Finding Again the World

by John Metcalf

  The fields were separated by dry-stone walls and where stones had fallen I pulled them up from the gripping turf in search of slow worms. I carried the slow worms inside my shirt and kept them in a large box in the cottage garden.

  One day I prised up a large stone by its corner. The earth beneath was black. A few white threads of roots. Three bright red ants. And there lay the largest slow worm I had ever seen. It was over twelve inches long, strangely dark on its back, almost black, and fat. It was as fat as two of my fingers together. It started to move. Its belly was fawn. I was filled with terror. It started to burrow into the grass roots surrounding the oblong of black earth, the length of its body slowly disappearing.

  The sky was blue, the wind blowing over the grass from the sea. I knew I had seen the slow worm king. Filled with an enormous guilt, I ran from the place, my heart pounding, the killing-jar thumping against my back in the knapsack. I ran for three fields before the terror quieted and I remember then sitting on a pile of rocks emptying out the limp, closed Marble Whites from the cyanide jar; I remember the greenish veins of the underside of their wings as they lay scattered on the grasses.

  * * *

  Mary has brought me a tuna sandwich and a peeled apple cut into slices and has moved my chair back into the sun. She is still wearing a headscarf ready to attack another part of the house. As I eat the sandwich, I crave for all the things I am forbidden—cucumber, strong cheese, radishes, tomatoes in vinegar. Pork. Especially pork. I cannot abide this blandness. Like an old circus lion with worn down teeth.

  Mounting the centre box, cuffing at the trainer.

  Words on paper. Words on paper.

  With my chair in this position I can see her through the kitchen window. The hair pulled back, framed in the scarf, the shape of her face seems to change; she has, surprisingly, my looks about her.

  I always wanted to own a piece of land so that the children could grow up in the country or visit me in a place they could make their own. True, we lived in a variety of rural slums during the summers, but the children were always too young to begin to learn and appropriate things and place. It was only in the city I could hawk my largely unwanted talents. Hand to mouth for so many years as the books and dry times bore on, the struggle to make ends meet thwarted me. And by the time I could have afforded land, the time and the children were gone.

  I have spent so many hours dreaming of that place. A stream running over rocks sweeping into deep, silent trout pools. Honeysuckle in the evenings. Near the house, clumps of brambles which in the late summer would be heavy with blackberries. A barn filled with hay for the children to run and jump in, sunlight filtering in through broken boards, swimming down in shafts of dust-motes.

  I can hear their voices calling.

  Would they, too, have made maps with magic names?

  Once I felt bitter.

  A memory of Mrs. Rosen fills my mind. She is sitting on a park bench holding a grey poodle on her lap and gazing across the baseball field.

  I worked for Mr. Rosen for over five years. I taught English in the mornings in his private school trying to drill the rudiments into dense and wealthy heads and toiled over my typewriter in the afternoons and on into the early evening.

  He is now long dead.

  Rosen College Preparatory High School occupied five rooms on the floor above the Chateau Bar-B-Q Restaurant and Take-Out Service. There were three classrooms, the Library, the supplies locker, and the Office. The staff was all part-time and so in my five years I came to know only the morning shift—Geography, Mathematics, and Science. At recess, the four of us would huddle in the supplies locker and make coffee.

  Mr. Kapoor was a reserved and melancholy hypochondriac from New Delhi who habitually wore black suits and shoes, a white shirt, and striped college tie. His only concession to summer was that he wore the gleaming shoes without socks. I remember his telling me one day that peahens became fertilized by raising their tail feathers during a rain storm; he held earnestly to this, telling me that it was indeed so because his grandmother had told him, she having seen it with her own eyes in Delhi. He taught Science in all grades.

  Mr. Gingley was a retired accountant who taught Mathematics and wore a curiously pink hearing aid which was shaped like a fat human ear.

  Mr. Helwig Syllm, the Geography teacher, was an ex-masseur.

