Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  ‘Obligated, sir,’ said one of these cronies, from the front row of seats.

  ‘Obligated?’

  ‘It’s what the Americans say, sir. It’s what my brother says they say,’ the student said, drawing himself up a little. ‘He’s an attorney, sir, in Philadelphia.’

  ‘Oh, an attorney, who is obligated from afar to correct my English,’ Patrick told him drily, and the class laughed. ‘Well, there you are now. Well, boys, I’m obligated to give you the other side of the story. Listen up, Mr Porter, you’ll like this.’

  And he told them. About the privileges accorded explorers down the years. To shed experiences as rapidly as they are acquired. To move on, to have others enter the space that has been created, in order to set this new world to rights. To allow horror and degradation to ensue: think, he told them, of the history of America in the aftermath of the Mayflower’s arrival on the scene. Think of the Vikings landing on Irish shores, the Spaniards coming upon the Incas, the British arrival in Tasmania and the Maori arrival in a pristine, pre-human New Zealand.

  ‘Think of my own Cook,’ he told them scrupulously, ‘and think about the diseases they unleashed.’

  ‘Diseases, sir?’ They liked this bit.

  ‘Smallpox, boys, running from island to island, and killing everyone in its tracks. No immunity, you see: they died like flies.’ He didn’t mention syphilis: he didn’t want any parents to hear that he had been lecturing their Catholic boys about stuff like that. He hoped they’d cotton on by themselves. ‘Think of the deluge,’ he said – and he thought suddenly about the deluge, about Robert and Margaret; about the flood that runs across the fields when a sea wall breaks.

  He swayed on his feet: paused for a moment, the boys eyeing him. But no: he was well trained; he kept his talk, cool, cold. He kept his composure.

  Better, he understood already, to be a pond-skater. It did less damage. In his fantasy life, he could continue to skate and watch and observe. To experience perfection; to do no more harm to anyone.

  ‘So, what happened to Captain Cook, sir?’

  Porter was looking – sly. Knowing, literally. Though, how would he know? Why ever would a Derry schoolboy know about the fate of Captain Cook?

  ‘I mean, did he –’

  ‘Live to a ripe old age?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No, Mr Porter, that he definitely didn’t.’

  This advantage Patrick was able to wield over some of the great explorers: he kept his distance. Unlike his favourite: James Cook, clubbed to death and then filleted on a beach in Hawaii. His mistake? – getting too involved. He ought to have kept his distance and kept his head, sailed away and stayed away – and then he might have kept himself whole and lived to enjoy a hearty Yorkshire retirement.

  ‘So I suppose the moral of the story, boys, is – what?’

  The boys looked at him. They were thinking, presumably, about being filleted, and what that would feel like.

  ‘Mind your own business, boys, of course.’

  *

  That same summer – mere weeks later – he went to New Zealand. Partly, in fact, to check out Cook’s stamping grounds, his base at Ship Cove: this was the official reason he gave, in fact, to his family. To Sarah, who looked sour and disapproving, who complained about the extravagance, the expense.

  ‘Wouldn’t Spain do you? Half of Derry goes to Spain in July – but oh no, you have to go to the other side of the world.’

  ‘Not every summer I don’t, Ma. You make it sound like it’s an annual event.’

  She pursed her lips and seemed to withdraw her head into the folds of her latest scarf like a tortoise into its shell.

  Not any summer, he ought to have said – but his mother had a humiliating knack of silencing him, even now in his thirties.

  ‘Good for you,’ Margaret told him over the phone. Her voice held its now habitual bleak tones. ‘Good for you. Why not. Any other news?’

  Yes, he wanted to say. I want to put half a planet between me and Derry, Ireland, the whole damn place. I have had enough, at least for the time being: enough of my family, of grey streets and obstreperous students, of the present – and of history, of the past, and of my conscience, most of all.

  ‘No, not really. You?’

  A pause. ‘No.’

  ‘How’s Robert?’

  Another pause.

  ‘He’s not doing so well, actually. But so what?’

