by Simon Edge
“Let me see. The first approach must have been the middle of May. I remember, because I’d just come back from a trip to New York. And then we talked, and that must have gone on for, I don’t know, two, three months.”
“When did you last hear from him?”
“That would have been a month ago, maybe a little more. That was when he stopped replying.”
“Shocking.”
As he talked, she tried to match the dates with her own milestones: meeting Tim at the lecture; coming over for her first visit; then getting together with him and spending lots more time at the Red Lion. Barry Brook’s local informant – Chloe prefers to call him “Tim” – seemed to have been in effusive communication during most of that time, and only stopped replying fairly recently, long after Chloe’s own arrival. Wasn’t it around a month ago that Alun Gwynne first blurted out all that stuff about Brook, when Tim made a ridiculous attempt to pretend that this was the first he had heard of it? She counted back in her head. Yes, exactly right. That was the night when she herself went bananas. Tim had clearly thought better of the whole thing since that moment. Bless his little heart.
She finds herself laughing out loud at the memory, as she eases into traffic on the fast coast road that will speed her back towards Manchester.
Once she was sure that Tim was no longer encouraging Brook, she knew she wouldn’t have to dump him, and that was a relief. After that it was easy work to put the frighteners on Brook and make him get out of the valley as fast as his Lexus would carry him. Tim’s face as the guy walked out of the Red Lion was truly a picture, and since then he hasn’t let up asking what she said to make him leave. He can ask all he likes, she doesn’t have the slightest intention of telling him. Not yet, anyway.
If she is planning on staying with him, does that mean she has changed her mind on manipulators and her standards are slipping? She wonders about that as she flicks on her wipers to deal with a sudden shower of rain. It would worry her if that were so. But no, that’s not quite it. It’s true that Tim has embarked on a cynical scheme for entirely mercenary ends that would have hoodwinked huge numbers of readers into believing utter claptrap, and he came astonishingly close to pulling it off. But he seems to have repented, which is a good thing, and even though he came so close to success, there is still something loveably inept about the whole business.
Maybe that’s it: she can cope with someone a little bit sneaky provided she can always see right through him.
Nevertheless, he cannot be allowed to get off completely free. He still needs to be punished, which she plans to do in the most entertaining way she can find. All she has to do now is think of how.
Dublin, 1889
Hopkins was now in a ground-floor sick room, to which he had been moved so that he could be properly nursed by the women of the parish. Curtis had packed a small bag of personal items for him – his rosary, his Bible, letters from his mother and brother Arthur, volumes of published verses by his friends – although he had not the focus or the inclination to open any of them. He had asked also for his portrait of Savonarola, which he was still carrying around with him after all these years. The monk now glared down at him from the wall opposite his bed. The only treasure he had not dared request was his picture of Dolben, which remained untouched in the top drawer of his writing desk. It too had accompanied him on move after move, and it had always comforted him in times of distress. If he had been packing his own bag, he would have tucked it into one of the books, but the attachment was a private one, locked away deep in his memory, and revealed to no one in all that intervening time. Even now, when the idea of keeping secrets seemed so unimportant, he was not ready to bare that part of his soul.
He could remember the first snowdrops shivering over Christ Church Meadow on the morning twenty-four years earlier when he first encountered that strange, entrancing boy. He had arranged to go to Bridges’ rooms to meet the famous young cousin visiting from school. He had hastened to get there, fearing he was going to be late, but the boy himself was much later. Dolben kept the pair of them waiting a full two hours before he finally appeared, and then he seemed completely unconcerned about it. The discourtesy ought to have been maddening, but Dolben’s detachment from the trivial reality of concerns like punctuality somehow added to his allure.
Having heard so much about this young eccentric, Hopkins was disappointed to find him in conventional dress – albeit a scruffy form of it, with dust all over his top hat and his collar wildly askew. Tall and pale with a delicate face, he was by no means conventionally good-looking. But there was something immediately attractive about his faraway expression. It gave him an other-worldly manner.
Bridges was late for the river, so it was up to Hopkins to show the boy around. Dolben had his heart set on Balliol, which was Hopkins’ own college, so Bridges thought they would get on well. Dolben was a poet too, which would give them something else in common.
Hopkins thought he saw a look of disappointment when the boy realised he was to be handed into his care. He attempted to counter that by showing what a perceptive guide to the city he could be. Conversation was difficult at first, but once they reached Balliol, Dolben became more animated. He was especially taken by the new rose-striped chapel, with its chaotic interior geometry and flamboyant alabasters – a controversial design which was deplored by the enemies of Catholicism. Before Hopkins could stop him, he had even genuflected. Hopkins looked around nervously: he thought they had the place to themselves but you could never be too careful, even in Oxford. He was beginning to understand why this boy created such a stir wherever he went.
Dolben was obsessed with the pre-industrial past, which this dreamy Italianate interior so powerfully evoked. And he was most obsessed of all by the Florentine friar Savonarola, scourge of corruption and excess, who preached with such fervour that congregations fought to get into the churches. They were talking of him when they caught a glimpse of Jowett, who was not yet Master but was already, by dint of the controversies around his name, the most famous man in academe. He was despised by the anti-Catholic zealots whom Dolben most enjoyed upsetting, so it was only natural that the boy would be excited.
