by A. S. Byatt
Death, judgement, heaven and hell, I said. The Four Last Things. Something was tugging at my mind. A new idea, said Erik. A tour of the Four Last Things. Like a pilgrimage. Tourism had taken over from pilgrimages, said Christophe, that was a cliché. Travel was what was left of religion. Art galleries were the new temples, it was true, said Erik. Once people travelled to see the artifacts in the galleries. Now the galleries themselves—Stuttgart, Nîmes, Houston, St. Ives—were the ends of journeys, spiritual centres of contemplation, as the great cathedrals had been, and before them the caves of the oracles. Great nineteenth-century monumental buildings of the industrial revolution (the Bankside power house, the Gare d’Orsay, the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin) now housed collections of art, canvas and sculpture, wax and glass boxes.
Something tugged more insistently. It was Destry-Scholes’s personages. All three were travellers. He appeared to have embellished all three journeys with invented “spiritual” visions. All three personages had, so to speak, hallucinated themselves, their doubles, their spirits, after strenuous journeys. Ibsen perhaps didn’t quite fit. I needed to do more work on his biography, on his real contact, or lack of contact, with Henriksen, his illegitimate son. But the biographical playlet presented the son as a double, an alter ego, a ghost. I had gone off Linnaeus since Fulla Biefeld had departed with the spliced-faked document. I wondered if it was time to start serious work on what Francis Galton had seen in Ovampoland. Why had Destry-Scholes taken to inventing spirit-journeys? The truth was, at that time, I had taken to spending more and more of “my own” research time in the British Library producing refinements of tour-plans that Erik and Christophe had in hand. It was nice to come up with an unexpected site full of archaeopteryx bones that could be reached from a better-known one by a trek across the Peruvian wild, or a painting of the Earthly Paradise by Brueghel the younger in an otherwise undistinguished minor Swiss gallery. Erik and Christophe were so encouragingly enthusiastic about my finds and my projects. They pointed out the uses of the Internet for research, and I took to it with pleasure, but it did not beat the library, not yet, with its catalogue and its books full of bibliographies full of books full of bibliographies. It was interesting that Destry-Scholes was becoming more substantial even whilst no progress was being made. I wondered if there was a Galton society like the Linnean?
I wondered also—how could I not—about travelling myself. The fortunate notice in the window had mentioned a possibility of travel. I asked Erik and Christophe—they were so easy, so relaxed, it was not difficult—what they had meant. They said that every so often a particular tourist needed a companion—for reasons of health, or frailty, or loneliness. Sometimes tourists could be amiably paired, satisfying a double need. But now and then—not often—one of them—one of us—might be the best and most reliable travelling companion. Christophe said I would need to know the trade backwards—to have proved my worth—before there was any possibility of such a jaunt. Where would I ideally wish to jaunt to? I mentioned, again, the Maelstrøm. The man I was researching, I said, had disappeared near, or in, it. Erik remarked that it should perhaps be included with the death-leaps or in the Four Last Things. Christophe said there would be nothing to see. Erik said that depends on him. Meaning me. But they did not offer to facilitate my journey to the Maelstrøm and I did not mention it again.
I cannot now remember what came next, the letter or the first visit of the Strange Customer. I called him the Strange Customer, to myself, from the beginning I think, after Destry-Scholes’s rendering of Henrik Ibsen’s doppelgänger son. Who had been named for the Strange Passenger, in Peer Gynt’s last voyage. He came in when I was alone, the first time, and the subsequent times. The first time I think I did not notice his tall shadow pacing the pavement outside the proscenium of the window with its paper whirlpool. Subsequent times, I did. I came to suppose that he was prospecting, so to speak, to see whether I was alone, but the first time that was a long way from my thoughts. I thought he had come in on an impulse, as I had myself. He was very tall, well over six feet, with sleek black hair, beautifully cut, short and conventional. He wore a suit—double-breasted—also beautifully cut, with the merest hint of an exaggerated nipped waist, the merest gesture towards a flamboyantly wide lapel. He wore a white rosebud in his buttonhole, and carried a black lacquered cane with a bone handle, which he propped against the counter. His face was a little too long for its proportions. His lips were large and full, but pursed a bit tightly, not loose, not even relaxed. His nails were square and dreadfully clean. I took a long time to notice or remember his eyes. When I called him up to memory, that part of his face, which should be the most striking, always remained a grey rectangle of smoke or cloud or something. I think he may have worn dark glasses, or other sorts of glasses, and possibly not always the same. I was not very used to being left alone with the shop on the occasion of his first visit. So I pretended to be busy—well, I was busy, I went on being busy—with my blue screen and dancing alphabets. He stood in the doorway—he always stood in the doorway—I could feel his weight like a barrier if I should wish to rush out into the street. His shoes were beautifully polished.
