by John Darnton
“Sin Nombre.”
“That’s it. No wonder I can’t remember it. And did your man Darwin visit there too?”
“No. It’s only a small island. There’s a research project there, looking at Darwin’s finches, measuring them—the length of their beaks, that sort of thing—to see how they change when conditions change.”
“I see. Measuring bird beaks. And you were doing this for a degree?”
“Yes. Well, I was. But I didn’t finish my time there. It was actually kind of rough—in the sense of depressing. I left.”
“You left? Meaning what—you washed out?”
“You could put it that way.”
“So you never got your degree?”
“No, not yet. I talked to my adviser—he’s at Cornell—and I told him I wanted to come here, maybe write something about Darwin.”
“I see.”
“Trouble is, so much has been written about him. It’s hard to imagine coming up with something new, not to mention earth-shattering.”
“Uh-huh.” She was quiet, thinking, but only for a moment. “I bet your dad’s glad he spent all that money for you to go to college.”
He stared at her, hard. She had always been proud of her insensitiv-ity and she was always presumptuous, insisting she had the right to give him advice like an older sister. Any minute now she would start talking about his brother.
“It didn’t cost so much. Not like Harvard.” He realized it was a weak comeback and she paid it no mind.
“Listen to me, Hugh,” she said, leaning forward. “From what I heard, you’re just drifting. You’re what—thirty years old?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-eight. Don’t you think it’s time—”
“For what? To get over it, you mean?”
“Well, yes. Others have.”
“Like you.”
“Like me.”
“What do you mean, ‘from what I heard’? Who are you talking to, anyway?”
“People. The world’s not such a big place, you know.”
He looked down at her wedding ring. His father had told him about that too.
“Yes, I’ve married. And I’m reasonably content.” She paused. “I wouldn’t say I don’t think of your brother from time to time—I think of him often, as a matter of fact. But one has to get on with one’s life.
That’s not being heartless, it’s just realistic. The world really does go on, you know. That may be a cliché, but it’s true nonetheless. You have to get on with things.”
“I know that, but—you know—it’s different with me.”
“Because you always thought he was better than you. And because you think you’re responsible for his death.”
He was too stunned to speak. He’d known it was a mistake to sit down with her.
“I’m sorry to talk like this, Hugh. But somebody has to. You’ve got to get over this. It’s absurd for you to blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault, for God’s sake. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone wasn’t there. I was.”
As he spoke, the loop of memory played in his mind again—the rocks, the waterfall, the shadow of the falling body and the pool of bubbles looking odd in the shaft of sunlight.
He willed her to talk again, if only to interrupt his thoughts, and she didn’t disappoint him.
“You know, self-pity doesn’t get you anywhere. And it’s very unat-tractive, especially on you, Hugh, of all people. You’re young. You’re handsome. God, half the women I know were in love with you.”
He wanted to bring the encounter to an end.
“Where were they when I needed them?” he said, with a half smile.
He looked at his watch.
“Someplace to go?” she asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I’ve only got a few minutes more.” He took another sip of beer. He wanted another one, but more than that he wanted to leave.
“Why didn’t you answer my letter?” she asked.
For a moment he thought of pretending he hadn’t received it. But that kind of lie never worked with her; she would see through it and just go barreling ahead as if it wasn’t worth acknowledging.
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to go over the whole thing. I didn’t want to think about it, I guess.”
“So you went off to be by yourself and stare out at the ocean. That’s a good way to take your mind off things.”
“Yes, well, in any case, it didn’t work.”
“I would think not.”
He decided to change the subject. “What’s he like—your husband?”
“Erik. And he’s very smart. He works in the City and we have a flat in Elgin Crescent.”
“I see. Kids?”
“No.”
“And you—do you work?”
“Life of leisure,” she said, sitting back and rubbing her ring with her thumb. It was a false gesture, pretending at some bourgeois compromise, and she played it that way. A silence set in and he resolved not to break it. After half a minute, she spoke.
“And your father. How is he?”
“He’s remarried.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“A good woman, or so it seems. Kathy. They’ve been married about three years now.”
“No kidding. That’s amazing. He’d been single for years, ever since . . . how long ago did your mother leave?”
“A long time. I was a teenager.”
“And how do you get on with Kathy?”
“Okay, not bad. I don’t spend much time with them. They seem good together, but I can’t say it’s really changed him.”
“He’s not exactly a touchy-feely kind of man.”
“No. But he’s stayed on the wagon. He seems to be making an effort to get engaged in things now, including with me. I think Kathy’s pushing him in that direction. He kept pressing me to go back to school. So I got into this evolutionary biology, partly to get him off my back, and then ended up liking it.”
Hugh didn’t say what he was thinking—that his father had made some kind of peace with the past and “moved on,” as Bridget would put it, but that he still believed his father had never forgiven him and undoubtedly never would. Certain things you just don’t get over.
He could see that Bridget had something on her mind. She leaned across the table toward him and spoke in a low, intimate tone.
“Hugh, there are some things that even you don’t know about. I don’t know if you even should know, but it might help. It might make everything a bit easier.”
“Bridget, for Christ’s sake. Could you be a little less cryptic?”
