by Jane Langton
Robert picked up another volume and opened the cover, revealing a grubby sheaf of paper. “This is the last of his journals, the one he wrote in prison.”
“Oh, it’s so sad,” exclaimed Lucy. “Such a passion for revenge! And no wonder. The next beastly thing that nasty bishop did was to blackball the election of his brother to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The bishop, of course, was a member of the association. For him, getting in was just a matter of manipulating his lofty connections. Poor Oliver yearned to be a member. I mean, after all, his own scientific credentials were surely more acceptable than his brother’s. But they turned him down, and afterwards he learned that his own brother had destroyed his chances. The bishop had ridiculed him in the presence of all the great men of British science, the very men Oliver most revered.” Lucy shook her head contemptuously. “Oh, it was unforgivable.”
Homer looked at her sympathetically. “You could almost call it a sufficient reason for fratricide.”
“Exactly,” said Lucy. “But wait till you hear the last straw. Oh, it was so wicked and frightful, but on both sides, you see, on both sides! The bishop was invited to preach in Oxford Cathedral, you know, there at the college of Christ Church. Do you know the cathedral? It’s right there in the college quadrangle, but it’s not just a college chapel, it’s the cathedral for the entire diocese of Oxford. Anyway, they called some sort of synod or convention or something. What would you call it? A convocation of bishops? A conclave?”
“A bevy,” volunteered her husband, “a bevy of bishops. A beatitude of bishops—”
Homer pitched in. “A billow of bishops, a bellowing of bishops, a befuddlement of bishops, a bawling babble of—”
“Stop!” cried Mary, while Lucy clapped her hands, then collected herself and carried on.
“That’s right, it was a whole bellowing of bishops, all the bishops of Great Britain, along with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, with their miters cleaving the sky and their robes afloat”—Lucy flounced her arms in the air—“and then Oliver’s horrid brother stood up in the pulpit and preached against amateur naturalists who adopted the pernicious new theory of human descent. He pounded his fist and shouted that it was a sin against the sanctity of the female sex to claim that the sacred lineage of human motherhood had such a depraved ancestry. And then he thundered against his poor brother. His own brother, he said, might have had an ape for a mother, but if so then he was an abominable bastard.” Lucy lifted her hands in horror. “That is a quote, an exact quote.” Exhausted, she turned to her husband. “You tell the rest. It’s beyond my power.”
“Well, there’s nothing much to it,” said Robert. “Oliver stood up in his pew, took out his pistol, and shot his brother through the heart.”
CHAPTER 47
But how durst you attack a live bishop in that fashion?
I am quite ashamed of you! Have you no reverence for the fine lawn
sleeves?
Charles Darwin, letter to T. H. Huxley
“In the cathedral?” said Mary, aghast. “He shot the bishop right there in the cathedral?”
Homer jumped to his feet in a fury. “Well, who could blame him? Talk about bastards! His brother should have been drawn and quartered. But I suppose all the righteous indignation in England was directed at poor old Oliver. What did they do, hang him from the nearest tree?”
“Oh, no,” said Robert. “They went through all the proper dismal legalities. It took six months or so, with Oliver languishing in prison, scribbling furiously in his journal, before they took him out and strung him up in the presence of a gloating priest.”
For a moment Homer and Mary sat in stunned silence. Then Lucy bounced out of her chair. “We all need a drink,” she said. She vanished into the next room, and came back a moment later with four glasses and a bottle on a tray.
They sipped their sherry gratefully. Then Robert picked up the journal that had come from Windrush Hall. “See here,” he said, tapping the cover, “what’s all this about crabs? And Thomas Bell? And Charles Darwin? Here’s Darwin’s name, right here on page one.”
It was Homer’s turn to explain. “They were Darwin’s crabs, sent home from his expedition on the Beagle. He loaned them to his zoologist friend Thomas Bell for identification. But Bell was too busy, and besides, he was sick, so he turned a bunch of them over to Oliver. And then poor Oliver got them mixed up. He didn’t know which was which.”
“And there was a jar,” began Mary.
“A jar?” Lucy Clare leaned forward, gazing at her intently. “What sort of jar?”
