by Paul Binding
To a Londoner such as myself all this might, you would think, appear parish-pump stuff, and often I tried to dismiss it as this, but I could not disguise from myself my pleasure in amassing facts and figures and my pride in my almost effortless retention of them. And this gift, to call it that, unlike my quick wit of which I was more proud, did not go unacknowledged by the other members of the newspaper teams; on the contrary it was looked on with favor. On not a few occasions—if I’d been happier, I would have felt the more gratified—long-standing members of the team had turned to me, me, for information or clarification.
So—Oh well, I said to myself, as if yielding to external persuasion, I might as well stay on for the blessed July the Fourth do. Then when all the fuss is over, I can decide how best to spend my life. As for Mary, I shall just have to go very carefully—not throw my weight about as I’ve tended to . . .
What, I asked myself as I trudged up St. Ethelberga’s Road, if Hans Lyngstrand were still there on my return? What if I went up to my room and virtually stripped myself bare of clothes—as the hot weather demanded I should—and the door stealthily opened, and he came in, at once gentle and strong. And shedding his own garments, he once again flung himself upon me, and we became two united youthful summertime bodies whom Bertel Thorvaldsen himself might have wanted to honor in his art on account of their mutual joy and satisfaction?
But all that was almost as much a part of the past as the great gale which had brought Hans to the Kent coast in the first place.
And how sad it was to think like this! While some episodes in one’s life—my parents’ deaths, for example—are so painful that little could be more terrifying than the possibility of their recurrence, there are others one would like to hold on to forever. And to be aware that they are receding further and further from easy recovery is as painful as the literal watching, after departure, of a dear friend dwindling until he has reached complete invisibility.
Later that day, after such dark as the June night could muster, still far from sure that I had done the right thing earlier in not boarding a London train, I took that mile-long, mostly uphill cliff-top walk which starts with a stile at the southernmost bend of St. Ethelberga’s Road and culminates in what is known locally simply as the View, a knoll marked by a compass stone indicating the directions and distance of a variety of places in relation to this eminence, some of them on the other, the continental side of the Channel.
Tonight, and by no means for the first time, all three Castelaniene cats were pleased to accompany me, the stile and its three successors presenting no obstacle whatever for them. For the most part they walked some yards behind me, in the order Japheth, Ham, and, preserving a strict distance from her sons, Mrs. Noah, but every now and again one of the two toms would flatten his ears, turn himself suddenly into some squirrel or rabbit startled by a gunshot, and bolt ahead, whereupon his brother felt honor-bound to follow suit and overtake him. At such moments, to make sure she was of the party, I would look ’round to see that the sharp triangular ears of Mrs. Noah were still visible above the tufts of the grass with her yellow eyes bright beneath them, and still maintaining exactly that number of yards from myself she had decided on at the outset. But when we came near to the compass-stone itself, she did what she usually did—leap onto the top of it, obscuring with her body many of the place-names, and survey—as if with accompanying reflections—the terrain around her. It was easy on such occasions to believe her capable of the strange powers the Gateway ascribed to her. She allowed me to stroke her head, but never lowered it so as she received my attentions she appeared to be at the same time absorbing the whole famous eponymous view into her quiet, mysterious being.
And what a vista it was, almost better at night than by day, with ribbons of lights unfurling below, northeastwards down to the harbor, and then becoming tauter, stretching up the opposite hillside toward downland now engulfed in blackness. Moving my head to my left I beheld a sea like a sheet of dark, lightly creased watered-silk. I thought yet again of how different its smooth surface was from the tempestuous roiling waters of the spring equinox that had thrown Hans into my life, and which I had never so much as glimpsed yet. A gentle breath seemed tonight to rise up from the Channel, without significantly stirring it, like a gentle, involuntary sigh from a sleeping body that refuses to be disturbed by it, and naturally I couldn’t but think here of Hans and his slumbers at my side. Now he was lying alone in some different bed far, far away—far beyond the Channel, indeed at a point so far up the German Ocean that it was making room for the Norwegian Sea, the sea that would carry all who embarked on it to the polar regions themselves. It would still be light at Hans’s latitude, his was as near the land of the Midnight Sun as, from down here, scarcely mattered. Perhaps he too could not sleep and was taking a strand-side stroll. Would he, just as I was thinking of him, be traveling in his mind back to Dengate and myself?
