by Graham Swift
That’s what it must have felt like when she woke at night to an empty space beside her and knew that he was still down there at his desk: that he was deserting her. She must have thought of ways to get him back.
Who is Elizabeth? What is she? I see her as a warmhearted, trusting, perhaps rather brittle girl, emerging suddenly from the chrysalis of life at the Rectory into the full bloom of womanhood. Any man, perhaps, might have been the touchstone; it happened to be Matthew. It was her fortune, and her misfortune, to marry Matthew. And strange that this robust and outgoing man, to whom she had looked to lead her, some way at least, out of the sheltered existence that she could admit now had been hers, should himself slip so easily into domesticity and family-hood, should choose to settle, after all, right here in Burlford, under the eye, as it were, of the Rector and her mother, should even seem now and then to need a sort of shelter himself. It must mean he was happy; that she made him happy.
She has soft brown eyes and the smile of newly awakened, newly indulged instincts; the clear conscience and undissipated emotions of a clergyman’s daughter. What did she think of her husband’s “interests”—the specimen-collecting, the reading-up in learned tomes and journals? Perhaps they seemed, at first, endearingly, if vexingly, like her father’s interminable devotion to Virgil. Men seemed to need these “enthusiasms,” which rapidly became so all-consuming. She had thought, perhaps, that her own sex, with its needlework, sketching and piano-playing, was lacking in this respect. But now, watching little Christopher at play, watching the earnestness with which he went about it—a furrow in his brow just like one in Matthew’s—she would have felt more of concern than envy for these curious menfolk. But she would no more have dared knock on Matthew’s study door and urge him, for his own sake, to stop, than she would have dared ask her father (though perhaps she had the subversive thought) why he, a minister of the Christian church, should spend so much time in the company of a pagan poet.
She has deep-brown hair and a soft, ripe bosom. And she is perfectly capable, now that she has discovered her instincts, now that she knows, beyond all girlish dreams, the full extent of her power to give and receive love, of concurring absolutely with that motto (what if they were the words of a pagan poet?) which Matthew’s father had had inscribed for them. Yes. Amor vincit.
2nd March 1860:
Neale here again for Sunday dinner. And playing very merrily afterwards with John and Christopher and offering them fine exhortations as to how they are almost grown men now, with “places to take in the world.” Cannot help supposing that these visits are encouraged by Elizabeth in collusion with her father, so as to preserve our Sundays from the animosity that now so often springs up between myself and the Rector following our church-going. Suspect also that the Rector has had private words with Elizabeth about the parlous state of my father’s affairs—how, in plain terms, if I do not have a care and desist from lending my father money, the taint will spread to my own reputation.
Neither of these suspicions becomes me. Yet suspect also that Elizabeth wishes, out of an understandable and not uncharitable motive, to put Neale before me as an example of what I should be, and, indeed, once was before my falling off of these last months. That is: sanguine, cheerful, dependable, steady in my responsibilities and successful in my affairs. Yet cannot, for the life of me, see myself in Neale (or him in me) at all. Distrust my former liking of him. Despise my own distrust and upbraid my own seeming want of character. Should perhaps be simply jealous and act the plain part of jealousy. Nothing, in fact, might better restore me in my Lizzie’s eyes—proving I was a creature still of direct and vivid emotions, and not the remote occupant of my own incapacitating thoughts.
Yet I disdain to be—even as I become the very thing—the pallid husband resenting the vigorous interloper. And I disdain (pride! Oh, pride!) to engage in matrimonial histrionics, when it is indeed my “thoughts” which are the nub of the matter.
