The Hopkins Conundrum

by Simon Edge

  “Cheerful.”

  “Well, you’re the one who started quoting it. Is your life so bad at the moment?”

  “Of course not.”

  He leans over to kiss her on the lips. She’s right, he is certainly not complaining about this part. But out of the corner of his eye he can see the light of his phone blinking away, to remind him how close to relationship doom he has brought himself.

  In the past two weeks he has received no fewer than nine emails and tweets from Barry Brook. They start relatively calmly:

  “Hey dude, I’m getting on a plane tomorrow and I still haven’t heard back from you. Let me know where you are so I can come and find you, okay? And give me a number so I can call you!”

  Then they become more frantic:

  “I’ve been in your goddamn country three whole days now, and I still haven’t heard a word from you. Do you want me to write this book or not??!”

  And they end up downright furious:

  “Just remember YOU were the one who got in touch with ME and I’ve come four thousand freaking miles for you, so have the decency to send me a darn reply!!!”

  Those are just the ones that Tim has opened. He tells himself the guy can’t do him any harm even if he could find him, which he can’t. But throughout the weekend, that winking red eye of the unopened messages serves as both a rebuke and a menace, reminding him how badly he has messed up, and how much messier it could still get.

  He eventually checks them after Chloe has left. Only one is from Barry; the other two are spam from an insurance company and a forlorn suggestion from a garage back in England that he should have the Suzuki serviced. But the ominous silence after a final angry outburst from Brook is, if anything, even more alarming.

  The worry gnaws at him. Over the next few days, he finds himself prickly and irritable. He loses his temper in traffic on the way to Morrisons, and he picks a fight with customer service when his trolley won’t give him his pound coin back.

  “It’s like he’s here somewhere, and I don’t know where or when he’s going to pop out,” he tells Alun Gwynne.

  “You’ve no reason to think he’s actually here,” says the old boy.

  “Apart from all those messages saying he’s arrived?”

  “But did he actually say he was coming here? He said he was coming to this country, by which he probably meant England not Wales, so he’s probably in some fancy hotel in London.”

  Tim tries to remember what he told Barry Brook about their location. He was careful not to give his own identity away, so he certainly didn’t mention the Red Lion. But did he mention the village, the valley, St Vowelless’s? Thinking back, he is pretty sure he didn’t. But that’s not much consolation, because it wouldn’t be hard for Brook to work it out from any online biography of the poet.

  He explains that to Alun, who just shrugs and says: “I’m sure we’d have heard if he had been here.”

  “Really? He’s an author, not a film star. It’s not like he’s recognised everywhere he goes. Do you know what he looks like? I don’t think I do.”

  “I might. I saw him on TV once.”

  Tim makes a mental note to google Barry Brook to see if he can find a picture.

  “But I really don’t think he’ll come any where near this corner of Wales,” Alun continues. “I bet you at this very moment he’s eating cucumber sandwiches in Harrods. Americans love that sort of thing, don’t they?”

  Tim is not entirely sure that rich American tourists eat afternoon tea in Harrods, but before he can say so they are both distracted by the scrape of the heavy front door on the flagstones.

  In the doorway is a small, round man of about sixty. He removes a pair of aviator shades and squints as his eyes still don’t adjust to the gloom.

  “Afternoon, sir,” says Tim with a queasy feeling. He wishes Alun Gwynne and Macca didn’t look quite so much like extras from The Wicker Man, turning round to stare at any stranger.

  “Good day to you,” says the newcomer.

  He’s wearing a pink Lacoste polo shirt over long shorts, with matching pink socks over gleaming white trainers. It’s a strange ensemble, but of more obvious concern is his unmistakably American accent.

  “I’m looking for a room to stay a few nights, and I saw your sign. Do you have vacancies?”

  Cleaning up the battered old board advertising bed and breakfast has been another of Chloe’s schemes, and they have bought new bedding and towels and little tabs of guest soap. That’s one reason that Tim doesn’t immediately tell the American he’s sorry, but all the rooms are taken: it feels wrong to be turning his first-ever customer away, particularly when he needs the cash so badly. Also, he reckons the visitor would see through that right away. This doesn’t look like the kind of pub where the accommodation is all taken. And there are two hundred and fifty million Americans, so the odds are stacked heavily against this being the only one of them he specifically doesn’t want staying under his roof.

  “Certainly, sir. Just a single room, will that be? And if I could take a name for the register?” He tries to open his brand new guest book in such a way that the guy can’t see that his will be the first entry.

  “Yes of course. It’s Brook.”

  Tim feels his stomach turn over. He signals urgently with his eyes to Alun Gwynne not to say a word.

  “Would that be Brooke with an ‘e’ or Brook without?”

  He knows he is clutching at straws.

  “Without. B-R-O-O-K.”

  “Without. Got it.”

  “And that’s initial F,” adds the visitor.

  Tim looks up, perhaps a little too delightedly. Is there a God after all?

