Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  The Colonel paused, the memory transforming his expression. Outside, a coach and horses rattled past, creating an avalanche of hoof-falls that hung for a moment then faded.

  ‘And did he?’ Hamish leaned forward eagerly.

  The Colonel hesitated; whenever he had related this experience before, he had always censored it. Why did he now feel the need to confess to this youth? Was it the desire to be unburdened? To admit to an epiphany that he, a self-declared atheist, regarded as spiritual? Perhaps he was looking for absolution…but to be absolved by an apprentice, a novice half his age?

  Could he really trust him? He studied the youth; the look in Hamish Campbell’s eyes, the open enthusiasm that played across his features again reminded him of his younger self. The Colonel decided to continue without expurgation.

  ‘In a manner, I think I experienced both my future and my death there. As the shaman began to mimic my walk, my slightly hunched shoulders, the perplexed knot of my forehead, the swing of my travelling stick clearing the foliage, I could see myself: prejudiced, burdened by all the preconceived notions I had carried into the jungle six months before. Then, suddenly, I saw myself at ten, alone, fearful; then at sixteen, bursting with all the arrogance of youth; and then, like ripples across one’s reflection in water, I saw my own death mask. I tried to flee but I was fastened to the ground as firmly as an insect to a specimen glass. I could not tell you whether I stood there for hours or days, but I can tell you I saw their goddess of death, Calounger, with her skull head and burning eyes. I saw their gods, Campbell, I swear it. This scientific rationalist witnessed the very fabric of another culture’s belief. I tell you, there is not one truth but many.’

  There was a beat. The Colonel, embarrassed at having sounded so youthfully impassioned, set the mask down and waited. He must believe I have lost my sanity, he thought. What an idiot I have been to endanger my reputation. Finally the student spoke up.

  ‘What I’d give for such an experience—to throw off the shackles of the conventional world, to see into another sensibility!’

  Relief flooded the Colonel’s body. He felt intoxicated, inspired by his companion’s obvious enthralment.

  ‘What would you give?’ It was a rhetorical question. The Colonel had sensed already what Campbell would offer.

  Hamish glanced at Huntington. The man’s tone was brazen, and yet it was a delicate moment: to presume wrongly would be certain social suicide.

  ‘I think that as an anthropologist it must be considered an essential part of one’s training. To experience such a profound insight through a single ritual—’

  ‘And a little ayahuasca,’ the Colonel interjected, smiling slightly.

  ‘—and under the guiding hand of a mentor, to understand that the known world can be so easily usurped—for something far more exhilarating and dangerous…’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The two men laughed, a deliberate ploy to break the suddenly charged atmosphere. Each felt a nervousness not unpleasantly laced with elation and erotic desire. As the Colonel leaned forward, his knee brushed Campbell’s flannelled leg, an almost imperceptible contact that both were excruciatingly aware of.

  ‘I can make it happen,’ he said softly and quickly, before he had time to regret the words.

  ‘And that could only be a source of both pleasure and delight,’ Hamish replied unflinchingly.

  The carriage pulled in behind the mews. It was past midnight but Lavinia could see lights still burning in the windows of James’s study. Aloysius helped her out of the coach. She stood for a moment in the moon-drenched courtyard, the cold air suspending all reflection. She looked as if the wind might flatten her like a paper doll, the coachman marvelled. He wondered at the conversation that had passed between the curious boy-whore and his mistress. Then, anxious she might catch a chill, he stepped forward.

  ‘Madam?’

  Dragging her eyes back from some distant place, Lavinia looked at him, and it was as if she was looking at him for the first time as an equal, in every way.

  ‘Aloysius, I have been naive.’ Her voice trailed away until only the steaming breath of the horses and the creaking of the wind through the branches could be heard.

  Aloysius stood there, his arms turned to stone not able to take her as he wanted, but frozen like some huge clumsy giant, silently cursing this land and its people for the injustice and unnaturalness of it all. Then, to his great amazement, Lavinia stepped forward and rested her head against the front of his greatcoat. His heart fluttered like the wings of a trapped bird until she turned and walked into the mansion, leaving him standing in a maelstrom of his own bewildered emotions.

