by A. N. Wilson
It only took a few London seasons after the First World War, a few irresistible flourishes by the milliners, as they prepared for another Royal Ascot, another County Ball, another Garden Party in the Governor’s Residence in Carmichael, for the voice of the Huia to become silent in our land. And, as I have already said, the only Huia feathers we had left in Aberdeen, those of the ceremonial Tangata cloak in the museum, were lost in the rubble when our museum, with its beautifully preserved Tangata canoes, its dress uniform of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (who came twice to our Island when he was in the Royal Navy and who wanted to be our governor – an idea vetoed by his Imperial-imperious mother), its ceramic collections, its Victorian watercolours of our Island landscapes, its education centre, added in the 1990s, with its informative notes on the gold rush and its plausible reconstruction of a Digger’s hut, as well as its older military memorabilia, its uniforms and medals, and its photographs of Island regiments in the Dardanelles, in Crete, and at Anzio, were all lost in the Quake, an event which reminded us that human beings are not the only wreckers. That metaphor, God, had something to do with our destruction, surely? Since that disaster, we Huias, anyway the Huias of Aberdeen, have the feeling that we are everlastingly on the threshold of imminent danger. The very homeland beneath our feet had become more explosive than a minefield; only luck could spare us from obliteration of one sort or another, however bright our hopes, or however colourful our extinct feathers.
If this were a play – and it’s natural for me to think like that, given what I do for a living – then all this bit of the book would be contained in a prelude spoken by the Chorus.
Nietzsche thought the Greek tragedies started as just the Choruses, and that the idea of plays came later. I like that – if I understand him rightly. Some people think that the Choruses in the Greek tragedies either represent the audience of the play, or, in some cases, actually are the audience. Digby explored this idea in one of her lectures once – which I attended, when my obsession with her was beginning. (This was a lecture, not one of her classes with Barnaby Farrell.)
Maybe at this stage I’m the (sort of) Chorus of this book – hammering it out on my laptop. Only, I’m about to be a character in the story, so maybe I’m not a Chorus, just a narrator, which is different. Maybe you are the Chorus, interacting with what I have to tell you. Each reader makes her own narrative, after all, as my mum’s generation, fed on Roland Barthes, Derrida and co., bla bla bla, all believed. Probably something in it. After all, how you react to mention of the Aberdeen Quake will tremendously depend on who you are. If anyone outside the Island is reading this, she will probably scarcely remember that there WAS a quake in Aberdeen. If she’s European, she’ll remember the dreadful quakes in Italy; if she’s American, California. Our Island isn’t even on the radar of most of you. Besides, there have been so many other calamities in the world since then – wars, tsunamis, floods, famines. Why should you remember our earthquake: which in any case, was a little like the proverbial dull newspaper headline, ‘Slight earthquake in Chile, not many killed’. We had over two hundred and fifty killed and over a thousand badly injured, but what is that to the numbers killed in the civil wars in Rwanda or Iraq or Syria? Many of you would not be able to find the Island on a world map. We Huias don’t blame you. We are a small faraway country of which you know little – but the Quake matters to us. Maybe most of you reading this are Huias. Maybe some of you lived through the Quakes, or lost people in the second one, the big one. Maybe, you are just reading this as a novel, a work of fiction. I can’t remember enough of Digby’s lecture to remember whether you ever get to know the Chorus in a tragedy, or whether that matters. Are we meant to know who they are? She made us laugh by quoting something her dad once said about the choruses in Sophocles – they were ‘Moaning Minnies’. Digby was far and away the best lecturer I ever heard.
In case you are interested, I’m the daughter of Cavan Cliffe, who’s quite a well-known journalist in Aberdeen. I’ve mentioned her already and I’ll describe her in more detail later, because she comes into the story. Can’t decide whether it’s worth mentioning anything else about myself at this stage. Prefer in some ways the narrative voice, the irony of holding back. Prefer to write the story in a dispassionate way, and even in a godlike way, telling you what is passing through Eleanor’s mind and stuff. And then again, our perspective shifts. When I was in the fifth form at St Hilda’s and Deirdre was my teacher, she was an object of derision. Now, she’s a heroine for me. In between, I’ve had all sorts of complicated thoughts – especially about her and Barnaby. The tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface are not the only things which are constantly on the move. The kaleidoscope is being shaken at irregular intervals, and the patterns are different every time.
