by James Wood
I especially dislike Colin. His ears are large and on fire with a tiny network of veins, which also cover his nose and cheeks. In some men these veins suggest a life of drink and wasteful pleasure. In Professor Thurlow’s case they suggest a lifetime of studying minute connections and branches of knowledge; the veins are like little paths of rewarded endeavour; it is as if a map of diligence covers his face. In happier days, my mother used to imitate Colin Thurlow’s quick, uncertain smile; she made me and Father laugh when she reproduced some of his sayings, such as “Driving a motor car is intellectual suicide, of course,” and his peculiar complaint about “the girls who serve at Marks and Spencer—really the lowest of the low, intellectually speaking.” Belinda Thurlow lacks her husband’s pedantry and malice. (She also drives the family car.) She has a bad back and often leaves the room to “have a lie down.” She wears shapeless denim dresses with large storage-pockets, giving her the air of an intellectual poacher. Belinda is Max’s saviour; it can only be from his mother that he gets his sweetness.
Jane and I were led into the frigid drawing room. Belinda left, and returned, wheeling an ugly silvered trolley before her. It bore a white plastic Thermos flask and a plate of white sandwiches, which were organized in four batches of four sandwiches each. An ambassador of each batch was impaled with a little coloured flag on the end of a cocktail stick. “We don’t have you and Jane here very often, so we pulled the stops out,” she said. “Now, you see, this enables me to keep the fillings separate in my mind. The blue flag is anchovy paste, white is cucumber, green is tinned salmon, and red is gooseberry jam.” She poured tea from the Thermos. It fumed in the wintry air. “These cups keep the heat much better,” she said, as she handed us large plastic mugs.
I looked at the electric fire, at the tangerine grin of its single coiled bar, and wondered if it would be rude if Jane and I left within half an hour. I prepared myself externally by “setting” my face. It was during the first or second year of our marriage, while I was working hardest on the Ph.D., that I contracted my habit of “setting” my face to resemble an appropriate emotional state—humble in post offices (because the staff are always so sullen), generous in shops, distracted at the university (to impress the students), arrogant in buses, confident with my parents, genial with Jane, sober with Max’s parents, and so on. It came about, I think, because I spent all day at home and had no one to show my face to until I blundered out onto the busy London street—and suddenly, people were looking at me, staring at me, and I had to appear correct. That is also why I began the trick of the solemn little cough. I can’t recall how that started. I think it was originally to hide a moment of social awkwardness. But then I began to give little coughs not to hide an awkwardness but simply to seem serious and preoccupied. There is something grave and quite contained about a man giving a little cough with his fist held to his mouth, in the classical way. Sitting there in the Thurlowses’ house, I made my face look serious and distinguished, with an analytical squint and pursed Bunting lips.
Colin Thurlow asked about Max. The Thurlows do not have a television, and Colin, at least, does not read a newspaper. He disapproves of newspapers. So I had to report on Max’s success in the media without making it sound as if it was actually occurring in the media. I thought a pompous patina might help.
“Is Max hard at work on his exposés?” asked Colin, stretching out the last word.
“Max prospers. He’s a most venerable figure now—at only thirty,” I said, with proper gravity.
“Aha,” said Colin. He always said “Aha” in a flat, verifying way, as one might when copying down a number. Even when I told him a funny or strange story, his expression would not change. He would study the room in general and calmly say “Aha.”
“What does eighteen ninety-six mean to you?” Colin asked me.
“Now, Colin,” said Belinda, “you’ve been riding this hobby horse so hard it’s broken its back.”
“Eighteen ninety-six,” said Colin, taking my silence to be ignorance, “is the date of the founding of the Daily Mail. I dare say one could do worse than date a certain civilizational decline from that moment. The tabloidization of our intellectual discourse.” Colin always acted like an inspector from a rarer country.
“But Max doesn’t work for the Daily Mail,” said Jane. It was the first time she had spoken in the drawing room. “He’s a columnist for a serious paper. It’s The Times.” Colin stared at Jane, as if astounded that a woman other than his wife would oppose him.
