by Graham Swift
And the Rector? The would-be missionary who had come to a quiet Devon valley, seen the village, the church and the rectory and seen that they were good, and seen as the only shadow upon a comfortable living the onus of being an Anglican cleric in Methodist-infiltrated territory, could little have guessed at the changes he would witness in these seemingly unchangeable surroundings. That the little nearby town of Tavistock would become, depending on how you looked at it, a modern Eldorado, a satanic gambling-den in which the stakes were dividends and miners’ bellies—a crowded enclave of avid, abused humanity. That in his old age it would be part of his pastoral charge—the would-be missionary indeed—to visit the dismal hovels of the starving and cholera-ridden.
Did his fears persist of that undermined world, waiting to collapse into infernal darkness? Did he have thoughts akin to Matthew’s?
19th March 1856:
These toiling masses of our mine-workers trouble me. Because in the habitat of their workplace they do indeed appear as so many termites labouring in the dark and occupying a literal subexistence, we convert the appearance into substance. But by what perverted definition of common humanity do we pronounce that they are brutes and not we?
And what, in the end, would he have judged to have been worse? His son-in-law’s defection to the forces of godlessness? Or his daughter’s rush—with his blessing, oh yes, with his politic blessing at the time—into the arms of Mammon, that false god that it was his duty to denounce in his sermons?
And what comfort had it brought her?
This search for buried treasure. This fever of the mines. The hills and vales of the south-west are still, apparently, sprinkled with the forlorn chimneys, the ruined engine-houses and overgrown waste-heaps of old mines. With the wind sighing around them, they have acquired, no doubt, a soulful effect, like the rusting hulks of old locomotives.
This alchemical quest to turn base metals into pocketable gold. This search, if not for the real thing, then for the substitute thing, the thing that, perhaps, will do just as well. The money. The money. First copper, then tin. Then—O heir of the Ellisons! O fully lifelike model fresh from the factory of the dead!—plastic.
And Matthew? And Matthew—gone on his soulless way? Throughout these years—or for part of them—in which the market in ore peaked then fell, we must assume he was living in Launceston, where he ministered to the ailing John Pearce and weaned him off the bottle. A Christian enough picture for a man who had forsaken Christianity. Did he attempt to revive his father’s neglected clock-making business? Did he—could he?—practise still as a surveyor? Did he endure a barrage of gossip, both on his father’s account and on account of his former, dissolved marriage; and did his father, who at one time, in his cups, had rebuked his son for not having become a famous man, ever chuckle over the rueful joke that at least they were reunited, now, in mutual ignominy?
He never wrote another word in the Notebooks. Not one word. But he preserved them. Why? Did he ever show them to his father? No, I think not. Not to the man who had once kept him ruthlessly at his school books and who only in his last hours yielded up a supposedly lost Bible. They both had things, this father and son, they thought it best to keep from each other.
And when John Pearce, creator of the original, ticking wedding gift, breathed his last, Matthew kept the Bible, as well as the Notebooks. Both were with him when he wound up his affairs in Launceston and travelled to Plymouth, thence to voyage to the New World. Then on that last night, as the Atlantic drizzle drenched Plymouth, he sent the Notebooks to Elizabeth, but held on to the Bible.
Question: did she or didn’t she—with Neale, even before that afternoon of the bees? The birds and the bees. Question: did she stop loving him, as (so she believed, let’s suppose) he had stopped loving her? Or did she love him still, even as the price of copper plummeted, even as Matthew looked his last on England?
Forget the other stuff. Stick to the love-interest. The ever-popular love-interest. What the audience wants. When all is said and done and the meaning of the universe has been fully squeezed dry, Hamlet sees Laertes usurping Ophelia’s grave (these dramatic strokes), picks a fight with him, spikes himself on a rapier and so achieves in the heat of the hour what he might have achieved, with a bare bodkin, after much exhausting philosophical deliberation. Matthew quits Burlford, to return to his birthplace. And Elizabeth quits Burlford, to marry into copper. Years later, she receives a package.
