There was another round of beer, and Jack said, Speaking of downhill. Or should I say up. He told them about the bloke who’d materialised at Cattle Bay. The Americans went off in their four-wheel drive, he said, and suddenly there was this bloke. Just appeared. He told them how he’d sort of had to walk up the hill with this bloke, and related the long story he’d told, of the whale swallowing him, and being got out after fifteen hours. He didn’t mention the skinny bone-white hand that had rested so lightly and yet so relentlessly on his arm, or the strange glitter of the man’s eyes when the light of the street lamp fell glancing upon them.
George gave him a curious look. How old was this cove?
Dunno. That white skin. Kind of half-digested somehow. Hard to say how old he was.
That story—the bloke being swallowed by the whale, and people calling him Jonah. That’s up on the wall in the museum.
Jack had always meant to go and look at the museum, every time he went past the pretty blue and white building on the hill, but somehow he’d never got round to it. Plenty of time, he told himself.
He reckoned he was a whaler? George said. You don’t get whalers no more.
Not legal ones, said Jack.
He said he was in the paunch, and it looked like it was breathing, and they cut it open, and out came this foot with a boot on it.
Yes, said Jack.
It’s all writ up on a board in the museum. Doreen! George called to a woman at the next table. What year was it that bloke got swallowed by the whale? In the museum.
Doreen turned around. Eighteen ninety-one, she said.
Knows that museum off by heart, Doreen does, said George. Eighteen ninety-one. I reckon he’d be pretty old by now. George and Leon broke into wheezy laughter.
Maybe he was his own ghost, said Leon.
George shook his head. I reckon you was conned. Bloke spun you a fancy one. And you fell for it.
The two men looked into their empty glasses.
Looks like I’d better buy the next round, said Jack. Gullible and all as I am.
Why would he of done it, though, George? asked Leon. What was in it for him?
Conning, said George. Your good con man, he cons for the fun of it.
But Jack, walking home through the cold night and looking up at the sky washed clean by last night’s storm, wasn’t so sure. The stars sparkled, a long way away, explained by science but not really understood. Not by people like him, who were happy to look up and let gazing at the sight be enough for them. The blackness so smooth, and the points of light so prickly and brilliant; he slowed his pace and bent his head back to let his eyes rest on them. On the day that his brother had died Jack had perhaps nearly died too. That was something to think about, but what might you make of it? And the hooded bleached-white stranger . . . perhaps he had really survived swallowing by a whale and lived to be called Jonah and bought drinks on the strength of it. He hadn’t got a drink out of Jack. Had refused a mug of soup. Perhaps he was even now sitting in a warm room somewhere laughing at the way a stranger toiling up a hill had swallowed his yarn. Though Jack had been so exhausted he didn’t think anyone could tell what he made of it. Except he had listened. He’d heard every word. He hadn’t wanted to, but somehow he couldn’t help himself. He’d heard every word, and remembered it to tell the blokes in the pub.
And Quarantine Bay, with its buried bodies and poisoned silk sold up and down the coast? Was that a story on the wall of the museum, too?
FERDIE AND BERENICE GO ON A PICNIC
Now he was a student living in London, Ferdie was in the habit of saying to women he fell in love with: Sometimes I’m afraid I’m just another Casaubon.
He was waiting for one to say, No, of course you’re not, anything but, no way—any sort of ardent denial—but they never did. They never had. They said, Casaubon . . . ? Sometimes they just said, Cas . . . ?, looking at him with big liquid eyes waiting to be filled with the knowledge.
So then he would say, Middlemarch? George Eliot? Adding more and more details as they looked more and more solemn. The story of Dorothea? A novel? Published in 1872?
Probably the best novel written in the nineteenth century, he would say. Dorothea is a rich and beautiful and good woman who wants to do something important with her money and intelligence. She marries Casaubon, a biblical scholar, who is working on a great book, a key to all mythologies. She thinks she can love him, cheer and help and support him, be a handmaiden to the great work. And her money will be used to noble purpose.