You’ll get to know me in the course of the following pages. No need for me to go into much detail just now. It’s probably worth mentioning, though, before the Earthquake completely destroys our city and we are all changed forever, that I do come from Aberdeen. I was born here. Cavan and Richard Ashe – that’s my dad, who now lives in Sydney; he was a journalist too, in those days, but he now works for a photographic library – split up when I was five. I stayed with Mum – with Cavan. Dad left the Island when I was twelve and, although I still see him from time to time, we’ve never been close. I think Cavan is still quite angry with Dad, at some level – or angry with herself – or both – because of the failure of the marriage.
When this story begins, the Me who was wandering idly round the Dyce Gallery would have said that this is the really great division between my generation and all the ones which went before. Mum’s generation expected everything to last forever. In an ideal world, that is. Cavan and Richard and the other baby-boomers, they thought that whatever they started in their youth, they’d still be doing when they were old. Richard changed jobs, but most baby-boomers never even expected to do this. Become a shop assistant aged sixteen and you’d hope to go on working in the same shop for the next forty years, when you might have risen to become assistant manager. Do teacher training, and you’ll go on being a teacher until they pension you off. And it was the same with their relationships. They nearly all got married. They’d seen the wartime marriages of their parents, and they’d seen how disastrous most of them were, and they could see, with the rational part of themselves, how utterly unlikely it was that two people, forming a relationship when they were twenty, would still have enough in common to want to stay together ten, twenty years down the line. But off they went, regardless, to the register office or to church, to tie the knot. And then came all the acrimony and sadness of divorces and settlements and lawyers, and everlasting self-questioning. Get Mum with a glass of our Island Riesling inside her, and, as like as not, she will start asking, aloud, why she and Richard did not make a better fist of it. Whereas I, at the age of twenty-seven, had some relationships behind me and thought some of them were mistakes – some of them pretty disastrous mistakes! – but the others? Well, they ran their course. No hard feelings, on my part anyway.
That was how I was before the Quake. Afterwards – well, how things changed. That feeling which I’ve just described as so crazy – a belief that I’ve found love which will last forever and a day – that’s what happened to me. I’m Ingrid, by the way. Ingrid Ashe.
One more bit of gossip to get out of the way before I tell this story. I don’t want you to think this book is just going to be tittle-tattle. You have already read enough to realize that I am what Mum calls a Nosey Parker. (Who was Parker, I wonder? Being Nosey, he could probably have told you a thing or two about Riley, whose life we are all meant to envy?)
I’ve told you about Charlie Nicolson and Eleanor Bartlett in the art gallery. Well, not long after I’d clocked that part of the Aberdeen-soap-opera, I had a strange experience in the University. It was all fine between me and Barnaby. A friend of mine says you have to go to bed with someone ten times before there is any danger of breaking your heart, and we’d only done
it three times (well, three times in bed and once in his office). We’d got over the thing. I’d even been round to his flat and had a nice high tea with him, Stig and Deirdre Hadley, our Green MP, who sneaked in to see him there whenever she could.
One of the things which this book is all about is Digby and Eleanor. No swanks, but I was the only one to have seen the truth about them, from really quite early on. This was partly because, as I say, Mum goes to the Cathedral and I sometimes go with her, so we had seen quite a lot of Eleanor in her professional capacity, and because I was doing this course on tragedy at Banks. So I’d seen a lot of Digby. Most of the Cathedral Folk (as Eleanor whimsically called us, after the title of one of her favourite Russian novels) were unaware of Digby, and in our seminar at the University, I was the only churchgoer. You certainly wouldn’t have got Barnaby into a church, and if you had done, it would not have been an Anglican one. (His parents were very VERY lapsed Irish Catholics.) I was the only person, really, who had clocked Digby and Eleanor. But we’ll have more, much more, about this, when the Quake brought out the truth.