She kept them. (What did she do—hide them from Neale?) She kept them, persuaded or not by Lucy. And kept the letter too. Would she have replied? But he left no forwarding address. He wished to disappear. And he did, he did. So would she have kept them anyway, or was it only that other news, that would have reached her not long afterwards—news not from but of her former husband—that decided her?
For the bare fact is—I have done my additional research: a simple matter of consulting shipping registers—her former husband never reached the New World. The Juno went down on 14th April 1869 in a storm some miles west of the Scillies (what final terror, or acceptance? what revelations, confirmations—wrenched-out prayers?); and among the list of those who perished was Matthew Pearce, surveyor, of Launceston.
But there he sits, for now, on terra firma, in terra cognita, pen in hand, in his lodgings in Plymouth. The rain, a gentle, enclosing rain with no hint of fury to come, patters at the window and induces in him seafaring, far-ranging, spacious thoughts. By the light of the oil-lamp, he fills the page, as once he filled so many pages in his study at Burlford. This need to write it down. To describe it, to know it: this strange land of the living. He describes the rain. He describes the gaggles of displaced miners who mill round Plymouth in the spring of 1869. He says he will go to take one last look at Brunel’s bridge. Memories, and memories of memories, flood in.
A New World. A new life—a new name. Forget it all. Start again. Is it possible? There will always be what remains. He loved her. He wrote it down: that flimsy, romantic thing, a love letter. And Elizabeth? She kept the letter, she kept the Notebooks. She loved him still.
19
I have dipped into Darwin. It’s heavy going. The prose thick, grey and formidable, like porridge. It is hard to see in this sober stodge the bombshell which tore apart Matthew’s life and horrified Victorian society. Perhaps this proves Darwin’s point. Species adapt. Yesterday’s cataclysm is today’s absorbed fact. Yet it is equally hard to see, behind these plodding, scrupulous, epoch-making words, the man who wrote them. To picture the young Charles Darwin who set sail one day from Plymouth just as Matthew did, though this would have been nearly forty years before, when Matthew was only a boy of twelve, trying to absorb the recent cataclysm of his mother’s death. And the voyage was somewhat longer.
New worlds. New life. Matthew perished barely a day from port. Darwin returned, safe and sound, after five years’ roving, with the inklings of a new picture of the universe.
So was he the adventurous sort? A budding Sir Walter? Hardly. Seasick, it seems, all the time. And comes back not exactly with a booty of rattling yarns. But not, at one time at least, such a dull swot either. A dab-hand with a shot-gun. Footloose, outdoor type. His father, alarmed at his son’s idle ways, steered him first, abortively, towards medicine, then, of all things, towards the Church.
Was there a compartment in Darwin’s later fully freighted mind—a subsection of his own Theory of Natural Selection—which gave due consideration to the question of how individuals who undertake momentous undertakings—are selected? Did he ever ask: but why me? Why me? The captain of the Beagle, an amateur phrenologist, nearly rejected Darwin as a suitable shipmate on account of the shape of his nose. And it is a well-recorded fact that the great Theory, some twenty years in the forming, was only rushed into publication because someone else—a fellow called Wallace—seemed to have got hold of the same idea. Were it not for the mutual reasonableness of the two parties (not typical, I can vouch, of your rival men of learning) and for the fact that Wallace was
tied up at the time in the Celebes, we might have had Wallace’s Theory of Natural Selection—Wallacism, Wallacists and Neo-Wallacists.
But what’s in a name?
So what became of the feckless duck-shooter (and prospective priest)? He signs on, more by chance than design, as naturalist with the Beagle. Voyages for five years to the far corners of the earth. Then ends up a studious and sickly recluse, writing endless notes in a house in Kent. So, he had seen the world? The rest was contemplation? To challenge the universe from a house in Kent!