“No, I can’t. But maybe you should just be open to thinking about things in a different way.”
“What the hell does that mean? Bridget, if you’ve got something to say, just say it.”
“Maybe sometime. Let me think about it.”
“Have it your way.” He put down his glass and stood up. “I’ve really got to go—sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be playing games. I’m not—I hope you realize that. All this is too important.”
“Sure. I guess. But I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
He paid the tab and by the time they reached the door, she was a flurry of resolution. She insisted on taking his phone number, and he found it on a piece of paper in his pocket—the rooming house in Cambridge—and read it aloud as she punched it into a PalmPilot. She said she was going to invite him for dinner.
“Promise you’ll come.”
“Maybe. I’ll have to see.”
On the sidewalk, she leaned over to kiss him, both cheeks, saying how glad she was that they had bumped into each other, and then she turned abruptly and walked down the street, her heels clicking against the pavement. He thought she looked broader across the hips and wondered fleetingly if she was pregnant.
What would it have been like, he thought, if she was carrying my brother’s child? What would their children have been like? All
that powerful DNA conjoining, his brilliance and her drive, making little gods in diapers, almost too perfect for this world.
All that time we were talking, he thought, and we didn’t even say his name.
So he said it to himself: Cal.
Cal, Cal, Cal.
He spotted the building at once, number 50 Albemarle Street. A discreetly placed brass plaque announced it as home to John Murray, Publishers. He stepped back to examine the eighteenth-century town house.
It was five stories tall, cream-colored with a cranberry-painted cast-iron fence leading to the imposing front door. French windows peered down from the first floor. The blank facade of a NatWest bank next door made it doubly quaint.
He tried to imagine the crush of buyers nearly two centuries ago, shouting up at the windows to obtain the early cantos of Byron’s Don Juan. Or Jane Austen’s messenger delivering a carefully wrapped manuscript of Emma. Or the frail figure of Darwin in a top hat, prematurely aged, gripping the railing to climb the steps in order to negotiate yet another edition of the Origin.
He had called ahead for an appointment. The archivist said she’d be “delighted” to meet him—though her tone belied her words—and she remarked pointedly that she found his request “intriguingly spontaneous.” He ignored the sarcasm and said he’d be there “right away,” using the American expression, which forced her hand.
Walking there, he was pursued by memories of Cal. Years ago Cal had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he first fell in love with science. Hugh, just kicked out of Andover, was spending a year in Paris and he often jumped on the ferry for a quick visit to England. They’d set a time and place to meet—Piccadilly, the Tower, the pub forty paces from 10 Downing—and they’d surprise each other by arriving incognito, back turned, collar up. (Once Cal came disguised in a ridiculous mop wig.) They’d go carousing through London and then take the late train to Oxford and Hugh would crash on a couch in Cal’s room.
There was something liberating about being abroad—two New World vagabonds traipsing around Europe’s haunts, trading confidences (they could somehow talk more openly, more honestly so far from home). The four-year age difference melted away. Hugh remembered it as a time of confidence and endless possibilities. He did not dare compete for girls, convinced that Cal was irresistible, and he took solace in contrasts: his brother was the serious one and he was the wit, his brother the responsible one and he the rebel. He smoked Gauloises, letting the cigarettes dangle from his lip, spoke fluent French, wore a black turtleneck, and carried a paperback of War and Peace in his backpack.
And then Cal had met Bridget, who was backpacking with a friend.
“I want you to meet her. We’re coming over to Paris. A whole week— nothing to do but drink wine, hang around museums, and pretend I love French poetry.” And what a week it had been! The obligatory baguette and cheese on the Quai Voltaire. Marie Antoinette’s peasant cottage at Versailles.
Getting lost in the forest at Fontainebleau. Touring the catacombs, even the sewers. For three days he escorted Bridget’s friend Ellen, but thankfully she left. Then the three of them were inseparable. On the final day Cal left them alone to get drunk at an Algerian bar but really, as he put it, “ ’cause it’s time you two get to know each other.” No flirting—a novel sensation. He liked her immediately, maybe loved her, because she loved Cal and Cal loved her.
How odd—feeling so comfortable, so at ease, so included. A big sister to go along with the big brother. A trinity. There was nothing the three of them couldn’t do.
Where had all that piss and vinegar gone? Had it really disappeared in a single summer afternoon?
The receptionist, inside a glass cubicle in the front hall, directed him past a winding banister to the waiting area, a tiny room under a glass cupola. He rose to greet the archivist, a young woman in tweeds.
“Hello,” she said brightly.
“Hello, I’m glad you . . .” He broke off—his words were being splintered, odd echoes bounced around the room. Above him was a hanging disk that refracted his voice. She smiled.
“That’s our little surprise,” she said.
She apologized, said the house was in the throes of moving, and as she led him up a winding staircase, they stepped around stacks of card-board boxes. They passed a bust of Byron, under an array of portraits in heavy dark colors with thick gold frames. Hugh read the names: Osbert Lancaster, Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman. There were half a dozen John Murrays.
“That was Darwin’s,” she said, casting her eyes at a portrait of John Murray III looking out from behind a writing desk with a confident gaze.
