by Graham Swift
I fielded (still technically her manager) the commiserative calls, dealt with the kind-but-cruel welter of mail. I developed unsuspected skills as a nurse, chef, maid-of-all-work. We tried to submit to the illusion that all this was some kind of benign interlude, a period of rest, of convalescence. Not a— Then a look of quiet urgency, of concentration, would come into her eyes, which would seem to make my presence futile. As if somewhere, deep inside herself, she were searching for someone. I would think: I must distract her. Distract her? I didn’t allow myself to think that all this withdrawal, this retrenchment in a country cottage, this privacy, this trying to be simply, at last, herself, was itself a kind of rehearsal (so rich with stage fright), a learning of the final part.
“Give me my robe, put on my crown …”
I think she wanted recognition. She achieved it. Some of us want recognition, some of us don’t. Potter wants it. I can live without it (perhaps I should rephrase that). And some of us who want it never achieve it. It’s a funny thing, recognition. You achieve it and then you have problems about being recognised. You go around in dark glasses. And though you are recognised, everyone wants to know about this other person, this elusive, hard-to-spot character called “the real you.” The “real Ruth Vaughan,” as the journalists would have it. No one would recognise me, but nobody would want to ask me about the real me.
(Though I wonder who he is—really I do).
She used to say—a strange thing for an actress—that she never knew what she looked like, she couldn’t have described her own face if she were asked. My experience is different. When I look in the mirror (especially these days), I see this incorrigible mask. I know it’s not me, but I’m stuck with it. Perhaps it amounts to the same: you might be anybody. Which means I have the makings of an actor too. But not the gift.
How could you describe her face? There was no other word for it: it was full of life. So full of life. I think she was beautiful, but that is not an objective statement. I think she was beautiful because she was her. Because she was Ruth. She had brown-green eyes and a way of smiling and laughing with them before even moving her lips. Off-stage, off-screen, people always found her smaller, slighter than they had imagined. She had this—naturalness. Yet she was an actress. But isn’t that what actors seek—naturalness? There was this space that was always hers, just hers; this magic, mobile space. There were these audiences who claimed her, but there was always this space that was hers alone. And back in the days before she was famous, when she was only Girl Number Three …
Romantic, impossible love. The student and the chorus girl. The scholar and the actress.
She cut the process short. She couldn’t bear, or bear that I should bear, the coming disintegration, which, on that February day, by some inner gauge that very sick people have, she must have known was about to begin. I can’t think of any other reason. No, I can’t think of any other reason.
It’s wrong, of course. Suicide. My father was wrong. Ruth was wrong. I— But I’m still here. We don’t have the right. To take ourselves from ourselves. And from other people. It’s cowardly. It’s selfish. The mess it leaves for others. But there would have been mess anyway. It’s vain: a last bid for posthumous limelight; a staged exit. “I have immortal longings …” A form of death not so uncommon among actors. Though they aren’t supposed to. They are supposed, by the sheer force of their personalities, to make miracle recoveries and so inspire us all. They are supposed to turn their inexorable demises into brave, grotesque performances on behalf of medical research funds. We look to actors and actresses—don’t we?—to show us how to act.
You keep saying to yourself (trying to dismiss the thought, trying to give it your utmost attention) there will come a last time for everything. A last time to do this, a last time we do that. Simple, inconsequential things. A last day, a last hour. Then, when the last time comes, you don’t realise it’s the last time. She wanted to sleep. She slept all that afternoon. It was during these increasingly frequent periods when she slept in the day that I would begin, then immediately abandon, the exercise of trying to imagine the world without her. It was a fine, cold, clear day. I looked out towards the end of the garden. Beyond the trees on the other side of the field, the silver tip of a silage tower, hidden in the summer, glinted ruddily. Huge shadows barred the glowing folds of the Downs.