No, not the adventurous sort. A sufferer, most of his life from mysterious, possibly psychosomatic ailments. And hardly one of your showmen among men of genius. No top hat, cigar and thumb poked in waistcoat pocket. The frontispiece of my copy of The Origin of Species, a late-Victorian edition published within ten years of Darwin’s death, shows a brooding, oracular figure, all flowing beard and thought-furrowed brow, seated on a rickety wicker chair. He looks like the original Hoary Sage. He looks a miserable old codger.
So did he want fame? Was it important, after all, that it was his name on the bombshell? He always maintained that he worked only for the elucidation of truth. Witness those years of painstaking toil before he was finally induced to publish. Did he reflect on the desirability of the elucidation of truth? Did he consider what the effect might be on lesser mortals (was he some greater mortal?) like Matthew Pearce? On the big question, the God question, he seems to have maintained—this one-time candidate for orders—a careful reticence, a curiously bland open-mindedness, an obtuse bewilderment. Reading Darwin, you sometimes get the feeling that the man was—dim. It was not his business to settle questions of final causes; it was his business only (only!) to elucidate the truth.
And where did it get him, this devotion to the truth? A gnarled and lugubrious septuagenarian in his creaking wicker chair, author of hundreds of pages of meticulous, fatiguing, world-shattering prose.
I pick at the Journal (this magpie scholarship), struggle with the Origin, home in on the letters and the Autobiography. There is a passage in the latter where the author laments the gradual loss of all taste for poetry, likewise, virtually, for music, painting and fine scenery, and speculates (ever the man of science) on what has caused the atrophy of the relevant parts of the brain. Is he trying to tell us something? In 1858, the year before the Origin appeared, and before, presumably, the “atrophy” set in, he wrote, while on one of his numerous “cures” in the country, to Mrs D. (with whom, by the way, there was never a rupture, and with whom, for all his ill health and monumental toil, he begat seven children):
The weather is quite delicious. Yesterday, after writing to you, I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half and enjoyed myself—the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as I ever saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.
These great men of ideas, they get turned themselves into ideas. So Darwin becomes a kind of abstract condition, a sort of irrevocable tinge that settled on the world around the middle of the nineteenth century. The world before Darwin, the world after Darwin. Who thinks of Darwin the man? Was he a man or a mind? Who thinks of Newton the man? Save, of course, to picture him in that legendary reverie, not unlike Darwin’s idyll (Darwin in nature’s playground!), ensconced beneath an apple tree—a reverie shattered by the Law of Gravity. The apple, of course, provides a resonantly Edenesque touch. These men of knowledge. These meddlers with the universe. Darwin, they say, was the Newton of biology. If Darwin was the Newton of biology, then Einstein was the Darwin of physics.
In the red-brick village of Aldermaston, there used to be a little tea-shop, of the welcoming but unassuming kind (a cool, oaky demureness, even on a hot summer’s day) now virtually vanished from rural England; and there, one day in the first summer of peace, my mother took me and told me about the William’s pear.
We must have come in the new Armstrong-Siddeley: one of her madcap drives—hands fluttering over the steering-wheel—through pulsing tunnels of trees, hazy troughs of heat and the dry, ropey smell of harvest time. I don’t remember if we stopped on the railway bridge—completing that child’s encyclopaedia picture—to watch a train billow through beneath us. And I still don’t know (I certainly didn’t know then) whether this outing to Aldermaston held for her some special, extra frisson. But I remember the blatant fact that as we took our tea (lemonade for me) the top three buttons of her blouse were undone—there was a little sheen of sweat at the base of her throat—and I remember thinking (the first time, perhaps, I had had such thoughts) that this fact was not only remarkably compelling in itself but also remarkably complex, fraught with unsteadying repercussions, such as: did she know that the buttons were undone, and if she did, why didn’t she do anything about it? And was it more proper for me, as a gentleman, to point out this little omission or to say nothing?
The blouse was cream silk (even in those war-pinched days). A white strap, thin and shiny like a ribbon and lifting from her skin where it crossed her collar-bone, was visible. The just discernible fringe of the garment to which it belonged had a filigree tenuosity, curiously evocative of the doily that bore our angel cake and macaroons.
