Arthur & George

by Julian Barnes

  On Sunday afternoon, shortly after four o’clock, he turned out of No. 79 Borough High Street and headed for London Bridge: a small brown man in a blue business suit, with a dark blue book tucked under his left arm and a pair of binoculars over his right shoulder. A casual observer might think he was going to a race meeting—except that none was held on a Sunday. Or could that be a birdwatching book under his arm—yet who went birdwatching in a business suit? He would have made a strange sight in Staffordshire, and even in Birmingham they might have put him down for an eccentric; but nobody would do so in London, which contained more than enough eccentrics already.

  When he first moved here, he had been apprehensive. About his future life, of course; about how he and Maud would manage together; about the magnitude of the city, its crowds and its noise; and beyond this, about how people would treat him. Whether there would be lurking ruffians like those who had pushed him through a hedge in Landywood and damaged his umbrella, or lunatic policemen like Upton threatening to do him harm; whether he would encounter the race prejudice Sir Arthur was convinced lay at the bottom of his case. But as he crossed London Bridge, which he had been doing now for more than twenty years, he felt quite at his ease. People generally left you alone, either from courtesy or indifference, and George was grateful for either motive.

  It was true that inaccurate assumptions were habitually made: that he and his sister had recently arrived in the country; that he was a Hindoo; that he was a trader in spices. And of course he was still asked where he came from; though when he replied—to avoid discussing the finer points of geography—that he was from Birmingham, his interlocutors mostly nodded in an unsurprised way, as if they had always expected the inhabitants of Birmingham to look like George Edalji. Naturally there were the kind of humorous allusions that Greenway and Stentson went in for—though few to Bechuana Land—but he regarded this as some inevitable normality, like rain or fog. And there were even some people who, on learning that you came from Birmingham, expressed disappointment, because they had been hoping for news from distant lands which you were quite unable to supply.

  He took the Underground from Bank to High Street Kensington, then walked east until the Albert Hall bulged into view. His cautiousness over time—about which Maud liked to tease him—had made him arrive almost two hours before the service was due to begin. He decided to take a stroll in the park.

  It was just after five on a fine Sunday afternoon in July, and a bandstand was blaring away. The park was full of families, trippers, soldiers—though at no point did they form a dense crowd, so George was not made anxious. Nor did he look at young couples flirting with one another, or at sober parents organizing young children, with the same envy he might once have done. When he first came to London, he had not yet given up hope of getting married; indeed, he used to worry about how his future wife and Maud might get on. For it was clear that he could not abandon Maud; nor would he wish to. But then a few years passed, and he realized that Maud’s good opinion of his future wife mattered more to him than the other way round. And then a few more years passed, and the general disadvantages of a wife became even more apparent. A wife might appear agreeable but turn out to be a scold; a wife might not understand thrift; a wife would certainly wish for children, and George thought he probably could not bear the noise, or the disturbance it would bring to his work. And then, of course, there were sexual matters, which often did not lead to harmony. George did not handle divorce cases, but as a lawyer he had seen evidence enough of the misery that could be inflicted by marriage. Sir Arthur had long campaigned against the oppressiveness of the divorce laws, and been president of the Reform Union for many years, before handing over to Lord Birkenhead. From one name on the roll of honour to another: it had been Lord Birkenhead, as F. E. Smith, who had asked Gladstone searching questions in the House about the Edalji Case.

  But that was by the by. He was fifty-four years old, living in adequate comfort and largely philosophical about his unmarried condition. His brother Horace was now lost to the family: he had married, moved to Ireland and changed his name. Quite in which order he had done these three things George was not sure, but they were all clearly linked, and the undesirability of each action bled into the others. Well, there were different ways of living; and the truth was, neither he nor Maud had ever been very likely to marry. They were similar in their shyness, and in seeming to fend off those who approached them. But the world contained enough marriages, and was certainly not threatened with underpopulation. Brother and sister could live as harmoniously as husband and wife; in some instances, more so.