“He’s a pundit!” said Belinda brightly, with what sounded like a curious, evenly balanced mixture of pride and disdain.
“He’s a ‘pundit,’ as were, in their way, Voltaire, Heine, Carlyle, Orwell, Sartre, and on,” I protested.
“I think he had the brains to be an excellent classicist,” said Colin, ignoring me. “It’s a great shame that he did not carry on into the academy … like you.”
Like me … This was surely calculated irony on Colin’s part. But Belinda wanted to change the subject.
“Isn’t it sad about Mrs. Millington having to sell Vaughan House,” she said.
“Oh, Max and I loved that house when we were little. The red bricks, and the ivy—the river. Who’ll buy it?” I asked.
“It’s already bought. With all contents. Philip Zealy. You know him.”
“Philip Zealy? That crook. My God.” Everyone in Durham knew Zealy; he had a local car dealership, which had expanded into an empire. His latest experiment was a financial services company: credit, brokerage, loans, mortgages. He was based in Newcastle but chose to live in Durham. A familiar sight of my childhood on billboards and local television advertisements, he was universally thought of as shady and disreputable, thanks to a local government scheme in which he had profited. The ringleaders went to prison; Zealy somehow escaped charges.
“That’s him. It’s a Cornish name,” said Belinda to Jane—“no, my dear, Cornish,” she repeated, anticipating her husband’s correction. “But he isn’t living in it, apparently. Expect the worst. He’ll break it up into flats or knock it down for profit.”
“Mrs. Millington had six Pekineses, and all of them had extraordinary names,” I said to Jane. “One of them was called B.D., for ‘brain damage.’”
“What were the others?” asked Jane.
“Horatio, Albino, Salmon, and—oh, I’m getting old, I forget now,” said Belinda. Our conversation was clearly becoming too warm, too feminine, too much of a conversation, to please Colin, who was staring at the window, waiting for a natural break to announce itself. Once again I marvelled that Max, so sane and dependable and cheerful, had grown up with these parents.
“How is that Ph.D. of yours progressing?” asked Colin. Enquiry had been inevitable.
“It’s nearly finished,” I said. “Really close to the end now.”
“Aha.” The verifying stare. “You know that I don’t have one? A questionable supplement. It’s largely for people who like letters after their name.” While you, I thought, like letters in front of your name.
“And how is Birkbeck?” Colin asked.
“It’s University College, actually.”
“University College. Indeed. A cut above, a cut above. No wonder you wanted to correct me so fast.”
My thesis is on the influence of the Epicureans on early modern English thought. Colin Thurlow told me that he did not “like” the Epicureans.
“Why not?” I asked.
“They were rather juvenile. They may seem mature about death, but if you study it you’ll see that they were juvenile about it. Terrified of it. Emotion posing as rationality.”
We got away as fast as we could. I told Jane how, when Max and I were small, we had heard Colin talking to my father at the dinner table. From the cigarette smoke drifted the phrase, in Colin’s precise accent: “ … the Kyrie is recited ninefold in that rite, I believe.” Max and I laughed for weeks about the word “ninefold,” which we had never heard before.
On the
Saturday night of Jane’s weekend in Sundershall, I offered to cook supper for all of us. Father, who had been oddly invisible all day, stayed in his study; Mother and Jane, I remember, laughed at my grand manner in the kitchen: Jane stole pieces of food from the counter. I like to play at being rather magnificent when cooking; half the pleasure is in disobeying all the rules of the recipes and refusing to measure anything as precisely as instructed. I threw around clouds of herbs and roughly upended the newly opened wine bottle into the casserole so that I could hear that delicious steady choking noise as expensive wine blunders in tides into the pot. Of course, I have to be careful to be not too blase. Jane, who knows nothing about cooking, used to enjoy suspending her adulthood in the kitchen. Her favourite trick was to give my arm a nudge while I was spooning or shaking something into a pot; she had no idea that I was really keeping a secret tally of weights and measurements—that, in effect, I was measuring my own carelessness. To her it was just another area of Thomas’s anarchy, but one which, unlike bill paying or accepting invitations, did not affect her.
