Arthur & George

by Julian Barnes

  As the first months of the new year pass, the curtains are parted each morning with the increased certainty that there will be nothing but God’s shining dew upon the lawn; and the postman’s arrival no longer causes alarm. The Vicar begins to repeat that they have been tested with fire, and their faith in the Lord has helped them endure this trial. Maud, fragile and pious, has been kept in as much ignorance as possible; Horace, now a sturdy and straightforward sixteen-year-old, knows more, and will privately confess to George that in his view the old method of an eye for an eye is an unimprovable system of justice, and that if he ever catches anyone tossing dead blackbirds over the hedge, he will wring their necks in person.

  George does not, as his parents believe, have his own office at Sangster, Vickery & Speight. He has a stool and a high-top desk in an uncarpeted corner where the access of the sun’s rays depends upon the goodwill of a distant skylight. He does not yet possess a fob watch, let alone his own set of law books. But he has a proper hat, a three-and-sixpenny bowler from Fenton’s in Grange Street. And though his bed remains a mere three yards from Father’s, he feels the beginnings of independent life stirring within him. He has even made the acquaintance of two articled clerks from neighbouring practices. Greenway and Stentson, who are slightly older, took him one lunchtime to a public house where he briefly pretended to enjoy the horrible sour beer he paid for.

  During his year at Mason College, George paid little attention to the great city he found himself in. He felt it only as a barricade of noise and bustle lying between the station and his books; in truth, it frightened him. But now he begins to feel more at ease with the place, and more curious about it. If he is not crushed by its vigour and energy, perhaps he will one day become part of it himself.

  He begins to read up on the city. At first he finds it rather stodgy stuff, about cutlers and smiths and metal manufacture; next come the Civil War and the Plague, the steam engine and the Lunar Society, the Church and King Riots, the Chartist upheavals. But then, little more than a decade ago, Birmingham begins to shake itself into modern municipal life, and suddenly George feels he is reading about real things, relevant things. He is tormented to realize that he could have been present at one of Birmingham’s greatest moments: the day in 1887 when Her Majesty laid the foundation stone of the Victoria Law Courts. And thereafter, the city has arrived in a great rush of new buildings and institutions: the General Hospital, the Chamber of Arbitration, the meat market. Money is currently being raised to establish a university; there is a plan to build a new Temperance Hall, and serious talk that Birmingham might soon become a bishopric, no longer under the see of Worcester.

  On that day of Queen Victoria’s visit, 500,000 people came to greet her, and despite the vast crowd there were neither disturbances nor casualties. George is impressed, yet also not surprised. The general opinion is that cities are violent, overcrowded places, while the countryside is calm and peaceable. His own experience is to the contrary: the country is turbulent and primitive, while the city is where life becomes orderly and modern. Of course Birmingham is not without crime and vice and discord—else there would be less of a living for solicitors—but it seems to George that human conduct is more rational here, and more obedient to the law: more civil.

  George finds something both serious and comforting in his daily transit into the city. There is a journey, there is a destination: this is how he has been taught to understand life. At home, the destination is the Kingdom of Heaven; at the office, the destination is justice, that is to say, a successful outcome for your client; but both journeys are full of forking paths and booby traps laid by the opponent. The railway suggests how it ought to be, how it could be: a smooth ride to a terminus on evenly spaced rails and according to an agreed timetable, with passengers divided among first-, second- and third-class carriages.

  Perhaps this is why George feels quietly enraged when anyone seeks to harm the railway. There are youths—men, perhaps—who take knives and razors to the leather window straps; who senselessly attack the picture frames above the seats; who loiter on footbridges and try to drop bricks into the locomotive’s chimney. This is all incomprehensible to George. It may seem a harmless game to place a penny on the rail and see it flattened to twice its diameter by a passing express; but George regards it as a slippery slope which leads to train wrecking.

  Such actions are naturally covered by the criminal law. George finds himself increasingly preoccupied by the civil connection between passengers and the railway company. A passenger buys a ticket, and at that moment, with consideration given and received, a contract springs into being. But ask that passenger what kind of contract he or she has entered into, what obligations are laid upon the parties, what claim for compensation might be pursued against the railway company in case of lateness, breakdown or accident, and answer would come there none. This may not be the passenger’s fault: the ticket alludes to a contract, but its detailed terms are only displayed at certain main-line stations and at the offices of the railway company—and what busy traveller has the time to make a diversion and examine them? Even so, George marvels at how the British, who gave railways to the world, treat them as a mere means of convenient transport, rather than as an intense nexus of multiple rights and responsibilities.

  He decides to appoint Horace and Maud as the Man and Woman on the Clapham Omnibus—or, in the present instance, the Man and Woman on the Walsall, Cannock & Rugeley Train. He is allowed to use the schoolroom as his law court. He sits his brother and sister at desks and presents them with a case he has recently come across in the foreign law reports.

  “Once upon a time,” he begins, walking up and down in a way that seems necessary to the story, “there was a very fat Frenchman called Payelle, who weighed twenty-five stones.”