  Mrs. Rosen, who drew salaries as secretary, teacher, and School Nurse, would sometimes grip one by the arm in the hall and hiss: “Don’t foment. My husband can fire anyone. Anyone.”

  Exercising my dog one morning some three years or more after Mr. Rosen’s death and some five years after I’d left the school, I saw his widow in the park. Bundled in an astrakhan coat against the weak spring sunshine, she was holding a grey poodle on her lap and gazing across the baseball field. Queenie, who was in heat, pulled towards her but I did not recognize her until I had passed and she did not notice me. I kept Queenie busy on the far side of the park and, throwing sticks for that ungainly dog, I suddenly felt loss, an absurd diminishment.

  I wonder if this coming March I will be sitting across the desk from Mr. Vogel? When I first went to see him he was just a sprig but is now a portly middle-aged man. Even then, he made me feel a little like a truant youth before the principal. He shakes his head over the mysteries, his spectacles glint as he reproves me for lack of receipts. His fingers chatter over his adding machine.

  His manner is dry; his inventions are fantastical.

  “And now,” he always says, “we come to Entertainment.”

  Flashing a glance of severe probity.

  “A very grey area.”

  I do not want to be seen laughing aloud in the garden. I stifle the laughter and cough into my handkerchief.

  Will Mr. Vogel and I invent my taxes this coming March?

  Only the cartons of papers for Queen’s await my attention; my other papers are in order. My will is drawn up, insurance policies in force, assigns of copyright assigned. I should not pretend any longer. I remember the papers in that outer room of Fortnell House, a scullery perhaps. I do not want my papers abandoned in that way, stored in the damp to rot. But if I do not put them in order perhaps they will be consigned to some air-conditioned but equal oblivion. Tomorrow, after the young man, I must start to sort them, the manuscripts, the journals, the letters from dead friends.

  The doors had been nailed up.

  That outer room in the rear of Fortnell House whose iron window bars we forced with a branch must have been a scullery or pantry. It was stone-flagged and whitewashed, green mould growing down the walls and on some of the damp papers. After the awful noise of screws being wrenched and wood splintering, we stood in the cold room listening.

  Stacked in boxes were bundles of letters, newspapers, parchment deeds with red seals, account books, admiralty charts, and municipal records. The papers littered the floor, too, in sodden mounds where other boys had emptied boxes searching for more exciting things.

  I stuffed my shirt.

  I took bundles of parchment deeds, indentures, wills and leases, documents written in faded Latin.

  THIS INDENTURE made the second day of May in the seventeenth year of our Sovereign Lord George the Third by the Grace of God of Great Britain France and Ireland King Defender of the Faith and so forth and in: the Year of Our Lord . . .

  I remember, too, the half-leather ledger of the clerk of the Christchurch magistrate’s court. The dates ran from 1863-65. The handwriting was a faded sepia copperplate, the name of the defendant in one column, the offence in a second, the fine in a third.

  For bastardy, the commonest charge, the fine was five shillings.

  The cover was, yes, mottled pink and white. The end papers were marbled. The leather spine was mildewed. The front lower corner was bruised, the cardboard raised and puffy with damp.

  I can feel it in my hands.

  * *
*

  The salmon fishers who netted the run between Mudeford and Hengistbury Head—the hours I have sat watching the two rowing boats laying the cork-bobbing net across the incoming tide. Mostly they came up empty, the net piling slack and easy. Perhaps twice a day the net would strain, a flash of roiling silver, and then the great fish hauled in over the side to be clubbed in the boat bottom.

  The name for a bludgeon used to kill fish is a “priest.” How I hug these words to myself, savouring them. “Priest” was not a local usage; I have seen it in print. It is not recorded in the Shorter Oxford.

  One of Mr. Taylor’s ferrets was brown, the other albino. I swung a stake with him one day on the Double Dykes despatching rabbits as they bolted into the nets pegged over their holes. The albino ferret eventually reappeared masked in blood. The ferrets frightened me; Mr. Taylor handled them with gauntlets. Some of the dead rabbits were wet underneath with trickles of thick, bright yellow urine which stood on the fur.