“He took over in 1843 and prodded the firm towards science, which was his prime interest. He published Darwin, Lyell, David Livingstone, and of course the famous travel handbooks. They were the first of their kind and very popular. They kept the wolf from the door.”
They passed through a rear drawing room decorated in thick gold wallpaper—from Japan, 1870, she said—and entered an office that was cluttered with boxes and files. She explained that the publishing house had been purchased by a larger company and was moving to a corporate headquarters.
“I see the wolf was patient,” said Hugh.
She didn’t smile. Hugh produced the letter from Simons, which she read twice.
“Well,” she pronounced finally. “All of our important Darwin papers are locked away in a secret archive, which will remain with us. We have a few boxes of unimportant material in a storeroom here, which you are welcome to peruse, but I doubt you will find anything of interest. It is commercial in nature, bills and accounts and such.”
Hugh recalled Darwin’s obsessive bookkeeping. One year when he was too ill to jot down the precious sums of money coming in and money spent he permitted his wife, Emma, to take over the ledgers; a £7 discrepancy cured him of that forever.
The archivist informed him that he was not allowed to search directly through the cartons of material. Instead, she led him to the main drawing room where, she explained, he would be observed as he pursued his research. The ornate chamber was lined with glass-encased books and on the higher reaches portraits covered every bit of wall space. He recognized the French windows he had seen from below.
She offered him a seat at a round felt-covered table set upon a Persian carpet. A box was brought to him and placed beside his chair. She cautioned him to use pencil only in taking notes and said an observer would soon be there to sit at the desk near the window. She lingered for a moment and seemed to have something on her mind. Perhaps, he thought, he was not grateful enough.
“I appreciate that you’ve allowed me to do this.”
“Oh, don’t mention it. That’s what we do. We take care of our authors even after death.” She paused a beat, then added: “You realize this room has remained unchanged for nearly two hundred years. And you are in good company. Southey, Crabbe, Moore, Washington Irving, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Madame de Staël. Over there”—she gestured to the center window—“Sir Walter Scott was introduced to Lord Byron in 1815. And over here”—she nodded toward a fireplace with a marble mantelpiece—“Lord Byron’s memoirs were burned after his death. It was thought best for all concerned. Especially Lady Byron.”
That was it: he had not been sufficiently impressed with the surroundings.
She left Hugh alone. He looked around the room, taking it all in, and then another woman entered and sat primly at a desk near the window, glancing over from time to time as he opened the box and went through the material.
The archivist was right: there seemed to be nothing much of interest.
There were business files and account books—bills of sale, royalty statements, translation agreements, account ledgers, and the like. Hugh’s interest began to flag.
For an hour, he sifted through the material. Then he picked up an account book and was confronted with long columns of numbers, neat and small in black ink—itemized expenses. He skipped ahead, holding 5 3
the book by the spi
ne and flipping the pages with his thumb. Soon the columns disappeared, blank pages flew by and then—suddenly, to his amazement—they came alive with writing. A fine script moved quickly across the pages. It was as if a movie had burst onto a white screen.
He looked at the pages more closely. The writing was old; it was in a girlish hand but the penmanship was easy to read and elegant. It was an ocean of script. The a’s and o’s and e’s crested forward gracefully, like waves headed for shore, the b’s and l ’s and t ’s tall and slanting, like sails.
The first entry began with a date.
CHAPTER 6
4 January 1865
Papa gave this book to me for the New Year to keep my accounts, a duty to be faithfully discharged. I shall record my expenditures (which are pitifully meagre) in columns and subtract as I proceed until I attain the magical tally of nought, at which time he will replenish my monthly sum. But this little book shall serve an additional purpose, one that is secret. I shall use it as a journal, setting down my most personal thoughts and observations when I deem them sufficiently interesting, and I shall pray it does not fall into the wrong hands, for that might prove an embarrassment.
For I have many thoughts of a personal nature and no one to relate them to—certainly not to sweet Mamma, who cannot bear to think ill of anyone, nor to Etty, for though my sister is nearly four years older, she is not, to my thinking, four years wiser. I shall consign this personal journal to the rear of this account book and thus disguise it. My expectation is that it will remain at the bottom of my writing-desk unread by anyone other than myself. Deception, says Papa, is Nature’s art and we can all learn from it.
Ever since Papa became famous, we have had a veritable flood of visitors to Down House, many of whom come from distant parts. I quite enjoy the company, and not simply because they tend to be people of noteworthy distinction, modern thinkers and various scientists whose nature makes them peculiar specimens in their own right, but also because they provide a distraction, which I sorely need.
On the morning of a visit, everyone leaps into action in order to put his best face forward. We are like the army mobilising for the Crimea. Mamma organises the household with quiet command. Mrs Davies heaves pots hither and yon on the fire with great urgency and much yelling, so that soon aromas of spiced lamb and baking potatoes fill the house all the way to the servants’ rooms. Parslow readies the wine in the butler’s pantry. The gardener, Comfort, harnesses the horses and drives the waggonette to Orpington to fetch the guest or guests (since there are likely to be more than one).