Christopher has also retrieved his iPad, and discreetly looked up surgeon Manolo Zerolo Herrara. He looks fine, but how can one tell? They all look fine, on their websites, with their white shirts and their excellent teeth and their confident smiles.
Ivor knows a lot of bars in Arrecife – the Picasso, the Astorias, the Terrazza, the Timanfaya, the Salinas. He likes the Volcan: they know him there. Ivor and Christopher have been talking about Morocco, so near to them over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Christopher has spoken a little of Sara’s doomed project and of the wrecked vessels in Port-Étienne, which he now finds himself unaccountably longing to see, as Sara had longed to see them. Ivor has been describing Bennett’s interest in General Lyautey and telling indiscreet but not very improper stories about Bennett’s erotic adventures in Morocco in the 1970s.
As Western Europe has become less homophobic, North Africa has become more homophobic. It’s as though the blot and stain of it moves around the map, settling here, settling there. You can get yourself slammed into a Moroccan jail these days for the things Bennett and Ivor had got up to in Essaouira in the 1970s, whereas in England now, anything goes.
Christopher is drinking but Ivor is not. Christopher no longer minds that Ivor knows he is a drinker. They have reached that stage in their acquaintance.
In the corner over the bar, suspended from high brackets at a precarious and uneasy angle, a television set is playing footage of the recent oceanic eruption off El Hierro. It is strangely beautiful, and they glance towards it from time to time. The programme morphs into other sequences showing other eruptions and volcanic flows, some Canarian, some not. They can’t hear the commentary. Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli, the eponymous island of Vulcano. Christopher still hasn’t been to the fragile landscape of Timanfaya.
Ivor tells Christopher of an entertaining Spanish television programme, of which Bennett had been fond, about car crashes, aeroplane crashes and other disasters. It was called Impacto, and it was, as its title proclaimed, about impacts, in a fairly wide interpretation of the word. Stones on windscreens, gunshots, motorway pile-ups, trees struck by lightning, aeroplanes imploding on runways, cruise ships run aground. Its naive enjoyment of these moments had charmed Bennett. Ivor had liked it too, though he couldn’t follow the commentary. Bennett had said he wasn’t missing much.
There are worse ways to die than by impacto, Christopher says to himself as he makes his way to the Servicios.
He feels a little unsteady on his feet as he returns to the table where Ivor is sitting, and is surprised to find that he is stumbling slightly. He certainly hasn’t drunk nearly enough to justify staggering. He hasn’t staggered in years. He can take far more than a Prosecco and a closet vodka and a brandy and a couple of glasses of El Grifo. Maybe he’s in shock. They’d better go to find something to eat. The Canarians don’t eat as late as the Spanish, but Arrecife is more Spanish than most of the tourist island, and here the night is yet young.
As he and Ivor are discussing where to go to find a meal, they both fall silent as they notice, mesmerised, that Ivor’s empty beer glass is travelling slowly across the glass of the table top, as though the table were beginning to tilt, as though they were sitting at a séance. At the other side of the bar, they hear a plate crash to the floor. The customers are looking around at one another, curiously, and the barman laughs. Is this the promised end?
The barman’s bottles rattle.
The television set wobbles, the picture streaks and flashes, and then settles again.
It’s all OK. Bennett will be safely sedated and strapped into his hospital bed when the earth splits open, when the wind turbines crumple and tangle and the chalky caverns implode, when the tidal wave bears the glittering ziggurat of the anchored Norwegian cruise ship over the concrete moles from Puerto Naos to crash into the still and green inland heart of the lagoon. For Bennett, all shall be well.
Fran has not slept much at Poppet’s, although she has not been uncomfortable. She has been too anxious about rescuing her poor car from the ploughed field. It had begun to rain again during the night, so the water level will be rising. She’s not really in a hurry to get home, but she has no wish to hang around with her daughter, getting in her daughter’s way. Jim will come to get her, which is embarrassing, but not disastrous. If she manages to get safely back onto the A303, she’ll be fine. She has promised Poppet that she will look out for the cranes.