  Yes: so what?

  July was winter, of course, in the southern hemisphere: not that he minded that; and the New Zealand weather stayed reasonable. Patrick travelled the length of the two islands, staying in youth hostels as he went – aware that he was the object of compassion on the part of young, unwashed fellow travellers, some of whom liked to ask kindly questions of this solitary guy rattling around the communal kitchen, and to regale him with their take on Sri Lanka, on Malaysia, and (to shock) on the drug scene in Thailand, in other places. ‘Man!’ they would say, scratching their on-the-road beards and hippy braids.

  Patrick only wanted to read and be left alone: but he felt obliged – ‘obligated!’ said a voice from the recent past – to listen to them. Of course he knew he could press the off button and cause them to beat a retreat at any moment, simply by informing them that he was a schoolteacher. In their juvenile minds, teachers and the FBI were clearly synonymous.

  Towards the end of his visit – thoughts already tilting back towards lesson plans and staff training days – he fetched up at Picton, and took a launch out to Ship Cove. What to expect? – he hardly knew, though he was pleased with what he found: a curving bay of deep, green water, a beach of white sand; and on either side of the beach the dark New Zealand bush growing down to the edge of the sea. He took the path that led from the cove to the heights above and looked back and down and drank in the landscape and seascape: all green points of land and serpentine fiords – and this little silent cove of deep water in the middle of it all. And he the only visitor that day and apart from the little jetty and a plaque, there was no sign at all of human intervention in the landscape. Entirely alone: and that pleased him most of all.

  He remembered this now: now, lying in his blue hospital bed. The afternoon was darkening and there had been no visitors and the pain for a moment was not so very bad: and he was able, he had the liberty, to think a little. To take stock of memories of air and light, to think of colours and textures, gleaming gemstones stitched to the fabric of his life.

  What had he felt, there on that silent beach, on the dense, bush-clad hill above? He felt the sheer fact of the distance from home: this was mind-boggling and wonderful in itself. He felt a sense of space in his head for the first time in years, because the life that crowded him in at home was now, suddenly, sloughed off – sloughed off, shrugged off into deep, cold New Zealand waters. He felt he might be in with a chance of washing himself clean there, far from home. To step away from involvement in the lives and deaths of other people.

  Patrick had imagined it was too late for him to learn this lesson – the one he ought to have learned long ago. Sitting by Ship Cove that day, though, he knew he would never forget it again. He thought about what had happened to Captain Cook: killed, filleted for the crime of getting too involved. He thought: look what happened to Cook – and look what happened to me. He thought: from now on, I’ll keep my distance.

  And then the launch returned, and he clambered on board and was brought back to Picton.

  All of which meant that a little corner of this tapestry would be stitched and coloured and emblazoned in green and blue: in the dark green of the New Zealand bush, and the cold green and profound blue of its sea, and the wake of a little white boat puttering across the Sounds. Nobody else will understand it, he thought: nobody else was there; this will be my story alone. Private history. Nobody there to report on the meteorological conditions, on the views of the sea, on the sounds of the bush. Nobody in the whole world, for those few hours, but me.

  The relief of it.
And the understanding that a new chapter might, tentatively, have begun.

  He returned home now – and a year or so later came the diagnosis. This had been cruel, it felt cruel still, to be left with a series of might-have-beens.

  Patrick moved a little in his blue bed. Time had run out, instead.

  *

  The bush was silent. Midday, and warm for the time of year, and Patrick shed his coat, his hat, his scarf. The sound of the departing launch faded and he was left in deep silence.

  Earlier, lying in his bunk in the hostel, he had listened to the cacophonous birdsong of New Zealand, sounding through the bush which hemmed in the little town. Not a bird he could recognise. It came to him, then, that Cassie might have known. Some of them, anyway: not the native ones, but the others, brought here long ago from Europe. She knew about such things, though he had never bothered to learn from her.

  Now, standing on the sand at Ship Cove, the birds had fallen silent; and the sun, winter-low in the northern sky, glared on the water.