  Over the two stone bridges and beyond Christchurch, along the New Forest road towards the Cat and Fiddle Inn, we cycled sometimes on our new Raleigh All-Steel bicycles to Summerfield. The Summerfield Estate stretched for miles over heath, farmland, and woods. We visited the roadside rookery where in late spring we gathered the shiny twelve-bore cartridge cases that the gamekeeper had scattered blasting into the nests from underneath. Beyond lay the heath where adders basked and kestrels circled the sky. We visited the hornets’ nests in the trees in the dead wood and the pools where the palmated newts bred and we walked down the stream-bed to attach leeches to our legs. And always, past the cottages and the wheat fields and pasture, we headed down for the woods and coverts.

  The gamekeeper was our invisible enemy; he was rumoured to have shot a boy in the behind. The raucous calls of pheasant held us in strained silence; rootling blackbirds froze us.

  We trespassed into the heart of the wood where in a clearing we would stare at the gamekeeper’s gibbet—a dead, grey tree hung with the corpses of rats, crows, owls, stoats and weasels, hawks and shapeless things. Some of the bodies would be fresh, others rotted to a slime. There in the still heat of the afternoon we stared. Over the bodies in a gauze of sound crawled the iridescent flies.

  Children are, I think, drawn towards death and dying. I remember the ambivalence of a young girl of eight or nine to a litter of puppies at suck, the blind mouths and puddling forepaw at the swollen dugs—she, too, it seemed to me, sensed a relationship between herself and the bitch. I remember it—vividly. The daughter of a friend. I seem to remember attempting a story once on that but as with so many of my stories, I could find no adequate structure.

  * * *

  The cutlass was about three feet long and slightly curved. The guard was brass and the Tower of London armoury mark was stamped on the blade near the hilt. The hilt was bound in blackened silver wire. I got the cutlass from one of the older boys—I forget his name—in exchange for six Christmas annuals and a William and Mary shilling. It was from him, too, that I learned the secret of Fortnell House.

  I went there first on my own. The house was an eighteenth century mansion on the outskirts of Christchurch. It was invisible from the road; large padlocked gates marked the entrance to the drive. On the gate-pillars weathered heraldic beasts stood holding shields. The details of the quartering within the shields were little more than lumps and hollows. I think the beasts were griffins but time and the weather had so eroded the soft grey stone that the outlines of the carving were indistinct.

  I climbed the iron spears of the railings and forced my way through the rank laurels onto the drive. The wood and the drive were overgrown and dark; the gravel had reverted to grass and weeds. The bottom windows of the house were blind and boarded; the front door was padlocked. Pink willowherb and weeds sprouted from the guttering. Some of the second storey windows were broken.

  Around the back of the house were extensive grounds and a spinney, the lawns and terraces overgrown, the garden statuary tumbled. The windows were boarded and the doors nailed shut. I tried the doors with my shoulder. Inside, according to report, upstairs, room after room was filled with swords and spears and armour, guns, statues, strange machines, old tools, pictures, books—a treasury. The silence and the rank growth frightened me.

  To one side of the house at the back, next to the coach house, stood three wooden sheds, their doors smashed open to the weather. Two were empty except for a rusted lawn-mower and an anchor but in the third I found a broken mahogany cabinet full of shallow drawers. It had contained a collection of mineral specimens, many of which were scattered about the floor. I filled my pockets with strange and glittering stones. In a corner of the shed were stacks of plates and dishes; many had been smashed. I found intact two large willow-pattern plates, meat chargers. The blue was soft and deep. I told my parents I had traded something for them.

  Fortnell House had been built in the 1720s. The last Fortnell, Sir Charles, had left the house and his collections to the town of Christchurch as a museum. The town had accepted the gift but was disinclined or unable to raise the money to refurbish the building and install a curator.