I produced an aromatic coq au vin (made with some pricey wine I had bought in Durham and a few interestingly different spices) for my parents, who were at their best, high-spirited and genial. My father was exceptionally jaunty, and told Jane, when he emerged from his study, about his day. His bald head shone.
“Jane, Jane, my dear. Your presence in this house is the single star in the unrelieved blackness of my day.”
“Oh, Peter, it can’t have been that bad,” said Jane, enjoying the old man’s attention.
“I have passed the day in utterly monkish solitude. There was no one at all at the early communion this morning, not a solitary fig, so I had to administer communion to myself, swill down the wine like a Neapolitan, and resist the exceedingly strong temptation to skip great chunks of the liturgy. Then I went home, had breakfast—alone, because my esteemed wife had been too greedy to wait for me and you sluggards were still in bed—read the morning paper, changed into civvies, and spent most of the rest of the day writing a book review for Jim Earley at the Theological Review.”
“You should have been resting, dearest,” said Sarah.
Peter looked meaningfully at me; it was my cue to ask him about the book.
“What was the book?” I asked.
“A shallow study of the resurrection, but it did allow me to invent a rather good joke, though I say it myself.” Again, my cue.
“Yeah?” I asked, stirring the casserole, and watching my strong, healthy father, impish and commanding. I tried to find any suggestion of weakness, of recent frailty, and failed.
“Yes, I said that the author was certainly right that although the resurrection is the hardest miracle in which to believe, it is nevertheless the central one, the only one really, and most faithful Christians in this country do in fact believe that Jesus rose again.”
“I don’t get it—”
“I’m not finished. I then added that there is a certain modishly unbelieving Anglican bishop, ‘who shall remain nameless,’ that was how I put it, who obviously does not believe in the great triumph of the resurrection and who ‘seems to think that when they took Jesus down from the Cross he just ran down the other side of the hill and disappeared. ’ That’s what I wrote. What do you think?” He looked at me hopefully.
“Not bad at all, Dad.”
“Oh good, you like it.”
At the table, Mother asked Jane about her teaching, and about future concerts. I couldn’t help noticing that my parents seemed almost afraid of Jane, respectful of her talents and accomplishments.
“I haven’t been able to practise hard in the last two years, because of my heavy teaching load,” Jane said, and looked at me briefly, dazzlingly, with her dense, filled eyes. As usual, I had to look at the rest of her face to check that she was not angry. She was not; and yet I felt that she mentioned the teaching reproachfully, since had I not been essentially unemployed she would not have needed to support me. I felt my parents looking at me, felt some kind of hard rise of energy, and became irritated.
“I’m not going to apologize, if that’s what you want,” I said, cursing myself for having so baldly shown my hand.
“What on earth are you talking about?” said Jane. At which point my mother, whether designedly or not I don’t know, seemed to choke on her food, and said:
“This is a very strange coq au vin. Is that a caper on my fork? What on earth have you put in it, Tommy?”
“Made by a very strange chef,” said Father, and we all laughed.
After supper, at Peter’s suggestion, Jane played for us. The usual apologies were made—how often I have heard them—for the poverty of the English upright piano in the sitting room. (“No one ever plays it in this family, you see.”) As so often, Jane seemed to be lifting her hands to calm the instrument, soothing and stroking it. I identified with the piano. The black and white keys went up and down, madly disagreeing with one another, yet from this curious enclosure came beauty and loveliness and harmony, and Jane was their provider. I envied her this unworldly ability to bring flocks of sound from sheets dotted with abstract black collisions. She played a Chopin mazurka, slightly primly seated in the way that had excited me when I first saw her, her bottom softly quenched by the soft seat, which made me want to be that seat, and she moved her long thin arms, and the bright repeating Polish music filled the room, the notes quickly running, but running a little stiffly, with pointed joints, as if a barrel organ were turning the sound, a street music, a people’s peg-leg dance, full of clanging joy—I could imagine them throwing out their legs and kicking the air—and all this raised by English Jane, primly seated.