Josephine Drummond has taken an impromptu day off (off from what, she asks herself) to go to London to pursue the Studdert Meades in the British Library, so easy to access from Cambridge and King’s Cross. She has finished reading Bennett Carpenter’s The Reaper and the Wheat and is now becoming obsessed by the Spanish Civil War, a more mainstream topic than that of the Deceased Wife’s Sister. She knows more about the young man who died at Jamara, and is making her way through his unpublished diaries and letters in the Cambridge University Library. They have led her to items in the Manuscripts and Rare Books departments of the British Library, which will be waiting in their boxes for her when she arrives, if the Explore the British Library login page has worked as well as it says it has. She is pleased with herself for having remembered her password, as she hasn’t logged in for a while.
In finding out about Valentine, she will also discover more about his mother Alice.
The Fatal Kinship had provided a surprising and intriguing denouement. The young couple, Olive and Vesey, had not taken the route to legal matrimony in Jersey, or Paris, or Normandy, or Neuchâtel, as others in their predicament, in fact and in fiction, had done: they had parted, but they hoped only for a year, while they awaited the outcome of the debating of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill in Parliament. In order not to suffer temptation, they had gone their separate ways. Vesey had sailed to New York, to work for a year and a day in Wall Street, whereas Olive had set off for Cape Town on the steamship Ariadne, to engage with her Quaker banking family connections and their post-Boer War programme of land redistribution. When we last see Olive, she is on deck, as a great storm begins to bluster off the coast of Tenerife. Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges, implores the well-read Olive, as she gazes at the violent Atlantic. Will she drown? Who knows? The Waratah went down without trace on this route in 1909, and not a stick or a stone or a bone from it has ever been found, one of the great ocean mysteries: but we are only in 1907, the year of the novel’s publication, when, Jo has realised, Alice Studdert Meade probably did not know the outcome of the Bill, let alone the fate of the Waratah. She must certainly have written the novel in a state of uncertainty. She was writing a modernist open-ended novel. She was on the edge of history. The fate of Vesey and Olive depended on a vote.
Jo has grown to admire Alice, and is happy to think that she has seen an interesting possibility of a link with her own family history. One of Jo’s Cambridge-based aunts, her favourite aunt, had been a successful illustrator of children’s books, and had also designed some once-famous and not-yet-forgotten posters for progressive political causes: in these days of instant access to images, it is easy to find Marian Heber’s designs for the Children’s Circle (a short-lived offshoot of the Left Book Club) and her posters for Medical Aid for Spain and for a play about Goya and the atrocities of war at the Unity Theatre. Aunt Marian had always been, unsurprisingly, a source of well-chosen and much-appreciated Christmas and birthday present books, including Munro Leaf’s 1936 classic about a reluctant bull, The Story of Ferdinand, Kathleen Hale’s colourful Orlando the Marmalade Cat of 1938, and J. B. S. Haldane’s My Friend Mr Leakey, all stalwart favourites which Jo and her sister Susie had read again and again. But Marian had rarely mentioned her adult work to her nieces, and the only tribute to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War with which they had been familiar had been a children’s book about evacuees, with a sound left-wing slant and an introduction by a social historian connected with the Mass Observation project. Printed on cheap paper with narrow margins, and with a restricted palette, it
had portrayed the adventures of Walter and Katie Ward who had been evacuated from the East End of Sheffield to a sheep farm in the Peak District. Jo had loved this book, with its contrasting landscapes of factory chimneys and pit heads and flaring furnaces and sheep and meadows and windswept moorland and dry stone walls. She liked the words ‘Peak District’ too, though she wasn’t quite sure where or what the Peak District was.
