by Simon Edge
It was odd to think of himself dying before his parents, and it pained him to imagine the sorrow it would cause them – even his father, to whom he had never been close. But he had very little distress on his own account. After the initial shock of the diagnosis, he was surprised by how calm he had become. He did not wish to be ungrateful for the gift of life, but death would have great compensations. Apart from anything else, it would free him once and for all from the wretched examination burden.
For so many years he had been dogged by frustration that his verse had never got into print, that he was so little understood, that his concept of sprung rhythm had been so utterly ignored, even though children recited nursery rhymes in it every day. He had been deeply wounded by Coleridge’s failure to publish his massive work about the shipping tragedy. But that no longer hurt him. He felt bad only for the poor women he had tried to memorialise. Their fate had gripped the newspaper-reading public for a few days, and they had been given a tremendous funeral conducted by a cardinal. But now, fifteen years on, they were doubtless forgotten by most people, and in fifteen more years not a soul would know about the wreck of the Deutschland.
Really, though, did any of it matter? It was only posterity, which was another form of vanity while you were alive, and made no difference at all to you once you were dead. He could now see that he had written the poem for himself and for God, and that was all that counted. What gave him far greater concern was the chance that Bridges would be indiscreet with his jottings. He had been copying his verses out for years and sending them to his old friend. What if his lines were rubbish after all, and his attempt to reinvent meter was just laughable? If it reached wider attention, his work might bring mockery to his community. That was far more important than posterity: it would be a legacy, bequeathing ridicule on those who remained in the Society once he was gone.
“Father, if I don’t survive…” he said when Wheeler made his afternoon visit.
“Now then, who says you won’t survive?”
“We both know I may not.”
“No one else is giving up hope, so you must not either.”
“I know, but you will put my mind at rest greatly if you listen to me now. Among my papers upstairs… I’m afraid there are a great deal. But if you find scribblings, verses… I’m afraid I have broken the rules of the Society by indulging in many such projects over the years. I beg of you, please put them in the fire. You will be doing me a great favour if you promise me that.”
“I promise, old man. I’ll use my best judgment and I’ll make sure that nothing exists that will put you at odds with the Society. How does that sound?”
“Thank you, Father.”
“But it won’t come to that, so let’s hear no more of it.”
Hopkins smiled, and after that he slept soundly.
He spent more and more time sleeping as the days went on, and he began to lose track of time. He dreamed of his mother leaning over to tuck him in, as she had when he was a child. She looked greyer now, not just than when he was young, but also than the last time he had seen her. How lined her face was; if only he could reach out to smooth the furrows away. He fancied his father was there too, pacing and pulling at his moustache, standing over him occasionally, but mainly in the background, which was how Hopkins always thought of him. It was comforting to have them both here, even if they were imaginary.
“I am so happy, so happy…” he whispered to her.
He awoke to find Wheeler where his mother had been.
“What day is it?” he wanted to know.
Wheeler leaned down, bringing his ear close to Hopkins’ mouth.
“Say again, old man?”
Hopkins repeated the question.
“It’s Saturday.”
Saturday. No teaching, at least.
“How are you feeling now?”
Confused, weak, and his head ached. As well as being hard to think straight, it was an effort to speak, because his mouth was dry and his breath in short supply.
“Here, have a sip of water. Let me help you. There you are. Now, if you wait just a second, there’s someone here to see you.”
He left the room and Hopkins shivered. His headache was worse now. Then the door opened again and there was his mother, with his father just behind. What an extraordinary coincidence for them to arrive now, just after he had dreamed about them. He tried to tell them so, but the words would not come out well, and it was only when his mother had taken his hand in hers, and was mopping his brow with a cool cloth, that he realised it could not have been a dream. He must have been through a period of delirium.
It was so good of them to come, but how had they managed that awful journey?
“I have put you to so much trouble all my life. I’m sorry.”
All of a sudden he had a great impulse to weep.
“Hush, Gerard,” came his mother’s soothing voice. “Don’t try to speak, if it’s an effort. And it has been no trouble. We came on the packet and it was really quite easy. The crossing was smooth and we were well looked after. Your father will tell you. Here he is, can you see?”
Now he did see everything, only too clearly. They had been sent for. It meant the end must be near.
“How are … Cyril and Arthur and Everard … and Grace and Milicent… and Lionel?”
“They are all fine. They send their very best love. They are looking forward to seeing you properly when you are better.”
“And Kate?”
How could he have forgotten Kate?
There were tears in his mother’s eyes too. He did his best to smile, playing along with the fiction that he would see them all soon, because she intended it for his benefit. It would certainly be a pity not to see any of them again, not to watch his brothers’ children grow up, but he was tired, so tired…
Naturally, all his life he had wondered what heaven might be like, but now his picture of it was clear: it was a place with no headaches or gouty eyes, where you could discard the body that caused so many woes, and where there was no need to mark a single examination paper ever again. That would be paradise enough for him. Sleep, the end of all desire – wasn’t that Dolben’s line? It really wasn’t bad.