  “…for Finbar.”

  “Of course,” says Tim as he inscribes it. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean it’s, erm, a name you don’t come across very often.”

  “I’m from an Irish background,” says the visitor.

  “Oh yes, I see. Marvellous. Now, if you wouldn’t mind just signing here…”

  Tim’s face is fixed in a rictus smile of hospitality as he offers his guest a pen.

  But he is actually thinking how right the poet got it.

  No worst there is none.

  Dublin, 1886

  Hopkins truly understood how bad his living conditions were the day he was summoned to the kitchen by a chorus of female screaming. It was not long after his arrival, when he was still trying to comprehend the cultural vandalism of the bishops who had previously run the university and had departed with all the books. He and his colleagues had been trying to rebuild a collection, but since the bishops had also confined their sorry institution to the top two floors of the crumbling building, there was barely anywhere to put the few volumes they did have. These works were now shelved on odd bits of spare wall around the stairs and hallways. He had been trying to reach down an Aeschylus from a high shelf when the alarm was raised.

  He turned to find the older of their two cooks, redder in the face than normal and wild-eyed with panic.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Father, but can you come?”

  “Whatever is it?”

  “Would you just come?”

  Another wail reached them from the kitchen, followed by a plaintive: “Would you hurry up, Mrs Brady?”

  The cook looked imploringly at him, kneading a tea-cloth in her calloused hands.

  “Very well,” he blinked, although he wondered if this was quite his jurisdiction. Was it an intruder of some kind? As Mrs Brady bustled ahead of him, he plucked one of the house umbrellas from the hall stand and gripped it tight. Could she not have found someone else – Father Delany, or one of the resident students?

  His guide had reached the doorway, and now stood aside to let him see. Whatever he had expected, the sight that greeted him w
as not it. The younger cook, a broad-faced creature with a lazy eye, was perched on a chair in the middle of the room. Whimpering, she had her one good eye fixed on the corner opposite the door.

  “It’s still there,” she hissed. “I’ve had me eyes peeled the whole time.” She risked a glance in their direction and registered Hopkins’ presence. “Was that the only Father there was?”

  He drew himself up to his full five feet two.

  “Come, my dear. Tell me what on earth is going on here.”

  The girl on the chair pointed at the range.

  “It came out of that stewpot. I just took the lid off to give it a stir, and it jumped out at me. Dirty great huge thing, with teeth and everything.”

  Hopkins suppressed a smile. He liked mice and had never been able to fathom female hysteria over them.

  “And where is it now?”

  He hoped his calm tone might reassure the girl.

  “Over there, behind them buckets.”

  She nodded at a cluster of mops and pails.

  “Well, then. We’ll soon get him out of there. No need to distress yourself any further. I’m certain he’s far more afraid of you than you are of him.”

  He was rather enjoying himself.

  “Now, all we have to do is move this one here…”

  He was expecting the fugitive to bury itself further within the pile and not emerge till he removed the last item. It might even have found some skirting-hole to squeeze through already. He was not expecting to be charged by a foot-long monster, if you counted the tail, its fur slick with whatever gelatinous concoction had been in the stewpot. The girl screamed again, and Hopkins uttered a yelp of his own as he leapt to avoid it. He wheeled round to see the rat disappearing under the low legs of a stout dresser against the opposite wall.

  “Get it out, Father! Get it out of my kitchen now!” cried Mrs Brady. “I swear by the Blessed Virgin I’m not going near that stove until you do.”

  Hopkins discovered he was trembling. He had no idea how to proceed. He was professor of Greek, for pity’s sake, not a rat-catcher.

  “Isn’t there a man for this? Whom do you usually call on for practical things?”

  He was ashamed to find himself so ignorant about how the place worked. Back in Wales, he would have known which member of the household to summon, at least as a first resort. But this wasn’t that kind of community.

  “That would normally be my brother, Father. But he’s after breaking a bone in his foot and he’s laid up this last month. Should we go for Father Delany?”

  This acted as a spur. Was Hopkins really so unequal to the task? Shaking his head and indicating they should stand back, he hitched his cassock into a fold so that it gave a double thickness for a cushion at the knees, and lowered himself to the floor. With his palms flat on the cool slate slabs, he cautiously brought his face down to the same level.

  “Careful, Father. You don’t want it to bite.”

  “No, Mrs Brady, I most certainly don’t.”

  He had hoped the rat might have found some means of escape under the range, but no such luck. There it was, every bit as large as it had seemed at first encounter, staring straight at him with mean little eyes. What on earth was he meant to do? If it charged him again, it really could bite, with possible consequences that did not bear thinking about. Perhaps they ought to fetch Father Delany after all. He backed slowly away and stood up.