They met again the next day, when they walked across Port Meadow to Binsey. And the following afternoon, Dolben’s last, they strolled through the deer park and up along the Cherwell. During this time Dolben had spoken without embarrassment of his feelings for a boy at school, who was his best friend but unaware of his passion. Hopkins was not used to such frankness in conversation but was aware that he felt a burning envy for this other, unknown boy – and an indignation that the ingrate should not be aware of the honour bestowed on him.
When they parted, Hopkins expressed the hope that, the next time they met, it would be as fellow members of Balliol. In the event, that was never to be. The boy sent his photograph at Hopkins’ request – inscribed “ever yr affectionate D Mackworth Dolben” – but there was no letter, no thanks for his time and attention, his hospitality. The boy was too ascetic to bother with such fripperies, he told himself. Still hoping to begin a correspondence, Hopkins wrote regularly from Oxford, in the summer from Hampstead, from a walking holiday in Snowdonia, dispensing cheerful items of news, begging to be considered Dolben’s true and obedient friend, and remaining in hope of receiving some word of reply. Did the boy plan another visit to Oxford? Was he ever in London, and if so would he care to visit Hopkins at home? Sometimes he attached poems, asking for critical comment and offering to perform the same favour in return. He received a cordial reply to one of these letters, focusing on the boy’s own news and pointedly not enquiring about Hopkins’ own doings. It was encouragement enough to make Hopkins carry on writing for a while, but there was nothing more.
All he could remember of those weeks was waiting on the arrival of the postman for day after day, with disappointment every time. He was deeply hurt by the rebuff. He had carried that pain with him at first, but the appalling tragedy
that came not long afterwards allowed the hurt and rejection to mutate into something nobler. He was no longer spurned, but bereaved. Lying with his head on the hard pillows of his cheerless Dublin infirmary, he smiled to recall his own foolishness. He had been bewitched, that was all it was. How could he have spent so many years deluding himself about a lost love that never existed?
The accident itself occurred two summers after their meeting – which had felt a long time then, when they were all so young. Dolben had failed his Balliol entrance after fainting in the examination room. He had been starving himself as part of his devotion to the Rule of St Benedict, a piety of such extravagance that it really was another form of vanity, Hopkins could see now. Dolben’s father was furious and the boy was sent to a succession of private tutors to cram. The last of these was a country parson in the East Midlands, a decent member of the English Church who turned a blind eye to the images of the Virgin that his unusual young charge kept beside his bed. This vicar had a boy of about ten who looked up to Dolben as to an older brother and loved bathing in a pool of the local river, even though he could not actually swim a stroke. He would nag Dolben to take him there and would then float on his back, with Dolben towing him along and generally being on hand to save him if he got into trouble. Unfortunately, there was no provision for the reverse possibility. Dolben was a strong swimmer, so the consensus was that he must have fainted again. He suddenly sank within a few yards of the bank. The parson’s son was terrified, of course. The only thing he could do was flip onto his back and scream loud enough for some labourers working in the fields to hear him. But the water was deep, and Dolben’s body was not found till several hours afterwards.
Hopkins heard all this in a letter from Bridges, who conveyed it as a family tragedy, having no thought – why should he? – for how much it would devastate him. So Hopkins had dissembled, pretending to be unaffected.
He had always seen that lack of understanding from Bridges and his other friends as further cause for self-pity, but now he could see that they were right. The whole business had been futile, impertinent even. He had felt deeply for Dolben on the basis of a few days’ acquaintance, and the boy had felt nothing for him. So his death had indeed been a tragedy – for Dolben’s mother, his father, his sister and brother, and of course for the world of letters, because he was never able to fulfil his great promise as a poet. But it had robbed Hopkins of nothing – no friendship, no affection, certainly not love, because those things had all been figments of his lonely imagination. Dolben’s death had merely allowed that illusion to stay alive.
How strange to be able to see that only now, a quarter of a century later. The illusion was gone, only clarity remained, and it was a relief at long last to be unburdened of it. It was a peace of sorts, he realised as Mrs Brady wheezed in to mix up his tonic.
“It’s good to see you smiling, Father? What’s the joke? Have I got something on me face?”
Hopkins shook his head and assured her it was nothing. How could he begin to explain to her the comfort he had just found in realising what a fool he had been?
North Sea, 1875
Aurea had been half out of the skylight too, holding up her hands to be lifted out, when she saw the wave gather Henrica. Their beautiful, kind, wise leader had been standing there one moment, and in the next came a wall of water that forced Aurea to turn her face away as the sea sluiced through the open skylight and into the saloon below. All she caught was the look of surprise on poor Henrica’s white face. When she looked again, their leader was not there. She might be safe, simply knocked off her feet and holding on to the rail or the rigging. But Aurea saw from the shocked faces of the men who had been helping them up, looking down at her as if not knowing how much she had seen, how much to tell her – she saw that Henrica was gone.
