The career of the woman who had established the dangers of low-level radiation had been undermined by the efforts of the man who had established the dangers of smoking. They had been rivals, enemies, intent on public good and private glory, and both had met much resistance. Both had lived long lives in science, into their nineties. The man who had tried to thwart the woman had attended her funeral, shortly before dying himself. What had been that stubborn, vain old man's thoughts, as he mouthed the words of the hymns? Had he repented of his attempts to block the woman's research, or had he attended the funeral in a spirit of triumph? In order, finally, to see her off, and to make sure that she had gone to earth for good?
Rivalry endures until death and after. The man had hated the woman, or so it was said. This story had tormented Professor Humphrey Clark, with good reason.
Darwin had tried to behave well towards the ill-fated Alfred Russel Wallace, but despite Darwin's good intentions, Wallace was doomed to be labelled and remembered as 'forgotten' – a paradoxical afterlife.
Darwin had died at the age of seventy-three, Wallace at the age of ninety. Wallace had been a pall-bearer at Darwin's funeral.
Funerals, memorials, ceremonies. The tea-parties of the dead. He attended many of these now, even though he was only in his sixties. And he worried more, now, about his own life after death. The worry demeaned him.
Again, delicately, he swallowed. He ran his fingers over the back of his neck and down the sides of his throat. He swallowed again. The fingers felt no swelling, but there was a sensitivity of the mucous membrane. Not quite a soreness, but a sensitivity.
He had so many ways of cheating himself in his smoking audit. He would cheat in his calculations, shaving off six months, reducing the recollection of his intake. Not that any of these sums mattered. Of course he did not have cancer of the oesophagus. He had been pronounced healthy at his last annual medical check-up. A slight problem with cholesterol, despite his largely vegetarian diet, but nothing to worry about. His chances of dying of a stroke or heart failure in the next ten years were moderately low, according to the instant multiple calculations on the Private Healthcare Policy computer.
Whenever he had thought, over the past few months, of the transcendent landscape of bridges and arches and estuary, his throat had begun to ache. He could induce, at will, a sense of inflammation in his throat and neck, and a pain in what would have been his tonsils, had not his tonsils been surgically removed half a century ago. Just as some lines of poetry, some phrases of music, some painful childhood memories never failed to elicit a Pavlovian prickle of imminent but invisible tears, so the prospect of this journey seemed to have animated a physical and by now predictable response. He had lowered his guard, and an infection had entered him. An infection not of the body, though it seemed to have this bodily manifestation, but of the spirit. An infection of a missing, disembodied, severed, long-ago incinerated organ.
Less than nine years of nicotine inhalation, but probably more than seven and a half. That was less than a tenth of his life. Considerably less than a tenth of his life. He had in his college days affected untipped French Gauloises, because they were fashionable and he had wanted to be one of the boys, but as a postgraduate he had moved on to a brand with lower tar. Now, like most of his contemporaries, he never smoked.
As a child, he had been enchanted by the Diophantus riddle about time, by the notion of the pie chart of a lifespan.
Though they did not talk about pie charts then. It was a recent coinage.
Hippocampus, Diophantus.
The memory trick.
A cup of tea or coffee might help. Should he go in search of the buffet car, or would the young woman pass with her trolley? Tea, like the tabloid-sized broadsheet paper, was free, thrown in with the high price of his first-class ticket. He would wait for her. Glancing now out of the window, he saw a neat new red-brick housing estate, all hipped roofs and economy conservatories, then swans floating serenely in a small semi-industrial brick pond, fringed by sedge. He knew this southern stretch of the northern track well. It was the end of term now, the beginning of the long summer holidays. Children would be looking forward to the freedom. And there, on cue, in a rural housing estate back garden, was a child, a small child in a floppy white canvas hat, waving at the train, as in a storybook of long ago.
He could hear the trolley's approach. It seemed to advance with extraordinary slowness and innumerable delays, as the young woman dispensed coffee and tea and bottled water and small cellophane-wrapped packets of biscuits to the left of her and to the right of her. He could see her clearly now, a pallid-faced, small-featured girl in her twenties. She was dressed in a dark blue monogrammed tabard, and her dull fair hair was tied back in a pale blue headscarf-bandeau with the rail company's name written upon it. Her cool manner suggested that she considered she was putting much effort into being patient with her clients, and wished them to know this. He prepared himself to be polite or even pleasant, to try to alleviate the ill-borne dullness of her task. Politeness, as his mother often used to say, costs you nothing.
When she paused by him, bringing her vehicle to an irritable halt, he waited for her to repeat the phrase he had heard advancing with her along the compartment. 'Would you like any refreshments, sir?' she asked. He smiled, and opened his mouth to say, 'I'd like some tea' but when he tried to speak, no sound issued.
She repeated her request, a little less graciously.
He tried again, with the same result. He seemed to have been struck dumb. He swallowed, and massaged his throat with his fingers, and tried again.
By now, she had understood that he was in some difficulty, and her indifference melted into concern.
'You'd like a drink?' she suggested helpfully.
He nodded humbly, and made a gesture towards the teabags.
