Arcadia

by Iain Pears

  ‘Besides which, of course,’ added Davies, ‘you risk turning into Stalin. A perfect society requires perfect people. The People are always a terrible disappointment. Not up to it, you know. Damned nuisance, they are. No wonder rulers go mad and turn nasty. You have no doubt read as many Utopias as I have. How many would you want to live in?’

  ‘True. Anterwold will be a framework for a better society, not a perfect one, which is obviously impossible. Still, I will need your help, my friends. I will, over the next few weeks, bring you the basic outlines of my world. You will tell me whether or not you think it might work. I will modify them until it becomes strong, stable, and capable of dealing with the feeble creatures that are men without collapsing into a nightmare as bad as the one we already have.’

  He smiled. ‘In return, I will listen to you again. Persimmon’ – he looked at the man on his left who had not yet spoken – ‘I hope you are driving a coach and horses through the laws of physics? If you would care to remove that look of disapproval at my escapist frivolity, perhaps you would like to tell us what you are doing?’

  *

  I want a beautiful, open, empty landscape, bathed in sunlight, Lytten thought as he pedalled his old bike home a little later. Gentle rolling hills, green and dotted with sheep. The very ideal of paradise. At least for an English reader. Mountains always contain evil. They are where people die, or are attacked by wild animals or wild people. We think of mountains as beautiful, but then we can rush through them on a warm train. Our attitude would be different if we had to walk up and down them, buffeted by rain or snow.

  It is easy to imagine a world where not only can few people read, few need to or want to. Serious reading can become the preserve of a small group of specialists, just as shoe-making or farming is for us. Think how much time would be saved. We send children to school and they spend most of their time learning to read and then, when they leave, they never pick up another book for the rest of their lives. Reading is only important if there is something worthwhile to read. Most of it is ephemeral. That means an oral culture of tales told and remembered. People can be immensely sophisticated in thought and understanding without much writing.

  Such were Lytten’s thoughts as he made his way up the road back to his house. There was bread and cheese in the kitchen; he’d put the kettle on the hob to boil up some water for tea, put coke on the fire and soon enough his study would be warm. No one would disturb him. The doorbell rang rarely; only the tradesmen – the groceries being delivered, the coal man once a month, the laundry man to bring back a sack of damp washing – disturbed his peace, and they were all dealt with by Mrs Morris, who came in three mornings a week to look after him. Most evenings he ate in college, then came home to read or settle down with a record on his extremely expensive record player. An indulgence, but he had always adored music – which is why his imaginary world would place a high value on song.

  He felt genuinely affectionate towards many, but needed few. Take Rosie, the girl who fed his cat, for example. Either she had adopted him, or he had adopted her. Or perhaps the cat had been the matchmaker. She came, and often enough they had long chats. He liked her company, found her views and opinions stimulating, for he had no experience of young girls, especially not those of the most recent vintage. The young were very different these days. Flatteringly, Rosie seemed to like him as well and their conversations would start off on some perfectly ordinary subject, then meander into music, or books, or politics. Much more interesting an individual than most of his students or colleagues. She was insatiably curious about everything.

  2

  Rosie Wilson breathed in the air with appreciation; she was old enough at fifteen (and a bit, she thought fondly) to recognise the first faint tang of winter. Not that she needed such evidence to know it was coming. She was long back at school, after all, and that was a more reliable indicator of the time of year than anything else.

  It was Saturday, and she was free until Monday. Of course there were tasks to fill up the time she could have spent enjoying herself. Walking the next-door neighbour’s dog. Doing the shopping. Peeling the vegetables and washing up after meals. Her brother never did any chores. He was at work today and on Sunday would go off with his friends to play football. That was normal. That was what boys did, and she was doing what girls did.

  ‘I want to play with my friends too,’ she had protested once. It was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘You don’t have any,’ her brother had snapped back. He was two years older and already had a girlfriend and was earning good money in an ironmonger’s shop. ‘Brainy girls don’t have friends.’

