Ever After

by Graham Swift

  And if the soul is a fiction, and it is all just a struggle for existence, why do we ever reach beyond ourselves to the existence of others, not to say beyond existence itself? Why do we think of the dead? And why, and for whom, did Matthew write the Notebooks at all? For some all-viewing, all-reading witness (like God in the sky)? For some “kindred soul” in the audience of the future (oh yes—an avid theatre-goer) who unexpectedly “identifies,” as the saying goes, with the plight of this “character” up there on the stage of the past?

  Why do bees make honey? They say it will last, uncorrupted, for a thousand years. People have eaten honey from the tombs of the pharaohs. They say it is as good as gold.

  I see the two men in the little apiary at the far corner of the garden. I see Ruth pacing beside the tumbledown fence, learning her parts. They stoop over the first hive. They have an observer (as well as God in the sky): the Rector’s wife—let’s suppose she was watching, watching quite intently, from a rear window of the Rectory. She knows that something is in the offing. She knows that the two men do not see eye to eye. It is some while since she has indulged the fond notion that Matthew is like a son to her husband (there have been regrettable developments by this time, with Matthew’s own father). And her former motherly soft spot for her son-in-law (who, after all, scarcely had a mother of his own) has hardened of late. It is high time the Rector took things firmly in hand. And now here is Matthew again, showing up with his face like the calm before a storm. And here is her husband employing his usual blustering, stalling, side-tracking tactics.

  The sky is heaven-blue. The hives hum like little generators. Dressed in their grotesque costume, as if for some strange form of martial art, the two men bend over their peaceable task. The Rector has lit his curious, home-made smoking-device. They proceed to the second hive. The Rector removes its roof. They seem to confer. Then there is a distinct pause. The two men pull themselves upright. An evident disagreement. Some difference of opinion on the finer points of apiarian practice? Hardly. The exchange is more fraught, more passionate, than that. There is a pacing to and fro and flinging of arms—the older man waves his smoking-device like some useless gun. The inspection of the other hives is forgotten. More gesticulation. Then the gentle Rector seems suddenly to wax apoplectic. He throws aside his smoker: the smoke indeed might be issuing from his head. He shouts something at his companion, marches off to the very edge of the garden, delivers a blow to one of the apple trees, stands stiff and intent for an instant, like a man taking a final look at a cherished view, then turns.

  You have to picture the scene. You have to reconstruct the moment, as patient palaeontologists reconstruct the anatomies of extinct beasts. If it were not for Matthew’s Notebook, nobody might have known it had happened at all, it might have been as though it never was. So what, on the part of this unforeseen testifier, is a little bit of creative licence? A little bit of fiction? The place: a rectory garden in Devon (it is like the setting for some vapid period piece—of course, Potter’s TV “realisation”). The time: a June afternoon in 1860. The persons: Gilbert Hunt (the Rector); Matthew Pearce, his son-in-law; (off-stage, Emily, the Rector’s wife). I don’t know what they really said, but all around them, like some counterpoint—it’s the same sound now as it would have been then—was the undesisting drone of bees.

  … RECTOR: But look, look again at the contents of this hive! Look at the combs! You are aware that they are constructed upon a principle that is geometrically perfect. Geometrically perfect! Is it not astonishing? And you are to tell me that this is some freak, some stroke of chance? Have you no spirit of wonder? You may as well say that a rose is an ugly thing that stinks!

  MATTHEW: I do not question the wondrousness of things—only that God made them so.

  RECTOR: So, so. Then how comes your very wonderment? How comes your capacity to behold, marvel and inquire? How comes, Matthew, the marvel of your marvelling brain?

  MATTHEW: In just such a way—I cannot tell exactly—as comes the marvel of the bee and the honeycomb.

  RECTOR: Indeed! And you may as well have a honeycomb for a brain! Do you hold yourself as no more favoured than a bee?!

  MATTHEW: That is no simple question. A bee, had he my faculty of speech, might profess that I lacked his faculty of flight, and his unrivalled ability to build in wax.