Who now connects Aldermaston with the William’s pear, first produced there in seventeen hundred and something by a local schoolmaster? But in those days it was one of Aldermaston’s little claims to fame and it was the done thing, in season—and this year they had ripened early—to buy them while you were there. My mother had bought two (“a pair of pears”), wrapped in a brown paper bag, and, for some reason, over our sticky and crumb-strewn tea plates, she chose to give a brief lecture on the local genesis of this distinguished fruit.
At that time (aged eight-and-a-half) I had no conception that pears might be made. As far as I was concerned, they grew on trees. And I couldn’t tell a William’s from a Conference or a Comice—I am still hazy on such things. But my mother, who was no doubt proud of her little scrap of knowledge and who would now and then have this curious urge to be my instructress, took it upon herself to enlighten me.
And yet—do I remember this correctly?—having launched eagerly into her subject (I picture the old schoolmaster as rather like the rector of Burlford—with one it was bees, with the other, fruit propagation), she drew herself up suddenly on the brink of a tricky discourse on cross-fertilization, and said, “Oh well, never mind.” Perhaps I had protestingly voiced my thought—“But pears can’t be made!”—and she had said, “Oh yes, they can!” At any rate, she cut short the lecture. Then she proposed that we eat our pears.
It was, of course, the riddle of hybrids and cross-breeds that set the Sage of Kent thinking.
Outside, the afternoon was a hot, chalky glare. A canvas awning kept it at bay. An arc of black lettering on the window, above the little skirt of lace curtaining, proclaimed in reverse the name, which I forget, of the premises within. Spoons clinked. A fly-paper twirled slowly beneath the ceiling. Doubtless, there were other tea-takers at other tables and, doubtless, there was some bustling proprietress with a sugary smile, and a flustered teenage waitress. I don’t know—why should I have noticed?—if any of them were giving my mother looks. I don’t know if she still had, in the reckoning of country villages with limited horizons but long memories, a certain reputation.…
And only now does an extraordinary thing occur to me. I can pinpoint, after all, the date and the purpose of this little jaunt exactly. My father (let me call him that) was, as he had been for most of that summer, away. Some of the wartime secrecy of his whereabouts had been lifted and I knew for a fact that he had gone to Washington.
Not that this meant much to me. I now recall an e
arlier and more ambitious lecture of my mother’s, which aimed at nothing less than a brief history of the world, or at least the New World, a concept quite beyond me, since I was still at that stage of infancy (Paris would end it) when I vaguely suspected that the existence of foreign countries was a clever adult fiction. Washington, apparently, was called Washington because of George Washington, who had made America American. But, before that, America had belonged to us—it was really British. There was also something, to add to the confusion, about a cherry tree. These great men and their trees.
August 1945. August 5. It was my mother’s birthday. That was the point of this tea-time excursion. I was “taking her to tea.” My father was in Washington, and it was my mother’s birthday; and, as it was her birthday, there was a chance he might telephone at any moment. Think of that—a phone call all the way from America. (But would that prove—I was sceptical—that America really existed?)
By lunchtime no phone call had come (my scepticism increased). But apparently there was still plenty of time. You had to remember that over there they were only just having breakfast. A likely story. Perhaps she saw my disbelief, and perhaps rose to the challenge of another lecture—but thought twice about it. Waving the whole matter aside, she said, “But what a gorgeous day! Where are you going to take your mother for her birthday treat?”
The past, they say, is a foreign country, and I fictionalize (perhaps) these memories of that afternoon. But then my mother is dead. With all the others. She doesn’t exist. And fiction is what doesn’t exist. Did she really, right there and then in the tea-shop, hold up before her by its stalk her William’s pear, as if inviting me to snatch it, or as if she might suddenly let it fall? A small age seemed to pass in which it dangled between us, like a hypnotist’s watch, and in which my mother, her eyes swimming in and out of focus, seemed like a woman I was just beginning to know.
