The Hopkins Conundrum

by Simon Edge

  “I’m sorry for you, landlord, truly I am. It was a betrayal and it caused you pain. But if you didn’t love her? She released you, however much it may have hurt at the time. If it hadn’t happened, you would never have come here and met Chloe. Everything happens for a reason, do you see?”

  Tim usually despises people who say that everything happens for a reason, and of course Nadine used to say it a lot. But, for the first time, he can understand the truth they are groping for. Every action has a reaction, every event has a consequence and, without a random series of interactions, the present as we know it would not exist. Whatever good stuff happens now, the bad stuff probably played a role in it. It’s a useful insight that surprises him. He hopes he will still remember it tomorrow. But it doesn’t solve his present problem.

  “If I hadn’t met Chloe, I’d be getting ready to welcome Barry Brook and looking forward to transforming the fortunes of this valley.”

  “You only wanted to transform the fortunes of the valley because you had a gap in your life. And now you haven’t.”

  “I had a gap in my bank balance, and I’ve still got it.”

  “Oh come on, landlord. You’re a romantic. I can see you are – even if you don’t know it yourself. And you can see yourself that Chloe can help you get this place working. It won’t happen immediately, but it might not happen immediately with Barry Brook either. The whole thing is still just a fantasy, remember, and there’s no guarantee it will make you rich, even if he does write a book about the place. The only thing you know for certain is that you’ll lose Chloe if she finds out you were behind the whole thing.”

  “Which she would never have done if some loose-tongued old fool hadn’t blabbed.”

  “I’ve told you a dozen times I’m sorry about that. I just assumed you’d have told her about it already. In any case, I truthfully think you’re fretting about nothing. If you keep mum and don’t encourage him any further, I bet you all the tea in China that this character Brook will give up on the idea, and you’ll never hear from him again. You mark my words. And even if he does write the book, it won’t come back to you, because he doesn’t have the slightest idea who you are. In fact, that might be the best of all worlds for you – win/win, as they say – because you’d get the tourists coming anyway. Your lovely lady may not like it, but she’ll come round to it when she realises she’s sitting on a goldmine. And she’ll never know you had anything to do with it.”

  He chuckles at the thought and takes a sip of beer, as if to toast this perfect outcome. Then he wipes his mouth and continues:

  “As long as he doesn’t actually turn up here, which I really don’t think will happen. And if you want to keep her, which I think you do, you must not have any more direct contact with Barry Brook. That would be most unwise, in my opinion.”

  Tim thinks on this for the rest of the week and comes round to the idea that the old boy is right. It’s true that Nadine did him a favour. Either because of an old-fashioned respect for his vows, or maybe just because he was too gutless, he would never have ended the marriage himself. Of course it hurt to lose the two most important people in his life at the same time, to imagine them together, not just physically but also in comradeship, conspiring against him and laughing at him – that had hurt his pride. But looking back on his years with Nadine, on the rage he had felt because she didn’t see the world in just the same way as he did, he cannot ever recall feeling the kind of contentment to which he now looks forward every weekend, the warmth he feels just to be in Chloe’s company. That warmth makes him see the world differently: she is softening him, he can feel it already, otherwise he would never have opened up to Alun Gwynne like that. It’s odd to feel himself changing, but he likes himself for it, far more than he liked the old Tim.

  By the time Chloe arrives the following weekend, he has decided there is indeed a choice between riches and happiness, and happiness is the better route. He plans a walk for them on the Saturday morning before he opens the pub, and in the evening he watches her radiate charm at their slowly enlarging clientele. He even finds himself reflecting some of it in the form of genuine bonhomie. He is all the more convinced that he has made the right decision when, at the end of the evening, he watches her denim-clad rear climb the creaking stairs ahead of him. Yes, he will emerge from this escapade with his relationship intact, even if he must kiss goodbye to his dream of filling the valley with Grail-trailing punters. Keeping her is the main thing, he is certain, as he watches her emerge from the bathroom in a skinny robe that barely covers the tops of her milky thighs.

  He is about to get into bed when he notices a message blinking on his phone.

  His blood runs suddenly colder when he sees who it is from.

  It reads:

  Dude, change of plan. My current project has just been shoved back a whole six months so I’ve got time on my hands. Seems like the perfect opportunity to come check out this place of yours and talk some more about these nuns, no? I’m arriving the back end of next week, so we can finally meet. But I still don’t know your real name or where you are. Let me know how I can find you.

  BB

  Dublin, 1886

  Hopkins had been trying to decide which was more bruised, his arm or his dignity. When he removed his undershirt to inspect the damage in the flickering gaslight of his room, he was surprised to find there was barely a mark. Maybe it would flare in the coming days, but for the moment the dignity had it.

  All he had been trying to do was get his class more engaged. The witless creatures only ever saw the verse as a chore, dead lines on a page they were translating because they might be examined on it, not an account of flesh-and-blood events that had once moved listeners to tears. He yearned to create that impact once more, to make it sing for them. Of course it was harder when the music of the words came in a difficult ancient language. That was why he had hit on a more theatrical approach.