  In their early days together, he and Maud would make the journey back to Wyrley two or three times a year; but they were rarely happy visits. For George they brought back too many specific memories. The door-knocker still made him jump, and in the evening, as he looked out into the darkened garden, he would often glimpse beneath the trees shifting outlines which he knew to be nothing and yet still feared. With Maud it was different. Devoted as she was to Father and Mother, when she stepped back inside the Vicarage she became withdrawn and tentative; she had few opinions and her laugh was never heard. George could almost swear that she was beginning to ail. But he always knew the cure: it was called New Street Station and the London train.

  At first, when he and Maud went out together, people sometimes mistook them for husband and wife; and George, who did not want anyone to think he was incapable of marriage, would say, rather precisely, “No, this is my dear sister Maud.” But as time passed, he would occasionally not bother to make the correction, and afterwards Maud would take his arm and give a little laugh. Soon, he supposed, when her hair was as grey as his, they would be taken for an old married couple, and he might not even care to dispute that assumption.

  He had been wandering randomly, and now found himself approaching the Albert Memorial. The Prince was sitting in his gilded, glittering surround, with all the famous men of the world in attendance on him. George extracted his binoculars from their case and started practising. He swept slowly up the Memorial, above the levels at which art and science and industry held sway, above the seated figure of the pensive Consort, up to a higher realm. The burred knob was hard to control, and sometimes there was a mass of unfocused foliage filling the lens, but eventually he emerged at the plain vision of a chunky Christian cross. From there he tracked slowly down the spire, which seemed as heavily populated as the lower reaches of the monument. There were tiers of angels and then—just lower than the angels—a cluster of more human figures, classically draped. He circled the Memorial, frequently losing focus, trying to work out who they might be: a woman with a book in one hand and a snake in the other, a man in a bearskin with a big club, a woman with an anchor, a hooded figure with a long candle in its hand . . . Were they saints, perhaps, or symbolic figures? Ah, here at last was one he recognized, standing on a corner pedestal: she had a sword in one hand, a pair of scales in the other. George was pleased to note that the sculptor had not given her a blindfold. That detail had often drawn his disapproval: not because he didn’t understand its significance, but because others failed to. The blindfold permitted the ignorant to make gibes at his profession. That George would not allow.

  He returned the binoculars to their case, and moved his attention from the monochrome, frozen figures to the colourful, moving ones all around him, from the sculpted frieze to the living one. And in that moment, George was struck by the realization that everybody was going to be dead. He occasionally pondered his own death; he had grieved for his parents—his father twelve years ago, his mother six; he had read obituaries in the newspapers and gone to the funerals of colleagues; and he was here for the great farewell to Sir Arthur. But never before had he understood—though it was more a visceral awareness than a mental comprehension—that everybody was going to be dead. He had surely been informed of this as a child, although only in the context of everyone—like Uncle Compson—continuing to live thereafter, either in the bosom of Christ or,
if they were wicked, elsewhere. But now he looked about him. Prince Albert was dead already, of course, and so was the Widow of Windsor who had mourned him; but that woman with a parasol would be dead, and her mother next to her dead sooner, and those small children dead later, although if there was another war the boys might be dead sooner, and those two dogs with them would also be dead, and the distant bandsmen, and the baby in the perambulator, even the baby in the perambulator, even if it lived to be as old as the oldest inhabitant on the planet, a hundred and five, a hundred and ten, whatever it was, that baby would be dead too.

