by Graham Swift
I sat, belatedly, at my desk, Lyell’s 1853 edition in front of me. Also before me, the 1855 (enlarged) edition of the Elements of Geology. Yes, I knew, all right, which were the proper editions. But I couldn’t concentrate (any more than the Rector). I couldn’t feel whatever it was Matthew had felt. What was I doing, a hapless civilian in this arsenal of learning? I fingered the phial of perfume in my pocket. Yes, I admit it, I took it out, unscrewed the gold cap and sniffed. It is as well that library-goers are generally used to each other’s eccentricities.
She would be here, somewhere in this building. The girl in black. Gabriella. I should find her, return the bottle. This, after all, was the classic way in which Romance began: the misplaced article, the trinket retrieved. This, after all, was the way life worked, the way it took its chances and began again, especially on a May morning when sunlight penetrated even the thick bulwarks of the University Library and fondled the dusty racks of books. What was I doing in this necropolis? What was I doing, bent over a book about the antiquity of rocks?
We are prepared, therefore, to find that in time also the confines of the Universe lie beyond mortal ken.…
A simple matter. All I had to do was wander the premises. The History section was a good bet. I would happen upon her, as if by chance. We were, after all, half introduced. I would whisper, in this place meant for whispering, that perhaps, if she could spare a moment from her studies, a cup of coffee … Better still, a bite of lunch … Over coffee, or lunch, I would venture a disclosure or two (why not?) about the Pearce manuscripts. She would say (let it go, let it pass) how much she had admired Ruth. Then, at a certain point, with the deft timing of a practised intriguer and wooer of women, I would produce the bottle of perfume: “I think this is yours.…”
It didn’t happen, of course. That is, I didn’t find her. So how do I know, if I didn’t find her, that—?
(But how could it have happened?)
A library is equipped so that any book within it may be located precisely; but people—that is a random matter. And, of course, in so vast a complex as our University Library, it would be perfectly possible for two people, wandering independently along different routes, to elude each other for ever. I toured the building. I patrolled the corridors. I peeped along shelves and at the hunched forms at rows of desks.
A mad aberration induced by my having survived my ride with Potter? (He could really have done it.) A portent of things to come? This other life; these leases of life.
January and May.
I loitered on stairs and by the populous Main Catalogue. At the exodus for lunch I lingered by the main entrance, sun streaming through the tall doors. Gabriella. A name like a flower. And from Verona. Balconied city of love. The name was inseparable in my mind from something dark-haired, dark-eyed and slender. I couldn’t imagine a blonde called Gabriella. I couldn’t imagine Katherine being called Gabriella.
When I returned to my college room I still possessed the little bottle. I put it on one of the glass shelves in my bathroom. It is still there now, a source of perpetual speculation, I imagine, to Mrs Docherty, who cleans for me. But then its curiosity value has been far surpassed by other, recent events. It was Mrs Docherty, after all, accompanied by a porter, who “found” me. In the “old days,” she has since comfortingly told me, college cleaners were regularly stumbling upon suicidal inmates. There is something about this contemplative life. But she herself had never had the misfortune …
I could have thrown it away. But then it was not my property to dispose of, and in theory the opportunity might still have arisen to return it to its rightful owner. Though, had I done so, it’s true, the little bottle might by then have lost its strategic charge, the aura of cunning gallantry that it had possessed for a few, fond hours on a bright spring morning. So it stayed on the shelf.
It was on that May afternoon—only two months ago—as I put the perfume on the shelf—a gathering rain-cloud was squeezing the last rays of the sun over the college rooftops and onto the tiles of my bathroom—that I realised with sudden acuteness how little trace there was of anything feminine, let alone of Ruth, in these new rooms I inhabit. I had brought my two favourite photographs, one or two other things, that’s all. Besides John Pearce’s clock. A sort of self-denying instinct had made me not wish to embarrass others, or myself in front of others, with too many icons of remembrance.
And perhaps I clung to the illusion that I would go back. These rooms were only a temporary expedient, therefore deserving a sort of Spartan, bachelorly restraint (how many Fellows before me? How many muttering old fools?) When the lawyers and accountants had sorted things out, when this short-term shelter, courtesy of Ellison Plastics, had served its turn, then I would go back—to my former life. Like some soldier completing a tour of duty, I would return home. It would all be as it was.
I would never go back. This is what I realised, standing in front of the mirror. I was in my place now. A place which wasn’t my place. I was institutionalised. I had been in it for nearly a year. This was where I was.
In the roseate light of the bathroom I unscrewed the cap and once more lifted the bottle to my nostrils. He really meant to— A young girl’s perfume. I sniffed its little released world. Then I put it back on the shelf.
14
And how do I know? And why should I believe it?
The College notepaper is a godsend. A tasteful ivory, with the College crest lightly embossed in blue, top centre, and (only available to such as me) the words “Senior Combination Room,” for extra swank, in Roman capitals, top right corner. The sort of notepaper that must surely command respect and compel an answer, even as it is evasively passed, as I’m sure it will be, from desktop to prevaricating desktop in the warrens of Whitehall.