And God would be there too, of course. Having loosened his hold on life, Hopkins was excited at the prospect of coming into His presence. It was a form of joy, the same as he had imagined for the nuns in his great shipwreck piece: a happy knowledge that God was waiting for them. This was not how anyone ever pictured drowning at sea, but he was reassured to find that dying really could be like this. He might not have been so wide of the mark after all.
He rested his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, his parents were gone. One of the parish women was by his bedside instead, reading her Bible.
“Your mother and father have just gone to take some air, Father. They will be back soon.”
“Not … too … much… I … hope.”
“What’s that now, Father?”
He couldn’t remember seeing this one before. Plump, in an ill-fed way, with broken veins in her cheeks and yellow snaggle teeth, but a pleasant voice and kind eyes.
“I hope they don’t take … too much … air… It’s not … good...”
It was meant to be a joke, to show he hadn’t lost his sense of humour. But she didn’t seem to understand that.
“Don’t you worry about them, Father. They’ll be quite safe. Now let me do your pillows. There’s nice, no? Oh and here they are back already. What did I tell you?”
But it wasn’t his parents, it was Wheeler.
“It’s good to see you awake again, old man.”
“Have I been asleep very much?”
“I should say so, yes. Your parents have been here three days, and you’ve slept most of that time.”
“Three days?”
It was extraordinary how
time played so many tricks.
“In that case…”
“Yes, old man?”
“I think it’s time, don’t you? While my mother is out. I don’t want … to distress her.”
“If you’re sure?”
“Do you disagree?”
Wheeler shook his head gently.
“Very well.”
Wheeler turned away and Hopkins could hear him getting the unction oil out of its box. Then the priest pulled up a chair beside the bed and made the sign of the cross.
“In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.”
“Bless me, Father… for I have sinned,” said Hopkins as clearly as he could, but it was a terrible effort. “I do not know… how many days it is… since my last confession… but for all the sins of my past life… I ask pardon of God… penance and absolution from you, Father…”
“And now the Act of Contrition.”
Hopkins said the words in Latin, and he felt the wet dab of olive oil from the cotton pad – strikingly odourless compared to the heavily spiced version they used at Mass – as Wheeler slowly applied it with a touch of his finger to his eyelids, ears, nose, mouth, back of the hands and finally, pulling the covers out from the base of the bed, his feet.
“Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat,” the priest recited. “Et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis et interdicti in quantum possum et tu indiges.”
Then came the final words, “Ego te absolvo…”
Hopkins summoned a great effort to pull his hand up to his forehead and make the sign of the cross, knowing that he could sleep soon, perhaps even before his mother returned. He would be sorry to miss her, but oh, that sleep would be so pleasant…
North Wales, the present
It is a fine spring Friday, the kind of day when this part of the world comes into its own. Tim is on the track south of the village that leads up their local hill. In the months since Chloe moved in, he has taken more and more pleasure in exploring the locality on foot. Today, tasked with gathering wild grasses to arrange in the bedrooms of the four guests who are arriving later on, he is combining that duty with his morning constitutional.
In a few hours, two dozen visitors will converge on the Red Lion. Four of them will stay on the premises – including two in what Tim likes to think of as the Barry Brook Suite – while the rest are billeted in outlying bed-and-breakfast accommodation that Chloe has secured at a discount and sold on at a mark-up to the literary pilgrims as part of their Appreciating Gerard Manley Hopkins weekend package. All guests will receive a welcome pack consisting of their own hand-calligraphed sonnet, which Tim and Chloe have both been working on for the past couple of weeks, plus a large-scale map of the valley and a packet of Welsh cakes done up in fancy ribbon. Chloe has devised, marketed and organised it down to the last detail, so Tim has little left to do but marvel at his amazing good fortune in enticing this creature into his life. Just occasionally he finds himself wondering what it would be like if she applied the same formidable skills to his plans to put the valley on the Grail Trail, but he does his best to cast this unworthy, destructive thought out of his mind. No need to balls it up, Notso.
He has eventually wheedled out of her how she managed to get rid of Barry Brook.
“All I did was take him by the arm, tell him I was a massive fan, and then warn him that someone locally was out to scam him by hooking him into some stupid yarn that not even his readers would be gullible enough to fall for. I told him their plan was to sell the story to the papers in a way that would max out his embarrassment.” Her eyes are big, wide and innocent. “I said I didn’t know who was doing it, I’d just heard it on the village grapevine. Oh, and I said I wouldn’t put it past whoever was behind it to be filming him on a smartphone everywhere he went, so they could package his humiliation on YouTube. They might even be doing it at that very moment. That was enough to make him race back here and check out on the spot. He would have done it with his jacket over his head, but I told him that if he really was being filmed, he wouldn’t do himself any favours by acting like a paedophile at the Old Bailey. He didn’t know what that was, but he got the general idea.”