'Tea?' she hazarded.
He nodded, and mouthed the word 'Yes'. And in the same manner, they negotiated the milk. He declined, with a shake of the head, the sugar and the biscuits.
She had transformed herself in an instant into a pleasant, caring person, nurse-like in her attentions. As though he were an invalid, as perhaps he was, she arranged before him his hot water, his teabag, his impotent little plastic stirring implement. She prodded his teabag for him, and gazed at him in anxious interrogation to see if she had prodded it enough. Mutely, he assented, and she fished out the bag and returned it to a waste bin attached to her trolley. This was not a courtesy she extended to everyone. She tried to insist on helping him with the top of his little carton of milk substitute, but he felt he had been coddled enough, and waved her away. She must pursue her ward duties, he indicated. He could manage on his own.
'Thank you,' he mouthed in his distinguished, public way. She smiled at him, with intimacy, with familiarity, and said, in a slightly louder voice than was necessary, that she would soon be returning for lunch orders. And then she moved on.
He had difficulty removing the foil top of the milk substitute. He had never been very dexterous, and with age was becoming less so. His fingers were clumsy now. A little spurt of white liquid escaped on to the table. He dabbed at it with the paper napkin she had left with him.
After his first sip of too-hot tea, he tried, surreptitiously, secretly, to speak. To produce a sound, any sound. He could swallow, and he could cough, but something seemed to have paralysed his vocal chords or his larynx. Again he fingered his throat and his Adam's apple, once gawkily prominent and vulnerable, now comfortably shrouded in friendly folds. He was not a fat man, but he was not a scraggy man. He was a well-built man, with a reassuring physical presence. Or so he liked to think that others thought.
The trachea, the larynx, the adenoids, the uvula. The hyoid bone at the root of the tongue, the horseshoe bone that gave man speech, the bone that differentiated man from ape. He would not like to have to label any of these on an anatomical model. It was a long time since he had thought of anything as grossly human as the parts of his own speaking apparatus. The h
uman was not his subject.
Mrs Hornby's fingers had been forced to try to compress the folds and wrinkles of his throat into the stiff cardboard of the white dress-shirt front. This act was beyond and beneath and above her professional duties, and both of them had been in a state of shock at the unprecedented contact, but if she had not helped him, he would have been late for the dinner at Lincoln's Inn. It was lucky that she had been working late that evening. He had had to summon her from his study to the bedroom door. She had not crossed the threshold of the bedroom. She had wrestled with the recalcitrant little gold studs under the dim bulb of the corridor wall-light fitting, before asking him to move into the brighter light by the window that looked over the garden.
As a child, he had been thin and sickly and scraggy.
He sipped his slowly cooling tea.
The light weight and false texture of the polystyrene beaker were unpleasant to him.
Had he been struck dumb by God, for his sins? Had he been struck dumb to prevent him from speaking out? He did not consider these possibilities very seriously, but of course he considered them. He had been brought up to do so. He considered his sins of omission and commission daily, as the Book of Common Prayer had taught him to do, and he held himself responsible for them, even though he did not know what they were, and no longer believed in the God who had watched over him, the God who might lead him to a godly, righteous and sober life. He had a fertile imagination and could hardly begin to process the multiplicity of explanations and associations that rushed into his consciousness. His sins were many and his burden heavy. He deserved to lose his voice, because he had abused his voice.
'It serves you right.'
That was a phrase which came back to him, from his childhood. But they could not have used it to him then, could they? They were not unkind, unreasonable people. They could not have blamed him for his illness.
He tried, discreetly, to hum, but did not seem to achieve much resonance. He could not get his soft palate to connect properly. His throat vibrated, but no sound issued. A motor difficulty, or a swift-onset virus? Aphasia, aphonia? The problem seemed very local, so he reassured himself that he was not having a stroke. Everything below the collarbones and above the jawline felt fine.
This disconcerting sensation must, he concluded, be connected with his return to the landscape of his boyhood.
For it was during his sojourn in the northern outpost on the outskirts of the beautiful town of slate and sandstone that his tonsils had been removed. This much he could remember clearly. He had been taken to the infirmary, and his tonsils had been cut out, and then he had been taken home to convalesce. He had lain speechless, bedridden, shocked by the indignity of the pain. They had told him in a kindly, worried, grown-up, deceitful way that it would not hurt much. But it did. They had given him a little brass bell, a brass cow bell from Benares, to keep by his bedside. He was to ring it if he needed attention. But he did not dare to ring it very often, because of the steepness of the stairs, and when he did ring it, they did not always come. His grandmother came more often than his mother and his aunt, but even she did not come very often.
They had said he could keep his tonsils pickled in a jar, but they forgot. They threw them away. He never saw them. He was not sure whether he would have wanted to see them or not. They told him that tonsils were not useful organs. You could do well without them, they said. Like the appendix, they weren't much use.
His baby sister had not been allowed to come upstairs to see him because, independently, she was suffering from measles. Most of the children of the neighbourhood had measles that summer. He must not catch the measles, and he must understand that Lizzie required a lot of attention.
The cat had not been allowed to visit him either. He missed the cat more than he missed his sister.