Aunt Marian, whose Quaker husband came from Hathersage, had been particularly good at sheep. The sweet-faced lambs bounded on their stiff sprigged legs, their rounded woolly mothers grazed and gravely chewed. Jo was particularly fond of one large full-page ewe that stared out of the picture at the reader with a quizzical expression, a divine silliness. They were very comforting animals, accepting of the city strangers who had come to join them. The storyline included a little Spanish boy, José, who had also been taken in by the kindly farmers. Josephine, as a child, had had no idea what he was doing there, amidst the alien bog cotton, and it was only many years later, indeed only yesterday, as she was reading a footnote in The Reaper and the Wheat, that she had realised that José was standing in for a generation of Basque refugees who had been exported to Britain from Bilbao on the Habana in May 1937, shortly after the bombing of Guernica. The disobliging British government, according to Bennett Carpenter, had been reluctant to accept the children and argued that taking in these ‘useless mouths’ would contravene the treaty of non-intervention.
Young José had at first been sorry that there were no cattle at Long Stone Farm, coming as he did from the land of the bull, but he too had come to love the sheep.
The three children all wore very pleasing woollen jerseys, and in the Christmas chapter they wore jumpers with reindeer patterns, a very avant-garde motif for those days.
This story had been popular in its day, though it had not gone through many editions, as had the tales of Ferdinand the Bull and Orlando, which are still in print.
Jo Drummond thinks it more than likely that Marian Heber had known the Studdert Meades. They had all lived much of their lives in Cambridge and had similar intellectual, religious and political affiliations. She can’t quite work out how the generations would have connected: Aunt Marian, she thinks, would have been younger than Alice, but older than Valentine who died in his twenties at Jarama. Marian had died not long ago, in her nineties.
It had not occurred to Jo until very recently that Ferdinand had been a pacifist anti-Franco bull, but it was obvious once one knew. She now knows that he had been banned in Spain and Nazi Germany, although Stalin, apparently, had liked him.
Nobody would have thought to ban Aunt Marian’s sheep. Her sheep did not have names: they were just sheep. Maybe Aunt Marian had missed a trick there. Only the children had names. Walt and Katie and the generic José.
She’d been able to find out about Ferdinand’s political history from the internet. It was all there, accessible in seconds. Some of the fun has gone out of scholarship, it’s become too easy. She’s had to work hard to find an excuse to come to the British Library for the day, where she will be happy and at peace for a few hours in the silent company of scholars. But she has found herself a pretext. Maybe in the boxes of uncatalogued and unpublished letters of Hubert Studdert Meade, and in the papers of his old college, and in the manuscript drafts of his translations, she will find something new, something unremarked – about his wife Alice, the forgotten novelist with her uncut pages.
And louder sang that ghost, what then?
Valentine, although quoted by Carpenter, and still often cited by other Hispanists with reference to Carpenter, has not been the subject yet of any major independent study. She is slightly surprised that he has not been taken up. The diaries are just as interesting as much that is available in print. He makes a tragic story, with a good image readymade for the jacket. He was as handsome as Rupert Brooke.
The weather on this February Wednesday is not wild, but it is steadily damp and bitterly cold. The pavements are greasy with a thin slick of dirty brown mud, dotted with pale scabs of trodden chewing gum and the skeletons of leaves. Luckily it is only a short walk from King’s Cross to the British Library, some of it under cover, and she hurries along, past the restored red-brick façade of St Pancras and the cowed and cowled sellers of the Big Issue, thinking of the wisdom of those who migrate to warmer climes and counting up the weeks that must be endured before one could reasonably expect the discernible coming of spring. Winter in the Midwest had been unpleasant, and she and Alec had usually flown south for the winter vacation, to Florida, to Mexico, and once to St Lucia.
Now she does not even think of escaping England. It seems to be her duty to ride this rough weather out. She and Fran are in agreement about this. They do not plan to set off together on a widows’ cruise to the sun, although they could. They remember the bitter years in Romley, when the children were small and had chicken pox and the plumbing froze and they could not afford to heat their homes properly and had to collect water in plastic buckets from a standpipe. Athene Grange is warm, and so is Fran’s flat. They will stick it out.
Owen England had liked the Canaries, he had sung their praises, but then he had been invited to visit them. It wouldn’t be the same, going without a purpose, for pleasure. Owen had been welcomed by old friends.
