by Jem Poster
‘If you’d prefer to sleep a little longer, sir …’
‘Thank you, Latham, but I have matters to attend to. Is there any post?’
‘No, sir, but an odd thing …’ He set down the ewer, fumbled in his pocket and produced, with as much of a flourish as his stiff joints allowed, my silver cigarette case. ‘From the garden. The girl found it by the flowerbed when she arrived for her duties this morning. And one of the lamps out there too, smashed to smithereens. I thought the house must have been burgled – there’s a pane broken in the study – but we’ve gone over the downstairs rooms from end to end, and there’s no sign anything’s been so much as breathed on.’
‘No, it was a matter of far less consequence – just a few lads up from the village looking for mischief. One of them shied a stone through the window and when I gave chase I stumbled and fell. No great harm done, though I imagine the flowerbed may be looking a little the worse for wear.’
‘Your smoking-jacket too, sir – caked with mud. I’ll have it seen to.’ He placed the cigarette case gently on the bedside table and reached the jacket down from the back of the door. ‘Look at this,’ he said, lifting the sleeve between finger and thumb and holding up the filthy underside for my inspection. There was a hint of reproach in his voice, as though I were still the troublesome child he had once had to swab down in the stableyard after a wet afternoon’s fossil-hunting in the local quarry.
‘Get Mrs Garrett to attend to it after breakfast.’ I eased myself gingerly up the bed and leaned back against the headboard. ‘And I’d be grateful if you’d ask the girl to make arrangements for the reglazing when she returns to the village. I have business in London and I don’t expect to be back before Friday.’
Latham stepped over to the window and drew back the curtains. I leaned forward, swivelling towards the light, and the pain flared again, making me grimace and catch my breath. He returned to my bedside and stared down at me, his thin face creased with concern. ‘With respect, sir, I think you should postpone your journey. You don’t look fit to travel.’
‘I’m well enough. Perhaps a little more shaken by my fall than I’d thought.’
‘If you’d like me to send for Dr Griffiths—’
‘There’s no need. I shall leave immediately after breakfast.’
‘You’ll miss the early train, sir.’
‘Then I shall take the next.’
‘If you insist, sir.’ He draped my jacket carefully over his forearm and withdrew without another word.
My uncle’s house was barely fifteen minutes’ walk from my hotel, but my leg was aching and the sky threatened rain, and it seemed sensible to take a cab. The city, I thought, as we bowled down Tottenham Court Road, was even more crowded and more frenetically busy than I remembered, and I was glad when the cab swung off down Bedford Avenue and into the quieter reaches of Bloomsbury.
The exterior of the house gave little indication of my uncle’s wealth and status. Less recently painted than either of its immediate neighbours, it seemed to give off a faint air of gloom although, looking up as I stepped down from the cab, I could see the soft flicker of firelight reflected from the ceiling of a first-floor room. I paid the driver, limped up the front steps and rang the bell, hearing its muffled clang reverberating upward from some basement room or passage.
My uncle Joshua – my father’s younger brother – was a banker by profession, but had accumulated most of his considerable fortune through shrewd investment in land and housing on the northern fringe of the expanding city. More successful than my father, he was also generally reckoned to be appreciably less scrupulous. A vicious scoundrel, my mother once called him in the course of an ill-tempered conversation with my father as we awaited his arrival one summer afternoon, and I remember very clearly the shock of her uncharacteristically scathing judgement, as well as the subsequent loosening of a family connection I had imagined, in my childish innocence, to be unshakeable. My uncle was never, I think, barred from the house, but he must have recognised at some point that he was unwelcome there. At all events, some time around my sixteenth year his visits ceased altogether.
Yet this sketch, I realise, misses the essential point. For, whatever else he may have been, my uncle was also the man who fanned to a flame my childhood interest in the natural world, taking me with him on his long, meandering excursions, answering my incessant questions with genuine erudition and exemplary patience, revealing what lay hidden behind the dazzling surfaces of things. I can see him now, twisting back a spray of privet to show me the hawk-moth larva clasping the stem, or withdrawing from the dark interior of a hawthorn hedge the pale, translucent egg of a linnet.
