by Simon Edge
The bird is still hovering, but now it wheels on the wind, and once more the lines are in his head, without him even trying to summon them.
“... off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend…”
Wow.
Tim is light-headed with the discovery that it is possible to observe the world through the eyes of a man who has been dead for more than a century, and to get so much more out of that observation in the process. Is this what it means to have poetry in your soul? He wonders if Nadine will ever know the feeling. For her sake, he hopes she does. And suddenly he doesn’t hate her. He doesn’t even hate Pete. Alun Gwynne is right: Nadine released Tim from obligations that he wished he didn’t have, and now perhaps both of them – all four of them, including Pete and Chloe – will have a chance of happiness. That’s surely not too much to begrudge the person you were once married to.
He is still on a high when he gets back to the pub, and it’s only when he sees a pile of printed papers on the bar that he remembers the other task Chloe has set him. She wants him to fold and put into envelopes the agendas for the weekend, all ready for the punters’ arrival. It’s a small thing, and he is not quite sure why she hasn’t emailed them all this stuff in advance. But for some reason she has been insistent on him doing it, reminding him twice before going out this morning that she has left them ready for him.
He picks up the papers and takes them to a window table, taking care there are no sticky puddles before he puts them down; it would be sacrilege to mess up Chloe’s hyper-efficient handiwork. He pads back to the kitchen to get himself an espresso – there’s always fresh coffee nowadays – and settles back at the window table to perform his allotted duty. The pile of agendas is lying face up, and he hasn’t actually looked at them yet. He picks up the top one to read it properly, and that’s when the sky falls in. The contented smile freezes on his lips. Instead there comes an insistent thumping at his chest and a tightening at the throat. He has caught sight of his own name on the agenda. And it’s not just at the top, as in ‘Tim and Chloe are delighted to welcome you…’ There’s a list of workshops and activities, and his name is all over that too.
Hopkins and Nature, workshop leader: Tim Cleverley.
Just below that, Hopkins in Wales, led by Tim Cleverley.
After lunch there’s a Reverend Something or other on Hopkins and the Jesuit order, followed by a guided walk of significant landmarks in the oeuvre of the poet, led by Alun Gwynne (really?).
But then the final session fills him with even greater horror, if that’s possible. It’s a concluding seminar on Inscape and Instress, with an introduction by T Cleverley.
Tim has never knowingly had a panic attack, and has always been dismissive of the kind of person who does. But now his temples are throbbing, he is gasping for air, and the room is spinning around him as if it’s circling in for the kill. Questions compete for attention. How could she? What the hell is he going to do? Can he get together one presentation, let alone three, by the evening? Is there any chance she has already told him about this and he has forgotten, or just wasn’t listening? And again, how could she? After a while, these queries seem a bit specific and they blur into a more general, self-pitying what-the-hell-is-he-going-to-do. The only consolation at this juncture is that he runs a pub, which at least means he can serve himself a neat double whisky. He’s about to pour a second one when Chloe gets back from the village.
“How do you mean you didn’t know?” she says. “You agreed to this weeks ago! Anyway there’s no point arguing about it now. We’ve got guests arriving in a few hours and they’re expecting workshops and seminars. Come on, handsome, with your knowledge it shouldn’t be too difficult to pull something out of the hat.”
Hat? What hat? Tim has never felt more bare-headed.
“But…but…but…”
As the whisky hits his brain, his head is in more of a whirr than ever. He can’t for the life of him remember her mentioning it. But she wouldn’t get something like that wrong, not someone as efficient and all-knowing as Chloe. So she must have told him, in which case he wasn’t listening. And admitting that, in his experience, is the worst thing to tell a woman. But that leaves the problem of what the hell he is meant to say to a bunch of people who know infinitely more than he ever could about a man whose name he wishes he has never heard, and who are paying a hefty fee to be further edified, not to have their intelligence insulted.
He notices that Chloe is shaking. Her shoulders are heaving, her peachy white skin has flushed the colour of raspberries and there are tears in her eyes. Now she’s doubling up, creased at the middle and clutching at the furniture to stop herself falling over because she’s laughing so much.
“Have you… have you looked at the…” She’s finding it hard to get anything out. “Have you looked at the… at the… date at the top of that?”
It’s there somewhere, it must be up at the top. Yes, there it is, Gerard Manley Hopkins Weekend, April the…
“APRIL FOOL!!!”
She throws herself round his neck and pulls his head down to kiss him hard on the forehead. Her face is purple now, and he is worried she may do herself a serious mischief.
“I can’t believe you think I’d really do that to you,” she pants eventually. “Look, I’ve got the real ones here.”
And she brings from behind her back another sheaf of agendas, all identical to the ones he has been staring at, except that there are other names, proper ones with professor and doctor next to them, alongside those hideous workshop titles he has been fretting over for the past hour. He ought to be furious – with Nadine he would have been furious – but she’s so much cuter than Nadine, especially when she laughs, and it’s such a massive, surging relief that he can’t hold it against her. Instead they play-fight, and she squeals and laughs even more. Eventually they stop because they’re in the public bar and anyone could come in; not just Alun Gwynne, these days, but seven or eight other regulars too, as well as genuine passing trade.