“It’s another long story,” said Mary, and then she took turns with Homer telling the story of the jars of desiccated crabs that had turned up so mysteriously in the Oxford University Museum. Homer explained his suspicion that their son had brought them from Windrush Hall.
“What we don’t understand,” said Mary, “is why he didn’t bring them to the museum openly, and say, Look what I found, the missing Darwin crabs! Why did he do it secredy, in the dark of night?”
Lucy looked at her husband soberly. “I’m afraid we understand it very well.”
Robert murmured, “Carry on.”
She turned to Homer and Mary. “Did they give you a tour of Windrush Hall when you were there? They didn’t? Too bad. If you’d seen the family portraits, you’d understand. They make it perfectly clear. There have always been two kinds of Clares. Sometimes the current squire stands beside a marble column draped in fur and velvet, and then the next one gazes at the moon through a spyglass, surrounded by his prize chickens. They were either dreadfully stuffy and arrogant like Oliver’s brother, the bishop, or they were cranks and oddballs like Oliver himself. There’s nothing in between.”
“We kept two portraits for ourselves,” said Robert, “two of the eccentrics, Oliver and my father.” Turning in his chair, he pointed to the picture hanging over the mantel, a portrait of a man in a bathrobe sitting outdoors on a folding chair. His feet were bare, and a small volume lay on his lap. “He was a student of early printed books. That one is from the Aldine Press in Venice. Alas, we had to leave it at Windrush Hall.”
“Does that make him an eccentric?” asked Mary, disbelieving.
“No, but there were other things.” Robert looked at her with a wry smile. “My father was a professional atheist. He smashed stained-glass windows and organized antichurch rallies. I confess it was a little difficult to be his son.”
“And of course our Oliver found it difficult to be his grandson,” said Lucy. She sighed. “From the very beginning he fitted into the other tradition.”
“The pompous tradition, I’m afraid,” murmured Robert.
“Oh, we did our best,” Lucy went on. “We sent him to the local grammar school instead of to Harrow, and made sure his friends came from every part of London. But as soon as he was old enough to understand the grandeur of our connection with Windrush Hall, the whole thing went to his head. He was dazzled by the family lineage and his memory of the stately home where he was born.”
“It was pitiful,” said Robert, “the way he was so attached to the house. To him it was a tragedy that it had passed out of the family. He kept going there, taking the afternoon tour, gazing at the ugly rooms in which great affairs of state had taken place, bedrooms in which his splendid ancestors had died. He couldn’t stay away.”
“It was so pathetic,” said Lucy, “his eagerness to rent a tiny part of it for himself.” She shook her head in melancholy wonder. “Ludicrous.”
They were talking freely, eagerly. Homer and Mary sat quietly, listening, while Robert and Lucy Clare described their son’s obsession with family glory.
“It was so sad,” said Robert. “I think he was ashamed of me for having given up the stately home, not hanging on somehow.” His face darkened. “I think he was ashamed of his mother for being the daughter of a salesman.”
“Oh, the poor dear,” Lucy went on, “he was so desperate to go to Oxford or Cambridge.
” She stared at the rug, her round face looking old for the first time. “We knew it couldn’t happen. His A-levels weren’t good enough. Oh, he was good at sports, but he just couldn’t get the hang of academics. Still, he couldn’t believe they would reject him. Of course when they did, he was dreadfully disappointed.”
“What did he do instead?” asked Mary softly.
“He fell back on piety,” said Robert, his voice edged with sarcasm.
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “Perhaps it was a reaction against his grandfather, the smasher of stained glass. But when he enrolled in a theological college here in London, we were glad he had something to care about. We thought it was rather a second-rate kind of place, but it was his decision, not ours.”
“I confess,” said Robert, “we were afraid it would lead to nothing in the end, that he wouldn’t get a parish of his own. And therefore we were immensely pleased when he was ordained by the Bishop of Oxford. He spent a year as a curate in Banbury, and then he was assigned to the church at Nightingale Court. But, unhappily—” Robert paused and shook his head sorrowfully.