  RECTOR: Do not joke with me, Matthew.

  MATTHEW: I don’t joke. I say only that creation—I use your word—favours no species save as it adapts successfully to its means of existence. A million fossils tell us that nature discards as well as promotes. The bee and mankind are just two of her ventures.

  RECTOR: I see, sir, I see. So we may as well shut the book of nature, and give thanks to no one when next we spread a little honey on our bread? And what of Holy Writ? We must have it out now, sir, it has come to this! What of the words of the prophets and evangelists? Come, speak your blasphemies!

  MATTHEW: Poetry! Poetry! Like your precious Virgil, who so extolled the genius of the bees. Admirable, inspired and inspiring, and composed by those, I do not doubt, who believed what they set down. But poetry—fiction!

  RECTOR: And your Darwin—who has had the bene fit of the world’s judgement for a little less time than the Bible—he only lacks the poetical inspiration to found a new creed?! By God, sir, by God, I charge you now to repeat your creed, here, before me, a minister of the church. And if you cannot—if you cannot, Matthew, if you will not—then, by God—

  But I do not know, I cannot even invent, what the Rector said. I falter in my script-writing, just as the Rector himself, perhaps, faltered on the verge of his imprecation. Did he say, wavering desperately at the last moment, “But can you not pretend?” Did he utter, thinking of the scandal about to unleash itself on the quiet backwater of Burlford, only what an inner voice had uttered to Matthew for six years? “I give you one last chance. I bid you go back now to your home. I bid you say nothing of this to Elizabeth, nor to anyone. I bid you go through the motions—yes, if it must be so for you—of a God-fearing man, of the husband of your wife and the father of your children. And if you cannot do this, then never darken my church door again, nor this rectory, nor, with my blessing, the home of my daughter! Go sir! Choose your way!”

  Did he compromise his own faith sufficient to beg another man to play false with his? Or did he, indeed (Matthew failing to recite his creed), draw himself up—in his bee-keeper’s hat—to his full anathematical height and thunder: “Then never henceforth, etc., etc.…”?

  The June afternoon still blooms. The bees still go about their summery business. The Rector stands alone among his little congregation of hives. Beyond the garden is the green flurry of the beech copse. Beyond that, the hedged languor of fields; warm, unavailing hills.

  And if we do not have souls, why should we have these—feelings? These moments that rack and enrapture us and take us by storm. Why should things matter?

  He stares, in his quixotic outfit, at the little gate, set in the hedge, leading to the churchyard, through which Matthew has departed. He has shouted, twice: “Matthew!” For a moment, the sweetness of the afternoon turns to sheer nightmare around him. He sees himself in some medieval vision full of demons and terror. He is before the walls of some beleaguered city in which the pious cower for safety and he, their champion, is beating back, with the intrepid zeal which once he hoped to bring to the darkest corners of the earth, the ravening beast, Darwin. Then the vision melts into the mocking familiarity of Burlford church and its quiet churchyard, its trusting retinue of gravestones, and the immemorial murmur of bees.

  At genus immortale manet, multosque per annos Stat fortuna domus …

  Poetry! Fiction!

  How long does he stand there? The Rector’s wife watches him. She knows that something extraordinary has happened. She has seen Matthew leave abruptly, not by the way he came but by the garden gate, and has watched the Rector watch him walk—retreat (so she pictures it)—across the churchyard and so out by the lych-
gate to the street.

  Well, and about time too. A few sharp words. For his own good. She feels a moment’s bristling solidarity with her husband, a moment’s pang for a stronger man she once knew.