“I can’t believe you fell for it,” she says, still panting from the exertion. “You really think I’d trust you to run a workshop on Hopkins?”
He smiles, but in the nick of time he remembers he’s meant to be a massive Hopkins fan. Now that he’s out of danger, that’s not a pretence he is prepared to drop. The smile turns to a frown.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he says. “I could, if I had time to prepare. It was only that you never warned me.”
“What, on inscape and instress? Aren’t you more of a sprung rhythm specialist?”
He doesn’t like her tone.
“Oh, come off it,” she continues, before he can say anything. “You can drop the pretence. You wouldn’t know Gerard Manley Hopkins from a hole in the road. I suspected it from the moment I met you, you great wazzock, when you didn’t know what a stanza was and you couldn’t quote any of the Wreck except the first line. You were bullshitting your arse off. I knew for sure when you got No worst there is none wrong. It’s only his most famous poem after the Wreck. No real fan would say worse instead of worst.”
Tim opens and shuts his mouth.
“It’s okay, really it is,” she says. “I don’t care that you don’t know anything about him. I’ve got all I want anyway.”
She kisses him.
“Now come on, let me check what you’ve done with the rooms.”
Tim follows her upstairs, not knowing what to say, but assuming that nothing might be a good start. He’s a little hurt that all that effort, all that pretence at sounding erudite, has been so completely unnecessary and she has been laughing at him the whole time. He also wants to protest: but I do know about him now! I can quote from The Windhover and even understand it! But that would involve conceding that he was bullshitting before, which it may not be wise to do. The main thing is that no harm has been done, and he seems to have emerg
ed not just unscathed, but with a sane, hot girlfriend, and perhaps even the makings of a modest niche business providing themed weekends to well-behaved literary tourists. It’s not the kind of life that anyone will memorialise in poetry, and nobody will ever propel him to posthumous fame, but it is beginning to look like a decent, rewarding, fulfilling existence.
And while it’s a shame that he won’t ever get to enjoy riches of the Grail Trail, at least Chloe never rumbled him on that score. That’s surely worth clinging on to.
At the top of the stairs she turns back to him.
“Hey, you’ll never guess what I found under the bed.”
He stops dead, two steps below her. In her hand, horribly close to his face, is that old copy of The Poussin Conundrum. He had shoved it there all those months ago, he remembers now, before she moved in. Why didn’t he just chuck it in the bin?
Still, all is not lost. He has got this far by bluffing it out, and he sees no reason to stop doing so now.
“That thing? Yeah, whoever left it never came back. Good thing, I reckon. That’s not the kind of customer we want nowadays, is it?”
She’s looking at him with a funny sort of smile, the kind that says she knows something he doesn’t. Maybe he’s just imagining that, and she still hasn’t got over the hilarity of April Fooling him. But it makes him nervous, and when he’s nervous he talks too much.
“You always said that whoever left it was the same person who lured Barry Brook here, didn’t you? I wasn’t sure at the time, but I reckon you’re right now. It’s obvious when you think about it, no? What do you reckon, babe?”
She sucks her bottom lip and narrows her eyes as if she’s thinking it over.
“Could be, yeah,” she says. “It would certainly make sense. Maybe we should ask him.”
“If we knew who it was. And it could be a ‘she’, don’t forget. Let’s not make sexist assumptions.”
“Mmm. Of course, we would know who it was if they’d done something useful like write their name in the front of the book.”
And slowly, calmly, she holds it out.
A chill spreads through Tim’s body, starting at the crown of his head and spreading down his neck, then fanning out across his back as if he has been thrown head first into an icy ocean. Did he really do that? He couldn’t have. Of all the cretinous, suicidally stupid things to do, that would be the ultimate Notsoism. He doesn’t need to open the front cover because, he already knows the answer. But he does so anyway and there it is, in the same hand he has been putting to such good use in the calligraphed sonnets: Tim Cleverley, North Wales, 2011.
He looks up at Chloe, utterly lost for words this time and wondering if this is the moment where it all falls apart and she packs her bags, leaving him to deal with the Gerard Manley Bloody Hopkins weekend on his own.
She looks back at him deadpan, and his mouth is dry.
Then she winks.
It’s just a normal wink, with that freckled eyelid and those long, lovely red lashes. But it’s laden with irony and indulgence and amusement. What it seems to mean is that she can see right through anything and everything he will ever do.
She turns away to resume her inspection of the guest rooms.
How much has she known? And for how long? Did she have the measure of him the whole time Barry Brook was here? Or is it more recent than that? Oh bloody hell, No worst there is none.
He feels sick to the stomach, and his mood has not improved by the time the guests are due to arrive. Chloe notices, because of course Chloe notices everything. He needs to remember that.
