The Hopkins Conundrum

by Simon Edge

  As they turned onto the trail that led up the hill, something cawed from off to their left. Hopkins had heard it before, three identical beats on the same note, but was never sure what it was. Daa daa daa came the call, then again daa daa daa, purely rhythmic, with no variation in tone. Daa daa daa. It could be saying Ding dong bell, which was his favourite metrical conundrum. Three beats and three stresses: how did you scan it? You couldn’t have more than one stress in a foot, but neither could you have a foot with just one beat, not in conventional metrics anyhow. To Hopkins, that just showed that the rules were wrong. Every child knew the rhythm of Díng dóng béll, just as they knew Óne, twó, búckle my shóe, and they were unconcerned by the supposed impossibility of the meter. How could it be impossible if you could say it?

  “There it is,” pointed O’Rourke, and they looked up to see the crow soaring above them. From below, its silhouette was like a cross against the sky, the wings forming perfect broad right angles as they came out from the tail and neck. The bird hovered lower now so they could see its five distinct feathers reaching beyond the end of the wingspan, like heavenly fingers reaching out into the sky.

  They stood still and gazed up at it together.

  “Do you ever wonder how we know it so easily to be a crow?” said Hopkins.

  “Because of its tail. It’s fan-shaped, almost stumpy. If it had a pointed tail it would be a raven.”

  “No, no. I mean, yes of course that’s true, but that’s not quite what I meant. It’s only part of it, anyway. I mean rather, what is the essential crow-ness of it, that makes us know beyond doubt that God is showing us a crow and not, say, a rabbit?”

  O’Rourke was grinning uncertainly at him.

  “Because rabbits don’t fly?”

  Hopkins sighed. “I… I’m not explaining it very well. Never mind. Come, have we time to go on higher before we turn back?”

  The first time he had come up here, not long after his arrival, the entire landscape had been swathed in the suffocating, cloying grey that was the worst aspect of this part of the world. It struck him then that the hills were suckling the rain from the clouds. But the landscape could not look more different now, as they toiled up through the snow-line, shielding their eyes from the white dazzle. He gasped with the nobility of it as they finally stood at the cairn on the summit. He was grateful for his two jerseys: the one the incompetent village laundress had shrunk, squeezing his chest like a corset, and the replacement his mother had sent, fitting loosely on top, but even that woollen armour under his robe was no defence against the rasping cold. O’Rourke was suffering too, groping for a handkerchief to wipe away a dewdrop.

  On the way down they saw a kestrel, floating on the airstream high above the meadow. From their vantage point on the hill path they were almost level with it, and they could see the crook of its neck hanging from its outstretched wings as it scoured the fields for some hapless mouse or vole. A vole on the foel. Ha, it worked wonderfully if you spoke it. Now the bird was off, swinging forth on the current to scan another part of the field. That elegant curve brought to mind the young skaters Hopkins had watched last winter on the little fishing lake over the hill. The ones who could really do it swept around as if they were tying a bow on the ice, and here was the bird doing the same on the air. Now it came to a halt again, as if the air beneath it were completely steady, and it stared hungrily down at a hedgerow far below. What majesty and terror all in one.

  Other men had not ventured so far, and the recreation room was crowded when the pair of them arrived back. Hopkins took coffee and bread for himself and sat gratefully on one of the stiff-backed wooden chairs. He would never compromise on the length of a walk, however cold or wet the conditions; but his feet ached horribly. Kerr was pacing in front of the low fireplace, so inadequate to heat the tall room, waiting for The Times. Now he came over with it, apparently set on reading out the latest reports. But Hopkins had no stomach for them today.

  “Really, I’m more than happy to wait my turn.”

  “If you’re sure…”

  Kerr took a seat of his own and bent over the paper. An aristocratic Scot who was rumoured to have distinguished himself in the Crimea, he had been a naval commander before joining the Society, so it was inevitable that the maritime disaster would have a fascination for him.

  That left Hopkins free to describe the kestrel to Bacon, who could always be relied upon to show interest in his natural observations.

  “Did you see it plunge?” the other man asked. Bigger and broader than Hopkins and about five years his senior, he was also a convert, also from London. He had a fresh, pleasant voice, lighter than you expected from a man of his bulk.

  “Not while we watched. The hawk went hungry and the prey went free.”

  Bacon had seen a flock of starlings on his own walk.

  “It was a sight that you in particular would have loved, Hopkins. They settled in a row of trees and then at some signal known only to themselves they rose, one tree after another, making an unspeakable jangle and sweeping round in whirlwinds. It was joyous to watch because their cries seemed somehow delighted, as if they were stirring and cheering one another.”

  “Could they really have been delighted, I wonder?”

  “No doubt that was my own illusion, an emotion of my own that I conferred on them.”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps all God’s creatures feel the joy of him.”

  “A controversial thought.”

  “We should subscribe to Descartes’ view that animals have neither souls, rights nor feelings,” put in Rickaby, his little monkey face beaming in a way that always irritated Hopkins. “It’s better to think of them as automata constructed by God. If they happen to make noises, so does a clock or a steam engine. Thomas Aquinas was also adamant that an animal has no soul. Imputing enthusiasm or delight to them is highly irregular.”

