by Graham Swift
His mother’s death would also have made clear to Matthew, if he did not guess it already, that his father had married not just as a means to material advancement. Until in later life he succumbed increasingly to drink, John Pearce does not seem to have been given to extravagant displays of emotion. But his son must have perceived what was seldom voiced: John did not remarry; grief became an abiding fact of his life. And it must have dawned on Matthew sooner or later that the loss of his mother was the beginning of his father’s own gradual abandonment of his faith.
One result of his bereavement might have been John Pearce’s return to the chapel. He turned, rather, to the world. He was the former industrious apprentice who had assiduously bettered himself so as to run his own modest workshop and his own modest household: it now meant everything to him that the amelioration should be continued in his son.
Only some intuition of the inner motive at work could have kept young Matthew from rebelling against the cajoling, insistent overseer his father must have become. It was all a form of tribute—a mutually binding tribute to his dead mother. On that basis Matthew would have learnt to serve rather than resent his father. He would have understood the responsibility placed upon him and grown up with a sense of obligation and duty as springing from some tenderer source than mere obedience. His appetite for knowledge would have been released and, behind all the paternal coercion, blessed. And all this would have reached its apogee on that day when, against all the laws of social expectation (though his father was now operating a thriving business and his clocks were sought after by the local gentry), a place was secured for him at Oxford. His father’s features, so long the stern features of a determined taskmaster, must have at last allowed themselves a broad, proud grin.
And now, as Oxford recedes behind him, Matthew imagines the scene of his homecoming. His father will be waiting in the market square. He will not be cowed by his son’s attainments, nor parade them too vainly before his neighbours; but nor will his son be cowed any more by his once overbearing father. They will greet each other amicably, as equals. In the White Hart they will clink glasses (one Methodist pledge John has long abjured), and Matthew will be aware of a sense of mission fulfilled.
What he will not be aware of, not until, years later, he confides the realisation to his notebook, is that while it is he who has enjoyed the benefits of education, it is really his father who is the more free-thinking, the more forward-looking and certainly the more calculating. It is John who, adroitly exploiting the connections of his clockmaker’s clientele, has secured for Matthew (he will start next month) a position with the Exeter firm of Westbrook and Cross, newly appointed consultants to the Bristol and Exeter Railway. And it will be John who, some four years later, will write to his son, pointing out that one Robert Makepeace, a crusty soul who runs a surveyor’s business in Tavistock and has so far found no junior partner to his permanent liking, is ailing and contemplating retirement. Tavistock is not Exeter, and a partnership in the Exeter firm is almost guaranteed, but now that the Bristol and Exeter was complete, the railway would forge its way westwards across the county to Plymouth: Matthew, with all his experience, would be well placed. And, as Matthew surely knew, Tavistock was no longer a sleepy market town: the talk now was all of copper mining. Here was an opportunity for Matthew not only to acquire a business of his own but to extend his experience into new fields.…
The coach rocks and trundles on through the long, midsummer day, through the drowsy heart of England. As evening sculpts the hills of Somerset, it rattles into the honey-stoned, eighteenth-century city of Bath. Matthew’s graduate companion, who has tried him all day with his stabs of wit, proposes a night’s dissipation—“one last bachelorly bout before we wed the stern bride of the future.” Matthew resists the wilder suggestions in the proposition but submits to supper and a good deal of claret before his companion finally takes his leave—whether to some house of the night or to the clutches of a guardian aunt, Matthew cannot be sure.
He goes to bed drunk. Upsets a candle. It would be like him, the next morning, to be a little ashamed of his behaviour. Nearly twenty years later, recalling, with some wistfulness, the days when his father’s abstinence was total, he will remember his saying, as they passed some grinning, lolling drunkards in a Launceston street: “They have swallowed the devil and now he makes them feel pleased.” But now, standing at his inn-chamber window, open to a starry sky, feeling the lift of the world beneath him like the pitch of a ship, he cannot resist a certain festive mockery of his own inner seriousness. We are not who we think we are, only figures in some eternal, amoral masque.…
There is a strong conservative streak in Matthew’s nature—an instinct, for all his inquisitiveness, for not looking too far about him, or looking only at what he wishes to see; and a tendency, for all his self-reliance and capability, to take a good deal for granted. During his spell at Oxford, the Tractarian question has been raging; but there is no evidence that, young man of religious conviction, he interested himself in the turmoil of an old Church facing new times. Nor, while he was at Oxford, does he seem to have pursued, though the opportunity was there, those areas of scientific debate which in later life he would grapple with for himself, as if they were new.