Erik and Christophe had told me not to disrupt any customer who showed signs of wanting to browse without approaching the counter. He looked at me for a moment, and then went and sat down on one of the stools, leafing through books on Greek art and Thai temples. I had developed the conceit that Puck’s Girdle was a chapel for meditation, with its starry ceiling and chained bibles of tourism. There was a certain reverence about my Strange Customer, who bowed his head over the pages and put the tips of his fingers together. He spent a long time there, moving along the rows, opening and closing the books. Finally he approached me. He asked where Pim (or Pym, perhaps. I didn’t know) was. I said I didn’t know Pim.
His voice was clear and belling. Not like those voices in Fitzgerald, full of money, but full of a thick-blooded mixture of confidence and desire (a word used, partly at least, in the sense of my postmodernist French theory). I don’t mean that he desired me. I mean that he gave me the impression of wanting to eat huge meals with gusto, and fly first class at great speeds. He said that perhaps Pim had left, perhaps I was Pim’s successor? Pim had arranged some unforgettable experiences for him, he said, leaning briefly towards me across the counter. I hadn’t thought about whether I had had a predecessor, but let it lie. I said we tried to think of unusual things. We succeeded beyond expectation, he agreed cordially. He added, to my surprise, that though many travel agencies might be said to run on adulterated or bastardised Fourierist principles, Puck’s Girdle was, so to speak, the distinguished thing itself, wouldn’t I agree? I agreed enthusiastically (for me, I don’t let much expression show in my face, even when I’m excited, that’s my nature). I could hardly believe I was living in a real world, where Englishmen in suits with buttonholes came in and chatted knowledgeably about Fourier. He would be back, he announced. He liked a long period of anticipation. He had one or two things in mind. Brewing. He’d be more specific when the time was ripe. I said I hoped we should be able to satisfy him. He said he was sure we would. I think that is all I have to record about my first encounter with him. I think all the rest came later, including his name, which he didn’t offer me on that occasion.
The letter was a complete surprise, not least because I don’t get letters, I don’t have correspondents. In recent weeks I had had two or three (or more—there were more) brief notes from Fulla Biefeld, who had gone to the Hope Entomological Institute in Oxford to work on bee systematics. She had sent me a bibliography of further reading on Linnaeus. This I found a little insulting, partly because the one expertise I pride myself on is my way with catalogues and bibliographies, and partly because she made the wrong assumption that I was unable to read material in French or Latin or German. She also sent me some material on the crisis in pollination studies, and what she referred to as the TI (Taxonomic Impediment) and TD (Taxonomic Deficit) in the study of natural resources
and ecology. Other things that came through the post almost certainly through her agency were an invitation to join a Europe-wide Bee Watch, sponsored in London by the Wildlife Trust, and a taxonomic study of the flora and fauna of Richmond Park. “You might like to use some of your spare time on what may (probably will) turn out to be a matter of some urgency,” she wrote. I was vaguely insulted by her assumption that I had spare time. I began to notice bumblebees on pavements and honeybees in hedges as I walked to Piccadilly. I wondered if it would be interesting to add Bee Watches and pollination holidays to the fan of possibilities displayed at Puck’s Girdle. I even thought with evanescent pleasure of looking at wormcasts and birdnests in Richmond Park. No one could say these were not things. There were things in Puck’s Girdle, but most of these things were images of other things, photographs of glaciers, standardised descriptions of hotel rooms (TV, central heating, bath/shower, large/small/queensize/kingsize bed and so on). The chained books were things, and the screens of the computers, but things containing the codes to access thingier, denser things.