  He was here to see for himself. To feel for himself: this blessed isolation, this aloneness that was the opposite of loneliness; this self-containment, he thought, that for these few hours was his alone, to be grasped and cherished. He stood by the water’s edge, on this beach that was once the centre of the world for a ship’s company – each member of which was busily hacking, hammering, stewing and provisioning – and which was now deeply silent and private. The sand ran down rapidly into deep, green water: memories of other waters, other beaches came to him and were thrust away. This is mine, he thought: this moment belongs to me. Not hedged in or elbowed or crowded by anyone else. Not compromised by one’s own grievous mistakes and sins, or those of others – but instead, a semblance of independence and peace, to keep hold of for as long as may be.

  He turned from the water and up the beach and onto the trail that tracked up the hill, deep into the bush. He walked slowly uphill, feeling the muscles working in the backs of his legs, feeling fit; I’m young still, he thought, though he puffed a little, his face reddening as he climbed. Soon enough, he reached a saddle: the path levelled off and then began to fall away; through the thick growth, he watched it fall and in the distance begin again to climb, following the beautiful contours of the land. No further. He looked back: the ground dropped away steeply back down into deep water; and there was the cove behind and below him, the jetty, the white sand with no tracks on it today but those he himself made. He laughed: Crusoe, he thought, how are you?

  Of course he had grabbed at a sense of perspective before now: grasped at a long view back over the landscape of his life. From time to time he had attained this perspective. Naturally: time and experience ensure this. But now he was aware of a ringing clarity: and aware too that he had been obliged to put some physical distance between himself and this still-unfolding life in order to attain this clarity.

  The lesson? Well, he thought, I know the lesson: never again to take on the affairs of others – their violence, their guilt and aggression. Their swaying, flailing emotions.

  Never, never again, he thought. He looked straight down, to this hillside plunging into deep water. He thought: I might wash myself clean, here. I might be reborn.

  *

  One of the points Patrick liked to make in class – though there were so many, and he was aware that some of them didn’t quite hit the mark – was to do with the trickery of history. These people stalking through history, who knows what they thought? What they imagined and dreamed? ‘How can we tell, boys? Our arrogance in making assumptions about these things: we can extrapolate, that’s all, but we can never really know, can we?’

  The boys sighed.

  He thought about the Spanish sailors on that Armada ship, long ago: what did they think as they came ashore, or as they felt themselves drowning in cold Irish seas? What did they say? Nobody could say – though it was easy enough to guess. ‘They cried for their mothers,’ he told the students, ‘didn’t they?’ The boys shifted uneasily: this was too emotional. Though probably true. ‘And what else? They cursed their leaders, the Protestant English Queen, the weather; and they prayed to their Catholic God.’

  This was more like it – the cursing, the Protestants; the boys perked up. ‘And what about all those others – those men in those armies, those women nursing, those camp followers, following a leader around the world? What did they think, how did they feel?’ Sometimes they leave letters and journals behind, he told them, if it so happens that they could read and write; usually, though, we never know. ‘We have to be watchful around history,’ he said. Narrow our eyes, and read between the lines.

  He gave one of the nurses a little lecture on historical context, when she came in to plump up the pillows the other day. Or last week. Poor nurse.

  *

  ‘And this one?’ asked the nurse. Good to have this young fella – God love him – nice and chatty; and she gestured at the latest card pinned to the corkboard on the wall, she peered. ‘The white cliffs of Dover, is what it looks like.’

  There was a pause. He seemed to fade, right there in front of her.

  ‘Something like that.’ He closed his eyes briefly, opened them again.

  ‘Were you there?’ the nurse asked. She glanced surreptitiously at her watch.

  ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ he said, and closed his eyes again.