Lucy carried on. “Unhappily Oliver himself was mortified. You can imagine the sort of thing he had hoped for—some grand edifice with a Norman tower and a rose window and lofty pointed arches.” She swooped her arms toward the ceiling. “So once again he was disappointed.”
“Of course he accepted the assignment,” said Robert, “but he lavished all his affection on the cathedral at Christ Church. As an outsider he couldn’t participate in its rituals and services, but he cozied up to the bishop and the canons and all the other ecclesiastical dignitaries, and made himself useful, and never missed an important service, no matter how he had to juggle things in his own parish.” Robert broke off with a tormented shake of his head.
“Oh, forgive us for talking about our poor dear son like this,” said Lucy, “but Bob is right. I feel the same way.”
For a moment they both seemed lost in sad recollection. Then Robert turned to Homer. “You asked about the jars.” He glanced at his wife. “I can imagine how Oliver felt about his ancestor’s wretched jars.”
“You see,” said Lucy, eager to explain, “he was deeply embarrassed by his atheist grandfather and all the other spotted apples on the family tree. He particularly loathed the first Oliver Clare, the man who had murdered a bishop in the sacred precincts of the Oxford Cathedral. He wanted us to pitch out the shrunken head and the sad little fetuses of the Siamese twins. He kept turning Oliver’s portrait to the wall. He wanted to know why we didn’t display the bishop’s crozier and the sword of the admiral and the great industrialist’s Order of the Garter, family relics he could be proud of. And once when he was about thirteen he smashed some of Oliver’s shells.”
“Oh, well,” said Homer indulgently, remembering certain violent acts of his own at that age. “Children will be children.”
“Of course they will,” said Robert, “but it shows how strongly he felt. And now”—Robert tapped the book on his lap—“think of it, here was proof that the nineteenth-century ancestor for whom he had been named had shamefully failed no less a person than Charles Darwin.” Robert shook his head. “Oh, my son, my poor son.”
There was a gloomy silence. Mary studied her shoes. Homer glanced around the room, and at once the pleasant chamber with its armchairs and windows, the cross-eyed portrait of the first Oliver Clare, the horn of the narwhal and the shrunken head, all gathered themselves into a certainty. “I see,” he said, boldly breaking the silence. “Your son thought the family honor would be compromised if he appeared in person with the miserable remains of Darwin’s crabs and tried to explain that they had been mishandled by one of his own ancestors, a man who had been hanged for murder.”
Lucy Clare nodded fervently, and Robert said, “Yes, oh, yes.”
Homer went on sorting the matter out. “Think of the universal respect for the name of Charles Darwin! Even the Darwin revisionists can’t do much to sully his memory. Your son Oliver must have been aware of the magnitude of the reverence. And he must have understood the historic importance of everything Darwin collected during his voyage around the world. Therefore—”
“The shame of it, that’s what he would have thought,” said Lucy. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. “The dishonor to the family name. Oh, it was foolish to think so, it was wrong.”
Robert put his hand on her shoulder. “That’s it, that’s it exactly.”
Mary spoke up, protesting. “Well, I think he deserves credit for returning those jars at all. He could have left them there in the cupboard, or dumped them in the river.”
“That’s right,” said Homer, trying to leave Mr. and Mrs. Clare with a pittance of praise for their dead son. “He had a conscience about them. He just didn’t want anyone to know it was his own family that had been at fault.”
Lucy wasn’t listening. She had been struck by a new understanding. She turned to her husband. “Oh, Robert, I see what happened. I know how he felt. It was his attachment to the cathedral. I see it now. And his reverence for the bishop, the present bishop, and his ambition to move up in the Anglican church. Oh, Robert, don’t you see? The murder that happened in the cathedral back in 1863, a murder committed by someone with his very own name, against a bishop, right there in the cathedral he cares so much about, what if all that were to come up again, what if everyone knew about it? It would make him look ridiculous. He’d be a figure of scorn, a laughingstock!”