For two or three years after he had ceased to visit, we maintained a regular correspondence. I remember the impatience, faintly tinged with guilt, with which I used to wait for his long, detailed letters – meticulous descriptions of specimens newly received from collectors in remote regions, affectionate recollections of our own excursions and general advice more accessible and more pertinent than any I can recall hearing from my father. And my replies were equally warm and full, quite different in tone from the dutiful letters I dispatched to my parents during the school term or the flippant chronicles of home life sent, during the vacations, to my schoolfellows. Only in writing to myuncle did I feel that the words on the page were in harmony with my deepest and most serious thoughts.
And perhaps it was some subtle embarrassment at my own openness with him which, as I grew to manhood, insinuated itself between us. At all events our correspondence shrank, during the course of my nineteenth or twentieth year, from a flow to a bare trickle, and the fault undoubtedly lay with me. I would put aside his letters to be answered later and then forget them for weeks on end, eventually responding with a hasty note and the promise of a fuller reply when time allowed. But time, for reasons my uncle may have understood more clearly than I, never did allow.
The door was opened by a manservant so coldly formal in his bearing and so supercilious in his manner that I wondered for a moment whether the telegram I had sent to announce my visit might have gone astray. ‘I’m Charles Redbourne,’ I said. ‘I believe – I hope – that my uncle is expecting me.’
‘Indeed.’ He led me up the stairway, stopped outside one of the front rooms and knocked gently. There was a brief pause, and then the door swung open.
I hadn’t seen my uncle since the day of my father’s funeral, and though I should have recognised him anywhere, it was apparent that the intervening years had not dealt kindly with him. His tall frame was stooped, and he seemed to hold up his head with difficulty. The skin of his face was slack, and pale as tallow; his eyes were dark in their hollow sockets. As he took my hand I could feel the distortion of his arthritic fingers and the weakness of their grip. He drew me forward and pushed the door shut behind me.
The room was large and well lit, furnished richly but with the restraint characteristic of an earlier and less assertive age. No clutter: just two fireside chairs, a low mahogany tea-table, an inlaid bureau and a wooden chest carved in high relief with scenes from the Greek myths. The carpet, I noticed, as my uncle propelled me gently towards the hearth, was unusually soft and thick.
‘You’re limping, Charles. Not your father’s trouble, I hope.’
‘I’ve been spared the gout. The limp is the result of a recent gardening accident. Nothing serious.’
‘Apt punishment for undermining the order of things. If you want my advice, I suggest you leave the gardening to those who are employed to do it. Half of society’s ills might be averted if men knew their appointed places, and it’s our duty – the duty of our class – to lead by example. When I ring this bell’ – he leaned over and tugged at the tasselled bell-pull beside the chimney-breast – ‘Mrs Fraser will put three spoonfuls of Darjeeling into the pot and fill it with scalding water. There’s nothing difficult about the task, and I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself. I’ve no doubt that, if I were obliged to do so, I could eventually
lay my hands on the milk-jug, the sugar-bowl and the best china. But my point is that nobody’s interests would be served by such an intervention, neither Mrs Fraser’s nor mine. Gardening is for gardeners, Charles; our part is to enjoy the fruits of their labours.’
He motioned me to one of the chairs and seated himself in the other, holding his crooked hands to the blaze. ‘And what brings you,’ he asked abruptly, with a hint of asperity, ‘knocking on my door?’
‘It struck me that we had become strangers to one another. And because I regard you as pre-eminent among those who influenced my early intellectual development—’
‘Thank you, but perhaps a little plain speaking would be in order. As you can imagine, your visit comes as something of a surprise.’