  *

  A painting: a nineteenth-century painting by William Dyce that he saw once. Pegwell Bay; he saw it in the Tate once on a trip across the water, and it cast a spell on him, being at once serene, and yet full of unease and doubt and fear. Pegwell Bay: it portrayed the white chalk cliffs near Dover, and though he was not English – not at all English – he knew about these cliffs. They were a comfort to the English; they enfolded the English in a warm embrace of happy, supreme insularity. In front of these cliffs the painting showed a family group – actually the Dyce family itself: a father, a mother, a child Dyce; even an aunt or two. But the family, he saw, was spread out thinly across the landscape, and nobody was looking at each other: instead, one figure looked one way and another figure looked another way, the beach was otherwise empty and vast, terribly so, and all the while a comet streaked silently across the sky.

  Margaret stood beside him, chafing, silent. They were in the middle of a quarrel.

  Patrick stood there in that splendid room in the Tate and looked at the painting for a long time. He knew a little about Victorian art. Dyce, he knew, was a bit of a Christian – lots of Madonnas and Children stuffed into his portfolios – but he was also a bit of an amateur scientist, a geologist, an astronomer. He settled on Pegwell Bay because this stretch of the Kent coast was falling into the sea, eroding year by year, exposing fresh gleaming-white chalk all the while; the beach in this painting was strewn with fallen rocks and debris. He settled on the comet because comets always prophecy Doom. And he settled on his anxious figures because he was living through an anxious time, with Darwin and evolution nibbling away at all those high Victorian certainties: God was suddenly more dead than alive, and his compatriots were spending their weekends at the seaside, slung about with hammers and magnifying glasses, poking around looking for the very fossils which proved – yes, that Darwin was right and the Church wrong.

  Patrick stood in the echoing gallery, and thought about all this. So much context. He stood longer than he would normally have stood – deliberately, to annoy his sister.

  Poor Dyce, he thought. What could he do? – well, the only thing he could do was to go off and execute in oils a painting about context. It made him feel better: it got it all out of his system, and then he could go back to his Madonnas, feeling Godly and secure once more. Fair enough, Patrick thought – and then they went off to the gift shop, and he bought a postcard of the painting.

  ‘Can we go now?’

  ‘If you like.’

  They left the gallery and headed up Millbank, walking briskly east towards Westminster.

  ‘History�
��s a man’s game, don’t you agree?’

  Margaret flashed him a glance. ‘Shut up,’ she said – or rather shouted, over the din of a diesel-scented London bus rasping by.

  His father had told him about the Spanish Armada as they drove out and across the border into Donegal that day. Told him – not Margaret, history being a man’s world – as they drove up the hill and down again to Kinnagoe. He sketched in a little context, and his son’s imagination did the rest. The galleons and supposed treasure chests, the winter storm and the foundering ship, the waiting locals and the drowning men, Philip of Spain in his castle and Elizabeth of England in hers: what a context.

  Clang, clang. The bell began to toll in its belfry across the garden. Home time for the boys, though not for Patrick. He was clinging on for dear life.

  *

  Characters being outlined, he thought. Using one of those soft, black pencils that roughens, thickens their edges; and crumbling, waxy crayons.

  In black and white: yes, he thought; some of them. Like the medieval morality plays we studied in university: not to my taste, then, but I can appreciate now the starkness of them, their love of allegory and metaphor. He shifted in the bed: they needed to come to him soon, to do their rounds, to turn him; he was almost past turning himself. In his mind’s eye, he roughed in his Robert: his medieval Robert, surrounded by shadows and ivies. His mother, in deceptive pastels; and his father in darks and greys, sensible colours; and Cassie in – pale blues and greys, perhaps. Margaret, caught in a snare of ivy, creeping and binding her feet.

  And what about me? He thought: how do I appear? I’m tumbling down the pecking order: that much is clear. They are making it clear – here in this place. The other day he remembered the impatient someone, a brisk and unsmiling nurse on the bustle in the room, her patience a little stretched. It was, after all, one of his good days.

  So she put him in his place. They slapped each other roundly for a few minutes; but she put him in his place.

  ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘On duty again, Samantha?’ He said, ‘Don’t they ever give you a day off, to go back to that farm of yours?’