  She suspected that her brother’s statement was true; that was why it had hurt, and that was why he had said it. It was her own fault for passing her exams and going to a school where they taught her things. Her parents had almost refused, but she had got her way.

  So she shopped, although she took her time, walking along the canal at the end of the road and strolling over the common with the dog first. It was a good dog, obedient and amiable. She tied it up outside the shops and it would wait patiently for her.

  Except that now it had disappeared. She shouted, looked around, and then heard it barking, down by the river bank. ‘Come here! Bad dog!’ she called out, not too seriously, as she walked over to find out what it was up to.

  ‘Come away! Stop that!’ she scolded when she saw the beast, tail wagging enthusiastically as it snuffled at a bundle of old clothes. Then she looked closer. The clothes were inhabited. It was a man, lying on the ground.

  Rosie cautiously walked closer; she had read in the papers of murdered bodies being discovered by people out for a walk. As she approached, though, the pile of clothes moved and let out a groan. The face of a man, pale and sick-looking, was staring up at her. He blinked and rubbed his red, bloodshot eyes. That’s a relief, she thought. ‘Are you all right?’ she said loudly, not daring to get too near and making up for her timidity with volume.

  He rolled over and squinted as he focused on the figure of the girl in her bright red coat, clutching a large bag with one hand and the animal’s neck with the other. ‘Back!’ she said to the animal. ‘Bad dog! Naughty!’

  ‘Food,’ he croaked. His mouth moved as he tried to say more but no other words would come.

  ‘Food?’ she repeated. ‘Is that a good idea? You seem ill. Should I call an ambulance? A doctor?’

  ‘Just food. Give.’

  She hesitated, uncertain about what to do. Then she opened up her bag and looked in it.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You can have a little cake. One won’t be missed, I’m sure. It’s not very nutritious, I’m afraid. Just sponge, really.’

  She held it out, but he didn’t move to take it, so she cautiously put it on the ground beside him, pulling the large animal away as she did so. ‘Don’t you dare!’

  ‘It’s a very nice cake,’ she added when she saw the way he looked at it.

  He concentrated hard. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I must go. Sorry about Freddy here. He just wants to play. Are you sure you don’t need help?’

  He ignored her, and she turned, took a few steps, then came back. She peered for a moment in the bag once more, and held out her hand with a coin between two fingers.

  ‘Get yourself some proper food if you’re hungry. It’s not much, but …’

  ‘Go away.’

  She looked at him a second or so longer, scowled in disapproval, then hurried away. She was now so late she rapidly forgot the thoughtful state walking the dog had induced in her. Still, she felt vaguely proud of herself for giving a little money to that man. It had been, she reassured herself, the right thing to do. Charitable. Kind. The sort of thing nice, friendly people did. Not that she had got many thanks for her gesture. Probably just a drunk who had staggered there after too long in the pub on Friday night, spending his week’s wages. But what if he’d been really ill? Shouldn’t she go back and make sure?

  She t
hought about it, but decided against. She had done what she could, and he had told her to go away. If you really want help, you are polite. You say, help me. That sort of thing. Still …

  The thought spoiled her sense of virtue, and now she was annoyed as well as late. The shops closed at half past twelve and would not open again until Monday. If she missed the butcher the rest of her day would be in ruins. What would they eat? Guess who would get the blame? Her dad was a man of habit. It was Saturday, so it was pork chops. And tomorrow a roast. Sometimes Rosie wondered whether they might have pork chops on a Wednesday, but that would have caused confusion. When she grew up and was married with children and a house to look after, she’d have pork chops on whatever day she wanted. If, of course, anyone would have her.

  She walked swiftly along the road, trying to keep her mind on the list in her pocket. Grocer, then butcher, then greengrocer. Or perhaps the other way around. Then she’d drop off the dog and the shopping and in the afternoon go round to old Professor Lytten and feed his cat – the thruppence would come in handy now her charitable inclinations had depleted her resources.