‘Not too much of a surprise, I hope. My telegram—’
‘Come now, Charles, your visit can hardly be accounted less surprising for having been announced five hours in advance. You don’t write to me – not a word in the past three years and no more than half a dozen carelessly scrawled pages in the past fifteen – and then you turn up on my doorstep with the air of a man who wants something. I’ll tell you now, my will has already been drawn up.’
The barb, delivered with only the faintest suggestion of humour, struck sufficiently close to the mark to disturb my composure. I sank back into my chair and cleared my throat.
‘It’s true,’ I began carefully, ‘that I’m here to request a favour, but I’m also offering something in return.’
‘Forgive me, Charles, but when you’ve spent as many years in the world of business as I have, you develop a peculiarly sensitive nose for what’s in the wind. I can tell without hearing another word that, whatever you’re offering, your proposal is likely to serve your own interests far better than it will serve mine. That said, I’m willing to listen. Tell me what you have in mind.’
This was not at all the conversation I had imagined as I travelled up. I had convinced myself that my uncle, delighted to see me after so many years, would be doubly delighted when he heard my proposal. The idea that the man who had set me on the path of scientific enquiry should subsequently provide me with the funds for an important collecting trip had seemed so apposite that I had scarcely troubled to examine it. Now I was mumbling, stammering, losing my thread, like a schoolboy called upon to explain himself to an unsympathetic master.
‘And of course,’ I heard myself saying, ‘the specimens – such as you needed for your own collection … I mean, it’s understood that I should be collecting on your behalf as well as my own, and any significant discovery—’
‘Have you no funds of your own? Your father left you tolerably well provided for.’
‘He left me the estate.’
‘And, if I remember correctly, a substantial proportion of his savings.’
I shifted uncomfortably beneath his gaze. ‘The fact is,’ I said, ‘that I’ve handled my financial affairs rather badly. The sum in question has been seriously depleted.’
‘Depleted?’
I felt my face grow hot. ‘There’s nothing left,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all. And the income from my tenants barely pays my bills.’
‘Then your proposed journey would seem singularly ill-timed.’ He leaned suddenly towards me, his eyes searching mine. ‘You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you, Charles?’
The particular predicament in which I found myself would not, perhaps, have diminished my standing in my uncle’s eyes and it might have been preferable in some respects to have made a clean breast of it, but I could see that anything less than a firm denial risked leading our discussion off at a tangent to my central concern. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve decided that this is the moment to go. That’s all there is to it.’
A soft tapping at the door heralded the arrival of the tea, borne on a silver tray by a diminutive maidservant. The girl placed her burden on the table and stood at my uncle’s elbow, her eyes downcast. He looked up sharply and waved her away. ‘That will be all, thank you, Alice. We’ll attend to it.’
She gave a little bob and withdrew, her footfall almost silent on the thick carpet. As the door clicked shut behind her, my uncle turned back to me and resumed his questioning. ‘Has it occurred to you that you might sell part of the estate?’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Of course you’d rather not. But when the alternative is to come cap in hand to relatives who have managed their affairs more wisely than you appear to have done, selling would seem perhaps the sounder option and certainly the more gentlemanly one. I’m sorry, Charles, but I’m at a loss to understand your thinking on this matter. And besides …’ He lifted the lid of the teapot and stirred the brew. ‘Will you take milk with your tea?’
I nodded. ‘You were about to say something.’
He was silent, apparently preoccupied with the matter in hand. I sat back and waited.
‘There was a time,’ he said at last, handing me my cup, ‘when I dreamed of being able to help you in some way – of being in a position to offer you the support a father might offer his son. But in those days you were not fatherless, and by the time you were, you had turned your back on me.’
His phrasing was a little melodramatic for my taste, but it was impossible to dispute the essential fact. I sat staring into my teacup, listening to the rain driving against the window-panes. After a moment, my uncle rose to his feet and crossed to the bureau. He opened the top drawer and drew out a bulging file.