But they had brought him books to read.
Books were allowed.
Oh yes, they had brought him books.
How old had he been, when he first read these books? He could not be sure. If asked (and he was occasionally asked) he would give approximate answers. Nine? Ten? Eleven? What did it matter? Nobody now alive knew the answer to that question. It would have taken some research to establish the date of the operation on his tonsils. It had a date, but nobody would know it. Would the infirmary have kept records for so minor an event? He could still remember by heart his National Health Service number, although he was never asked for it these days. He could recite it to himself, as he sat here in carriage G16 of what was once the Flying Scotsman. He had been made to learn this number by his aunt. But perhaps he hadn't yet had a number, when he went into the infirmary? The National Health Service was in its infancy, in those immediate post-war days, in those lost unnumbered days. Maybe his tonsillectomy had preceded the birth of the NHS. The NHS had been conceived during the war, but it had not been born until two or three years later.
The removal of the tonsils did not appear on his distinguished academic record.
His memory of those days had dried out into fixed moments, into little, hard, dry, screwed-up paper pellets. The richer details, the broad expanses, had drifted beyond recall. They would never blossom and unfold again, not even in the swelling tide of tears that flooded towards him from the enormous main.
The Public Orator pauses here, to take stock of what has happened so far. The Orator, a withdrawn, black-gowned, hooded, neuter, neutral and faceless figure, confronts choice. The Orator, at this point, is presented with too many choices.
The theme of public and private behaviour has been introduced. Two of the principal characters have been presented, in some detail, and we suspect that they are soon to meet. They are much of an age, although the woman, as so far presented, seems to believe herself to be in her prime, whereas the man, in so far as we have observed him, seems to fear that he is past his prime. Times have changed, notes the Orator. Over the past hundred years, over the past fifty years, gender expectations have altered. Both sexes live longer, and women still live longer than men, but women live longer and in better shape than they used to do. They do not give up so easily.
We know that we are on a journey backwards in time, towards some form of welcome or unwelcome reunion. We know that surprises may be sprung. Betrayal, envy and ambition have played their part. The denouement has not yet been decided, and not even the Orator knows the shape of the end of the story. Will the story be tragic or comic, open or closed? We cannot tell. But the nature of the denouement is not the Orator's present problem. The Orator's problem lies in the selection of memories, of anecdotes, of telling moments. In the selection lies the meaning. From the selection, for better or for worse, will unfold the sequence and the ending.
The Orator disdains the primary vulgarity of plot, in favour of an ambitious attempt at meaning. Telling stories is telling lies. But the meaning is not clear. Perhaps there is no meaning. Perhaps, at this late stage in the lives of the protagonists, there is nothing but a dying buzz, a dull echoing boom, a confusing sequence of increasingly disconnected events, an involuted series of diminishing circles. Maybe nothing will emerge from the endeavour towards meaning.
The Orator is not a puppet master, and on principle dislikes artificial arrangements, narrative devices, false dawns and false epiphanies. The Orator disdains short cuts and paper resolutions. The Orator is stubborn and fastidious. If there is no meaning, then meaning will be withheld, renounced. It is all too easy to impose a semblance of meaning. It is all too easy to play tricks, to conjure up fantastic reconciliations, where Jack shall have Jill and nought shall go ill. Most fall back wearily on these devices. On words, words, words. The weariness they betray is a manifestation of despair. To find a true resolution, that is the hard thing. But the Orator has got this far with the narration, and cannot honourably retreat.
How far back can we go? The past is dry and may never flower for us. It is not a question of memory, and it is not a question of effort. It is a question of good faith. Only for the pure of heart will the
past revive. To the impure, it remains dead and lost, lost and dead.
Hic labor, hoc opus est.
It is hard, it is hard.
When the heart is corrupt, the enterprise is doomed.
Too late, too late, booms the foghorn over the grey fog and the invisible water.
Try again, try again, tolls the bell from the bell tower over the steep slates of the roofs of the city.
Turn again, turn again, tolls the bell.
To fail is to fall is to die.
To move forward, we must move back, back to the plain land of bread and butter, when we were as little children, with few temptations, in a carefully rationed world.
The Bedroom Weeks
He must be brave, they said, because the baby was ill.
She was not really a baby, but she was too little to be brave, whereas Humphrey was a big boy now. So he went into the infirmary meekly. He felt miserable but noble. It is easy to persuade a child that it must be noble. Even at that age, he was aware of having been managed and manipulated into good behaviour. But for many months afterwards, he could not get out of his mind the horror of coming back to his senses in the infirmary ward. When he regained consciousness, his throat was so sore that he could not swallow, and yet he had to keep trying to swallow, in order to experience, again and again, the pain. He felt as though saw-edged knives had scored raw patterns across the back of his gullet. Deep nausea had seized him, and he had vomited up a deep brown stinking clotted fluid, with streaks of blood in it. It came up his throat and down his nose. He had tried to find a bowl or a potty to be sick into, but he could see nothing in reach, and he could not cry out, so he had been sick on the chequered linoleum of the floor.
The Sea Lady Page 4