I haven’t a clue whom I should write to. I don’t know if there exists, in the bowels of officialdom, any functionary appointed to deal with inquiries like mine. But who am I to turn to, a poor orphan, committed to the (temporary) fosterage of this goodly college?
And the College motto (embossed scroll under the crest) is auspicious and encouraging, not to say downright optimistic: Qui quaerit, invenit.
So I compose a “Dear Sir” letter, imagining, as occasionally we all do, that this “dear sir” really exists—a seasoned, ashen-haired figure, authoritative but kindly, long-suffering but fair-minded, on whom there presses the weight of many a more onerous matter, yet who is moved, as is only proper, as is only right, to give our particular little plea his heartfelt and painstaking attention.
Dear Sir,
I am writing with reference to my late father, Colonel Philip Alexander Unwin, DSO, MC, formerly of the Hampshire Regiment, subsequently seconded to extra-regimental duties, who died by his own hand on 8th April 1946, in Paris, while on attachment to or in the full employ of the diplomatic service.
At the time of his death, my mother, Sylvia Jane Unwin, and I were temporarily resident in Paris with my father. I was nine years old and an only child.
My age naturally restricted my acquaintance with the facts. However, it has never been a secret to me that my father died by suicide and that his death occurred (by gunshot) during working hours in the office where he pursued his duties in Paris. This I believe to have been in an annexe of the then British diplomatic mission in the Rue St. Dominique. I assume the matter to have been filed in the appropriate records.
On the authority of my mother, together with the findings of the inquest, I have always accepted that the motives for my father’s death, in so far as they could be scrutinized, were personal, if never wholly clear. However, following my mother’s death, eight months ago, information has come into my possession which prompts me to reconsider the matter.
I do not anticipate that official records, such as they are, will necessarily assist in a question of private concern. However, any further light you may be able to shed on the circumstances in which my father died would be greatly appreciated.…
The language that we use! The post
ures we adopt! A little ingratiating mimicry of those whom (we think) we are dealing with? Or is this stuff me?—the professorial blather (the infection well advanced); the palpable signs of fogeydom. No, not the moody Prince all along, but prating Polonius. Three “howevers” and an “in so far as.” The craven guff into which we slide in order to settle the most intimate facts of our lives. “Information has come into my possession.” Well, yes—and no. And “personal”—his motives for suicide “were personal.” What the hell else should they have been?
15
What did it was the bees. The Rector’s innocent, Virgilian bees. It began with dinosaurs, but what brought things to the breaking point, to their final undoing, was the humble, humming bee.
You have to picture the scene. Matthew does not detail every moment of that June afternoon—though he makes it clear enough that this was the genuine, the irrevocable denouement. It seems that the Rector issued an ultimatum; and perhaps nothing less, in the end, would have satisfied Matthew. Perhaps the pitch of his conscience, so long attuned to its own dilemma, was such that it required and desired another’s pronouncement of judgement. Or, to put it another way, the Rector was part of Matthew by now: if he hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary for Matthew to invent him. You could say that when Matthew called at the Rectory that afternoon, he was only knocking at the door of his own soul. Except that that, of course, is the wrong way of putting it. Precisely the wrong way. What he was about to do was evict his soul from the premises, to send it packing. What he would have to say henceforth would be: My soul? My soul? I do not possess such a thing.
24th June 1860:
… and, amidst everything, I still ask myself, did I will it to have fallen out thus, or was the hand of chance still my final arbiter? If the latter, it would not be inappropriate; since I am committed now—oh, committed!—to a random universe, the seeming capacity of which to present to our eyes instances of omniscient purpose only deludes us. What I ask is: did I truly set out this afternoon—I cannot remember now my exact feelings, it seems such an age ago—prepared, by my own determination, to take upon myself the consequences which now, indeed, I must accept; or was this to have been, at worst, but another addition to our stretched chain of “disputations”? But then was not, increasingly, the very drift of those disputations towards precipitating, in the heat they generated, what I myself could not in cold blood initiate?
Cold blood! Is my blood cold? It rushes now round my veins with such animal tumult. Did I not, like some spiteful heretic, like some cowardly deserter to the devil’s side (such phrases!), repeatedly tempt the good man to deliver his thunderbolt? As if, so long as he failed to do so, I might draw the mean and furtive satisfaction that, as I was a doubter of my faith (doubter—I must say now “abjurer”!), so he lacked the courage of his calling.
Well, I cannot charge him with that now.
And if, indeed, my intention, all along, was so resolved and adamant, then circumstances could not have been better disposed to dissuade me, to mollify me. Did this seeming perversity only spur me on? The sweet midsummer weather. Sailing clouds and the scent of hay. Dog roses in bloom. And the good Rector so eager to be examining his hives that he quite neglected his normal air, on my calling, of testy forbearance, quite failed to prepare himself for weighty altercation. Thus was I like the bringer of bad news who comes upon a household in a state of happy levity and is compelled, in spite of himself, to reciprocate the good humour.