‘Do you know what these are?’ he asked, bending back the cover to reveal a thick sheaf of papers. He returned to his seat and flicked through them, eventually extracting two sheets, held together at the corner by a rusted dressmaker’s pin. He leaned forward with an odd, tightlipped smile and handed them to me.
There is something strangely disconcerting about being confronted with one’s own letters, particularly when those letters belong to the period of childhood or youth. The careful schoolroom script seemed simultaneously alien and familiar, and though I knew at once that I was holding a fragment of my own past, I was slow to acknowledge the fact.
‘Do you remember writing that?’ He was staring intently at my face. ‘Look at the second page.’
I folded back the top sheet and scanned it quickly.
… deserving of my gratitude, since you have been a second father to me, a second father and more. More, because you have also been friend and tutor, and I dare say that what you have taught me on our walks together will prove more important to my future life than anything I have learned in school. If I ever make a name for myself as a natural scientist – and I am more than ever convinced that is my true vocation – my success will be due in large measure to you.
There was another paragraph in similar vein. The whole passage, I noticed, had been marked with two parallel pencil-lines in the right-hand margin of the page. ‘Yes,’ I said uneasily. ‘Yes, I remember.’
He tapped the file. ‘They’re all here,’ he said. ‘All of your letters to me, from the first to the last. An object lesson in the callous ways of the world.’
‘That seems a little harsh,’ I said, struggling to suppress my anger.
He shrugged. ‘Life is harsh,’ he answered, and with the words he sagged suddenly in his chair, his sallow face creased with grief. Tears gathered and fell, the slow, unimpassioned tears of the old.
‘I meant what I wrote,’ I said. And then, with regret, sympathy and cunning so finely blended as to confuse even myself: ‘I’m sorry to have disappointed you, Uncle, but the arrangement I’m proposing may go some way towards making amends. I should be glad to think that in adding to your collection I was also doing something to restore the connection between us.’
He drew a large linen handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his eyes. ‘The collection,’ he said quietly, ‘is neither here nor there. Think about it, Charles. I’m seventy-one years old. There’s not a single organ in my body that works as it should, and the various passions that serve to keep a man alive are all g
one. Sometimes at night, when the house is quiet, I drift upstairs like the ghost of my younger self and take a few choice specimens from my cabinets. I stare at them, I finger them, I put them back again. Whatever glamour they once seemed to possess is lost. Dead matter, Charles – rows of stiffened skins in an old man’s attic. Why should I add to their number?’
‘Then you won’t help me?’
In the stillness I could hear the cluck and gurgle of rainwater from the gutters below. My uncle placed his gnarled hands on his knees and gazed down at them for a long time as though lost in contemplation of his own decrepitude.
‘I’m prepared to pay your passage to Australia,’ he said at last.
It was not a destination I had considered. Although I had not thought very carefully about the matter, it was South America I had in mind. I was about to say as much when it struck me that I would do better to hold my tongue.
‘I know a fellow,’ he continued, ‘who can help you. Edward Vane – owns a substantial property just outside Sydney. A very substantial property indeed. Large house, extensive grounds, acres of grazing. He’s made more in twenty years – mainly from coal and shale-oil – than I’ve made in a lifetime. But the point is’ – he lowered his voice, though it was inconceivable that any of the servants could have overheard him – ‘that he owes his fortune to me.’
He leaned back in his chair and ran his hand wearily across his eyes. ‘I’ll leave if you’re tired,’ I said. ‘I can return tomorrow.’
He gave no indication of having heard me. ‘We were close in those days,’ he said, ‘Vane and I. I mean, during his early months in London. He had come to the city with the express intention of making his fortune here, and I’ve no doubt his life would have unfolded exactly as he’d planned it if he hadn’t been knocked off course by a woman. The usual story – passion, pregnancy, a hasty marriage on an inadequate income. She was a Cornish girl, a sweet enough thing but very dreamy and delicate, and not the slightest use to him. And, of course, she brought no money with her, none at all.’