Neale asks, in seeming candour or in seeming tact, after my father. Wheal Talbot fares well. Neale, in truth, is a rich man, an eligible match, slow to take his pick, and the story goes that he pays court to the fair daughter of one of our reduced gentry—or, rather, that she pays court to him. He observes that Benson (do I remember our “scourge of the boll weevil”?) does well enough out of his arsenic licence, and wittily remarks that while he extracts the “cordial” of the mine, Benson extracts the poison. Adds that Benson may be obliged shortly to interrupt his war against the weevil, if the States, as seems almost certain, go to war themselves. Might advise him that at such time it would be opportune to buy back the arsenic rights and thus secure, against future vicissitudes, another basket for his eggs. Might remind him also that Wheal Talbot does not command the richest section of the lode, and he would do well to sink exploratory shafts for tin while there is time and capital. But this perhaps would be only my “circumspection” speaking—who now sees any perils in the copper market?—and I do not wish Liz to suppose that I resent Neale’s success.
But these pages should not be a furtive laboratory in which I analyse my wife. God forbid that she should think that that is the object of these “studies” of mine. Truly I believe that—still—she would never dare touch a single page of these notebooks without my permission. Yet, while I closet myself repeatedly in their fellowship, has she not a right to be jealous?
What would I do without her? What would I have become without her? What price should I not pay not to lose her? I do believe she would forgive and forget all my strange humour of late, if I would only, as she once, so warily, entreated me, call upon my better nature and “be myself again.”
“Better nature”? What, in any of us, is our “better nature”? And what does it mean—is this what we love and respect in each other?—to “be oneself”?
So what are we supposed to believe here? Forget what Matthew, by now an almost confirmed non-believer, believed or didn’t believe. Consider the facts. Matthew left Burlford (and Elizabeth) in July 1860. Under new laws—imagine the Rector’s mortification—Elizabeth obtained a divorce, on grounds of desertion. I am working now from data outside the Notebooks (I have done my background research), which stopped with Matthew’s departure. Elizabeth married James Neale in November 1862. Neale, with his lucrative stake in a copper mine, and something of a charmer, had been on the scene at least since 1856. So what are we supposed to believe? That from 1854 until 1860 Elizabeth held out, the mystified, forbearing, loyal, loving wife, until it was all up? And then, and only then—?
Let’s read between the lines. Let’s be brutal and modern and take apart these precious Notebooks—this precious marriage of Matthew and his Lizzie. Forget his numerous avowals. Forget that last letter from Plymouth. Hogwash! Eyewash! When it comes down to it, Matthew was just another disillusioned idealist, an over-reactive Hamlet type—couldn’t take it that the world was real. See how he lapses into whingeing sentimentality. What price would he not pay not to lose her? But he did lose her. He left her on a July day in 1860. Though she had left him, perhaps, long before that.
And while we’re about it, we may as well ask the big question: which came first—the failed marriage or the ideological anguish? Which would Potter go for in his TV production? The fully licensed historical protagonist? The tortured man of his time? But think of rooms and beds and breakfast tables. (Think of the private life of Michael Potter.) Let’s face it—for at least six years they were in a state of marital shut-down. The good husband confides in his wife. Matthew kept it all to himself. Reason: some day he might just come out of it all, and there would have been no point in telling. But that way he dug a deeper and deeper pit for himself, and when he finally crawled out of it to tell her, can you blame her for feeling cheated—for having already made her contingency plans?
What was she supposed to have done? An Ophelia routine? Talked to the flowers?
So, have I got it all wrong? I invent. I imagine. I want them to have been happy. How do I know they were ever happy
? I make them fall in love at the very first meeting, on a day full of radiant summer sunshine. How do I know it was ever like that? How do I know that the Notebooks, while they offer ample evidence for the collapse of Matthew’s marriage, were not also a desperate attempt to keep alive its myth, and that even when he seems most honest Matthew, with much display of fine feeling, tender conscience and wishful thinking, only beats about the bush of an old, old story?
An old story. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Happens all the time. The way of the world. Even a clergyman’s daughter. Even a Victorian clergyman’s daughter. Così fan tutte (and tutti too). God damn it, it was how you were born.
And Ruth. And Ruth? No, I don’t believe that she ever— But suppose, suppose. In the days before I became her manager. Her minder … The freedoms of these theatrical folk, the way they touch and kiss and hug, and slip in and out of roles … No, I don’t believe she ever really— But what if she had? What if she had? Would she have been someone other than Ruth? People aren’t defined by other people. We have to be ourselves.