  39

  Los Angeles, 2002

  THE RADIOLOGIST CAREFULLY MANIPULATED the probe while watching the ultrasound screen. Julia, looking up at the ceiling, tried to pretend she was somewhere far away, not with her heels hoisted up in stirrups and a mechanical device inside her vagina.

  ‘Of course, at your age a late miscarriage is always a risk,’ Dr Weinstein, the gynaecologist, said.

  ‘Doctor?’ The radiologist, an earnest Chinese–American woman, rested the probe against Julia’s left side. A faint throb began to punch back at the apparatus. The gynaecologist peered at the screen. A small whitish mark blocked the faint scan of a long serpent-like trail: Julia’s Fallopian tube and ovary.

  ‘How long since the miscarriage?’

  ‘Three months, doctor,’ the radiologist replied before Julia had a chance too.

  ‘Hmmm. Can we look closer at the other side?’

  Again the probe circled—like a horrible mechanical pig hunting for truffles, Julia thought bleakly.

  ‘Are you still with us?’ Dr Weinstein, an amicable man in his fifties with a string of qualifications after his name and a reputation as one of the best at Cedars Sinai, touched her shoulder. He smiled but the concern slipped through his eyes anyhow.

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Good. Get dressed and see me in my surgery in ten minutes.’

  The ceiling to floor windows in Dr Weinstein’s consulting room showed a panoramic view that stretched towards Miracle Mile and the poorer suburbs that made up East Los Angeles. He frowned at Julia.

  ‘Julia, you should have come in sooner, when you first felt pain.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve been in such a mess I don’t even think I realised I was in physical pain. How bad is it?’

  Dr Weinstein sighed. He’d been her gynaecologist for over fifteen years and behaved more like a surrogate father than a doctor.

  ‘I’m not going to lie to you—your womb has sustained some damage we didn’t initially pick up. The good news is that we can fix the infections with antibiotics. The bad news is that it has left scarring on both tubes.’

  ‘I won’t be able to have another pregnancy, right?’

  Dr Weinstein looked down at his desk then absentmindedly spun a pencil.

  ‘Given your age and the damage the miscarriage has caused, pregnancy is no longer an option. I’m sorry, Julia.’

  It was what she had suspected. But hearing the actual words in Dr Weinstein’s precise tone was far more distressing than she’d imagined. She focused on a photograph on the desk of the doctor at his son’s bar mitzvah. I mustn’t lose control, I mustn’t break down in public, she told herself. In the midst of her rising grief, she noticed absurdly that the doctor and his son had the same ears. A sharp pain shot through her vertically, but she knew it was emotional. What was left? Her career. Was that enough? It didn’t feel like it; not now. A great rage began its bitter wave through her body.

  ‘Listen, you’ve had a big shock,’ the gynaecologist elaborated. ‘But things will get better. They will. I know it’s a cliché, but time is a great healer.’

  You bet it’s a cliché, Julia thought, hating him in that moment for his glibness and the conceit of a man who had a family.

  Sensing her distress, he took her hand. ‘Julia, have you ever thought about turning to some kind of spirituality
? Faith can be a great comfort, especially at times like these.’

  ‘You know me—the last atheist in southern California,’ she joked, her cracking voice betraying her.

  Outside, in the narrow corridor between the reception and the surgery, finally alone, Julia collapsed against the wall, holding her sorrow against her as privately as a lover.

  40

  London, 1861

  THE COLONEL SMOOTHED OUT the sheet of paper and stared down at its blank expanse. Then he dipped his pen in the ink and, pensively, almost shyly, wrote across the top: Advice from an old father to a young son.

  Dearest boy, he continued, I am writing this as you lie asleep in your cot in the nursery, a mere babe, but I am imagining you to have grown into a fine young man. Some instinct—the premonition of an old soldier, if you will—instructs me to immortalise my authority in case I am no longer of this world by the time you are of age.