They both laugh, although for Tim, it’s more about relief than the hilarity of it. He has had a lucky escape, and all of it feels too good to be true.
He spends weeks waiting for the catch. But as those weeks turn to months, he tells himself not to be so pessimistic, that good things can also happen to him, and he mustn’t expect the worst all the time. You create your own luck, he thinks now. Maybe he’s not so Notso after all.
“I wonder who it was,” he ventures occasionally, with his best quizzical expression. “You know, the guy hoaxing that loser Barry Brook. I guess we’ll never know, but wouldn’t you love to find out?”
She nods distractedly when he says this, not really that interested, and he gives himself a sneaky smile inside. Not so Notso, buddy.
Now that the weekend is nearly upon them, he can’t believe how little she has left him to do. She has sent him off to Morrisons to get supplies for the lunches and dinners, but Hugh Pugh’s granddaughter is coming in to do the catering and serving, and all he has to do is give the rooms the final once-over and then prepare some kind of speech of welcome. They’re all due to arrive in the evening, when they’ll have beer and local cheeses in the bar and take part in a Gerard Manley Hopkins quiz to get them in the mood.
“We can make it light-hearted,” Chloe promises when she first suggests the idea. “It’ll be fun.”
“If you say so,” says Tim.
He’s only hoping that she doesn’t ask him to set the questions. But she has that covered too, and on the eve of the guests’ arrival, she tries some of them out on Tim and Alun Gwynne.
“Okay, an easy one to start,” she says. “How many poems did Gerard Manley Hopkins have published in his own lifetime? Was it a) zero; b) less than ten or c) more than fifty?”
Tim smiles in a way that he hopes says this one is so easy it’s beneath him, and he offers it to Alun as if he’s being generous.
Alun Gwynne scratches his head, casting the usual snowstorm over his trouser legs and stool.
“I think he published one or two, so it would have to be number b.”
“Is the right answer!” says Chloe.
She turns to Tim. “Now one for you. This is easy too. I only put it in to make people laugh. Which poet laureate made Gerard Manley Hopkins famous by publishing his work posthumously? Was it a) Robert Bridges, b) Alfred Lord Tennyson or c) John Betjeman?”
Alun Gwynne chuckles ostentatiously, and Chloe bestows on him one of her most appreciative beams.
Tim grasps that one of the answers must be ridiculous, and it’s probably John Betjeman. He laughs too, to show that he’s in on the joke, then shrugs and shakes his head, gesturing back to Chloe and Alun Gwynne as if to say this one is so hilariously obvious he’s not going to dignify it with a reply.
Unfortunately, Chloe isn’t having that.
“Well?” she says, putting her tongue into her cheek in a way she has when she thinks she’s about to prove something.
Tim begins to panic. The only name apart from Betjeman that he has actually heard of is Tennyson. He didn’t know he was a poet laureate, but it sounds like the sort of job he might have had, and he must be vaguely the right era: Tim recalls an image of a massive black beard, so the guy must have been a major Victorian.
“Well obviously it’s…”
“…Robert Bridges!” cuts in Alun Gwynne.
How come he is surrounded by such competitive people?
“Is the right answer!” says Chloe again, but through slightly gritted teeth this time. Is Tim imagining it, or did she know that she had him on the spot?
“But that was easy,” she adds. “Even Macca would have known it.”
The dog
yawns by way of confirmation, and Chloe gives him a pork scratching.
“Okay,” she continues. “Now, this is a really fun fact and you could be forgiven for not knowing it. Which world-famous writer had their first-ever work published in the very same journal that rejected The Wreck of the Deutschland, at almost exactly the same time?”
“Go on then, what are the options?”
“No options for this one, you have to guess.”
Alun is frowning.
“It would have to be someone religious. A writer of hymns, perhaps? I’m going to say … er ....”
“Oscar Wilde,” says Tim, stabbing in the dark with the first nineteenth century writer he can think of. She has said it was hard, so at least he has permission to get it wrong.
Chloe’s eyes widen.
“How did you know that?”
Tim scoffs, as if it’s beneath him to explain.
She looks at him askance, as if to say that she knows he cheated, even if she doesn’t know how.
For his part, Tim is hoping that his luck will hold, and that he can get through this weekend without being rumbled as knowing next to zilch about the poet he is meant to be celebrating.
Now that the day is upon them, he is feeling genuinely optimistic. He stops on the gently rising path to look back the way he has come. The sea is glinting in the distance, as are cars on the road on the other side of the valley. Up to his right he spots a hawk of some kind, hovering motionless and alone in the sky.
Unbidden, lines of poetry flow into his head.
“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,
in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air…”
He laughs out loud, amazed at himself. He hasn’t tried to memorise those lines, but he has copied them out four or five times in the past week, and somehow they have stuck. No, not somehow. They have stuck because the rhythm helps fix the pattern. And the words themselves, opposites like ‘rolling’ and ‘level’ jammed together, manage to capture in a memorable phrase the wonder of this living creature that stays dead still on a moving current.