She didn’t wake till dark. I remember that she said she’d meant to wake before it was dark, and she gave a little, half-asleep, worried look. That same night, according to the findings of the inquest, she died, by her own hand, between the hours of three and five in the morning.
And I will never know whether she made up her mind suddenly, waking that night while I slept, or whether the intention was there even as she woke that afternoon. Even before then. And I will never know—it is an absurd, hypothetical question—whether, if I had had the choice, I would have wished for such a cruel, merciful blow or would have preferred her to linger on for more precious weeks, perhaps months, becoming less and less like the woman I would want to remember. A matter of recognition. I have the contrast, now, with my mother: a wasted figure, sprouting tubes in a hospital bed, resolutely letting her own death run its full course. Could I have borne to see Ruth like that?
But my mother was seventy-eight. And “resolutely”? I wonder, now.
I came down the stairs. Her body was lying on the sofa. Not “she”; her body. The difference sinks in. There were the pills; the empty tumbler on the coffee table. Cliché props.
“Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill.”
It’s not the end of the world. It is the end of the world. None of the arguments, none of the catechisms work. There was a time—don’t you remember?—when you never knew her; you lived without her then. No amount of grief ever brought anyone back. You wring your heart out over the death of one woman; but thousands die every hour, every minute. Well, I’m sorry. I’m selfish, I’m feeble, I only have heart enough for one.
Life goes on. It doesn’t go on. Yes, yes, I know, all we want in the end, we living, breathing creatures (am I still one of them?) is life. All we want to believe in is the persistence and vitality of life. Faced with the choice between death and the merest hint of life, what scrap, what token wouldn’t we cling to in order to keep that belief? A leaf? A single moist, green leaf? That will do, that will be enough. What do the dying cling to in their final moments? Sunlight through a curtain, the sound of a tennis game, the noise from a Paris street?
Good God, I am surrounded by leaves! But only Ruth will do. She represented life to me. I know that, now she is dead. She was life to me. And that isn’t just vain hyperbole, is it? She was an actress, wasn’t she? It was her job: to represent life to people.
I picked up the note. It was meant only for me, but it had to be submitted as evidence to the coroner. “I never could stand drawn-out farewells.…” I stooped over her body. It is almost inspiring, almost uplifting, at first, to be in the presence of such a momentous event. Later the madness, the helplessness, but first the gravity of the situation. I stooped over her body, as if I had rehearsed it all before and knew exactly what to do.
Romantic love. Romantic love. The first, flustered kiss on a wet night in a taxi to Girl Number Three. The last kiss, at the break of dawn, to the Queen of Egypt. “Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies a lass unparallel’d.”
And in between? Happiness. Yes, I commemorate it. Happiness ever after.
11
So Matthew married Elizabeth, in Burlford church on 4th April 1845. And on that April day John Pearce would have presented the couple with the clock he had lovingly and expressly made for the purpose.
Quite possibly Matthew was in league with his father over the clock, since the Latin inscription on the brass backplate, though a perfectly apt motto for the young couple, also conveyed, being a quotation from Virgil, a sly tribute to the Rector, whose chief recreations were the Roman poet (he laboured on his own translation of the Aene
id) and bee-keeping—complementary passions, as anyone will know who has read the Georgics. And perhaps the Rector, touched by the gesture, even more touched by the union of this sweet couple, which he himself had consecrated, refrained from ever pointing out (he was no pedant after all) that the Latin was the popular misquotation, the word order being inverted in the original—as was only characteristic of the Virgilian style and, in any case, required by the scansion.
And the marriage must have been blessed and happy and Matthew’s animal nature must have been nothing lacking, because between 1847 and 1853 Matthew and Elizabeth produced four children: John, Christopher, Felix and Lucy. And when in 1854 he began his Notebooks, after the death of Felix, Matthew would refer to this whole period as “the ten happiest and most fragile years of my life.”