  But the Rector does not move. He stands there stock-still. At last he turns and walks slowly towards the house. He has quite forgotten to replace the roof on the second hive and quite omitted to inspect the remaining hives. And, as the Rector’s wife well knows, if you do not attend to the combs when the bees are in full production, then you will have trouble, you will have swarms. Not to mention the need to extract the honey—the golden honey which, for years now, it has been her proud custom, with a little sweet glance to her husband, to press upon guests for tea at the Rectory: “Now, you are not to go without tasting some of Gilbert’s celebrated honey.…”

  The Rector walks towards the house, though not to speak to his wife. There is a French window in his study which opens directly on to the garden, and he makes straight for it. He does not remove his bizarre accoutrements—the gauntlets and hat. It seems that whatever it is that has happened out there has made him more than usually forgetful. Then the Rector’s wife sees that the wide-brimmed hat with its attached gauze curtain is still performing a useful function—the same function that her veiled black bonnet, and Elizabeth’s too, performed at little Felix’s funeral. Her husband is shaking with tears.

  16

  Qui quaerit, invenit. I wonder.

  I received a letter from a Major Pilkington, whose exact function and status remain far from clear to me, but who appears to be the final clearing-house for any awkward but unignorable inquiry from the general public. I have tried to picture Major Pilkington, this man who (in a manner and language so different from Sam’s) has been the bearer of such significant if belated news. The name suggests some buffer of the old school. I see him therefore as a grey-moustached, reddish-cheeked, chubby-jowled figure, long since past his military zenith and thus edged into this dead-end, dead-letter job, which a sort of tendency to fat in his character enables him to perform with the appropriate cushioning tact. He looks (I imagine) more like a headmaster of the patient, understanding sort, or an inured but genial family doctor, than a major. “Now, what seems to be the trouble …?”

  Then the image fades into that of some crisp, sharp-faced, still youngish high-flier. This, after all, is a responsible, if unspectacular, position: access to records, the handling of “sensitive” matters. And if it is a job in which our zealous career-maker has no wish to linger, then the best way to be shot of it and be picked for better and greater things is to carry it out with conspicuous diligence and the minimum of bureaucratic dither.

  Dear Mr Unwin,

  Your letter of 19th May has been passed on to me through various departments and it has been necessary to trace the relevant records. I apologise for the delay in this reply.

  The records relating to your father’s death on 8th April 1946, and to his career from March 1945 until his death, are governed by the strictures regarding classified information. I am therefore not at liberty to enter into details. However, in view of the personal aspect of your inquiry and of the fact that, subsequent to your mother’s death, you yourself have received new information on the matter, I am authorized to make the observations below, while trusting in your absolute discretion.

  Immediately following your father’s death, an internal inquiry was conducted into its circumstances. Your father was cleared of all suspicion of pressure brought to bear on him relating to a breach or endangering of security, and I must emphasise that his professional record remains that of an honourable man. However, it emerged from the evidence of colleagues and superiors that your father may have harboured, since the final months of the war, a growing aversion, on conscientious grounds, to the nature of his special duties, which, conflicting intolerably with his considerable dedication and ambition, may ultimately have contributed to his suicide.

  The records show that your mother was interviewed during the inquiry and, beyond recognising that they involved secrecy, appeared to have had no knowledge of the sensitive aspects of your father’s duties. Indeed, she adduced the “personal reasons” for your father’s suicide, which I assume are those referred to in your letter and which I will not, therefore, comment upon further.

  It was deemed necessary for the purpose of the inquiry to inform your mother, in the strictest confidence and in the barest terms only, of the nature of your father’s recent duties: that is, that from the spring of 1945 he was engaged in liaison activities with our wartime allies relating to the development of atomic weapons.

  You will appreciate that it was essential that none of this should emerge at the public inquest. Your mother was charged to repeat nothing of what had been disclosed to her and it was agreed that she should adhere to the aforementioned personal factors, which, I hope you will forgive me for observing, served very fortuitously the interests of secrecy. It would appear from your letter that your mother kept her word, with commendable compliance, up until her death.

  I regret that I am not empowered to enter into any further correspondence on this matter, and I must remind you that, although they date from over forty years ago, the records referred to herein remain subject to rules regarding public accessibility.