  “There must be a rat-catcher locally,” he said. How could they not have one when the place was so infested? “Other than your brother, I mean. A proper rat-man. You must send for him today. But first we must get rid of this one.” He mopped his brow with the sleeve of his robe. “Mrs Brady, could you fetch me a jar? No, that’s too small. Nothing bigger? It should be as tall as you can find.” He spotted a row of earthenware flasks on the shelf next the sink. “One of those will do. What’s in it, flour? Tip it into a bowl, that’s it. And now we need some bait. Have you some cheese? Put it in the bottom, like so, and let’s lay the jar down… gently now, we don’t want to scare him away. But give me that chopping board first…”

  It was ingenious, even if he said so himself. Whether it would work was another matter. With the older cook stooping behind him to offer moral if not practical support, he rolled the jar gently into position so that the neck was level with the rat.

  “Give him a prod from behind,” offered the younger cook, still on her chair. “Force him out, like.”

  “No, that will send him to ground.” He was impressed by his own certainty, whether or not it was true.

  He positioned the mouth of the jar as close as he could to the gap at the base of the dresser. But he realised he would have no way of knowing if the rat had gone inside, so he pulled his makeshift trap back an inch or two. Then he waited. With no sign of movement, he lowered himself down again as gently as he could and brought his face down to the floor. The creature was in the same place, with just a glint of those black eyes to show it was observing everything that was going on.

  “Maybe we should go for Father Delany,” said the girl on the chair.

  “Sh!” he hissed, irritated, because now that he had come this far, he did not want her to be right. He waited on, but nothing moved. He sighed and was about to admit defeat when the snout of the rat appeared, gingerly at first and disappearing from view again. Then, to his delight, the whole creature skittered forward and into the jar.

  “Now!” he cried, grabbing the lip of the jar to right it, and slamming the chopping board over the neck. His heart beat fast as he pressed the board down, and he could feel a trickle of sweat running between his shoulder-blades. He had done it.

  Together they bore the jar downstairs and out through the front door, dodging the carriages to cross over into the square. To think that when they first offered him this chair of Greek, he had seen himself striding across a college green with his hands behind his back, like some latter-day Jowett or Pusey, deep in learned argumentation with the brightest of his pupils.

  “Maybe you’ve found your calling at last, Hopkins,” said Darlington at dinner that night. He joined in with the laughter. But it was a stark reminder of the gap between what he had aspired to achieve in his life and career and what he had actually achieved.

  Every night after dinner their small community repaired to what served as their sitting room, its ornate plaster reliefs now chipped and soiled, its walls hung with cheap reproductions of the saints. Hopkins never joined them. The tall windows were rotten at the top, which meant draughts whistled in. In the grip of a murderous head-cold the previous winter, he had found it was easier to stay warm in his own room on the top floor, and since winters seemed to last until at least May in this country, he had lost the habit of sitting with the others at all.

  His Englishness isolated him too. It wasn’t just his views on Home Rule, which in any case had mellowed since his arrival. He knew that his colleagues also resented the appointment to the teaching staff of anyone from the English province – they had made that clear by having an open row about it at the time of his appointment. For them, a Catholic university was primarily about nationalism, not religion.

  But he would never break down the hostility if he did not make the effort to mix. Ten years ago in Wales, he had been the one to come up with word games or make everyone laugh with comic doggerel. Companionship was part of the reason he had chosen the religious life rather than take a parish, so it made no sense to shun it now.

  He saw his opportunity a night or two later. The old Frenchman Mallac, who taught Logic but seemed to have little use for it in his daily life, was creating merriment with his latest medical fad. He had developed a fascination for a European system of medicine involving tiny globules taken in water. Hopkins had tried it a few times and had been none the worse for it, even if it would be a stretch to say it had helped; Curtis, on the other hand, had a fit the night after he
took his first dose.

  “Not that quackery again,” the latter said now.

  Mallac made a show of looking hurt, which fooled no one. “No, this is a new one,” he said.

  “A new quackery?”

  “A new system.”

  “Go on then, you’d better tell us,” said someone else. “You’re going to anyway.”

  “Well, if you really want to know it’s based on the same principle…”

  “Quackery?”

  “It’s called homeopathy.” The old man glared from under his shaggy white eyebrows, but there was a twitch of amusement at the corner of his mouth. He was never wholly serious. “Only this time it is applied with electricity.”

  That made the smiles disappear.

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Deadly!”

  “I should say it is!”

  That was Curtis again, and Mallac reached across the table in a mock swipe.

  “Let me explain how it works.”

  “I think you should.”

  There were several kinds of electricity, apparently: red, blue, yellow, green and so forth. This system used the white kind, which you took from a battery. You used it with a liquid applied with cotton wool to the parts affected.

  “It comes from a shop in Paris, two francs a bottle. It should arrive next week.” Mallac beamed like a child.

  “Well in that case,” said Father Delany, “someone ought to try it.”

  “Not on your life,” said one of the resident students.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Darlington.

  “Does it work for chilblains?”

  A mass of faces turned to Hopkins in surprise.

  “It is recommended for all manner of complaints.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”