When she plays, she raises her head and closes her eyes, and seems to leave the world a little, to be alone with her notes in almost religious silence. I have sometimes to struggle with selfish resentment—resentment that she is so free, that she can so easily slip out of reality, that she cannot take me with her, that she seems almost to be at prayer (which as a secularist I am bound to disapprove of). We do indeed differ on religious matters, though Jane is so mystical that we have never really argued about the subject. She pities me a little, I think, for having no God to believe in. But if Jane does believe in God, then, as far as I can tell, He is really little more than a bearded old patron of music, a male Saint Cecilia. “A note,” she once said to me, “is an extraordinary thing. It wasn’t created by humans. Humans reproduce it; they borrow it and lend it to each other, by using instruments.” I objected that the instruments were created by humans, not by God.
“Yes, certainly,” said Jane. “But you can’t tell me that harmony is created by humans; how could it be? It’s like logic in maths. We don’t decide that two plus two equals four, we come upon that, it’s already made—isn’t it?”
“Yes, the ancient world talked about the music of the world—they felt it lay in the arrangement of the celestial spheres, that kind of thing. You know how keen I am on Schopenhauer—”
“I certainly do. How much was that book you bought on him last week? Thirty pounds?” Jane was teasing me, smiling broadly.
“It’ll earn its keep, believe me … Well, Schopenhauer has this mad but really quite likable theory that divisions in music correspond to the divisions between the organic and mineral worlds. He says something to the effect that a chord with a wide gap between soprano and bass sounds good because it parallels the gap between the animate world and the inanimate realms. Though I should add that I could never quite work out if he was thereby saying that the bass voice belongs to the mineral kingdom and the soprano to the animal.”
“That sounds very silly.” Jane stuck out her chin.
“Well, don’t blame me, blame Schopenhauer. But look, there are plenty of things which obviously haven’t been created by humans—the sea, for instance, or most human and animal instincts—and this knowledge, this knowledge that they exist outside our creation and control doesn’t necessarily compel us to posit God as their
author. Well, not me at least.”
But Jane had lost interest.
“Tom, you’re speaking your language again. I can’t stand it when you ‘go philosophical.’ You know I can’t, I can’t argue it logically. All I can say is that I feel when I am utterly suffused in music, immersed in it, so responsive to it that, that … well, in some silly way I want to change colour like a chameleon does, and become the colour of music—when that happens I go through the music as if it is a cloud, and, yes, I believe, I believe. I can’t not believe; nor could Bach or Handel or Bruckner or Elgar, and many others.”
I told her my father’s joke about the chameleon who finds himself on a tartan picnic rug and is so confused by the challenge of mimicry that he explodes.
“That’s me,” I said. “While you’re turning the colour of music I’m exploding! By the way, what does this something, this musical God, look like?”
Jane seemed genuinely surprised by the question.
“Look like? He doesn’t look like anything. He sounds, He-She sounds like music.”
Actually, although I think of Jane as excessively law abiding, she and I are both rebels in our way, I against inherited religion, and she against inherited indifference. Her parents are certainly not spiritual or musical. They live in a beautiful old house in Wiltshire. We used to go there fairly often when Jane and I were together. Jane insists that her parents have no money, though they were always able to summon a few thousand—out of the question for my parents—when we got into difficulties. Her father, Humphrey Sheridan, had been a lawyer and then in his fifties had some kind of nervous “collapse,” and took early retirement. I wondered when I first met him if it had had anything to do with alcohol, since he was always inviting me to join him for a drink on the pretext that “it must be six o’clock somewhere in the world.” Her mother, Julia, is vague, amusingly snobbish, and intelligently frustrated—she reads a novel a day, she says, and has no one to talk to.