Do you mean you’re looking for a handmaiden? a girl might mutter.
It’s a mistake more terrible than you could believe, Ferdie would go on. He’s supposed to be a man of God but he’s so cold he’s wicked. He denies her love. He won’t even have sex with her, so we understand; it is a Victorian novel, but that’s clear. He steals her money—legally, of course, but still wickedly. When he dies, which he does after a while, you think thank God, but then his will stipulates that she can only inherit her own money, her fortune which she brought to the marriage, if she does not marry a certain person. The person, it turns out, that she falls in love with. On top of it all, Casaubon is a bad scholar. The vaunted work of many decades simply doesn’t exist. He can’t do it, he hasn’t been doing it, it’s all pretence; it has to be above criticism so he’s too frightened to even try, and maybe there you should feel sorry for him. It’s ego that drives him, not scholarship.
The stolen money and sex denied often interest women and they will sometimes question him about what else happens in the story and he can explain how it is about wrong choices made from the best of intentions, and how the plot coils inexorably and squeezes lives. In fact, he says, it’s about two very bad marriages. There’s a character called Lydgate who’s a brilliant medico; he falls in love with Rosamond who is very pretty (if you like that blonde pink and white stuff) and frivolous and extravagant, and to keep her he has to become a fashionable doctor instead of doing research. He and Dorothea would have been a great couple, intellectually and idealistically, and she could have seen her money doing the good she wanted.
Well, said one girl, people never do fall in love with the right people.
Another said, Seems a bit cold-blooded. People being good people to marry, better people to marry.
He’d never met one who knew straight off who Casaubon is.
He wondered if he knew the reason for this. He always fell for girls who were pretty. He liked women who looked as though they lived in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, with masses of springy red hair—though blonde or chestnut was okay, provided it did the right springy thing—and milk-white faces with round chins and a sense of rich and flowery garments. Not one of these girls had ever heard of Middlemarch, so he was beginning to wonder if he would ever find Pre-Raphaelite beauty and his kind of cleverness going together. He considered this as a possibly sexist thought, but told himself it would be sexist to assume a pretty woman couldn’t be clever, or a clever woman pretty. He was sensitive to perceptions of sexism, his mother had brought him up to be so, occasionally offering his father as a model to be avoided, in a moderately scientific manner, not particularly emotional—as in that mad old sexist, your father, said in a calm voice—and he was glad of this education, it came in handy in his present circumstances. He decided that the solution was to persevere: sooner or later there would be a woman beautiful and bright. Well, he knew they were bright; he wanted one who knew the things that interested him.
He wished he was a man like George Henry Lewes, who could fall besotted with the truly astonishing mental beauty of a George Eliot, and ignore or maybe not even see her equally astounding ugliness, at least if photos are to be believed. Dorothea Brooke, beautiful and rich and good and quite clever, makes a disastrous choice. Mary Ann, or Marian she decided was less vulgar, before opting for the oomph of the masculine George Eliot, Marian Evans, plain and poor and gifted, has her disasters but finds a man who not only loves her for herself but lives in sin with her for y
ears. Ferdie admired George Henry Lewes, and hoped that one day he might be like him. He examined the women he saw in the corridors of the university, looking for someone plain and clever and adorable, but so far had failed to find one.
Berenice worked at a place that dealt in computers, providing technical support, she had a good brain, she’d just never heard of George Eliot. He offered to lend her Middlemarch, but she said she wasn’t a great reader. But she did say, Was Dorothea in love with Casaubon?
A good question, said Ferdie. She thought it was a good thing to do, that she would come to love him.
Berenice shook her head. It’s wrong not to marry for love, she said. Coming to love, what a joke. Didn’t George Eliot know that?
She was a Victorian novelist.
Didn’t they know about love?
Oh yes, they did, but they didn’t always trust it.