He sees himself as setting out to take his place in an advancing (if essentially unalterable) world: it is really his father who will have put him there. He thinks he has decided, himself, on his future profession: it is really his father, with his own instinct for not setting his sights too high, who has chosen it for him. And though John Pearce is no gambler (one Methodist vow he has not abjured) and would frown at his son’s forsaking the noble duty of Work so far as, for example, to dabble in railway or mining shares, Matthew would be astonished that his father’s dreams for him, if only when under the influence of brandy, extend beyond his becoming merely an accomplished, successful surveyor for the rest of his life.
It might also be claimed that there is in Matthew’s nature a strong capacity for happiness. Contentment, at least. A man who likes to think—and who does not like to think. Who has time for ideas but is peculiarly at home in the world of things. Who has no sense of his own importance but no vague notions, either, of his own abilities. Who has no airs and graces but a natural social ease—he is at home with people too. Who has the knack of knowing and not knowing.
Look at him now as, his journey resumed, the coach bears him onwards. Look into this bluff, obliging, earnest, amiable, in no way special face, which combines, right now, the stolidity of a man twice his age and the innocent glee of a child released from school. He has—he doesn’t know it yet—depths.
10th June 1854:
We are all aware, though none of us announces the fact, that today would have been the second birthday of little Felix. One and a half months dead—as if such posthumous calendars were significant. We go to the graveside, though I truly believe poor Felix, if he could speak, would bid us not to mark the inaugural day of a life so wastefully short.
A blooming, midsummer’s day. Swallows swooping around the church tower. A day designed to banish dark thoughts. Yet the thought does not escape me that it is almost ten years ago to the day that I made my excursion to Lyme. How I knew nothing then of my darling Liz, of my John, Christopher, Lucy and poor Felix. And yet how neither the passage of ten years nor all the heaped contentments they have brought me can expunge from my memory that former incident. How different my present powers of patience, of humble submission to Providence, had I not taken that journey. God knows how much since then I have pretended. God knows!—but there, in a phrase, is the essence of my pretence.
How earnestly have I endeavoured to persuade myself that I was the victim of some circumstantial or atmospheric “effect.” Was not the tableau perfect? The darkening sky, the lightning flashes at sea, the flapping and straining of the tarpaulin pitched above the exposed skull. I recall every detail. The sudden cry of the young woman who had slipped on the wet surface further down the path, so
that everyone rushed from the enclosure to attend the accident, leaving me alone with the creature.
Why did I not rush too? To assist the damsel in distress. A little common gallantry might have saved me.
Yet I know—ten years cannot undo the knowledge—that what followed was not a moment of unreasoned panic and confusion but a moment of acute perspicacity. Truly, I was to rush too, a little while after the others, from under the tarpaulin; to rush quite past the little group helping the young lady, who must have regarded me with astonishment. I recall a cluster of umbrellas bouncing in the wind; the pale face of the victim (victim!) supported by one of her party while she tried the strength of her ankle; mud on her garments. But of what little note to me was this touching scene of mere human misfortune.…
He saw an ichthyosaur. It is difficult to know how people will react when they see an ichthyosaur. I can understand it with Felix—though I have never had children. Yes, I can understand it with Felix (though, even then, such a man as Matthew, cognisant of the infant mortality rate of the times—they bred hard, these Victorians, and with reason—might have thought: not so terrible, one in four). But with an ichthyosaur? An ichthyosaur.