  Horace starts giggling. George frowns at his brother and grips his lapels like a barrister. “No laughter in court,” he insists. He proceeds. “Monsieur Payelle bought a third-class ticket on a French train.”

  “Where was he going?” asks Maud.

  “It doesn’t matter where he was going.”

  “Why was he so fat?” demands Horace. This ad hoc jury seems to believe it may ask questions whenever it likes.

  “I don’t know. He must have been even greedier than you. In fact, he was so greedy that when the train pulled in, he found he couldn’t get through the door of a third-class carriage.” Horace starts tittering at the idea. “So next he tried a second-class carriage, but he was too fat to get into that as well. So then he tried a first-class carriage—”

  “And he was too fat to get into that too!” Horace shouts, as if it were the conclusion to a joke.

  “No, members of the jury, he found that this door was indeed wide enough. So he took a seat, and the train set off for—for wherever it was going. After a while the ticket collector came along, examined his ticket, and asked for the difference between the third-class fare and the first-class fare. Monsieur Payelle refused to pay. The railway company sued Payelle. Now, do you see the problem?”

  “The problem is he was too fat,” says Horace, and starts giggling again.

  “He didn’t have enough money to pay,” says Maud. “Poor man.”

  “No, neither of those is the problem. He had money enough to pay, but he refused to. Let me explain. Counsel for Payelle argued that he had fulfilled his legal requirements by buying a ticket, and it was the company’s fault if all the train doors were too narrow for him except the first-class ones. The company argued that if he was too fat to get into one kind of compartment, then he should take a ticket for the sort of compartment he could get into. What do you think?”

  Horace is quite firm. “If he went into a first-class compartment, then he has to pay for going into it. It stands to reason. He shouldn’t have eaten so much cake. It’s not the railway’s fault if he’s too fat.”

  Maud tends to side with the underdog, and decides that a fat Frenchman comes into this category. “It’s not his fault he’s fat,�
� she begins. “It might be a disease. Or he may have lost his mother and got so sad he ate too much. Or—any reason. It wasn’t as if he was making someone get out of their seat and go into a third-class compartment instead.”

  “The court was not told the reasons for his size.”

  “Then the law is an ass,” says Horace, who has recently learned the phrase.

  “Had he ever done it before?” asks Maud.

  “Now that’s an excellent point,” says George, nodding like a judge. “It goes to the question of intent. Either he knew from previous experience that he was too fat to enter a third-class compartment and bought a ticket despite this knowledge, or he bought a ticket in the honest belief that he could indeed fit through the door.”

  “Well, which is it?” asks Horace, impatiently.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t say in the report.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “Well, the answer here is a divided jury—one for each party. You’ll have to argue it out between you.”

  “I’m not going to argue with Maud,” says Horace. “She’s a girl. What’s the real answer?”

  “Oh, the Correctional Court at Lille found for the railway company. Payelle had to reimburse them.”

  “I won!” shouts Horace. “Maud got it wrong.”

  “No one got it wrong,” George replies. “The case could have gone either way. That’s why things go to court in the first place.”

  “I still won,” says Horace.

  George is pleased. He has engaged the interest of his junior jury, and on succeeding Saturday afternoons he presents them with new cases and problems. Do passengers in a full compartment have the right to hold the door closed against those on the platform seeking to enter? Is there any legal difference between finding someone’s pocketbook on the seat, and finding a loose coin under the cushion? What should happen if you take the last train home and it fails to stop at your station, thereby obliging you to walk five miles back in the rain?

  When he finds his jurors’ attention waning, George diverts them with interesting facts and odd cases. He tells them, for instance, about dogs in Belgium. In England the regulations state that dogs have to be muzzled and put in the van; whereas in Belgium a dog may have the status of a passenger so long as it has a ticket. He cites the case of a hunting man who took his retriever on a train and sued when it was ejected from the seat beside him in favour of a human being. The court—to Horace’s delight and to Maud’s dissatisfaction—found for the plaintiff, a ruling which meant that from now on if five men and their five dogs were to occupy a ten-seated compartment in Belgium, and all ten were the bearers of tickets, that compartment would legally be classified as full.

  Horace and Maud are surprised by George. In the schoolroom there is a new authority about him; but also, a kind of lightness, as if he is on the verge of telling a joke, something he has never done to their knowledge. George, in return, finds his jury useful to him. Horace arrives quickly at blunt positions—usually in favour of the railway company—from which he will not be budged. Maud takes longer to make up her mind, asks the more pertinent questions, and sympathizes with every inconvenience that might befall a passenger. Though his siblings hardly amount to a cross section of the travelling public, they are typical, George thinks, in their almost complete ignorance of their rights.

  Arthur

  He had brought detectivism up to date. He had rid it of the slow-thinking representatives of the old school, those ordinary mortals who gained applause for deciphering palpable clues laid right across their path. In their place he had put a cool, calculating figure who could see the clue to a murder in a ball of worsted, and certain conviction in a saucer of milk.