“Yes, yes, you’re right,” said Robert. “So if he were to return the Darwin jars to the museum publicly, then the journal would come out, and everything about the first Oliver Clare would come out, too, including the murder of his brother, the bishop, in Christ Church Cathedral.” Robert turned to Homer and Mary. He winced with pain. “You see, the poor boy was so ambitious. I think he fancied himself a bishop too, one day.”
Lucy dabbed at her cheeks. “Of course we worried about him all along, because he seemed to be neglecting his own congregation. He wanted something grander, far grander.”
“Yes,” said Mary, nodding. “Freddy told me a little about that.” She glanced significantly at Homer, and they stood up to say goodbye.
Homer had a last question. “I wonder if you know about the drawing somebody scratched on Oliver’s memorial in the church in Burford. I thought it was a duck of some sort, but might it not be—?”
“A dodo?” said Lucy. “Yes, of course it’s a dodo. It was someone’s final thrust at poor old Dodo Clare.”
Mary had a last irrelevant question. “Your son was a skier, wasn’t he, Mrs. Clare? Freddy Dubchick told me they went skiing together.”
It drew a blank. “Skiing?” said Lucy. “I wasn’t aware that Oliver ever went skiing.”
“Nor was I,” said Robert. “Other sports, of course. He was good at sports. But not skiing, so far as I know.”
“Oh,” said Mary. “I must have been mistaken. Perhaps I didn’t understand her.”
They shook hands with Lucy and Robert Clare. All four of them were tearful. In the past two hours, in an atmosphere of perfect truth, they had endured together a century and a half of family tragedy and trouble.
When the door closed behind them, Homer and Mary walked silently in the direction of Sloane Street to hail a cab. Homer hardly noticed the handsome townhouses arrayed on either side. Instead he saw Oliver Clare’s pitiful bloodstained body as it lay on the floor of the house on St. Barnabas Street. That poor agonized young man! What did all his torments have to do with one another? His thwarted love for Fredericka Dubchick, the collapse of his belief in God, his frantic anxiety to shuck off the Darwin crabs—was there a common source, some anguished gland inside him?
At Paddington Station he found the answer as they were swept along in the crowd of hurrying men and women. “It’s simple,” he shouted at Mary. “It’s just a question of basic drives.”
Mary was jostled from behind. “Basic what?”
“Drive
s, basic drives. Hunger and sex, right? The urge to survive and procreate? Animals and humans too, isn’t that right?”
Heads turned, bodies surged past them. Mary struggled closer and shouted back, “I suppose so, Homer. What are you getting at?”
He grabbed her arm and together they were carried along into Paddington’s high open spaces. “There’s a third, a third basic drive, belonging only to the very tiptop primates, namely us.”
Mary laughed. “All right, Homer, I give up. What is it, this third basic drive?”
“Respectability, the urge for respectability.”
“Ah, yes. Hunger, sex and respectability, Oliver Clare’s obsession. Yes, of course.”
CHAPTER 48
Worms are destitute of eyes.
Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms
Mark Soffit never told himself that he was a worm. But in the remote center of himself, far from the surface, the knowledge lay coiled, an organ of self-loathing. Its secretion was a powerful stream that flowed all over his body, suffusing it, filling him with furious resentment.
After the cocktail party at Oriel, where he had been humiliated by the celebrated Jeremiah Heddlestone, Mark was irresistibly attracted to the Zoology Office in the Oxford University Museum.
It was here that Professor Dubchick was working on his book. A masterpiece, Heddlestone had called it. It galled Mark that Dubchick kept crossing him up. Mark had come to Oxford eager to work with the great man, to be able to say for the rest of his life, Oh, yes, we were colleagues. But look what had happened! On their very first encounter Dubchick had as good as insulted him. And then he had fobbed Mark off on Hal Shaw, who had given him degrading assignments, which Mark had rightly refused to do. After all, a person had some pride. And then when he had presented the case fairly and truthfully to Dubchick, the man had insulted him again, throwing his own words back in his teeth.
And now, after judging the old fraud to be senile, after burning his bridges so that he couldn’t go back, Mark had been tricked again. Dubchick was about to parade himself before the world as a central thinker, a unifier of disciplines, a sort of Albert Einstein in the field of zoology.