Quite probably, he had seen one before. (I too have seen ichthyosaurs, in museums, in books. I have made a point of it, in fairness to Matthew. I look at them and don’t feel that much at all.) If he had been to London, which he probably had, he would have seen in the British Museum the famous ichthyosaur, thirty feet long, discovered (first of its kind to be so unearthed) by Mary Anning of Lyme Regis—beside which awesome exhibit this half-buried specimen, perhaps some fifteen feet, was a mere baby.
Yet museums are safe, orderly, artificial places, and here, still trapped in the rock from which workers employed by the same Mary Anning were labouring to release it, within sight of the plump hills of Dorset and the ruffled waters of Lyme Bay, was the thing itself. Here, in the very spot where— Here. Now. Then. He stood face to face with the skull of a beast that must have lived, so certain theories would have held, unimaginably longer ago than even the most generous computations from the Scripture allowed for the beginning of the world (yet which must have been created, so something inside him would have insisted, by God); so long ago that the fact of its existence had been almost irretrievably swallowed up in the fact of its extinction and only now, in the pathetically locatable nineteenth century, had it come to be known that it had existed at all; and thought— And thought what?
“… The moment of my unbelief. The beginning of my make-belief.…”
You have to picture the scene. You have to imagine these scenes in which for most people nothing changes, nothing is essentially different—all this drama and fuss, a passing storm, a twisted ankle—but for some people the world falls apart. I think that’s perhaps what Ruth did—all this drama! To picture how the world might be—how it might fall apart or hold, incredibly, together—in the eyes of other people.
Such a simple, unconscionable thing: to be another person.
A flapping tarpaulin. Sticky gobs of rain, a bruised, galvanic sky. The long, toothed jaw; the massive eye that stares through millions of years. He is the creature; the creature is him. He feels something open up inside him, so that he is vaster and emptier than he ever imagined, and feels himself starting to fall, and fall, through himself. He lurches on to the path, as if outward movement will stop this inward falling. He passes a startled young woman, who has fallen also, but less than her own length and on to solid ground. He blunders down another path, not the path he came up by but a path which takes him to the beach—as if to stop himself falling he must get to sea level. The storm swipes in off the sea. His hat blows off; he is soaked. Everything is lost and confused—sea, rocks, cliffs, sand—in swamping greyness.
17th June 1854:
An impossibility, a contradiction: to pray for belief. He knows everything. He “unto whom all hearts be open.” He punishes me with Felix’s death, for perpetrating this impossibility. Or: for my false belief, the belief in my own pretence.
Or: Felix’s death: merely a proof.
18th June 1854:
No, I will not believe it. I will acknowledge the insoluble mathematics of nature, the wanton waste and the resourcefulness of her economy; that compared with the brief life of countless creatures, my Felix may be said to have lived an age; that everywhere, if seeds and eggs be counted, examples abound of gross destruction so that few may survive; that humankind, albeit leniently accommodated, is not excused from this scheme. But I cannot believe that in this prodigious arbitrariness there is any purpose that grants life to a child only to withdraw it after two years; that it is not the case, rather, that he might as well not have existed; that he holds, in truth, in the great course of things, no place, value or identity compatible with the vain fabric of loving recognition that I, that we all, have built around him.…
He walks and walks, to stop the falling, all the way back to Lyme. If Lyme is still there. It is—emerging from the curtains of rain. But how pathetic and pitiable it looks; the little huddle of habitation, the quaint tumble of roofs, the cluster of rocking boats cradled in the curving arm of the Cobb.
And it was meant to be a holiday. And now it has become an experience from which he must recover, slowly convalesce. Though no one can help or nurse him but himself. No one will even know how he is not himself, how far he has fallen through himself, except himself. And the only remedy he has is to pretend. To pretend so hard that one day, perhaps, he will forget he is pretending. He will do his best, and even achieve, quite soon, some outward approximation of recovery, so that, back in Launceston that same summer, even his own father will not guess the true extent of the damage. The lad is strangely out of sorts, to be sure. So much for the benefits of sea air. Some talk of an untimely ailment, a fever, a soaking in a summer storm. As like as not, some woman is at the bottom of it. At any rate, his son is oddly reluctant to discuss the whole Tavistock question. Well, well, let the cloud pass, give everything its time.