  *

  Rosie liked Professor Lytten, although she knew she shouldn’t call him that. ‘Not a professor, my dear,’ he would say gently, ‘merely a fellow, toiling in the undergrowth of scholarship.’ But he looked and talked as if he were one. If only her teachers at school were a little bit more like him, she was sure she would enjoy being educated so much more. Instead, she had the prospect of Sunday morning preparing for a spelling test, with her parents muttering in the background, ‘Don’t know why you bother with that.’ And grammar. She hated grammar. ‘Never say “can I be excused”,’ the teacher had thundered at her only the other day. She had had to stand on one leg in agony as the impromptu lesson progressed. ‘We know you can, Wilson. That is obvious just from looking at you. But may you be? That depends. You are asking my permission, not enquiring about your capabilities.’

  ‘But Miss …’ she had interrupted desperately.

  ‘Never start a sentence with “But”. It is a conjunction, and in that position joins nothing. It is an error of the sort that marks out the ill-educated.’

  When the woman had finished, Rosie had run off to the toilets so quickly she could have won a medal at the Olympics, while the rest of the class cheered derisively.

  Feeding Professor Lytten’s cat wasn’t really a job, although only she could ever find anything remotely lovable or interesting in the beast, whose ill-humour was tempered only by laziness. Rather, she did it because every now and then the Professor would be there, and would talk to her. He knew everything.

  ‘He is a very nice man,’ Rosie had said to her mother once. ‘He talks to me very seriously, you know. But sometimes he just stops, halfway through a sentence, and tells me to go away.’

  Rosie was not disconcerted by this peculiar behaviour, and her mother assumed that it was the way professors were all the time. Certainly he never behaved in a manner which was, well, worrying. Quite the contrary; he addressed her gravely and carefully. She would tell him about the books she had read, or a song she had heard, and he never made fun of her or was scornful of her juvenile tastes. Nor did he seem to think that being a girl was a serious flaw.

  ‘I am afraid I do not know any of Mr Acker Bilk’s music,’ he might say. ‘A grave error on my part, perhaps. I will put on the radio next Saturday and expand my horizons. The clarinet, you say? A popular form of jazz, by the sound of it. It is, certainly, a most expressive instrument, in the right hands. As is the saxophone, of course …’

  So Rosie would go home clutching records by Ella Fitzgerald or Duke Ellington – for Lytten was a great enthusiast – convinced of the sophistication of her musical tastes, and knowing rather more about both jazz and the clarinet than she had done when she arrived.

  Lytten had even told her some of the stories of Anterwold, to gauge her reaction. She was the only person to know about this imaginary creation of his, apart from his colleagues in the pub and his old friend Angela Meerson. A grand idea, full of interesting characters, although, from Rosie’s critical point of view, there wasn’t much of a story yet. ‘They don’t seem to do anything,’ she pointed out one day. ‘Don’t they fight, or have adventures? Couldn’t you get someone to fall in love, or something? You need stuff like a love interest in a story.’

  Lytten coughed, then frowned. ‘I’m setting the context, you see, in which the story takes place.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘When that’s done, then people will know how to fall in love, and what to fight about.’ He paused and studied her face. ‘You are not convinced, I fear.’

  ‘It sounds just lovely,’ she reassured him as he looked crestfallen. ‘Professor,’ she continued cautiously, ‘are apparitions real?’

  ‘How curious you should ask that,’ he said in surprise. ‘I have been thinking about the same thing myself. Great minds, eh? Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh … a book. By Agatha Christie.’ She was shamefaced that this was the best she could think of, as she was sure he knew nothing of books with paper covers and pictures on the front. To her surprise, Lytten’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Agatha Christie! I am very fond of her, although I fear she cheats a bit by always introducing a crucial piece of evidence right at the end. Who do you prefer, Poirot or Miss Marple?’