Talk to the flowers. My prerogative, here in this garden. There is a buddleia bush, a clump of buddleia bushes, over there at the far end of the herbaceous border, assigned the rather lowly function of screening a compost heap. And buddleia bushes must still have the same properties they had more than a century ago, because even now, even from here, I can see, against the floppy purple flowers, the intermittent wink of tiny wings.
10th July 1857:
The enigmas of our buddleia bush! To which, while this fair and butterfly-breeding weather lasts, my little Lucy—as the butterflies are attracted to the florets—seems irresistibly drawn …
He wrote the Notebooks for me?
Perhaps it was Lucy who persuaded her to keep them. If persuasion were needed. Perhaps it was Lucy who, long before that, persuaded her to keep the clock.
The third (surviving) child, the only daughter, and the youngest. She would have been only seven when the news rocked Burlford. The children, of course, made it worse. How could he do it? His own flesh and blood! The downright perversity of it! He laments the death of one, then abandons the others. He heeds the exhortation of Scripture—“Be fruitful and multiply”—then denies Creation. The man must have been mad. Neale’s verdict, no doubt, and others’—disguised under the easy rant of outraged piety and, in Neale’s case, the rectitude of sexual triumph.
But Neale must have considered what he was taking on. The guardianship, the stepfatherhood of three children, all, presumably, in a distraught state of mind. It says something for the attractions of the former Mrs Pearce that, an unencumbered bachelor up to this point, he should have accepted these charges along with her. And it says something, perhaps, for Neale’s own position on the fruitfulness and multiplication question, or for the scruples of the second-time wife (Elizabeth was thirty-six), that no little Neales issued from his marriage.
I make no glib comparisons. Even though there is an entrepreneurial similarity between James Neale and the late Sam Ellison, and both acquired the waifs of scandal. But, of course, Neale chose. As far as the scandal went, perhaps it redounded to his credit—to be the saviour of this damsel in distress, to step in where that godless wretch had left off. Rich businessmen have a penchant for being judged virtuous; abandoned mothers of three need charity.
Of the Pearce children, both the sons were to throw in their lot with their stepfather and go into copper. No, I make no comparisons. We are talking about real ore hewn from the depths of the earth, not factory-made synthetics (though, as it turned out, John and Christopher might have been better off with the latter). Lucy seems to have made a break from the family, over which, by then, new shadows had fallen, when she married in 1872 and moved to London. Yet she took the clock with her. I know this. It is the fact that Elizabeth decided to give it to her (thus inaugurating a tradition) which makes me think that it was Lucy who perhaps persuaded her to keep it in the first place. And, of course, by that time, by 1872, that gift of the clock would have meant so much more.…
With Lucy, my mother’s reluctant and not necessarily reliable recollections come into play, along with the faint tug of my remote consanguinity with Matthew. For it was Lucy’s daughter, Alice, who in the early years of the century married the talented but ill-starred surgeon, George Rawlinson, inventor of the Rawlinson Forceps, and thus became herself the recipient of the clock. The fact that Lucy chose to pass it on suggests that her own marriage, of which I know very little, may have been a happy affair. All Lucy’s woes, perhaps, lay in the memory of her suddenly blighted childhood and in the tribulations that her own daughter, seemingly so well set up, would bring her. It is strange to think that “little Lucy,” she of the evening gig rides with her father, died only some dozen years before I was born, living long enough to contend with the surgical catastrophe that ended her son-in-law’s career and the ensuing marital débâcle. In fact, it was probably these things that finished her off.
My mother decried her father’s hubristic ambition. But George, perhaps, was only a man who made mistakes. One was that dreadful slip of the scalpel. Another, so it proved, was to have married, in his middle years, a woman substantially younger than himself, with a robust will of her own. It was Lucy’s daughter, Alice, possessor of the nuptial clock, who responded to her husband’s ruin by rapid and brazen flight to the arms of another man—a Latin lover, no less, called Salvatore. Whether this was the expedient of the hour or whether something had been going on for some time already is anybody’s guess. I think my mother’s somewhat unfilial guess would have been for the latter. Poor George really had it coming to him.