“Honestly, handsome, now is not the time to go sulky on me,” she says.
There’s a look in her eye that says she means it, and he realises she is right: he needs to snap out of it, because this is their first proper venture together and it needs to go well.
So he takes a deep breath and tells himself that he is the landlord of a nice pub which hasn’t gone bust, where several people do actually want to spend the entire weekend and pay good money for the privilege. He can’t be a total incompetent.
Then they start arriving, and he’s so busy welcoming them and showing them their rooms and talking them through the schedule for the weekend, that he hasn’t got time to worry about anything else. Before he knows it, he is actually enjoying himself.
And when one of the new arrivals is making small-talk and addresses Tim as if he’s a long-standing Hopkins aficionado, he corrects them without hesitation.
“Most of it goes way over my head, I’m afraid,” he says. “Chloe here’s the expert. I’m just the publican. Although I have to say I’m slowly getting there, and I’m beginning to see what the fuss is about.”
Chloe turns to him and beams. It’s not a beam of triumph, but of congratulation.
“Well done,” she mouths, and gives him a sly squeeze.
Alun Gwynne comes over in the evening to play the part of picturesque local, along with Hugh Pugh and the others. Later in the evening even Alun’s wife comes to join them.
“I’ve heard this is the place to be nowadays, landlord,” she says, and asks for a port and lemon. Since it’s the first time she has set foot in the Red Lion on his watch, Tim gives it her on the house – although he makes sure he does it discreetly, so that Alun doesn’t notice and want a free pint himself.
Later, when most of the guests have gone upstairs to bed or off to wherever they are staying, Tim finds himself alone with Alun, the two of them facing each other across the bar.
“Just like the old days, eh, landlord?” says Alun. “Just the pair of us.”
“Don’t forget Macca,” says Tim, doling out a scratching.
“I didn’t think you had it in you when you first arrived, but I think you’re going to make a success of this place.”
Tim decides to take it as a compliment.
“I nearly mucked it up along the way, though. With Barry Brook.”
“You nearly mucked it up with Chloe, that’s what mattered.” Alun lowers his voice confidentially. “How much did she really know, do you think?”
“Don’t go there,” says Tim. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. All I know is that I tried to bullshit her, she didn’t seem to mind, and at the end of the day she actually seems to like me for who I am, not who I pretended to be.”
“Let’s drink to that, then, landlord.”
“Cheers.”
“And do you know? Maybe it was worth going through all that nonsense with Barry Brook just to find out that she likes you the way you are.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“As I always say, everything happens for a reason.”
Tim smiles and picks up his familiar old cloth to wipe down the bar. Perhaps it really does.
Acknowledgements
Two of the narrative strands in The Hopkins Conundrum are based on real lives and events. The chapters featuring Hopkins himself are based wherever possible on genuine incidents and populated with real people. Aside from some necessary simplifications, the sections telling the story of the shipwreck also match the sequence of events as best we know them. My main sources were Hopkins’ letters and journals and the newspaper accounts of the shipwreck, but I am also indebted to Robert Bernard Martin’s biography Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, Norman White’s Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales and Hopkins in Ireland, and to Sean Street’s The Wreck of the Deutschland.
The characters in the fictional strand are entirely invented and are not meant to be based on any living persons. The valley they inhabit is real enough, and the identity of the building I have called St Vowelless’s is not hard to work out. I have used artistic licence in the nickname Tim gives it: there are more vowels than consonants in the actual name (although that doesn’t make it much easier for English visitors to pronounce).
This may be a slim novel, but it has be
en many years in the making. It owes its genesis to Matthew Hamilton at Aitken Alexander, who noticed that Hopkins was intruding unbidden into another piece of writing and suggested I get him out of my system by giving him a project of his own. From that point the manuscript variously grew and shrank as I wrote and threw away reams of material, including one entire narrative strand that proved to be a research indulgence too far. My City University comrades Glenda Cooper, Maha Khan Phillips, David Evans, Sarah Jane Checkland and Yasmine Lever offered tireless guidance, feedback and encouragement, as did Henry Fitzherbert at the newspaper office where we both spent many years. Other friends supplied historical or technical expertise, including Dominic Janes, Shan Rees Roberts, Ian Lucas, Margaret Tracey indebted to Anna Morrison for her cover design.
Supporting a would-be writer can be a thankless and sometimes hazardous business. Douglas Slater was tactful but uncompromising in helping me see the failings of my early prose. The late Peter Burton provided copious moral support, and my former partner Tony Bird dealt with my attempts to learn the craft with great patience.
The arrival in my life of my beloved husband Ezio Alessandroni, a former priest who had lived in similar institutions to Hopkins, gave this project renewed relevance. He made me see the attraction of the religious life to both Hopkins and the nuns of the Deutschland, and his love of the Church of his native Rome brought me closer to my characters. He lost his struggle with cancer just too soon to see the finished version in print, but he lives on in many hearts. I dedicate this work to him, with undying love.
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