I see Matthew tiptoe from the side of a cot. Of two cots … I see him blow out candles; open the little brass plate and wind the clock. He watches Elizabeth at her dressing-table as she loosens her hair. She smiles at his watching smile in the mirror. And he resolves once again—though by now, perhaps, the resolve has become a reflexive, unconscious, continuous thing—not to tell her, to lock up his thoughts. It sometimes seems to him that that very smile of hers is like a warning finger raised to her lips (the way she does it with little John and Christopher), bidding him not speak, not spoil things. She brushes her hair. He feels a tug, like an anchor-chain, at his heart. And beyond the window, in the middle distance, hidden now in the dark, is Burlford church. If Elizabeth is the anchor, there is the harbour wall. And every night now (for they are living at Leigh House, on the edge of Burlford village) the chimes from the solid old tower steal across to them over Rectory Meadow.
No, I don’t believe he ever told her about that afternoon in Lyme. He kept quiet, as the Rector kept quiet about the misquoted Virgil. Perhaps he meant to tell her. Many times, perhaps, especially in those months before they were married—to get it over with, to exorcise the ghost!—he would have looked for the right moment. But his mouth would have been stopped by her innocent unsuspectingness, then by the innocent unsuspectingness of John and Christopher, and by the simple safety of silence. So that the not telling became in the end a duty for her sake, for her protection, a measure of his devotion. And, anyway, how did you begin? An ichthyosaur … And with each non-disclosure the eventual utterance became less probable, less plausible. The more it hung back from his lips, the more it receded from the front of his mind. And perhaps that was all that was necessary: Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, it will go away.
4th September 1855:
What a good-hearted, muddle-headed old soul is my father-in-law. He understands—why should he be disposed to understand?—so little of the matters I have now begun to raise with him. How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling. I could thank for ever my darling Liz and my darling little ones for opening my heart, even to the emaciation of my thoughts. But hungry thoughts sooner or later must feed.…
And the good-hearted Rector, in those days before Matthew’s “thoughts” began to fatten, may even have suffered some small disappointment that his son-in-law was not quite the vigorous whetstone to his own blunted faculties that he had hoped. To put it plainly, happiness seemed to take away some of the man’s bite. Well, well, he could hardly complain of that. His trivial loss was a measure of his daughter’s gain. He could scarcely grumble if preoccupations domestic and professional (old Makepeace duly retired in 1848, and Matthew was his own master) left his son-in-law with little time for stimulating debates in the Rector’s study on the relative merits of the Classics and the Sciences in fitting a man for life.
And, as the Rector baptised grandchild after grandchild, there was plentiful comfort and even relief to be drawn from watching Matthew mellow before the age-old influences of matrimony and procreation. Well, well, a man settles down and finds out how his heart truly lies, just as he, Rector Hunt, had done some thirty years ago. Once—he was to confide this much to Matthew, and then, as it happened, during an exchange of some heat in his study—he had wanted to be a missionary. A more daring and pioneering undertaking, surely, even than laying a railway line from London to Land’s End. But instead of finding himself among the savages of Africa, he had settled for a rectory in Devon, and the role had fitted so like a natural skin that even his aspirations to further preferment had somehow evaporated. It would have been agreeable, of course, if a little chafing from his son-in-law had shown that some sharper, keener, more venturesome man still lurked within this skin. But it would have been disagreeable if, under the test of the young man’s provocation, nothing more had emerged than that he was what he was: an amiable, amenable husk of a man.
Yes, when you got him alone, there was something strangely muted and docile about his son-in-law, for all his fine, vigorous qualities, something almost—the Rector would not have seen it at first, then berated himself perhaps for overlooking the obvious, while simultaneously adjusting to a not unflattering irony—something almost suppliant. Of course! It was Matthew who looked to him. It was the younger man who in these changing times, in a profession which exposed him to so much modern upheaval and innovation, looked to the older man for guidance and certitude. As why should he not to one approved as a spiritual father?