  Rosie considered. ‘Miss Marple is nicer, but Poirot goes to more interesting places. I like reading about foreign places.’

  ‘A very judicious reply,’ he said. ‘Do you wish to travel, Rosie?’

  ‘Oh! Yes!’ she replied. ‘Ever since I was little. I want to see everything. Cities and mountains, and strange places. Places no one else has ever seen.’

  ‘An explorer, then?’

  ‘Mummy says I should be a nurse.’

  Lytten regarded her sympathetically. ‘It is not my place to tell you to ignore your mother’s advice,’ he said. ‘That said, in my opinion, I think you should seriously consider ignoring your mother’s advice. What does Miss Christie have to say about apparitions?’

  ‘There’s a scene where a character looms out of the mist like an apparition.’

  ‘I see. A true apparition is something which is not physical. “An idea raised in us”, as Hutcheson put it. It exists only in the mind of the person seeing it, like Beauty or Virtue. Or their opposites, of course. It is supernatural – a ghost or a fairy, or an angel – or it is an optical illusion, like a mirage, or, perhaps, the result of psychological disturbance. Those three classes, I believe, would account for all the possibilities. Would you like a slice of cake with your tea?’

  Rosie digested the information, but not the cake. Her mother was strict about eating between meals. ‘A fat girl will never find a good man, Rosie,’ was her view, handed down to her by Greataunt Jessie, a woman of many clichés.

  ‘Fairies don’t exist, though.’

  Lytten frowned. ‘Scientists would say they do not. But what do they know, eh? Believing something can make it so, I often think. If you believe in them you will never convince someone who does not. If you do not, you will never persuade someone who does. If you ever do encounter a fairy, it would probably be wise to be careful who you tell.’

  ‘You may be right,’ Rosie said.

  *

  The subject had become important a few days previously when Rosie had dropped in to feed Professor Jenkins.

  Jenkins was old, malevolent and abominably overweight, his entire life dedicated to spreading his ancient carcass over the most comfortable piece of furniture which could accommodate it. Most of his few waking moments were spent in eating; he had long ago discovered that he could digest and sleep simultaneously. No bird or mouse had ever cause to fear his presence. Play was unknown to him, even as a kitten, although it was hard to imagine him being young.

  That was the origin of his name, in fact – the beast was named after a man who had taught Lytten chemistry in his youth, a figure equally fat, unpleasant and idle. Som
etimes Lytten wondered if his pet was the reincarnation of his old tormentor. There was something about the cold malice of his stare which reminded him of lessons, long ago, in an icy classroom.

  Whatever the origin of his immortal soul, Jenkins would rarely allow anyone near him. But he tolerated Lytten, and almost seemed to like Rosie; she was the only person permitted to tickle his stomach.

  Ordinarily, when Rosie arrived she would go upstairs, where Jenkins would be found lying flat on his back, his fat little legs sticking up into the air, the very embodiment of debauchery. Amongst his many other failings, he was slightly deaf and did not take kindly to coming downstairs and finding his food already waiting. So Rosie not only fed him but also had to wake him up, although she drew the line at actually carrying him down to the kitchen.

  That day, Jenkins was not in his usual place, so Rosie had deposited her satchel in the hallway and walked from room to room, calling out to him. He was nowhere to be seen, but, as she was about to leave, she noticed that the door leading into the cellar was ajar. This was the bit of the house Lytten never used; it was really far too big for one person, although he had done his best to cram every room full of books.

  Even by the standards of the rest of the house – and Lytten was not the tidiest of men – the cellar was unpleasant. It was covered in dust, with a damp, rotting smell. It was dark as well, and, as she crept down the narrow staircase, she could just make out the piles of paper, the old cups, the few, poor pieces of furniture in what had once been the servants’ kitchen. The only light came through a filthy window in a door that gave onto the overgrown back garden.