But even as I write that sentence, I remember my resolution to be as honest in these memoirs as I can be. I have written to no purpose if readers have not understood that in these weeks of June when—when!—I permitted my mind to dwell on the matter of Hans-and-myself, I was as changeable in both feelings and attitudes alike (the two being far from the same) as the little night-moths now flitting above the turf in front of me, or as the light of the glow-worms behind those little molehills, so prone to abrupt self-extinction. I simply did not know what I should make of what had happened between the two of us, mostly dismissing any recollections of what either medical science or religious morality would have to say on the matter. But tonight, the image of his young body, at once sailor-strong and invalid-vulnerable, bathed in the soft light of the Norwegian white night was an appealing one as I leaned against the compass-stone. If I could have conjured it into proximity I would have done, I believe.
All of a sudden Mrs. Noah gave a loud miaow puncturing the audible, almost tangible quietness enveloping us, and then jetted her head forward in a sharp sudden action reminiscent of a snake. And then she started purring, the kind of warm, rich purr cats emit while rubbing themselves against human legs, invitations to stroke. But Mrs. Noah was seemingly rubbing herself against night air. Her sons, who had sat themselves down at the foot of the stone, looked up at her in wondering surprise, but did not change their own postures. That their mother was pleased about something, they and I could both tell, but it was a moment or two before I saw the cause, not a something but a somebody: a man coming up toward the View out of the darkness below, wearing—not inappropriately considering the temperature—a panama hat and loose fawn-colored tropical suit and carrying a walking-cane. I knew him, didn’t I? My host at Banstead Lodge—Colonel—whatever was his damned name?
“Mrs. Noah, I’ll stake my life on it!” he said. “And who better to stake one’s life on than you, you dear and wise old thing?” And now Mrs. Noah did have an object to rub her head against, the old colonel’s palm. “And if I mistake not, my feline friend has a companion. The young man who had the courage to ask a question of our treasured vehicle on his very first visit to our Gathering.”
So that was how he saw it, was it? Be grateful for small mercies, I told myself. Your behavior and its consequences could be quite otherwise interpreted.
“Good evening, Colonel!” I said, hoping this address would be socially acceptable. Then his surname came to me, and after a pause that must have been only too easily discernible for what it was, I said aloud, “Walton!”
If Colonel Walton minded my having forgotten his full identity, he did not show it. “And you have two other cats with you!” he commented. “May I be introduced?”
“They’re Japheth and Ham, Mrs. Noah’s sons,” I said. “They like to come on a good-night walk with me.”
“Greetings, Japheth and Ham. Nocturnal strolls are, I find excellent for the soul,” said Colonel Walton, still fondling Mrs. Noah who, looked at closer to, still retained at night her distinctive lavender-gray hue. “And there are times—perhaps you have
arrived at one such yourself—when the soul has particular need of feeling the essential benign mystery behind our earthly life.”
Remembering my temptation to quit Dengate only a few hours back I could hardly disagree with his observation.
“Perhaps,” I conceded.
“How old are Japheth and Ham?” the Colonel—who looked in the moonlight with his topping of white hair rather like a newly sharpened pencil—made the question sound oddly urgent.
“I don’t know, sir, a couple of years each, I suppose. They’re brothers.”
“So George Fuller never saw them. They post-date his—”
Please don’t say “disappearance,” I begged him. I don’t think I could bear to hear that stupid word again. But to my slight surprise he finished his sentence with “departure.”
“Certainly!” I said.
Colonel Walton—to whom Mrs. Noah was continuing to be affectionately attentive—went on to say: “Of course whenever I think of Mrs. Noah—which, like all of us at Banstead Lodge, l frequently do with gratitude and admiration—I think of George Fuller. It was he, after all, who found the cat—on a boat in the harbor—and brought her home, named her, and tended her. He must have missed her when he was over in Italy before his—” (and obviously he was now obliged to use the baleful word) “his disappearance.”