  I trust, however, that the contents of this letter are sufficient to answer your inquiry, and I offer my sincere regrets for any distress caused by the necessity of withholding information.…

  So, he was a spy then—of sorts—after all. A reluctant, a regretful, a squeamish spy.

  And it seems that my letter must have been taken as in some way loaded, double-edged (“information has come into my possession …”). They thought I knew something. Ha! And it seems we have got our wires crossed. Hopelessly crossed.

  And look how I obey Major Pilkington’s stringent admonitions. I copy out the text of his letter right here for everyone to see.

  (Everyone?)

  But none of it matters, does it? Because he wasn’t my— Was he? What does this phantom that Major Pilkington has conjured up out of his files matter to me?

  The night mist swirls round the battlements of Elsinore. Shapes loom on the guard platform. “Who’s there?” Did ever a play so palpably and so troublingly sound its note?

  “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”

  But even when he was alive, he was no more than the ghost of my father. “An honourable man” … “conflicting intolerably” … when you are out on an adventure …

  So why should I—?

  “Armed, say you?”—“Armed, my lord.”—“From top to toe?”—“My lord, from head to foot …”

  And what good, in any case, is Hamlet’s long-deferred and juvenile revenge, now that its spur, its object—my dear old wicked uncle Claudius—is dead …?

  For one thought that did not occur to me as Sam delivered his fateful message, here under the bean tree, was that I was looking at him for the last time. Barely six weeks later he would be dead, and news of his death—and of its nefarious circumstances—would reach me only days, in fact, before Major Pilkington’s dispatch came winging towards me out of the even more nefarious circumstances of an earlier death.

  Death! Death! You think it is elsewhere, but it is suddenly all around you, like a mist, a tide. It springs up like overnight mushrooms, it descends like the ghostly parachutes of secret agents, slipping behind enemy lines.

  Was that it, then? He somehow knew? Sam knew. I didn’t know, but he knew. Something some specialist had gently broken to him. The old ticker, it’s not what it was.… Or just some unquellable premonition. After Ruth, after Sylvie. Brother Ed’s old coral-boned tug at his sleeve … My turn is coming. My last chance, maybe. So—do I tell the kid or don’t I?

  Except he didn’t know the half. And now I’ll never be able to face him with it, ask him (a reversal of his confiding visit to me—and a flagrant contravention of Major Pilkington’s orders): Sam, I’ve got to tell you.… Sam, did you ever
know what my father—I mean my— I mean what he did …? Sam, will you take a look at this …?

  Why is it that it is Sam’s features and not my father’s (my whose?) that float before me as I read and re-read Major Pilkington’s studied words? The clean, unfadingly tanned smoothness of his skin, which even at sixty-seven (the man really thought he didn’t have long?) looked so incongruously unlived-in. The doggish eyes.

  “You have to tell the truth, don’t you, pal?”

  We might have continued our discussions, resumed our topic. Further visits, further colloquies, here in this contemplative domain. Mr Plastic in the purlieus of knowledge. A subject worthy of philosophic debate: Do people kill themselves for love?

  “Tis here!”—“Tis here!”—“Tis gone …”

  That she did or didn’t know I was another man’s son.

  That she would or wouldn’t have told me in the last days, hours, of her life.

  (That Sam should have kept his mouth shut.)

  That he killed himself because of my mother and Sam—i.e., for love. (And Major Pilkington never knew the half.)

  That he killed himself because of his “conscientious aversion,” and she really knew it.

  That she didn’t know it, and the explanation given by the inquiry must have seemed to her like the perfect gift. But she couldn’t use it, could she, because she had to keep quiet? (My mother—keep quiet?)

  That she told him he wasn’t my father (a monumental row, the heat of the moment, out it all comes) never thinking the revelation might kill him.

  That she told him he wasn’t my father, knowing that the man was primed, in any case, to commit suicide.

  That she was a murderous bitch.

  That he really was my father and she told him he wasn’t.

  A lying, murderous bitch.