But perhaps it went further than this. Gilbert Hunt could not have helped noticing, as the years passed, how Matthew’s links with his own father grew thinner, how his visits with Elizabeth to Launceston grew more infrequent and how John Pearce, even with the incentive of becoming a three-fold, four-fold grandfather, seemed to shy away from the close-knit atmosphere of Burlford. The Rector perhaps put this down to some wary residue of Methodism. Later, he would have revised his opinion. Later too, Elizabeth would have perhaps confided in him that there had been some difference of feeling between Matthew and his father: something to do with Matthew’s not advancing himself further in the world. So, Burlford parish was not far enough in the world for the former apprentice of Launceston, and all Matthew’s attainments failed to sate the clockmaker’s pride? Matthew was not doing badly. He had advanced far enough in the world for a God-fearing man—and advancement, in the world or in the Church, was a ticklish thing.…
In any case, before this point was reached, it would have seemed to the Rector that Matthew had transferred onto him from his own father a paternal status that it was difficult not to accommodate. And, remembering that sanguine young man he had first encountered in John Pearce’s premises, he could not have imagined the almost prostrate state in which Matthew would come to him, ten years later, yes, in the Rectory study, after little Felix had died, and demand an explanation, a reason. Nothing less.
He uttered the usual formulae. He spoke of God’s will. What else could he have done? God knows, his own heart was afflicted cruelly enough by his little grandson’s death and he grieved for both parents, though it was Elizabeth who seemed better able to bear this loss of one quarter of her issue. God knows, he found it hard enough, in this thick glut of family tears, to keep his own eyes dry and remember his priorities as a clergyman. And yet (could he ever be forgiven?) he could not deny that thrill of pure joy when (God’s will not seeming to suffice) he had put his arms round Matthew in a silent, receptive embrace, while a voice inside him uttered the equation: he has lost a son, I have found one.
And that was when the trouble really began. If that scene ever really took place (I imagine, I invent), then how deluded the older man was. He could not have guessed how this son-in-law, who had so far failed to be his friendly sparring partner, would one day become his earnest antagonist, on terms beyond any he could have predicted.
I see Elizabeth turn from the dressing-table, put down her hairbrush. I don’t believe that these Victorians were really, when it came to it, so Victorian. So demure and strait-laced. I don’t believe they were a different species, who propagated their kind by some method less intimate and passionat
e than ours. John, Christopher, Felix, Lucy. The atmosphere at Leigh House in those early days was surely ripe with love; as sticky, as fertile, as any pullulating little patch of ground that Matthew would have stooped over with his magnifying glass and collecting bottle, ready to trace yet more evidence of nature’s astonishing irrepressibility.
For that was how the villagers of Burlford must now and then have come across him, on Jacob’s Hill or in Loxley Wood, though not yet with the haunted and furtive looks he would later display when discovered in this way. Far from it. Like as not, he would wave to you and give you the time of day and tell you something savouring rather of one of Rector Hunt’s harvest-tide sermons, about how all creatures were exquisitely adapted to their purpose in creation. Which was obliging of him.
To be sure, he had his scientifical fancies, did the Rector’s new son-in-law—beetle-hunting and the like. But he was a good sort, for all his being a Cornishman larded over with Oxford learning. He made a fine picture with his young wife at church on a Sunday and said his Amen as loud as anyone, and any man who could marry the Rector’s favourite daughter with the Rector’s own blessing was good enough for Burlford and should hold himself, what’s more, a privileged mortal. He didn’t put on airs or hide the twang in his voice. All in all, he seemed to have his head set square on his shoulders and his feet square on the ground, and everything as it should be in between, judging by results. More to the point, when he stopped jawing about bugs and caterpillars, he could lean against a gate with you and tell you all that was worth knowing about the field in front of you, just by looking. Which showed he had a care for those who lived by the land and wasn’t just a lackey to the folk in Tavistock who got rich quick (and poor again just as quick, no doubt) by burrowing about underneath it.…