Disappearance. The Disappeared, The Disappeared’s Offer. (To be accepted if you listened to a trusty adviser in Canterbury!) In the vastness of the night these words had a different ring from how they sounded indoors, in the confinement of one’s head. In a somewhat bumbling way I spoke this last sentiment aloud, looking Colonel Walton in the eyes as if indeed he had stepped from off the Golden Pathway and had news to tell me. I swear he turned his head away from my look, as if—yes, embarrassed.
Our goodbyes were both perfunctory and conventional.
I entered Castelaniene by the basement backdoor to which I now had a key, given to me by Mrs. Fuller expressly on account of my new habit of nocturnal rambles. The relations between the two of us were (at least superficially) more amiable than at any point since my arrival. It was as though her fury with me for reading her telegram had purged her of her many resentments of me. And that subsequent strange burst of tears had been an offering of real sorrow on her part that things had not been as they should have between us. My acceptance of her weeping (but how could I have pushed her away?) was also an acceptance of her solemn unspoken intention that henceforward our dealings with one another should be courteous, considerate, completely unexceptionable. And so they had been, though probably not without a certain strain on both our parts, not least during Will’s second visit, when she nervously and unceasingly catered to my friend’s inordinate conceit.
“There the four of yous are!” Sarah exclaimed in her usual cross tone which, I was beginning to realize, didn’t, as far as I was concerned, mean anything very much. “I was after havin’ the bellman after yous at this godforsaken hour.”
The cats now padded in toward the kitchen proper in the expectation even at this late hour, of being given more scraps of food.
“It was nice having the three of them on my walk,” I said. “I walked as far as the View,” (but she probably did not even know where that fine spot was) “and who do you think I met? Colonel Walton.”
“Oh him!” Sarah did not sound impressed. “Glad to get out of that horrible great mansion of his, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“He certainly talked about the beauties of being out at night,” I agreed, “but he wanted to talk about Mrs. Noah and Japheth and Ham more than anything else.”
“Well, you don’t have to go out on the clifftops to think about them,” rejoined Sarah.
“We also,” I added, “talked about Mr. Fuller.”
The unease in Sarah’s curiously flat and wall-eyed face was so unmistakable I could not do other than take my chance:
“Sarah, did they bring back his body all the way from Italy for the funeral? I gather it was a pretty big affair.”
We were both speaking in whispers, which the subject itself seemed to demand though at this late hour Mrs. Fuller was certain not only to be up in her bedroom but most likely asleep. Even so Sarah looked quite wildly all around her before answering me in a yet lower voice, “No, how could they do that, Mr. Bridges? With the poor man crushed to a pulp in a climbin’ accident in them mountains near the village he loved so. Only his heart could be found, and that the Eye-talians sent back. In a casket. Terrible sad it was, but Madam said, we mustn’t be all sad, Sarah, it is beautiful also, to think of part of him there in Castel-aneen until this old world of ours comes to an end. And them at the Gateway—thanks to your friend Colonel Walton—have messages regular about Eye-talians he is with now, and all the beautiful things he loved on his journeys to their country he now has around him for all eternity.”
Her words—which for all their grotesquerie touched a nerve in me I scarcely knew was there—brought home to me one of the oddities in what believers say about the dead; on the one hand they are, they tell us at peace, at one with places they loved, on the other they are in some antechamber waiting for the terrifying moment, aeons ahead, when every single human being will have died, and the world will be declared at an end, and judgment can occur, and paradise proper begin. The two ideas, often uttered in the same speech by the same person, seem to me utterly to contradict one another. But probably I have not understood the thinking of the religious here. From boyhood on I have never been much of a one for the abstract, the pursuit of the absolute as some of them call it.
“I see,” I said, a little awed by what Sarah had just told me. “So there was no kind of wake for him. Just the laying to rest here in Dengate of his heart . . .”
“I should think it’s workin’ you are tomorrow, and if so, you’ll be needin’ your bed!” said Sarah sternly, “and I can hear that Japheth mewin’ away for more bits o’ fish.” She must have very acute hearing, I thought, for I had not caught this noise from my old feline friend. “It’s all ’cos of yous, Mr. Bridges, you’ve given him that much food he can now never have enough. He’s your favorite, an’ you’ve fair spoiled him.”