George Eliot. George Sand. George seems a good name for a woman to take on when she wants to assume a masculine persona. There’s George in The Famous Five, too. You read Enid Blyton, said the girl before Berenice, my god. Why not? he asked. It was on the shelves at home, would have been his mother’s when she was a girl. There was a time when he read everything on the shelves at home. Including Middlemarch.
Berenice had red-gold hair and big grey eyes. She was slender, waif-like even, with a touch of nineteenth-century tuberculosis chic, but of course she was healthy. He wondered if her pubic hair was the same precious metal colour but when he got to look he saw that she was completely shaved, like a bluish marble statue. Her cleft as bare and linear as a child’s. You should try it, she said. All that hair, yuck. It’s so free and clean and lovely without.
He did not say, I don’t feel dirty and imprisoned in my pubic hair. He liked the way it curled, softly stiff and brown, around his penis.
I’ll do it for you, if you like, said Berenice, but he said, Not now, thank you.
He knew he wasn’t a Casaubon. He was younger, for a start, and much handsomer, much livelier. He liked sex and expected to manage love one day. He had no intention of marrying to get a secretary. He would not punish a woman who loved him for having flaws. Would he? He thought that being aware of the situation would make him able to avoid it. And no way would he do her out of her money, should she happen to have any. But he also knew that it wasn’t any of these things that made him truly fearful. It was that matter of his ambition being greater than his intelligence, which had turned everything to salt and ashes and dung in Casaubon’s mouth and might do so in his. The whole lifetime spent in not doing what he claimed to be doing because he had understood that he could not do it.
Ferdie’s PhD money would run out after three years; there’d be a bit more time after that but not much. He thought he could do it; so presumably did Casaubon, at the beginning. And he wasn’t exactly working on the key to all mythologies, though the topic seemed equally large. He’d got the idea when he read some words in an essay: The gods never die. None of the gods that ever lived has ever died. ‘The gods are dead: long live the gods’ was the title he had chosen. A working title, he called it. There was a lengthy subtitle which changed from time to time.
At one time, dipping into The Golden Bough, he wondered if Eliot had modelled Casaubon’s enterprise on James Frazer’s, but the chronology wasn’t right, Middlemarch being 1872 and The Golden Bough’s twelve volumes taking from 1890 to 1915. Perhaps the idea had been in the wind for some time. He knew that some scholars didn’t think a lot of Frazer, being critical of him because he got all his material from secondary sources, but Casaubon who had never intended to do anything else couldn’t manage even that. Even that . . . There was a phrase. Ferdie was doing his work on literature, not anthropology, so by definition he was looking at people’s writing on his subject.
One person who would have known what he was doing in invoking Casaubon he didn’t tell his fears to. That was his great-aunt Pepita, on his father’s side, who had given him her car. She was ninety-four and thought it was time she stopped driving. It was a 1930s Sunbeam Talbot roadster with a canvas hood and a dickey-seat. It was called Pegasus.
Has it got wings? he asked.
It is a trusty steed, she said, with many powers. It may be given to you to see them.
He was pleased to have a car at all, since he didn’t have the money to buy one himself. Even better, for you, she said with her still-wicked smile, is its having had only one careful little old lady driver.
You weren’t very old when you got it, he said.
True.
She didn’t seem very old now, either. She had been a teacher of elocution, still had a few special clients, and would produce scrapbooks of correspondence from grateful and often surprising ex-students. Good grief, said Ferdie, what a catalogue of the great and the good. Ever thought of blackmail?
Pepita’s face said she did not consider this worthy of an answer.
The letters were not just one-off notes of thanks. Her former students seemed moved to send her postcards from time to time, just to keep in touch. I expect it will all end up in the tip when I go, she said.
She knelt on the floor to get out the Rockingham cups from the bottom of the china cabinet. Not these, of course, she said. She stood up in a quick graceful movement. The cups didn’t even clatter. She boiled water in a spirit kettle to make tea in a pot round and ribbed like a pumpkin, and poured it into the shallow precious cups. There was thin bread and butter and dark fruit cake.