Nell Digby, known to readers of the TLS, and to the scholarly world, as E.L. Digby, was a leading expert on classical tragedy, especially Euripides. She’s very well read in modern literature too, which is what made her class with Barnaby Farrell fizz like it did. One minute, he’d be off telling us about Thomas Hardy – which is his special area of expertise – and she’d cap it with thoughts about Sophocles, Shakespeare, and back he’d come with Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, whoever. We were all, the twenty or so graduate students who crowded round that table at Banks, really in their debt. We learnt so, SO much. I’d never read so much as I did during the months of that semester, and every evening, I’d come staggering home with armsful of paperbacks, longing to talk about my latest essay. Mum was brilliant, and because she is really well read too, I think she enjoyed it, and certainly never showed signs of boredom, even when I told her the plot of Jude the Obscure, and she said, with a quiet cigarettey chuckle, that she had read it, actually.
Anyhow. I was late handing in an essay to Digby. It was comparing Euripides and Hardy. Mum had helped me with it and therefore said it was the best thing I’d done. Because I was late with the essay, Digby said, no worries, just hand it in some time that week. She actually meant I should put it into her pigeon-hole in the corridors near the front entrance of the Forster Building. But she’d also said she’d lend me a book, so I took the essay to her office.
I did knock on the door, honest – but I did not wait before I flung it open, and there they were in one another’s arms. The funny thing is that, although he looked embarrassed, she almost glowed at being discovered. I did not tell anyone about it – like I say, I’m not the gossiping type. I just have this gift – or I do for the purposes of this narrative – of being around when stuff happens. Anyway, there they were, in a clinch, Digby and Barnaby Farrell. I’ll tell you in another chapter what I felt when I saw them.
CHAPTER TWO
—WHAT ON EARTH IS THE MAN DROUGHT? ASKED HER DAD, with the light laugh which greeted any subject which might have been considered serious, or any discussion of modernity.
Her dad’s face was distorted when they spoke on Skype because he sat too near the screen, and gawped incredulously at it. From the way he peered into the machine at his end – an Acer laptop which had known better days – she felt she knew what it would be like to be a specimen on a slide under the microscope. She by contrast sat well back. So he saw his daughter, with her dark bob of hair, and her natural cherry lips, and her toothy smile, and the large eyes the colour of the midnight sky in summer. She saw his neat silver hair, his gold-rimmed, round spectacles, his pink face so closely shaved that it looked as if it had been polished; but she saw it as if reflected in one of those convex glasses in amusement arcades which are supposed to be so funny, and which make you one minute one of the Ents in Tolkien, long and lagubrious, and the next, a squat Toby Jug.
—It’s one of the things that makes life on the Island so distinctive, said his daughter. Mum bucked the trend, marrying an Englishman. Most Huia women come home to breed, but when they get here, after their year off in England or America, or the Far East, they find the Huia men have all gone backpacking in Europe, or taken jobs in banks in New York or Shanghai, where they marry the local girls. So there are far more women than men.
—It sounds like the ideal situation for a musical comedy – Princess Ida or something.
When they had laughed, he said, perhaps prompted by the mention of marriage and breeding,
—Any news of . . . um . . .
—Everything’s fine, Dad.
When Eleanor and Doug had been married – well, they still were married – but when they had been together, she sometimes used to call him, to his face, ‘What’s-is-name’ or ‘Whosit’, or ‘Nemo’, in reference to her father’s dislike of the man. Mum had actually been able to get her palate round the single syllable ‘Doug’, but Dad, usually, would end telephone conversations with – ‘Oh, and love to, um . . .’
—So, North Carolina is . . .
Doug had taken the job at Duke when she had come to Aberdeen. Had Mum still been alive, there would have been questions – ‘Is your marriage in trouble, hun? Do you want to talk about it? Can we do anything to help?’
But Mum had been dead eight years now (cancer). Dad had retired from parish life and moved to Winchester, where he lived in a small flat with his favourite books, and attended Cathedral services every day. He was a spry seventy-one, and was still ‘in demand’ – preaching, conducting retreats, and still sitting on ARCIC, the committee of optimists charged with seeing their way to reuniting the Anglican Church with that of Rome.
He had few friends, apart from Lesley Mannock, with whom he had trained for the priesthood at Cuddesdon. Lesley, like Ronald, was a clever man, who could’ve become, had he chosen, a college chaplain, or similar, followed by a climb up what he called ‘the Church of England snakes and ladders board’ – Area Dean of Smethwick, Suffragan Bishop of Basingstoke. Instead, Ronald and Lesley had faithfully lived out their adult lives in sad towns, among people with whom they had little in common, apart from their faith. They had followed the bright angels, as Eleanor sometimes thought – her mind, filled as it was, with lines from her favourite poet.