  Hopkins pursed his lips. He would be prepared to consider a starling equivalent to a clock when the former started striking the hour and the latter learned to fly. But he kept that to himself, knowing that Bacon was right: he was at odds with the Society over this and it could prove an impediment if he held too obviously to the view. But Rickaby was waiting for a reply, smiling as irritatingly as ever, and Hopkins was relieved to have his attention diverted by Kerr, who had finished with The Times and was offering it to him.

  “What news of the shipwreck?” Hopkins asked.

  Perhaps he would pay attention to the terrible details after all.

  North Wales, the present

  Life begins to look up for Tim on the afternoon a rogue tourist wanders into the Red Lion. He’s a walker, early thirties, dramatically balding without having clipped his hair short at the back and sides to compensate, so that he looks like he’s wearing a clown wig, with t-shirt sleeves flapping uselessly around thin, white arms. But he’s clearly tougher than he looks because he’s carrying a massive rucksack on his back – tent, camping stove, the whole works, he explains to Tim – and claims to have walked all the way from mid-Wales.

  Tim pulls him a pint and makes him a cheese-and-onion sandwich, using the defrost function on his toaster to make the bread seem fresh.

  “Looking to get away from it all, are you?” he asks. “You’re certainly off the beaten track on this side of the valley. Most people seem to go straight on up to the coast on the main road on the other side. More fool them, of course. They don’t know what they’re missing.”

  He beams affably, wishing he could actually mean it.

  “Really?” says the walker. “I’d have thought you’d get some literary pilgrims at least. You know, with the poetry connection just up the road. Actually I was hoping you could point the place out for me on my map. I mean, the place where he lived.”

  Tim is too embarrassed to admit that he hasn’t a clue what the guy is talking about. Fortunately Alun Gwynne is on hand, and jumps in with a disqu
isition on the virtues of the neighbourhood bard. The visitor seems delighted with this expert tutorial. It’s only when he has gone on his way that Tim confesses his ignorance. When Alun gets over his elaborate disappointment at this failing – “And to think that I took you for an educated man, landlord!” – he fills Tim in. By the time he leaves, he has provided details of every bush, tree and hill within a ten-mile radius by which the poet is meant to have been inspired. Tim is exhausted by the effort of feigning interest.

  Alun Gwynne is clearly fond of the subject, because the next day he brings a paperback of poems.

  “I thought you might like to take a look, if you ever have an idle moment.”

  As ever, Tim is unsure if he is being insulted or teased.

  “The ones of particular local interest are here…” Alun jabs a weather-beaten finger at a short poem. “And this one, this one and this one. And of course the Wreck.”

  He flicks through several pages to point to that last poem. It seems to go on forever.

  “That’s the big one,” he says superfluously, “and it was all composed down the road, at the seminal college.”

  He means the place the walker was looking for.

  “It’s difficult language, mark you,” he adds. “Very complicated. Don’t be disheartened if you can’t grasp it. A lot of people can’t, especially if they don’t have a real bent, as it were. It wouldn’t surprise me if you couldn’t make head nor tail of it, landlord. But give it a try anyway, just to see.”

  He fumbles in his pocket for a biscuit for Macca, who eats it with one crunch and puts his head on one side in hope of more.

  Tim has never had the slightest inclination to read poetry for pleasure. While it’s true that he is not exactly rushed off his feet, it would have to be a cold day in hell before he would voluntarily pick up a volume of verse to entertain himself. On the other hand, every man has his pride and he is irritated by the assumption that the writing will be too hard for him – particularly when it comes from someone who is speaking English as a foreign language and has a fairly hit-and-miss relationship with its vocabulary. So, whether deliberately or not, Alun Gwynne has thrown down a gauntlet. After Tim has locked up, instead of flicking through the TV channels to reinforce his conviction that there is nothing on there worth watching, he sits down with the book.

  He opens the volume, noting that Alun Gwynne shares his own habit of writing his name and the place he bought it on the inside cover. When he gets to the long poem, the depressing news is that the old boy is right: it’s well-nigh incomprehensible. It’s full of strings of words that have a slightly hypnotic impact, because they’re full of swirling internal rhymes and rhythmic alliterations, but they don’t actually mean anything, not to Tim at any rate. According to Alun the poem is meant to be about a shipwreck, and that’s what the dedication says too, but you wouldn’t know it from the lines themselves. There’s no scene-setting, no narrative, and precious little about a ship. Instead it’s all about God and – from what little Tim can follow – the poet himself, who seems to be pouring his heart out in an intensely miserable way, although to limited effect when it’s so hard to know what he’s on about.

  Tim’s plan to tell Alun Gwynne that he has mastered the poem with no trouble is no longer viable, and he hopes the old boy will quietly forget about it. But he doesn’t, of course. It’s the first thing he asks about the next afternoon.

  “Honestly, Alun, I haven’t had a moment,” says Tim.