I digress. The letter came from Willesden, and was nothing to do with Fulla Biefeld. It was written in beautifully neat, minuscule writing, clear enough, but clearer under a magnifying glass.
Dear Mr. Nanson,
Someone brought your query to the Times Literary Supplement to my attention some time ago. I don’t see the Supplement, I’m afraid. I am the niece of Scholes Destry-Scholes—my mother (now dead) was his sister. It is possible that I am his only living relative, I don’t know, we are not a close family and never have been. Certainly my mother was his only sister. At the time I didn’t bother to write to you, because there seemed nothing to say. I never met my uncle and I don’t really remember much mention of him. But it seems from your query that he might have had some kind of importance. I have been clearing out some junk in my attic and found a suitcase of his things. There are a lot of index cards you might find interesting. It seems a pity for them just to gather dust if anyone at all is interested in them. Let me know what you think. I’ll quite understand if you think my “find” is too insignificant to bother with.
Yours faithfully,
Vera Alphage
Naturally, I was intrigued by the connection of Scholes Destry-Scholes with a suitcase full of authentic things. I did not form any very clear impression of Miss or Mrs. Vera Alphage. I wrote back to Willesden in a businesslike way, saying that I had formed the project of writing a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes, having been very impressed by his own work on Elmer Bole, but that I had been finding it very difficult to discover any information, and was therefore delighted to have the possibility of meeting a relative, or seeing any archival material at all. I had formed the impression, from her style, that she was a comfortable, slightly naïve housewife in her late forties. I saw her plump and cheerful. Matter of fact. She replied, however, that she could only see me in the evenings, when she got back from work, which could sometimes be quite late. I replied—always by post, neither of us vouchsafed a telephone number—with my own timetable of work and research time. So I ended up travelling to Willesden at about eight o’clock of a summer evening, forewarned that Ms. Alphage “would not call a few index cards an archive exactly.”
Number 10, Fox Crescent, resembled the Askham Way birthplace in many ways. It was small, in a terrace, with a little wicket gate into a front garden with a border of phlox and delphiniums and a strip of lawn like the area between wickets in cricket. (Which I know only from the television, it is not played at the sort of school I went to. I thought of saying, two complete revolutions of a roller, and then thought, I had got the roller from cricket, and needed the reference.) Unlike the Pontefract house, number 10 had a porch with a pointed roof, over which an abundant creeper sprawled, so that the door inside was shadowed. I knocked, and was let in. Vera Alphage is neither middle-aged nor all those other ordinary things I had supposed. She is young—in her late twenties—and quite shockingly beautiful. You do not notice this at first because she keeps her head down, and her fine black hair, including a falling fringe, is very long. Her legs and her fingers and her slender neck are long, too. Her skin is pale. I formed the immediate impression that she shunned bright light—her windows were veiled with lace curtains as well as shaded by tendrils of creeper. Her voice was very soft, and shy. She offered me tea—or sherry—I settled for tea—and a place on the sofa, which was covered with a pattern of violets on ivory linen. The room was a small box of a room (I grew up, and have always lived, in small boxes of rooms). It was uncluttered and minimally furnished, with white shelves on white walls, holding a few books (twenty or so, nothing in my reckoning) and a few pretty cups and saucers. I noticed also that Ms. Alphage wore no wedding rings, indeed, no rings.
We chatted. We are both shy, it was not easy, almost painful, indeed. She kept her head down over her tea, what I saw was the falling fringe. She said that her grandfather, Destry-Scholes’s father, had been a tax-inspector.
“They weren’t called Destry-Scholes, as far as I know, just plain Destry. My mother always called herself Joan Destry, quite plainly. She believed in plainness. She wasn’t romantic. She died about six years ago. She didn’t talk about her brother—I don’t think she ever mentioned that he had written a book—perhaps she didn’t know? She was quite miffed, I think, that he was sent to university and she wasn’t. She made sure I got a good education, but I was an only child anyway.”
“Did he marry?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. Mummy burned most of her letters before she died—out of tidiness, I think, she had bone cancer, she had time to think, not out of any desire to hide any secrets. I didn’t mind, I didn’t think to stop her. I wish I had now. I have a very thinned-down sense of my family, of any past—something people seem to like to have. You know, if I were to marry, there’d be no one I really need invite to the wedding, except a few colleagues. No family. I’m sorry to be so unhelpful.”