“Come, come, my dear Matthew, you must assist. Surely you have noticed—you with your eye for such things—there never was such a year for clover. The combs will be oozing.” And, so saying, in the full holiday mood of his enthusiasm, he bade me don a spare pair of his long-sleeved gauntlets and one of his long-veiled straw hats—oh there was comedy in the tragedy! And in this clownish costume I came to my final declaration and he to his final fulmination, not because such was at first the tenor of our discourse, but because he would not have it that a system so wondrously disciplined as the society of the honey-bee, or a structure so ingenious as the honeycomb, not to say a thing so delectable as honey itself—surely the veritable manna from heaven—could exhibit anything other than the work of a benign and intelligent Creator.
“I only urge you,” I insisted, “to read what Mr Darwin has written on the subject in his chapter on instincts. How even a skill as consummate as that of the hive bee in making cells may be arrived at by a gradual modification of instincts which other species also demonstrate, if less perfectly. How instincts, no less than organic structures, are the result of an adaptation of nature’s random variations. And the only principle behind this process is neither the will of God nor, indeed, as you will have it, the work of Darwin’s master, the devil, but, in Darwin’s phrase”—I confess I had begun to shout, the flapping veil before my eyes seeming to smother my words—“the continual and irrepressible struggle for existence!”
Whereupon the Rector cried, with a force that seemed to take even him by surprise, “Damn your Darwin! Damn your detestable Darwin, sir!” There was a moment when I thought he might add, “And damn you, sir!” But he did not do this. He strode up the row of hives, striking with his gauntleted fist the trunk of one of the apple trees, then strode back to deliver upon me his verdict, his anathema. Was there ever such a strange priestly garb for the purpose? Though who knows if it were not those outlandish masks—neither of us could clearly see the other’s face—that made such terrible words possible?
And, truly, even as I received my sentence, part of me still saw with the old man’s believing—credulous, I should say—eyes. Had I not once, too, drawn short at the great mystery of the instincts? Had I not, like the Rector, taken the industry of the honey-bee as one of the sublimest testimonies to the hand of Providence, demonstrating, moreover, like the milk of cattle (oh milk and honey!), that the chief care of Providence was the good of mankind? And if this were illusion, was it not a sweet and benign illusion? And was not exposing it but an act of wanton destructiveness—as if, there and then, I had lifted up the wooden roof of one of the hives and, upon a mindless whim, dashed to pieces the little insect Jerusalem within? See, it is as nothing!
(And yet—invincible instinct!—they would have repaired it at once.)
And even as the Rector spoke, I could not help thinking of the many pounds of the Rector’s honey we have consumed at Leigh House, and how, in the days when I was still her mentor in such things, I instructed Lucy in the “miracle” of its manufacture, holding it up to her as something to wonder at and reverence: “So, my dear Lucy, the honey we eat is made from flowers—does it not taste as sweet as a flower looks?—and the magician who performs this trick is the bee.”
She is asleep now, or so I hope. So I hope are they all. I am alone in the house with my children. Asleep or awake, they are frightened, and must all face the morrow. They are none of them so young as not to ask, in their own way: What will become of us?
And my dear Liz has departed for the Rectory. I do not know—there have been so many alternations of anger and tears—whether to remonstrate with him or to take his side (his “side”!). I do not know when, or if, she will return. Yet her children are here, she did not think to bundle them with her—I cannot therefore be such an ogre. For them, at least, she must return.
“How could you do this? How could you do this?!”—I will always hear her repeated cry. As if all this too were only a perverse, destructive whim. The little honey-hive of our home. The nectar of our happiness. Fifteen years!
I said nothing of Neale. It seemed to me that to make such a reference was inadmissible, though more than once I thought her look challenged me, even desired me to do so. To make this domestic drama no more than one of those familiar, sordid upheavals by which households fall apart. When she had stopped raging, I put myself, as resolutely as I could, at her mercy: “If I am no longer to make my home here in your father’s parish, then I ask you to choose between your father and me. If the former, do not sup
pose I shall cease to provide for you.” “Oh,” she said, eyeing me fiercely and tossing her head, as if she would turn this into some common jilting, “do not suppose I shall not be taken care of!”
She is gone. The night is still and starry. And the chimes from the church tower—one, two o’clock—seem to tell me she has made her choice.
I cannot sleep. I cannot move. I keep company with this notebook. This book! This book! What have I become, that I have parted from my wife, but I still keep company with this book?
Do we have souls? Do bees? Did Matthew have a soul? If not, why should he have written, over a period of six years, those pages in which it is no misapplication of a well-worked phrase to say he “laid bare his soul”?
But then the Notebooks ceased on that June day in 1860—or rather, a little later, when he had left wife, children and home. And they were, by his own description, the record of his life as a fiction: “the beginning of my make-belief.” From now on, he would be “real”—he would live according to the way things truly were. But if the soul is a fiction, why should a book—a few ideas set down on the page—make so much difference to the world? Did people have souls until 1859, when Darwin published his momentous work, then suddenly cease to have them?