Up in the mugginess of my attic bedroom I had too much to think about for sleep to arrive with its usual promptness; indeed I held it off for, I would say, an hour and a half with thoughts that at times alarmed and excited me so much I wanted to bound up and down on the bed like a rubber ball, or to bang walls and doors as expressions of a tumult I felt at once mental and moral, of both the head and the heart. Suppose that “disappeared” were indeed the correct word for what had happened to Mr. Fuller? Suppose that Barton Cunningham, and all the other many mourners at his Dengate funeral, had walked behind a coffin containing some old Italian villager’s heart while his owner’s body, heart completely intact, was over in Castelaniene, breathing, feeding, taking in with senses and brain all the multiple sensations that simply being alive entails. The Headmaster of St. Stephen’s College, Alfred Whittington himself, did not preach the address at the funeral service, I recalled, and the task fell to Edmund Hough, always so protective of his widow, to do so. Had he discharged it because he in fact believed, or even knew the man not to be dead, and, naturally eloquent, would be able to find the best words with which to establish the fiction? Perhaps my mind was running away with me, but in one direction I was pretty sure it was not. The telegram spoke—or rather could be taken to speak—of a monetary arrangement that still pertained between “the disappeared” (George) and Beatrice Fuller. Which made it—according to my more orthodox way of looking at things—more likely the man was alive than deceased.
But everything I knew about Mr. Fuller was strange and incomprehensible: the devotion to Latin poets that won him a grudging respect but little liking from Barton Cunningham; his belief that the village of Castelaniene in the Abruzzi was un antícipo di paradiso; his preservation of locks of Mary’s hair; his attitude toward his son when he was in trouble . . .
Come, I to
ld myself, going on like this will not do; I shall never calm down enough for even a few minutes of sleep, and tomorrow, Wednesday our paper comes, and we will have the usual business of facing down our reading public. A change of mental occupation was called for. But how? Of what kind? And then it came to me. I re-lit my lamp and picked up Tit-Bits. It was a judicious decision; clearly I knew myself reasonably well. What a treat its Puzzles and Conundrums page was this issue! As ever! And, it suddenly came to me at past one o’clock, why shouldn’t The Advertiser have a similar feature? To which you could add (I would add—for I saw all this as a coup in which I reclaimed my rightful position on the paper) such related items as amusing games and conjuring tricks (at which, I’d like to boast, I’d been a bit of a dab-hand at school).
My brain was kind to me now, its fertility soothing rather than a stimulant. I would include among conundrums not just those well-known and often distinctly unfair old chestnuts like “How many horse’s tails would it take to reach the moon?” (answer: one, if it were long enough!” which is an answer that satisfies nobody), but the more elaborate and intellectually exacting ones, like that a one-time favorite of mine cast in verse and beginning:
Twice nine of us are eight of us,
And six of us are three,
And seven of us are five of us—
Oh, dear! What can we be . . .?
Only too characteristically the next time (the following day, of course!) that I went into (burst into, more likely) Edmund’s office, I could not refrain from telling him my new plan for the paper. And, after a slight but suitably loaded pause (during which I imagined a whole swarm of contradictory responses emanating from him) he responded not just with pleasure but with a detectable enthusiasm. As well he might, I feel obliged on my own behalf to add. The eventual implementation of my proposal gave rise to what has been steadily one of The Advertiser’s most popular features. I can’t tell you how many folk have said to me what a gap it filled—“How come the paper didn’t have these columns before!”—and I suspect there are boys who read this part of the newspaper only, together with the sports pages of course. But for now—“It will all have to be thought about most carefully!” said Edmund cautiously, again mopping his brow. (He seemed to respond to the heat more badly than any of us, perhaps because he weighed more, perhaps because he was having to work harder in the teeth of it than anybody else!) Egotist though I was (and sadly still am), even I realized that this was a coded way of informing me that, where a proposal involving myself in any active role was concerned, he would have to proceed very cautiously with the others. Had I not turned an experienced journalist’s article into an Inverted Pyramid?