  Sir Charles had served for many years in India, the Middle East, and Africa. He was one of that vanished breed like Burton, Speke, and Layard—romantic amateurs who were gentlemen, scholars, linguists, and adventurers. Fortnell House became the repository of collections of minerals, fossils, books, weapons, tribal regalia, paintings and carvings. On his retirement, Sir Charles had devoted his energies to Christchurch and the county, collecting local records, books, memorabilia, and the evidences of the prehistoric past.

  It has become the fashion to decry such men as wealthy plunderers but we shall not see their like again. My youngest grandson, he of Adidas College, has called me fascist and them racist. I forbear to point out that his precious victims of oppression and colonialism despoiled their ancestral tombs for gold and used the monuments of their past for target practice. My heart does not bleed for the Egyptians; I do not weep for the Greeks.

  It is, I suppose, natural to clash with those younger, natural this conservatism as one grows older; one has learned how easily things break.

  What will the young man say to me this evening? And what can I say to him? It is difficult to talk to these young college men whose minds no longer move in pictures. Had he been here this morning I could, like some Zen sage, have pointed to the Monarchs about the apple leaves and preserved my silence.

  Particular life. Particular life.

  All else is tricks of the trade or inexpressible.

  I have often wondered, I wonder still, what became of those willow-pattern plates I stole from Fortnell House. I brought them to Canada with me when I was a young man and they survived endless moves and hung on an endless variety of kitchen walls. They disappeared when June and I were divorced. She was quite capable of breaking them to spite me. Or, more likely, selling them. She had little aesthetic sense. She would have called them dust-gatherers or eyesores—some such thin-lipped epithet. So do they now hang on some Westmount wall or decorate an expensive restaurant?

  I liked to be able to glance at them while I was eating; I used to like running my fingertips over that glaze. It comforted me. That deep lead glaze, the softness of the blue—one did not need to check pottery marks to know such richness was eighteenth century work.

  I remember reading that Wedgwood used to tour the benches inspecting work. When he found an imperfect piece he smashed it with a hammer and wrote on the bench with chalk: This will not do for Josiah Wedgwood. I have always liked that story. We would have understood each other, Josiah and I.

  As the years passed, I thought more often, and with greater bitterness, of those two large plates than I did of June. She is now the dimmest of memories. Strange that I cannot recall her features or her body; strange that she was Mary’s mother. Alison, too, has receded now so far that I must concentrate to see her features, st
rain to hear her voice. She sends me Christmas cards from Florida.

  Far clearer and more immediate is Patricia Hopkins. I see the scene like an enlarged detail from a great canvas. We are hidden in the laurel bushes in her garden; it is gloomy there though light hints on the glossy leaves. In the far distance the sunshine sparkles on the greenhouse. In the immediate background is a weed-grown tennis court along whose nearest edge the wire netting sags in a great belly. Patricia’s knickers are round her knees. I am staring at the smooth cleft mound of her vagina. I am nine and she is eight.

  Better remembered than the bodies of two wives.

  I have always detested photographs. There was an article in Robert’s Time magazine about that fellow Land and his Polaroid cameras. He called photography “the most basic form of creativity.” So obscenely wrong.

  But I must not get excited.

  My third visit to Fortnell House was my last.

  We got in through the bars of the scullery window and both lingered, turning over the sodden papers and documents that littered the floor, unwilling to go further into the dark house. Eventually we crept along a short passage into the kitchen.

  One wall was taken up by a vast black range, another by two long sinks. In the middle of the room was a long wooden table. On the wall above the door that led out of the kitchen was a glass case of dials. Inside the dials were numbers and beneath the case hung two rows of jangly bells on coiled strips of metal—a device, we decided, for summoning servants to the different rooms.

  A passage led from the kitchen through two doors to the hall. The hall was dark and echoey. On the walls hung the dim shapes of mounted heads and antlers. All the doors off the hall were closed. The staircase was uncarpeted. We started up it towards the first landing.

  A few thin rays of light came through chinks in the boards that covered the landing window. A line of light ran up the handrail of the banister. We spoke in whispers and walked on the outside edges of the stairs.