When Eleanor had the chance to come out to Aberdeen as Dean of the Cathedral, she had, naturally enough, asked Ronald’s advice. His reply had been ‘classic Dad’.
—I’ve given up having opinions about anything.
—But you must know whether I should take the job or not.
—I’ll ask Lesley.
—I’d love to know what Uncle Lesley thinks, Dad; but I’d rather know what YOU think.
—Oh, it’s so restful having Lesley. There are so many things nowadays which it does not seem quite sane to have an opinion about, and yet – to judge from all the voices on the radio – it seems more or less obligatory that one should have some view or another.
Cue for the light laugh. And then, one of the stock of quotations with which he peppered his conversation. This one from Hawker of Morwenstowe, the Victorian poet-priest who wrote ‘Twenty thousand Cornishmen will know the Reason why’. A bore was pressing him for his views. Hawker took the visitor to his study window and showed him the wild seas of north Cornwall. ‘Those are my views. My opinions I keep to myself.’
—Oh, but with Lesley! I do not need to know what to think about anything any more – women priests, gay marriage, Brexit, I simply say, ‘I think what Lesley Mannock thinks.’ He’s always right. He’s like the Oracle.
Next time they spoke, guided by his oracle and friend, Dad had weighed all the arguments, for and against, entirely in terms of her professional career. On the one hand, she would surely soon be in the running to become a bishop – if this was what she wanted. Coming to the Island would not commit her to a lifetime of exile. She could always return home. It would be a good thing for her to get out of Oxfor
d for a while. Her academic career need not be seen as ‘on hold’. And since you’re . . . you know . . . since um . . . North Carolina . . .
Had Dad told Lesley about Doug? Had the two old friends discussed her marriage? Should she, who could not talk of such matters to Dad, have tried to confide in Uncle Lesley, who was a wise old bird, if rather scatty, and was much in demand as a confessor, and spiritual director?
—But my work. My academic work . . . It’ll be a wrench, giving up the fellowship . . .
—There are plenty of scholar priests, surely in our Church. Or were. Lesley is one.
—So are you.
—Scarcely. Lesley really has kept up his theological reading. He’s read Rahner, Balthasar . . . I rather gave up after ploughing through Barth. I stick to diaries and novels. I’ve been rereading Hensley Henson. They’re so funny, his diaries. But terribly unkind!
—Well, there aren’t so many scholar priests as there were, she had said, to be greeted only with the light laugh.
The laugh reflected his inner commitment, some years ago, to check his natural tendency to compare present with past. Every now and then, the light laugh, which Eleanor had inherited, preceded some uncontrollable value-judgment on a measure in the General Synod, a liturgical infelicity, a particularly ripe fatuity on the part of this or that Bishop of their Church. The words ‘donkeys’ – more laughter – or ‘Ichabod’ – had sometimes escaped his cleanly shaven lips. But less and less frequently. The past was the past. There was no recovering it. He and Lesley were determined not to be miserable old gits, though, on the second or third sherry, some degree of satire, when discussing the contemporary Church, was unavoidable. The difficulty was, that in refusing to make pessimistic statements, they were in danger of not making statements at all. Lesley had always been a man of silences. Mum, who read French fiction for fun, used to speak of Les Silences de Lesley Mannock. Dad never used to be like that. When Mum was alive they had chattered like sparrows. And Mum would certainly not hold back on the idiocy of the Bishops or the Synod. Eleanor sometimes wondered whether, had she not become a priest herself, her father would have not greeted the ordination of women with the same light laugh which was inspired by the new liturgies or the debates about global warming, as though it made any difference what the synodical busybodies thought about these matters. He was a natural conservative. His ARCIC work was made much more difficult, now that we had gone ahead and ordained priests and bishops of both genders – should that be ‘all genders or none’, nowadays? – while Rome stood, for the time being, unbudgeable on the issue. He had never, however, breathed a syllable of disapproval of the ordination of any genders. Uncle Lesley, anyhow, rather to Eleanor’s surprise, had always been in favour of the ordination of women, years before it happened. Now that she was a priest – had been for seven years – it made a bond between her and her father. How could it not?