  “You sir,” he had said to a mousy boy with buck teeth who always sat in the front row and was one of the few never to chatter, cat-call or cheek – more from lack of spirit, he suspected, than good manners. “How would you like to come out here and be the gleaming-helmeted Hector for us?”

  The boy looked alarmed. “What would I have to do, sir?” Even his voice was slow, with a country drawl, although what part of the country Hopkins could not say; he had not been in Ireland long enough to tell. He hoped he never would be.

  “Nothing too taxing. He has just been slain, remember, so for the moment all you need to do is position yourself on the floor, recumbent, about here…”

  He moved his table away from the front desk so that the Greek victors, when he had chosen them, would be able to get a clear run around it. When he looked up, the toothy boy had not budged.

  “Come on, man.”

  “What, lie down and that?”

  “Yes, yes, sir. Come on, the floor is quite clean.” A white lie was permissible in the cause of bringing Homer to life.

  “I’d rather not, sir.”

  He was momentarily at a loss. There was no going back now, but what if there was no going forward either?

  “I’ll have a crack at it, sir,” came a breezy voice from the back.

  Hopkins peered near-sightedly through a blur of faces to see a hand semaphoring in his direction.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Me, sir. Craig, sir.”

  Now he could see. Craig was built like a bull, with manners to match. Hopkins had no idea how he had ended up at a university, even such a sorry one as this.

  “Any other volunteers?” He vainly scanned the benches, up, down, across and back again. “No? Very well then, Mr Craig. Down you come.”

  Craig was remarkably compliant, and they were all entering into the spirit now. Having cast his Trojans, Hopkins toyed with the idea of making them stand on the table, but he decided that would be too precarious.

 
; “You could turn it upside down, sir,” suggested Craig, and it wasn’t such a bad idea. So he cleared away his papers and books, and Craig and a couple of the other meatier ones up-ended the desk, allowing the grieving Trojan party to take its smirking place within the legs.

  All that was left was to appoint a swift-footed Achilles, mad to avenge the dead Patroclus. A rat-faced young man called Byrne put himself forward to play the warrior hero. It was hard to imagine anyone less appropriate, but there were no other volunteers.

  In the text, Achilles pierced Hector’s heels to pull him along.

  “I’m not sure that’s very practical here,” said Hopkins. “You’ll have to make do with grabbing him by the feet.”

  Byrne did as he was told, and now there was laughter. Hopkins could not actually see Craig’s face, but he assumed there was mugging going on. Byrne pulled and strained but failed to shift Craig an inch.

  “You’ll have to swap,” said Hopkins.

  Now Byrne too started fussing about not wanting to lie on the floor, and they seemed to have reached an impasse.

  “Why don’t you play Hector, sir?” piped up a voice from the back. “Show us how it’s done.”

  And in his keenness to make it work, not to abandon the whole idea, he went along with it, arranging himself on the floor and allowing Craig to grasp his ankles. It was only when the whole lecture theatre erupted in a delighted, Vesuvian uproar, and he saw the room spinning above him as he was trailed in ever faster circles around the upturned legs of the besieged city, that he saw the full, catastrophic extent of his folly.

  At some stage his arm hit the table leg, but the ordeal only stopped when the door opened.

  “Who was it that came in?” asked his friend Curtis, when Hopkins related the story a couple of days later. It was painful to relive any of the scene and he would have preferred to block it from his memory completely, but he was aware that hiding it away would only worsen the sense of shame. His colleagues were probably all laughing about it behind his back anyway, so facing up to it was the best thing to do.

  “You really haven’t heard it from him already? It was Darlington.”

  “No, I swear, I didn’t know any of this until now.”

  “Decent of him not to tell, then. But it was degrading. I thought when I came here that teaching undergraduates would be an improvement on schoolboys. But these ones are just as unruly. I don’t object to their cheeking me personally, but I do mind their being rude to their professor and a priest. And I confess I dread facing them again.”

  “Brazen it out, old man. Don’t let them see they’re winning.”

  He and Curtis, who taught mathematics, had been friends since their arrival at the university. Curtis was ten years his junior, with pale blue eyes set beneath a wide brow, and a sportsman’s physique that belied the fact that he suffered from epilepsy and avoided all undue exertion. A couple of hours’ walking was about the limit of it, and today they had been out to the park, a lonely but beautiful place with deep woods, dells and drives where Hopkins would spend more time, if only it were a little more accessible.

  He had imagined this would be an elegant city, and clearly it once had been. There were some fine buildings, a Corinthian colonnade here and a couchant lion above a doorway there, and he had seen richly ornamented interiors. But the whole place had fallen into a sad decline. Few buildings were as wrecked as their own, which had once been a showy gem but now crumbled around their ears. He had entertained notions of walks in the new-laid garden square across the road from the house. But even this was full of vagrants who seemed to have set up home there, and he had not been back after the first time. The fog was thicker than in London, but the worst aspect of the whole confounded city was the ever-present stench. It got stronger the closer you came to the river, and he avoided crossing this open sewer at all, if he could help it. His own preferred route to the park involved crossing it higher up, but Curtis, who had lived here all his life, had set out the most direct way today, and Hopkins had not liked to give offence by objecting. He made do with pressing a handkerchief to his face as they crossed the bridge.