I reminded her about the suitcase of Uncle’s things.
She said it was in the loft, and too heavy for her to lift alone. Would I mind coming up, and helping. I could see her dubious look at my small size and delicate hands. She must be six inches, or more, taller than I am. I stood up briskly, to show that I was ready for effort. Her staircase is little and boxed, like the rooms. The loft is approached from a trap door in the ceiling of the landing. She fetched a stepladder, and a broom-handle, with which she pushed open the trap door. I followed her up. The loft is full of light—she has had a Velux window let into the roof—and full of neatly arranged packing-cases and bales. There is no dust. She had pulled the suitcase—battered, russet leather—out under a window. Someone—I presumed it was Vera Alphage herself—had stuck a label on it: UNCLE’S THINGS. I knelt beside it. I was about to write I knelt reverently, because the adverb tripped off the pen. But that wasn’t true. I knelt greedily, if you can put those words together. Vera Alphage produced a little key, and opened the lock (which she had oiled, it was clear).
There were two shoeboxes, made of shiny, durable cardboard. One a kind of dove-grey, and one a navy-blue. There was also a pair of rather battered lace-up shoes, ordinary brown, unexceptionable lace-up shoes—not very large shoes, I noticed, the shoes of a smallish man, unless his feet were disproportionate. There was a collection of corkscrews and bottle-openers, tied together with red cord, and other instruments—a cheese-grater, a nutmeg-grater, a box of tintacks, a Swiss Army knife, a pouch which when opened turned out to contain surgical instruments—scalpel, needles, scissors, a small saw. There was a contraption of leather bands and screws and spikes I could make nothing of. There was also a soft scarlet leather bag, which drew up at the neck with a cord, designed perhaps as a sewing-bag to hold needles, threads, etc.—Vera Alphage referred to it, later, as “the dolly-bag.” This rattled, as though it was full of little stones. I had hoped for heaps of documents—letters, drafts of further instalments of the lives of the personages—but there was nothing. Th
ere were several pairs of well-worn socks, and some rather voluminous jersey underpants. Two balls of twine, of different thickness, and a very small geological hammer. Vera Alphage said, “The index cards I wrote to you about are in the grey shoebox. The blue one is full of photos.” I lifted the lids. Both boxes were packed neatly, one with large-sized index cards, narrow-ruled, and one with photographs. The photographs, ruffled through, appeared to date from many periods—Victorian, Edwardian, 1920s, 1930s, 1950s—and to vary from family snapshots to seaside postcards, heavy daguerreotypes to fading Kodak prints perhaps two inches square. Some were even pasted cutouts from newspapers or what appeared to be plates from books. At first glance they were in no order—blurry babies in woolly bonnets came next to impressive opera-singer-like dames in corsages, next to freaks with elephantine probosces or pendulous buttocks. “I haven’t touched them,” said Vera Alphage, as if to exonerate her tidy self from responsibility for this disarray. I asked if any of the collection were family photographs (hastily flicking past a close-up of a canker to settle on a pretty 1950s debutante in a Juliet-cap). She said she had only cast a cursory glance over them, and had recognised no-one.
“They are like a freak-show,” she said. “Even the ones that are normal at first sight.”
This remark interested me.
I turned my attention to the box of cards. It was possible that here, at last, (unless you counted the brown shoes and the greyish underpants) was Destry-Scholes himself. They were handwritten, in a maniacally tidy script (what do I mean, maniacally? I mean, simply tidy, tiny and tidy) in blue ink, with a fountain-pen. They appeared, at very first glance, to be a file of disjunct quotations or jottings—again in no immediately apparent order, and again with no apparent system of reference or categorisation. My own notes on Destry-Scholes, like my notes on female personae in Firbank, Maugham and Forster, are all carefully referenced, with the source, the edition, the page. Here there was nothing. Careful annotation and analysis would be required. I ruffled through the cards. Almost at random, I pulled out two—not quite at random, they were both in verse, not prose. I noticed Vera Alphage’s reflex gesture to prevent me destroying the order, which pleased me. She had a scholarly temperament, it was clear. I had not asked what her work was, that kept her late.