  Holmes provided Arthur with sudden fame and—something the England captaincy would never have done—money. He bought a decent-sized house in South Norwood, whose deep walled garden had room for a tennis ground. He put his grandfather’s bust in the entrance hall and lodged his Arctic trophies on top of a bookcase. He found an office for Wood, who seemed to have attached himself as permanent staff. Lottie had returned from working as a governess in Portugal and Connie, despite being the decorative one, was proving an invaluable hand at the typewriter. He had acquired a machine in Southsea but never managed to manipulate it with success himself. He was more dextrous with the tandem bicycle he pedalled with Touie. When she became pregnant again, he exchanged it for a tricycle, driven by masculine power alone. On fine afternoons he would project them on thirty-mile missions across the Surrey hills.

  He became accustomed to success, to being recognized and inspected; also to the various pleasures and embarrassments of the newspaper interview.

  “It says you are a happy, genial, homely man.” Touie was smiling back at the magazine. “Tall, broad-shouldered and with a hand that grips you heartily, and, in its sincerity of welcome, hurts.”

  “Who is that?”

  “The Strand Magazine.”

  “Ah. Mr. How, as I recall. Not one of nature’s sportsmen, I suspected at the time. The paw of a poodle. What does he say of you, my dear?”

  “He says . . . Oh, I cannot read it.”

  “I insist. You know how I love to see you blush.”

  “He says . . . I am ‘a most charming woman.’ ” And, on cue, she blushed, and hurriedly changed the subject. “Mr. How says, that ‘Dr. Doyle invariably conceives the end of his story first, and writes up to it.’ You never told me that, Arthur.”

  “Did I not? Perhaps because it is as plain as a packstaff. How can you make sense of the beginning unless you know the ending? It’s entirely logical when you reflect upon it. What else does our friend have to say for himself?”

  “That your ideas come to you at all manner of times—when out walking, cricketing, tricycling, or playing tennis. Is that the case, Arthur? Does that account for your occasional absent-mindedness on the court?”

  “I might have been putting on the dog a little.”

  “And look—here is little Mary standing on this very chair.”

  Arthur leaned over. “Engraved from one of my photographs—there, you see. I made sure they put my name underneath.”

  Arthur had become a face in literary circles. He counted Jerome and Barrie as friends; had met Meredith and Wells. He had dined with Oscar Wilde, finding him thoroughly civil and agreeable, not least because the fellow had read and admired his Micah Clarke. Arthur now reckoned he would run Holmes for not more than two years—three at most, before killing him off. Then he would concentrate on historical novels, which he had always known were the best of him.

  He was proud of what he had done so far. He wondered if he would have been prouder had he fulfilled Partridge’s prophecy and captained England at cricket. It was quite clear this would never happen. He was a decent right-hand bat, and could bowl slows with a flight that puzzled some. He might make a good all-round MCC man, but his final ambition was now more modest—to have his name inscribed in the pages of Wisden.

  Touie bore him a son, Alleyne Kingsley. He had always dreamed of filling a house up with his family. But poor Annette had died out in Portugal; while the Mam was as stubborn as ever, preferring to stick in her cottage on that fellow’s estate. Still, he had sisters, children, wife; and his brother Innes was not far away at Woolwich, preparing for an army life. Arthur was the breadwinner, and a head of the family who enjoyed dispensing largesse and blank cheques. Once a year he did it formally, dressing as Father Christmas.

  He knew the proper order should have been: wife, children, sisters. How long had they been married—seven, eight years? Touie was all anyone could possibly want in a wife. She was indeed a most charming woman, as The Strand Magazine had noted. She was calm and had grown competent; she had given him a son and daughter. She believed in his writing down to the last adjective, and supported all his ventures. He fancied Norway; they went to Norway. He fancied dinner parties; she organized them to his taste. He had married her for better for worse, for richer for poorer.
So far there had been no worse, and no poorer.

  And yet. It was different now, if he was honest with himself. When they had met, he had been young, awkward and unknown; she had loved him, and never complained. Now he was still young, but successful and famous; he could keep a table of Savile Club wits interested by the hour. He had found his feet, and—partly thanks to marriage—his brain. His success was the deserved result of hard work, but those themselves unfamiliar with success imagined it the end of the story. Arthur was not yet ready for the end of his own story. If life was a chivalric quest, then he had rescued the fair Touie, he had conquered the city, and been rewarded with gold. But there were years to go before he was prepared to accept a role as wise elder to the tribe. What did a knight errant do when he came home to a wife and two children in South Norwood?

  Well, perhaps it was not such a difficult question. He protected them, behaved honourably, and taught his children the proper code of living. He might depart on further quests, though obviously not quests which involved the saving of other maidens. There would be plenty of challenges in his writing, in society, travel, politics. Who knew in what direction his sudden energies would take him? He would always give Touie whatever attention and comfort she could need; he would never cause her a moment’s unhappiness.

  And yet.

  George

  Greenway and Stentson tend to hang about together, but this does not bother George. At lunchtime he has no desire for the tavern, preferring to sit under a tree in St. Philip’s Place and eat the sandwiches his mother has prepared. He likes it when they ask him to explain some aspect of conveyancing, but is often puzzled by the way they go off into secretive spurts about horses and betting offices, girls and dance-halls. They are also currently obsessed with Bechuana Land, whose chiefs are on an official visit to Birmingham.