  He wishes he were a better liar. He remembers reading somewhere that the real art of being plausible is to convince yourself of whatever you’re trying to say before you try it on anyone else. He tries to create a mental picture of what being busy might be like, but no, it won’t come.

  “Had a late rush after I left, did you?” asks Alun.

  That’s a cheap shot, and Tim rises above it.

  But Alun Gwynne carries on nagging him day after day to know if he has looked at the poem yet, so a couple of nights later he backs down.

  “I did, er, finally get round to looking at it, yes,” he says. “You weren’t joking when you said it was hard. I’m not surprised that some people can’t understand a word.”

  “How far did you get?”

  There is a twinkle of merriment, or perhaps mockery, in the old boy’s eye.

  “Not very far. I didn’t want to rush it, you know? Better to take it a bit at a time and savour the finer subtleties.”

  His customer raises an eyebrow.

  “Did you understand any of it?”

  Tim sighs.

  “Not a bloody word,” he says, and they both laugh. It’s a relief to be telling the truth.

  “There’s no shame in it,” says Alun. “Some of it is pretty cryptic. Almost as if it’s a puzzle.”

  “Like it’s written in code or something?” says Tim. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  That thought stays with him for the rest of the day. There’s a memory somewhere at the back of his mind that is trying to push through to the front, only it won’t come.

  It’s only later that he remembers, and suddenly it’s all flooding back unchecked: the full ghastly detail of the disastrous week that he and Nadine spent in the south of France for their tenth anniversary.

  The trip was Nadine’s idea, and it would have been fine if they could just have had a normal holiday. But that was never Nadine’s way. Instead of drinking Bordeaux by the glorified paddling pool that came with their gîte, as any ordinary couple would have, she made them clamber over ankle-twisting hillsides in the August heat, on an idiot quest for the Holy Grail involving maps, a set-square and a postcard of an old painting. She had just read a book – the book the whole world seemed to have fallen for that summer – and she was on a mission. The result was misery for them both. For Tim, it meant facing up to the fact that he was spending his life with a credulous simpleton. Nadine’s discontent took a different form, chiefly her dislike of being called a credulous simpleton quite so loudly and quite so often. He remembers one row in particular, at furious volume in a restaurant full of obviously rubber-necking Brits. That detail is crucial: the restaurant was full, just as the hotel was full and all the cafés and gift shops in the centre of the village were full.

  If this were just a function of the hot weather and the dramatic scenery, all the nearby villages would have been swarming too. But everywhere else in the surrounding region was terminally sleepy, places where all the shutters were closed in the middle of the day and you had the creepy sense that everyone had either died, moved away or was watching you from behind them. Their village, by contrast, had something extra: a Unique Swindling Point far more compelling than climate and cheap plonk. And that piece of value-added had been put there by a succession of mutually back-scratching con-artists – he remembers shouting that very phrase as Nadine dripped angry tears onto her crêpe flambée – with each new shyster standing on the shoulders of the last.

  Some confected nonsense involving the resurrected Christ, a French wife and a hidden grave had made the village famous and its businesses rich. This wasn’t just a matter of luck for those businesses, of happening to be in the right place. This village and its entrepreneurs had made their own luck, by announcing to the world that it was the right place. The scam had been going on since Victorian times, but the world had really gone nuts for it when Nadine’s favourite book – The Poussin bloody Conundrum – had turned the whole thing into a thriller. Everyone in the world seemed to have read it and the village had scored big-time.

  These memories ought to make Tim shudder: they certainly always have before. But now they have generated something, the germ of an idea that excites rather than repels him. It’s tantalising.

  Alun Gwynne says the poem – the very religious poem written on their doorstep – is so bewildering it could be written in code. And codes convey secret messages, don’t they? So what if…
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br />   Tim spends half the night online trying to see how far he can spin the yarn that is coming together in his head. Old enough to remember the world before the internet, he marvels that there is a page for literally everything, put together by someone, somewhere, so that nothing needs to be complicated or impenetrable any more. And he discovers there is a thrill to be had by clicking on links. Best-selling conspiracy thrillers need powerful people holding life-or-death secrets, and it’s a stretch to describe a lonely little priest on a rainy hillside in North Wales as important. But he’s a member of the Society of Jesus – click – which is part of the Catholic Church – click – which is run by the Pope – click – who is based in the Vatican – click – which has always been a serious player in this kind of yarn. Bingo.

  He navigates back to the top of his chain and goes off in a different direction, to see if he can find out more about the poem. How can he doubt it? It’s based on a real event – click – involving real people – click – some of whom were fleeing religious persecution in their native Germany, organised by a bloke called Bismarck – click – in response to some initiative or other by the Pope – click – of that selfsame Vatican. This is fun! Does it add up to anything? In Tim’s excitable imagination it seems to, but it really is getting late, and he has an empty pub to open sometime tomorrow, so he jots down a few key notes to try and clear his brain of the facts that are otherwise likely to keep him awake, and then goes to bed, where he sleeps immediately.

  The next step is to try out the fledgling idea on his only available test-audience who, if nothing else, is always up for a rambling tale.