The library welcomes her. Her items are waiting for her. She installs herself at her desk, plugs in her lightweight mini-laptop, and begins to browse through the contents of the slim old-fashioned dark-red string-tied cardboard folder and the larger and smarter pale green canvas box.
The box reminds her of bookbinding lessons at school, in a Wednesday afternoon slot called Craft Work. She can still smell the fabric and the glue.
She knows that others before her have read Hubert’s letters. A few quotations from them have surfaced in print in biographies and cultural studies, establishing dates and connections, charting changing attitudes to the Cambridge Classical Tripos and to Greats in Oxford, to Greek tragedy, to fashions in translation. Hubert had been acquainted with A. E. Housman and Gilbert Murray and with A. W. Verrall, all famous in their day. Hubert seems to have been a kindly and well-principled man, although his versions of Aeschylus and Euripides are, in Jo’s view, as texts, both dated and deplorable. She had managed to acquire some of them on her Kindle, and has been puzzled and amused by some of the typographical errors that have crept in, which would certainly have startled Professor Studdert Meade. The word ‘fanes’, for example, appears throughout as ‘fannies’, and ‘corselets’ as ‘corsets’. How can this be? What human error or fallible technological process has introduced these louche innuendoes? Had non-English speaking technicians on the far side of the world seen fit to interpret the text of Euripides in this ingenious way? Or had some scanner automatically readjusted to the more familiar?
Hubert wouldn’t have known the word ‘fanny’, and neither would his son Valentine, but he’d have known about corsets. Alice would undoubtedly have worn corsets. Everybody did. Just as she and Fran when they were young had worn what were then called girdles, Alice and Aunt Marian had worn corsets.
As she begins to think it’s nearly time to allow herself to go to find some lunch, she discovers she’s on the track of something she may have been searching for. It looks like a reference to the Basque refugees.
Dear Hubert [writes somebody called Jack, from Grindleford, in December 1938]
You will be pleased to hear that Eduardo and Manolita are settling in. The camp does its best but some of the children are very disturbed and it is good to be able to offer a temporary refuge in a proper home. Our thanks to Alice for suggesting us. The children are company for Elizabeth who has been in very low spirits. Marian has been to visit, and has made some beautiful sketches of the children walking on Stanage Edge. Did you see her poster for the A.I.A.? She is now a member of the Basque Children’s Committee.
I know Alice is very busy with the Dependents Aid Committee and Medical Aid. I am sure that she is finding such work a
lifeline. This is such a hard time for you both and we send you our deepest and continuing sympathy.
Yours ever,
Jack
This has to be a reference to Aunt Marian. It had not occurred to Josephine that José had been standing in not only for a generation of Basque refugees, but also for a real child, or perhaps two real children. Now it seems that this must have been so, and why not?
Marian herself had briefly taken in a family of Hungarian refugees in the crisis of 1956. She had invited them into her large under-occupied Edwardian Cambridge home in Grange Road. They’d been billeted on her by the Quaker Meeting. Jo can remember them well, though she has no idea what had happened to them subsequently. They’d been around over Christmas and everyone had had to improvise little presents for them, and watch the little girl dance a sugary show-off ballet routine beneath Aunt Marian’s annually resurrected silver-tinsel Christmas tree. Jo hadn’t taken to these particular Hungarians at all, although she’d been of an age to take an intellectual interest in the uprising. She’d wanted to like them, but she didn’t. They had seemed too pleased with themselves, too certain of deserving attention. Her unpleasant teenage self would have preferred them to be more humble. They had nearly spoiled the annual visit to Aunt Marian.
This is all a very long way from Jo’s dilettante interest in the plot of Alice’s novel, The Fatal Kinship. She feels she has strayed far from her subject. As she descends the luminous white staircase of Portland stone, past the portholes, past the classical seats of travertine, past the varicoloured busts of literati, past the disturbing Kitaj tapestry, she tries in vain to remember why she became arbitrarily interested in the Deceased Wives’ Sisters in the first place. The link has gone.
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