Matthew says nothing. And John Pearce treads carefully. But remarkable recoveries—or rescues—happen. And Matthew has a capacity for happiness. And John Pearce is doubly glad that Rector Hunt should call that afternoon about his clock, and that he should bring his daughter with him.
Or that is how I like to see it. That is how I wish it to have happened. I give to Matthew’s life that very quality of benign design that he had already glimpsed might be lacking from the universe. I choose to believe that Matthew first met Elizabeth in his father’s office in Launceston that same July. And I choose to believe that at the very first meeting Matthew would have had the overwhelming perception that here, when his thoughts had already shown him how terribly you could go adrift, was the true, sure ground of his life. That he would have felt himself falling, sinking, collapsing again, not with that fearful sense of falling into a void, but with a sense of miraculous, restoring gravitation.
The scene: John Pearce’s workshop in Bell Street, Launceston. July sunshine—let’s suppose there was sunshine—slanting through the workshop windows on to the scratched and worn surfaces of the workbenches and on to the little brass pieces—cogs, springs, levers—laid out like some miniature treasury on rectangles of black felt. Matthew would have been impressed by the improvements to the workshop. His father now employed two journeymen and one apprentice, but he still sat, himself, at his workbench, eye-glass crammed into one eye, conforming to the image Matthew still retained of him from childhood: a vaguely magician-like figure, hunched over his little clockwork world, unwittingly miming the classic analogy for the existence of a Creator, and seeming to be engaged not only in the making of clocks but in the manufacture of this vital stuff called Time, this stuff which Matthew still thought of as being essentially human in meaning, the companion and guardian of human affairs.
A clock ticks on the mantelpiece.…
A desultory conversation in progress: Launceston gossip. John notes yet again the want of his son’s usual buoy
ancy and curiosity. Then the little bell in the office tinkles and John says, “Ah,” and drops his eyeglass neatly into his right hand, removes his apron, rolls down his sleeves and reaches for his jacket. “That will be Rector Hunt.”
Or perhaps there was nothing so apparently casual about this encounter. Perhaps John had said to Matthew: “The Reverend Hunt, from Burlford, will be calling by about his clock. He would be pleased to meet you.” Which is why Matthew was there. Or perhaps John, on a previous occasion, had said to the Rector, a man who, living in a household of women, felt a want of educated male conversation and a vague sense of being out of touch with the world, “Matthew will be home in July, so please call by—and you can see how the clock comes along.” But whether John had anticipated the Rector’s being accompanied by his elder daughter is another matter. And whether Rector Hunt had said to Elizabeth, “I shall be paying a call on Pearce the clockmaker—I believe his son, a Brasenose man, may be there. Perhaps you’d care to join me?” is another matter still. But why should Elizabeth have decided to attend her father about so humdrum a matter as a clock, when she might have passed her time in Launceston much more pleasurably, at the dressmaker’s or milliner’s, say?
Matthew would have gone with his father into the office, ready to offer his hand to Rector Hunt, but his eyes would have been compelled to meet first—and have been met quickly, meekly—by the eyes (I see them as glossy brown) of his daughter. A just-detectable hiatus would have occurred in which a just-detectable mutual blush would have touched the faces of the two young people. Then, after exchanged pleasantries and at a polite inquiry from the Rector and some prompting from his father, Matthew would have found himself rehearsing what he would have already rehearsed to his father, namely his account of the opening of the Bristol and Exeter Railway and of the jubilant arrival, just two months ago now, at the Exeter terminus of the first train from Paddington. And Rector Hunt and his daughter (if with different motives) would have listened with genuine awe to his tale. Railways existed, had existed for some thirty years in Cornwall—little, narrow-gauge haulage lines serving the north coast ports. But the Rector and his daughter would never have seen a steam engine. And these hurtling contraptions, which could take a man from his breakfast in London and set him down for dinner in Devon, they would have regarded with amazement and not a little dread.