You will have to leave me soon, she said. I have to prepare for my date tonight.
A beau? he asked.
She smiled mysteriously. Oh, she said in a pensive voice, a dear boy. I taught him in, let me see, the late fifties. He was quite a lad then. These days . . . he has a fondness for grand restaurants. A taste acquired when he was at the embassy in Paris. I think I shall wear my black lace fascinator with a diamante clip, nearly hidden. It’s always seductive.
Pepita held her fine wrinkled cheek to be kissed. It was soft and scented and faintly rosy in the rich dim light of her house. This aunt, the tea party, her blue eyes shining on him; he suddenly felt immensely lucky.
Come and see me, my dear, from time to time, and bring Pegasus to visit. I shall pine for news of the dear old boy.
Pepita had never married, but it wasn’t for lack of the flirtatious arts. Ferdie could remember odd remarks from his father about his aunt’s adventures. She was supposed to have claimed she didn’t ever feel like marriage at the time. I like my own company, she said, and there is no shortage of men should one feel in need of a little masculine diversion. Ferdie wondered if he could understand the pleasures of a lifetime’s coquetry. What do I know? he said to himself. Maybe she slept with all her clients. She certainly dined with them. Bet you could tell us a thing or two, eh Pegasus, dear old boy. He eased his foot on the clutch as she had warned him, but still the car leapt forward.
Berenice thought Pegasus was wonderful when she first saw him but after driving for a bit she wasn’t so sure. When it rained and she got soaked before Ferdie got the hood up, she hated it.
Next time he visited Pepita he talked to her about Middlemarch. Ah, poor dear Dorothea. Silly girl, how could she be so taken in by that frightful old bore? And if she had to get married, why not Lydgate? Of course that’s what we all think, but there’d be no story if she’d done that. I often wonder if that is why people marry. There’d be no story if they didn’t. I’m lucky, she said, with a wicked little smug air. I’ve had plenty of stories and no need of wedlock.
She said ‘wedlock’ with such a snap of finality that he laughed.
I’m still planning to live happily ever after, she said. And what about your generation? They’re doing quite well without.
Oh, we mostly get caught eventually.
In the trap, she said.
She was wearing a jumper in a pale cream colour, so fine it had to be cashmere, with a cream silk shirt and a soft tweed skirt. She had gossamer stockings on her slender legs and polis
hed brown shoes with a small heel. Once again she had to go and get dressed for dinner, another old pupil, on a flying visit from New York; she was planning to wear her ashes of roses cocktail gown which had quite a daring neckline; it seemed the occasion for it. And her new pashmina, in a slightly deeper rose colour. She’d already had her nails painted to match. Ferdie wished he had enough money to take her out to a grand dinner, one that would warrant the ashes of roses cocktail dress. Whatever that was. With the daring neckline. He wondered, were these proper thoughts to have about a great-aunt?
He got into the habit of calling to see her most weeks. She lived in a village but it wasn’t far to drive and though Pegasus drank petrol like water he decided to forget that. He liked to talk to her because she knew what he was talking about.
The sin of Casaubon, she said one day, and it gave him a start, he thought she might have guessed how that failed scholar troubled him, the sin of Casaubon was envy. I know despair is supposed to be the most terrible sin of all, and it is bad, but it doesn’t hurt others, except as they love you. Which is an occupational hazard of living. But envy, resentment of the happiness or good of others, so that you desire to do things to harm them, that is very bad. Other sins—lust, sloth, gluttony, even covetousness—are benign in comparison.
That’s only six.
I can only ever remember six. A different six each time, usually.
Ferdie counted on his fingers and thought. Wrath, he said.
Ah yes, wrath. There you are, a good honest sin. And often, I should think, appropriate, even necessary. I have been wrathful and most righteously so on occasions. But envy, no. A mean and withering and poisonous sin. Self-poisoning.
Goodbye Sweetheart Page 6