  Follow my advice, my son: always live according to your true nature, whatever the cost to the loved ones around you. To do otherwise is to live a lie, and I have discovered this to be untenable and unethical.

  Exercise both your curiosity and your imagination, for there are no greater gifts; and no greater wisdom than the breadth of experience—learn not by example but by following the courage of your convictions.

  I do not know what you will think of me. I know I have been weak and fallible, but I have never lacked valour, either on the battlefield or in other arenas of human affairs. When you look upon my writings and my portrait, do not make a myth of me, but see me as a man. And, like all men, I have been made vulnerable by my humanity…

  He heard the slam of the front door in the distance, footsteps ascending and then filling the hallway outside. Lavinia, returning from the park with the nursemaid and Aidan. Quietly, the Colonel closed his writing desk.

  Where things decayed and loved ones lost

  In dreamy shadows rise,

  And, freed from all that’s earthly vile,

  Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,

  Like scenes in some enchanted isle,

  All bathed in liquid light.

  As dusky mountains please the eye,

  When twilight chases day;

  As bugle-notes that, passing by,

  In distance die away;

  As leaving some grand waterfall,

  We, lingering, list its roar—

  So memory will hallow all

  We’ve known, but know no more.

  The bookseller was right: Abraham Lincoln was a better statesman than poet, Lavinia conceded as she sat reading on the window seat. Gazing at the journal, she was reminded again of her encounter with Polly Kirkshore. Why had the whore asked if Lavinia had a sister, or even a mother? Could it be that her mother was living, perhaps even here in London?

  She replaced the book on the shelf and perused its companions. Pressed up next to George Combe’s definitive text on phrenology, The Constitution of Man, was a book whose spine read:Flowers, herbs and cacti of delirium: the New World flora of a tantalising and dangerous nature. The feathery head of a flower protruded from its pages.

  Intrigued, Lavinia pulled the book down. Settling back into the sun-filled warmth of the window seat, she turned to the inventive bookmark. The page showed an illustration of the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi.

  Lavinia read on.

  In the north-east of Brazil, the natives worship a goddess called Jubbu-jang-sange. To conjure her, the shaman will brew a magical potion made from the root bark of Mimosa hostilis mixed with the ayahuasca vine. Although not poisonous, fatality has resulted when the potion is taken with other hallucinogens, such as opium or peyote.

  She paused, wondering on the properties of a goddess who not only promised her worshippers the ability to see with the eyes of God, but who also held the hidden danger of death. Was this part of her seduction; to walk at the edge of one’s human existence and stare Death fully in the face? To taste immortality just for a few hours? Was Death female to these people? The idea fascinated Lavinia.

  41

  THEY HAD AGREED TO MEET at Trafalgar Square. It was not covert so much as convenient: they were to drive to the Royal Academy together. As Lady Morgan sat waiting in her carriage, she stared up at the Nelson Column. A monstrous act of pomposity, she thought to herself, remembering the square as it had been twenty years before. Her late husband had been an associate of the architect Charles Barry, who had complained bitterly about Nelson’s plinth being imposed upon his design. In the end, celebrity had triumphed over art and the column had been erected, to loom over Barry’s design forever.

  What narcissism, Lady Morgan observed, thinking about the egocentricity of the great sea admiral. Admittedly Nelson had saved England from the clutches of Napoleon, and perhaps from the dismantling of the British aristocracy (here Lady Morgan shivered and crossed herself; several of her husband’s cousins had lost their heads in the French Revolution). But sometimes, in secret, very unpatriotic moments, Lady Morgan found herself wondering what would have happened if Napoleon had invaded. Certainly both fashion and food would have improved, and there was a certain philosophical intensity and moral laxity about the French that Lady Morgan secretly admired. The English vilified the Corsican, but really he was far more than just a malevolent dictator, she concluded. Perhaps this was how history was shaped—accidentally; a whirling ballerina pirouetting from one battle to another, collapsing into the arms of whomever won. Was fate really so arbitrary?