  And though George was now nearing the limit of his imagination, he continued a little further. If you knew someone who had died, then you could think about them in one of two ways: as being dead, extinguished utterly, with the death of the body the test and proof that their self, their essence, their individuality, no longer existed; or you could believe that somewhere, somehow, according to whatever religion you held, and how fervently or tepidly you held it, they were still alive, either in a way predicted by sacred texts, or in some way we had yet to comprehend. It was one or the other; there was no position of compromise; and George was privately inclined to think extinction the more probable. But when you stood in Hyde Park on a warm summer’s afternoon among thousands of other human beings, few of whom were probably thinking about being dead, it was less easy to believe that this intense and complex thing called life was merely some chance happening on an obscure planet, a brief moment of light between two eternities of darkness. At such a moment it was possible to feel that all this vitality must continue somehow, somewhere. George knew he was not about to succumb to any uprush of religious sentiment—he was not going to ask the Marylebone Spiritualist Association for some of the books and brochures they had offered him when he had taken his ticket. He also knew that he would doubtless go on living as he had done, observing like the rest of the country—and mainly because of Maud—the general rituals of the Church of England, observing them in a kind of half-hearted, imprecisely hopeful way until such time as he died, when he would discover what the truth of the matter was, or, more likely, not discover anything at all. But just today—as that horse and rider trotted past him—that horse and rider as doomed as Prince Albert—he thought he saw a little of what Sir Arthur had come to see.

  It all made him feel breathless and panicky; he sat on a bench to calm himself. He looked at the passers-by but saw only dead people walking—prisoners released on licence but likely to be recalled at any moment. He opened Memories and Adventures and began flipping its pages in an attempt to distract himself. And instantly two words presented themselves to his eyes. They were in normal type, but they struck him like capitals: “Albert Hall.” A more superstitious or credulous mind might have found significance in the moment; George declined to view it as anything more than a coincidence. Even so, he read, and was distracted. He read how, nearly thirty years previously, Sir Arthur had been invited to judge a Strong Man competition in the Hall; and how, after a champagne supper, he had walked out into the empty night and found himself a few steps behind the victor, a simple fellow preparing to walk the London streets until it was time to catch the morning train back to Lancashire. George feels himself in a sudden, vivid dreamland. There is fog, and people’s breath is white, and a strong man with a gold statue has no money for a bed. He sees the fellow from behind, as Sir Arthur had; he sees a hat at an angle, the cloth of a jacket pulled tight by powerful shoulders, a statue clamped casually under one arm, its feet pointing backwards. Lost in the fog, but with a large, gentle, Scottish-voiced rescuer padding up behind, and never afraid to act. What will happen to them all—the wrongly accused lawyer, the collapsed marathon runner, the disoriented strong man—now that Sir Arthur has left them?

  There was still an hour to go, but people had already started moving towards the Hall, so he joined them to avoid a later crush. His ticket was for a second-tier box. He was directed up some back steps and emerged into a curving corridor. A door was opened, and he found himself in the narrow funnel of a box. There were five seats, all currently empty: one at the back, two side by side, and another pair at the front by the brass rail. George hesitated for a moment, then took a breath and stepped forwards.

  Lights blaze at him from all around this gilt and red-plush Colosseum. It is less a building than an oval canyon; he looks far across, far below, far above. How many does it hold—eight thousand, ten thousand? Almost dizzy, he takes a seat at the front. He is glad Maud suggested bringing the binoculars: he scours the arena and the sloping stalls, the three tiers of boxes, the great pipe organ behind the stage, then the higher slope of the circle, the row of arches supported by brown marble columns, and above them the beginnings of a soaring dome cut off from view by a floating canopy of linen duck, like a cloudscape over their heads. He examines the people arriving below—some in full evening dress, but most obedient to Sir Arthur’s wish that he not be mourned. George sweeps the binoculars back to the platform: there are banks of what he takes to be hydrangeas, and large drooping ferns of some kind. A line of square-backed chairs has been set up for the family. The middle one has an oblong of cardboard set up across it. George focuses his glasses on this chair. The sign reads SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.

  As the hall fills up, George stows his binoculars back in their case. Neighbours arrive in the box on his left; he is only a padded armrest away. They greet him in a friendly manner, as if the occasion, while serious, is also informal. He wonders if he is the only person present who is not a spiritualist. A family of four arrives to complete his box; he offers to take the single seat at the back, but they will not hear of it. They seem to him like ordinary Londoners: a couple, with two children approaching adulthood. The wife unselfconsciously takes the seat next to him: she is a woman in her late thirties, he judges, dressed in dark blue, with a broad, clear face and flowing auburn hair.