  “They hold it against me because I’m English.”

  “There may be some of that, I’m afraid. Nationalism is growing ever stronger, especially with the archbishops putting their oar in. But there is also...”

  Curtis hesitated, passing his hand nervously through his short russet beard.

  “Go on,” said Hopkins. “What is there also?”

  “Well, it’s your syllabus. You don’t teach to the examination.”

  This again! “How can I teach to the examination? I set the questions and I mark all the papers. One thousand, six hundred and fifty-two scripts last year, let me remind you, and probably more this. So, as I keep telling everyone, it would be quite improper, utterly improper, to give my own students an unfair advantage…”

  “Don’t work yourself up, old fellow. All I mean is, the rest of us aren’t perfect teachers either, far from it. Most of us are complete idiots, if truth be told. But we teach what we think will come up, so they pay attention. It stands to reason, doesn’t it?”

  “But none of the rest of you has to set an examination!”

  “But for heaven’s sake, you can teach to some of it! The reason they lark about so much is they know that nothing you teach will ever come up. Don’t you see?”

  “But don’t you see…?” Hopkins was trembling. It made him so furious when people refused to acknowledge the impossibility of his position. They didn’t have the terrible burden, the Sisyphean labour, of marking papers. He wouldn’t mind having to go through the hundreds of scripts if he felt he was furthering the cause of learning, but the process merely confirmed that nothing could be further from the case. The thought of it wound him into a further bate, and it wasn’t until he felt Curtis’ touch on his arm that he realised they were standing outside the railings of the soot-blackened townhouse where his friend’s parents lived.

  “Shall we call in for tea?” said Curtis with a conciliatory smile. “It’s nearly time, and you know how Mother loves to see you.”

  Hopkins was not yet in a mood to be conciliated, but his chilblains had flared from walking, and a rest would be very welcome.

  North Wales, the present

  Tim and Chloe are on the sofa in his little sitting room watching the evening news. Chloe is curled up, her shoes kicked off and her small white feet tucked neatly behind her thighs, as she rolls herself into a feline ginger ball. Tim sprawls with one leg on the rug and the other slung over the coffee table, just clear of their empty supper plates.

  The headlines are depressing: wars, terrorist bombings, job losses.

  “What kind of world are we living in?” says Chloe. “It just seems to get worse and worse.”

  Tim nods, sensing that a moment has arrived. Closing his eyes, he recites:

  “No worse, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

  More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring…”

  He pauses, as if to suggest he’s savouring the power of poetic expression, although it’s actually to cover the fact that he can’t remember the next line. He could do it yesterday, but now he can’t for the life of him remember what comes next. Mary, mother of us? No, there’s something before that. Bollocks. Why is he always so useless?

  He has decided it is important to convince her that he is a genuine devotee of the poet, rather than the mercenary fraud he really is. During the days when he is alone at the Red Lion, he has been looking through some of the other poems in the Collected Works. Most of them go way over his head – sometimes he can understand the first few lines and then he gets lost, other times not even that – but this one has caught his eye. It’s short, the language isn’t too weird or obscure, and in his present mood of self-flagellation, having come so close to messing up the best thing that has happened to him in yea
rs, the sentiment seems pretty relevant. He has been trying to get enough of it by heart to recite casually during the weekend, as if lines of poetry are always flowing from his soul, and he has simply never got around to expressing them before. Mindful that this is not the most obviously romantic poem, he has been waiting for a suitably bleak moment to perform it. The present opportunity one is perfect – but now he has managed to balls it up by forgetting the words.

  He risks opening his eyes, and finds she is smirking at him.

  “It’s not ‘worse’, it’s ‘worst’,” she says, muting the TV to leave the newscaster mouthing gravely on in silence.

  “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

  More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.”

  And then, of course, she continues. She is more competitive than any man he can think of – and unlike him, she doesn’t dry after two lines.

  “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?”

  How could he have forgotten that? It’s not exactly hard – one line made pretty much entirely from the words ‘comfort’ and ‘where’.

  She isn’t stopping. Why would she? She rattles off the other eleven lines perfectly – he has learned them well enough to recognise that, even if not to successfully recite them himself. He starts to applaud – she is seriously good at it, knowing how to put the accent on certain words so that lines which are obscure on the page suddenly acquire a clarity – but now she’s explaining it to him as well. It’s a good job he likes her so much.

  “Do you see the difference in that first phrase?” she is saying. “If the line went ‘no worse there is none’, he’d be saying his life couldn’t possibly get any shittier than it was for him at that moment, wouldn’t he? But he’s actually saying it’s even worse than that because, however bad things get, they can always surprise you by getting even worse later on. There are no limits to the crap life can throw at you, basically.”