And now, for the first time, it was real. This was not the kind of danger that would be averted by rescue or by God’s mercy. Henrica, the guide she had looked up to and relied upon to put everything right, had been taken from them in the most horrifying way. What hope could there be? All she could see in her mind was what she had not seen: Henrica flying off the deck, veil billowing and hands flailing, reaching uselessly back toward the ship as she was pulled by her heavy robes, tiny and doomed, into the unimaginable cold and dark.
And Aurea screamed, letting all the terror of the past twenty-four hours come howling out.
The others still had no idea.
“What is it?”
“I knew the deck wasn’t safe. She has seen something terrible.”
“What is it, Aurea? What have you seen?”
At first she could not find the words, even after her three companions had helped her down, and when she did, they came only haltingly, because telling it meant reliving it, seeing it again, the vision that she wanted to blot out and forget that she had ever had. But out it came, at last, and Brigitta too began to keen, while Norberta renewed her frantically whispered Ave Marias.
They were pressed now into the highest corner of the saloon, where the water came to their waists if they knelt to pray. They shivered as they clutched at one another, their life-belts making the embrace clumsy and uncomfortable. Hands reached down from the skylight to pull up the last of those who had decided to escape the brimming saloon. Then the shouting receded, as those above gave up trying to coax them out, and looked instead to their own safety. All the while, the icy sea was seeping higher, the wash through the open skylight adding to the merciless rise of the tide, and Aurea was trembling as much with cold as with fear. It seared deeper into her being than any winter she had known on land.
She had clung all along to the hope that the tide would turn in time, that something would happen to make everything all right. But now she knew it would not be so. All they could do was pray for Henrica’s soul, and their own souls, and hope the transition from this world to the next would not be too awful.
Barbara was speaking.
“We are all four here together, and we will stay here,” she said, struggling to control the shake in her voice. “We will not die without human companionship, like poor Henrica. We have the comfort of one another, as well as that of what is to come. And we know, as she did even at the dreadful last moment, that the good Lord is with us always.”
Brigitta sobbed uncontrollably.
“Let it come quickly,” whispered Aurea in a tiny, terrified voice.
A little later, from his wind-lashed vantage point in the rigging, Otto Lundgren saw a veiled head emerge through the broken glass. The sight of the leader of their party being washed away was not one that he – who had survived the Schiller disaster only a few months ago and had already seen so many horrors – would quickly forget. He had reconciled himself to the impossibility of coaxing the other proud, frightened women onto the deck after such a tragedy. Perhaps they had finally changed their minds, the dark waters engulfing their refuge proving a greater terror than the elements on deck. He started to climb down, but others were there first, reaching down to haul her out. Come on, woman, hold your arms up so they can pull you. But she would not.
It was the tallest of them, he could see that now, the one called Norberta, and she seemed to have no thought of saving herself. With her arms at her sides to resist any attempt to help her up, she flung her head back and shrieked something into the wind. He did not catch it at first, but again she shouted it, and again, and again, so that eventually her desperate, blood-stopping plea was unmistakable.
“Oh my God, make it quick! Oh my God, make it quick!”
But it was not quick. It took hours for the desperate cry to stop, and Lundgren saw people try to stop their ears, even as they held on with cold-red hands for their lives. Yes, God help me, let it be quick, for her sake and theirs.
At first light, when the seas had abated, the tide had gone down and the English vessel that had at last come to find them was sending small boats alongside, Lundgren ven
tured back down into the saloon. He wished he had not. The four robed bodies were strewn about the soaking floor like discarded dolls, lifebelts still around their necks. Three were lying face down but the fourth, the tall nun who had shouted through the night, was facing upwards. It was obvious which one it was from the difference in height, but her face was bloated already from the water and Lundgren could scarcely recognise the woman with whom he had shared a table just two nights earlier – or was it three? He had lost all track of time.
It was all so senseless. Their leader, the bravest of them and the one with whom he had had the most contact, was beyond rescue as she was pitched into the wild sea. But these four could have been saved. They could now have greeted this dawn and led the prayers of gratitude. Lundgren was no Catholic, but he would certainly have knelt with them. Shivering with cold and delayed shock, he could scarcely believe that he, of all people, was still alive.
“Lundgren! L-look sharp, man. They are ready for us.”
It was Meyer, calling for him down the companion-way. Lundgren took one last look at the pitiful sight and turned away. It was time to leave the stricken ship.
Whether its horrors would ever leave him was another matter.
Dublin, 1889
In the following days, Father Wheeler was in attendance for much of the time. Curtis was a regular visitor, and the other members of the house also took turns to drop in, so Hopkins could assure his mother when he wrote to her that he was quite comfortable, perfectly happy and there was no immediate cause for alarm. The best thing about his situation was being able to excuse himself without a scrap of guilt from all his forthcoming examination commitments.
But of course he also thought about what would happen if Doctor Redmond’s tonic – administered by a sparrow of a woman called Clara, who mixed it up with boiled water every morning and evening so that he could drink it when it had cooled down, and who came back to stand over him to make sure he finished it to the last drop – did not live up to its promise. This was typhoid, after all. It was quite likely he would not recover.