  Lady Morgan glanced across the square. It was crowded with the usual throng of carts drawn by heavy draught horses, plumes of their steaming breath cutting into the air as they strained under their various loads of coal, wood and vegetables. Several flower girls stood on the street calling out their wares, wearing cheap straw hats with poppies woven through the straw. Street pedlars ran between the city gentlemen in their tails and top hats. The ubiquitous clerks scurried alongside, arms full of papers. A chimney sweep and his climbing boy loitered nearby, the sweep flirting with a barrow girl who stood over a brazier of roasting chestnuts. A matchstick girl, tray hanging in front of her, shouted sporadically, while a muffin man, ringing his bell furiously, added to the pandemonium.

  Hordes of urchins darted amongst the pedestrians, sooty-faced, bare-footed, their torn trousers held up by string. They whistled, cheered and generally caused havoc.

  A peeler kept vigil, his horse prancing nervously as the carriages rattled past. A cartload of night soil trundled by, sending a wave of noxious air towards the open window of the carriage. Lady Morgan lifted her perfumed handkerchief to her face. Just then she spotted a crossing sweeper running before a well-dressed young gentleman whose good looks and groomed appearance set him apart from the crowd. His back bent obsequiously, the sweeper cleared aside the horse droppings and debris that covered the pavement ahead of the man.

  They reached the carriage and the crossing sweeper put out his mitten-covered hand for a tip. By the time the man had paid him, there was an urchin offering to open the carriage door for him. Hamish Campbell angrily dismissed him with a wave. Hoisting himself into the brougham, he took a seat opposite Lady Morgan, slightly breathless from his brisk walk.

  ‘Why, we have become quite clandestine,’ he remarked as Lady Morgan offered him her lips. He kissed her on the cheek instead and, flicking the tails of his plaid frock coat clear of the seat, leaned back against the cushioned upholstery.

  ‘Clandestine? It is only married individuals or unchaperoned virgins who need be clandestine,’ Lady Morgan retaliated. ‘No, I’m afraid we have become quite estranged. And that, my elusive friend, isn’t nearly as exciting.’

  Hamish pulled off his cream kid gloves and rubbed his hands together in a vain attempt to alleviate the cold that had cramped his fingers. He had been avoiding this encounter for as long as he could; it was only when Lady Morgan’s manservant visited with a second request that he had acquiesced.

  ‘Are you feeling neglected, Frances?’


  ‘Feeling neglected? Why, I am neglected. I’ve had no escort for the past two operas, and I’ve had to resort to becoming that tedious child bride’s unofficial social secretary. And, as we both know, the husband is far more fascinating. N’est-ce pas?’

  Sensing a trap, Hamish remained silent. The confessions people threw carelessly into such lapses of conversation had always astounded him and he knew Lady Morgan hated silence almost as much as she hated being ignored. He stared out of the window, painfully aware of her gaze, then felt her hand on his knee.

  ‘You do understand?’ she murmured softly.

  Hamish noticed a small boy feeding the pigeons, accompanied by his uniformed nursemaid, and thought of more innocent times.

  ‘Frances, we have never been lovers.’

  Floored by his directness, Lady Morgan blushed, something she couldn’t remember doing for years.

  ‘No, but I thought…it was implied…’

  ‘There was nothing implied.’

  She watched his face closing against her and decided upon another tactic.

  ‘My dear boy, you cannot imagine what joy it gives me just to have you sitting here by my side. And we have enjoyed such extraordinary conversations; I had hoped it would lead to greater intimacy…’

  Hamish was intensely aware of the social repercussions of incurring her wrath, and decided it would be wise to allow her hand to linger on his thigh. He received a small but not insignificant stipend from Lady Morgan, not to mention the advantageous introductions she facilitated. However, she was renowned for her possessiveness—a trait Hamish had known about when he embarked upon his original campaign. But some events in life could not be controlled or circumvented, even by the most ambitious of men.