an endless repetition. I should have said – I should have said – a thousand things, but what I said. I should have done – I should have done – a thousand things, but what I did.
To speak plain: I have never loved anyone more than you, Sam Syme. And the great error of my life was not the foolish betrayal (paradoxically vengeful and affectionate) for which you dismissed me at last, but the fact that I never told you, simply this: you are wrong, you are wrong, it is all absurd, you are wrong. Not when I counted your quiet breaths beside me in bed, that long night on the road when Tom lay ill – I should have waked you. Not when you clutched my head in the crook of your elbow, and whispered ‘enough’ to me, pushing away – I should, for once, have pressed my point, and argued a quite different – sufficiency – that we were better off, happy and young in the ordinary way, than chasing such empty dreams.
‘Sam is my only love and a great man, and I would rather be miserable with him than happy with another. He is grand and fine, and everything around him matters wonderfully – the least thing, like me.’ But these alas are not my words, and
Phidy was wrong, wrong, wrong himself, Pitt avers, suffering from a different, more loving wound, misdiagnosed as doubt. There is no nonsense like the nonsense of self-justification. Tom and Kitty, to soften the news of Sam’s death, bade Phidy to come ‘home’ to them again – a designation less of place than time, a year of youth in which Phidy lived happy and easy among his highest ambitions, before the inevitable indolence of age wore such furniture down to threadbare shabbiness. And Phidy did indeed mean to revisit them; got as far as Paris, on his way, before succumbing to his usual prevarications and delays, before he flinched again; and this shameful letter, addressed perhaps as much to Tom as to Sam, no doubt played the part of his excuses – some low morning, when we go to such lengths to explain why we are where we are and what we are, precisely because we wish to be somewhere and someone else. But he never sent it; Sam was dead; and Phidy left it out in the grass of his neglect, as Auden says – among his other papers, memoirs and journals, themselves, in their ways, unsent letters to the future (till Pitt delivered them). Ruth must have stumbled across it packing up house on her journey west, stuck it in a leaf of ‘Amerikareise’, where Inge Muller discovered it and pasted it to her bedroom wall. Where my son found it. I publish it now (despite obvious hesitations) to please him, and Susie – a woman who, to do her justice, has the gift of being pleased, the grace of it.
It is only a scrap, but Susie is right, I suppose. This is a love story, after a fashion.
PART IV
•Heyday•
We arrived that first night, nowhere it seemed, after dark. Tom led us and Sam and I followed in a dull stupor, through which the rhythm of the carriage wheels still rattled like feverish dice. Then Tom stopped at a door and knocked softly and then louder till a woman came wrapped in a green robe. ‘Mrs Bevington?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Mr Cooling mentioned you.’
‘Of course he did, I’m his aunt. Just go round the back and it’s all laid out for you. A little cabin, quite cosy and you can bang about as much as you like.’
I could not guess where we were being led but I found a bed there and lay in it and slept.
The morning promised a hot day. We woke up early, like children, from the heat. It rose in a white mist from the breathing ground and hung in thick vapours round the lamp-posts and the trees, and lay low over the open field outside our window. The air had a sleepy power that barely stirred when the dawn broke, like a lion unconcerned – full, fat and unconcerned – by the approach of a cat. Tom had arranged a lecture for Sam the next day, but in the meantime nothing could be done, and we realized, like children, that the day lay empty before us.
Sam fretted himself into a temper at any idleness, though he loved it too and could not tear himself from the sweet enchantment of a listless hour. ‘Hold your cooing at that duck,’ Sam snapped once, ‘I cannot read – for all your love-making.’
I threw a piece of the bread intended for the bird at him.
‘You are going grey in the mouth, Sam, like a dog,’ Tom said, laughing. ‘Let’s go exploring.’
We set off from the back of our cabin through the dry yellow grass. The field fell to a river, thick with the cast-off shells of buds. They formed a green, starry meadow in the deep black reflection of the water. Syme stepped slowly on bare feet through the hard grass and dry earth, marked with ant tracks like a path of crumbs. Tom and I followed, trailing our shirts over our shoulders. Happiness, that homeless beggar, had come to us in the warm weather.
I remember a trivial incident of that day, less interesting in itself than as a symbol of what was to come. A boat lay moored by the arched foot of a willow tree. The rotting rope hung heavy with weed and wet, draped round the last pole of a small wooden pier. Syme stepped, unexpectedly ginger-footed, to the end of it. ‘Hey for a turn at the oars!’ cried Tom. ‘Climb in.’ Sam placed a heavy foot in front of the first cross-bench and fell full-bodied in the boat. He came up, tumble-mad and bruised, and cursed Tom with a real viciousness, whose heavy anger I had learned to ignore. ‘Lead your own damn-fool way in future. Get me out of here – get me out of here. Phidy, where’s your hand?’ But Tom stepped in neatly, ‘Nonsense, sit down and be still,’ timing his second step with perfect ease to rise to the roll-back of the boat. ‘Hey for a turn at the oar,’ Sam mocked, recovering his humour and holding up one rotting green pole.
Tom strained the water with his makeshift oar till it caught in the river bed, planted, and gave us a firm foot forward. Tiny green-bladed buds flew away like minnows. We reached the middle of the river, Syme running his hand through the thick water. O easy time. The thick vapours softened the hard sun like cotton round a watch. The boat made its slow path unmarked down the unmoving river.
But I could not remain unmoved, as Tom idly urged our stump-legged gait. Syme sat deep in thought, and I alone was uneasy, deeply aware of those two men as they were not of each other, or, I am sure, of me: Tom’s loose-limbed stance, high-rumped, swaying from the hips down like a tall woman, his browned hands active; Syme’s heavy shoulders and white-skinned forearms, spotted with unhealt
hy freckles and odd moles, a pallor that always seems lonely to me, though I could not answer why. And that powerful scent, of shaved wood, breathing from his skin, that tickled my nose and made me shy of him. But for once I was glad of my discomfort, that like a fine skin sensed the very motions in the air. And I must have been sensitive indeed to note the passage of that slow wind.
As I was lost in these thoughts I saw the water rise, over Syme’s boot, held in a careless hand, then above his wrist, touching the edge of his sleeve as he dipped it deeper. Tom said in a law, laughing voice, ‘We’re sinking.’
The rotted vessel wallowed like a waking beast. Water lipped over the edge and lost itself among the loose wooden ribs of the boat’s bottom. Gathering strength, it swelled above the cross-benches and would soon submerge us completely. Tom cried, in falsetto bravado, ‘We’ve been struck!’ and perched at the head. When he saw it was no use, he leapt into the water, crying, ‘Abandon ship!’ and ‘Death to the King!’ I shrank further and further from the rising wet, desperate to keep my white shirt dry. But the boat tilted with the shifting weight as Tom sprang free, and I fell in, disgusted and fearful, knocking my head against a suddenly lifted side. We swam to shore, splashing through the green buds.
The Syme Papers Page 40