We seem to have been this way before. This butterfly love. January and May. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! I do not say that history repeats itself. Or that my mother learnt from her mother’s example. I do not say that the beneficent clock was fast becoming a curse. My grandmother hung on to it, as part of the spoils of divorce, following which event, my mother’s relations with her mother were understandably tenuous. We are moving into that vexed period when my mother (discovering her gift of song) and her brother became unhappy dependants upon my great-uncle Ratty’s grudging and tortuous whims—while my unrepentant grandmother seemed to be having a high old time, much of it cheerfully out of the country, in such places as Monte Carlo and Capri. Remarkably, my mother seems never to have held this against her. Perhaps it secretly inspired her. And, indeed, the runaway Alice showed up, at least, for her daughter’s wedding (to the consternation, I can imagine, of the stiff and military bridegroom)—which is how my mother became the next proprietor of the clock.
As for the Notebooks, I don’t know if they came from Lucy to my mother via George (and/or Ratty) or via my grandmother. In any case, it’s plain that they were simultaneously preserved and overlooked. I can’t imagine they would have been of vital interest to Alice, while Uncle Ratty would have dismissed them as having nothing to do with the Ralegh hypothesis. But I can envisage my grandfather, man of science, after all, grey-matter specialist, being strangely drawn in his last, lonely, woebegone years (what am I saying?) to Matthew’s sceptical lucubrations.
I don’t know if my grandmother turned up also for my christening (that dubious ceremony). I suspect not. At any rate, she was never to be a presence in my life. Two years after my birth and only some two years before my uncle Jim met his end (yes, death sometimes comes a-knocking with a vengeance), she and her erstwhile lover, now husband of some years, died simultaneously in a car accident on the corniche road of the Cote d’Azur (“Tragic, sweetie, but a stylish way to go”). One should resist the thought that my grandfather may then have settled more easily in his own grave. One should resist these poetic pay-offs, these dramatic strokes and flourishes. Life isn’t a theatre, is it? Life is a back-stage business. A struggle for existence.
But to return to the West Country and the mid-1860s. It is clear from Matthew’s farewell letter from Plymouth that the days of the “Kingdom of Copper” were numbered. Matthew had been right. Nea
le should have hedged his commercial bets. It seems that scarcely had the Pearce brothers been co-opted into the mining business by their stepfather than the copper market, booming for some twenty years, fell crashing around them. Neale never bought back his arsenic licence and, having pushed the boat out to impress and provide for his new wife (I imagine some white-fronted villa, a gravel sweep, a backdrop of dark, shielding trees), must have thrown himself on Benson’s mercy. Benson, we may take it, weathered the interruption of the American Civil War, which, while it reduced the human population, presumably allowed boll-weevils to thrive. He must have looked smugly yet pityingly on Neale. What saved them all, as it saved many an ailing copper mine, must have been arsenic. They were kept alive by poison.
I know little of the subsequent history of the Wheal Talbot mine. My mother, speaking out of the dim recesses of family lore, never used that name and only referred to it contemptuously—as if her great-uncles, Lucy’s brothers, were never more than doomed adherents to a lost cause (crazed, unshaven prospectors)—as “some wretched little tin mine in Cornwall.” My mother was capable of getting facts wrong. But I like to think that in that confusion of metals there was a degree of truth. That the brothers recalled their father’s insistence that tin deposits almost certainly lay beneath the Wheal Talbot copper and that Neale should dig for it while he could. Did they miss their father—his sound surveyor’s advice, his nose for geology, his feel for the secrets of the earth?
But if they found tin they would not have enjoyed its benefit for long. Tin was to crash in the early Nineties. Even arsenic slumped at the turn of the century. Wheal Talbot was abandoned. Elizabeth Neale, formerly Pearce, née Hunt, and by this time a widow, died in 1906, unaided by poison, but assisted, quite possibly, by the gall of memory: those days at Burlford; those days of honey and constancy, when this world, this other world of deceitful metal, lay all beyond the hill.