  “Halfway to Heaven already, up here, aren’t we?” she says pleasantly. He nods politely. “And where are you from?”

  For once, George decides to respond precisely. “Great Wyrley,” he says. “It’s near Cannock in Staffordshire.” He half expects her to say, like Greenway and Stentson, “No, where are you really from?” But instead she just waits, perhaps for him to mention which spiritualist association he belongs to. George is tempted to say, “Sir Arthur was a friend of mine,” and to add, “Indeed, I was at his wedding,” and then, if she doubts him, to prove it from his copy of Memories and Adventures. But he thinks this might appear presumptuous. Besides, she might wonder why, if he was a friend of Sir Arthur’s, he is sitting so far away from the stage among ordinary folk who did not have that luck.

  When the hall is full, the lights are dimmed and the official party walks out on stage. George wonders if they are meant to stand up, perhaps even applaud; he is so used to the rituals of the Church, of knowing when to stand, to kneel, to remain seated, that he feels rather lost. If this were a theatre and they played the National Anthem, that would solve the problem. He feels everyone ought to be on their feet, in tribute to Sir Arthur and in deference to his widow; but there is no instruction, and so all remain seated. Lady Conan Doyle is wearing grey rather than mourning black; her two tall sons, Denis and Adrian, are in evening dress and carry top hats; they are followed by their sister Jean, and half-sister Mary, the surviving child of Sir Arthur’s first marriage. Lady Conan Doyle takes her seat at the left hand of the empty chair. One son sits next to her, the other on the far side of the placard; the two young men rather self-consciously place their top hats on the floor. George cannot see their faces at all distinctly, and wants to reach for his binoculars, but doubts the gesture would be held appropriate. Instead, he looks down at his watch. It is seven o’clock precisely. He is impressed by the punctuality; he somehow expected spiritualists to be more lax in their timekeeping.

  Mr. George Craze of the Marylebone Spiritualist Association introduces himself as chairman of the meeting. He begins by reading a statement on behal
f of Lady Conan Doyle:

  At every meeting all over the world, I have sat at my beloved husband’s side, and at this great meeting, where people have come with respect and love in their hearts to do him honour, his chair is placed beside me, and I know that in the spiritual presence he will be close to me. Although our earthly eyes cannot see beyond the earth’s vibrations, those with the God-given extra sight called clairvoyance will be able to see the dear form in our midst.

  I want in my children’s, and my own, and my beloved husband’s name, to thank you all from my heart for the love for him which brought you here tonight.

  There is a murmur round the hall; George is unable to tell if it indicates sympathy for the widow, or disappointment that Sir Arthur will not be miraculously appearing before them on stage. Mr. Craze confirms that, contrary to the more foolish speculation in the press, there is no question of some physical representation of Sir Arthur manifesting itself as if by magic trick. For those unacquainted with the truths of Spiritualism, and especially for journalists present, he explains that when someone passes over, there is often a period of confusion for the spirit, which may not be able to demonstrate immediately. Sir Arthur, however, was quite prepared for his passing, which he faced with a smiling tranquillity, leaving his family like one going on a long journey yet confident they would all meet again soon. In such conditions it is expected that the spirit will find its place and its powers quicker than most.

  George remembers something Sir Arthur’s son Adrian told the Daily Herald. The family, he said, would miss the patriarch’s footsteps and his physical presence, but that was all: “Otherwise, he might only have gone to Australia.” George knows that his champion once visited that distant continent, because a few years ago he borrowed The Wanderings of a Spiritualist from the library. In truth, he found its travel information of greater interest than its theological disquisitions. But he remembers that when Sir Arthur and his family—along with the indefatigable Mr. Wood—were propagandizing in Australia, they were christened The Pilgrims. Now Sir Arthur is back there, or at least in the spiritualist equivalent, whatever that might be.