The Hopkins Conundrum
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‘I love this novel. It pulls off the three-card trick of being entertaining, genuinely touching, and a fascinating insight into Hopkins’ poetry’
Harriett Gilbert, presenter of A Good Read
‘A splendid mix of literary detection, historical description and contemporary romance. Edge’s witty debunking of the Vatican conspiracy genre will appeal equally to fans and detractors of Dan Brown’
Michael Arditti
‘Wonderfully enjoyable: a masterful mash-up of contemporary literary satire and poetic erudition which had me laughing out loud and then reaching for Hopkins’ collected works. Prepare to be delighted’
Liz Trenow
‘A compelling and captivating debut’
Laurie Graham
‘A fascinating interweaving of fact and fiction; Edge has cleverly told three stories that deal with some of life’s biggest questions, in a way that is both humorous and deeply touching’
Helen Batten
‘A deft fusion of genuinely funny writing and deeply poignant drama bound artfully around the vividly imagined character of Hopkins, who is long overdue a revival and deservedly takes centre-stage’
Jennifer Selway, Daily Express
Tim Cleverley inherits a failing pub in Wales, which he plans to rescue by enlisting an American pulp novelist to concoct an entirely fabricated ‘mystery’ about the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote his masterpiece The Wreck of the Deutschland nearby.
Blending the real stories of Hopkins and the shipwrecked nuns of his poem with a contemporary love story, while casting a wry eye on the Da Vinci Code industry, The Hopkins Conundrum is a highly original mix of page-turning fiction, literary biography and satirical commentary.
SIMON EDGE read philosophy at Cambridge and edited the newspaper Capital Gay before becoming a gossip columnist on the Evening Standard and a feature writer on the Daily Express. He has taught creative writing at City University and also worked as a spin doctor. The Hopkins Conundrum is his first novel.
The Hopkins
Conundrum
Simon Edge
Published by
Lightning Books Ltd
Imprint of EyeStorm Media
312 Uxbridge Road
Rickmansworth
Hertfordshire
WD3 8YL
www.lightning-books.com
First Edition 2017
Copyright © Simon Edge
Cover design by Anna Morrison
Typesetting by Clio Mitchell
All rights reserved. Apart from brief extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without permission of the publisher.
Simon Edge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
ISBN: 978-1-78563-033-0
In memory of
Ezio Alessandroni
(25.3.1963–5.3.2017)
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion,
king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rólling level úndernéath him steady áir, and stríding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wónder of it: shéer plód makes plóugh down síllion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gáll themsélves, and gásh góld-vermillion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Lords of the Admiralty received a telegram from Sheerness reporting that a small life-boat had washed up on Garrison Point Beach this morning, containing one man alive and two dead. From the imperfect English the survivor speaks it was ascertained that the boat was washed away from the Deutschland, of Bremen. It is supposed this vessel struck either the Galloper or Kentish Knock Sands, at the entrance of the Thames. A tug has been sent from Sheerness to search and afford aid. The following telegram has also been received from the commanding officer of Her Majesty’s ship Penelope, at Harwich:
“The Deutschland, of and from Bremen for New York, with emigrants, grounded on the Kentish Knock on Monday morning. She afterwards knocked over the sand, and is now lying in four and a half fathoms, apparently broken amidships. Estimated number of passengers and crew lost, 50. Remainder landed and under the care of the German Consul at Harwich. The Locust, tug (sent from Sheerness to assist wreck), will pass Kentish Knock on the way to the Galloper.”
From The Times, London, Wednesday, December 8, 1875
Contents
Florida, the present day, London, 1876
North Wales, 1875
Bremen, Germany, 1875
North Wales, the present
North Wales, 1875
North Wales, the present
Bremen, 1875
Holland, the present
North Wales, the present
North Wales, 1875
North Sea, the present
North Wales, the present
North Wales, 1875
North Sea, 1875
North Wales, the present
North Wales, 1876
North Sea, 1875
Manchester, the present
North Wales, 1876
North Sea, 1875
North Wales, 1876
North Wales, the present
London, 1876
North Wales, the present
Dublin, 1886
North Wales, the present
Dublin, 1886
North Wales, the present
Dublin, 1889
North Wales, the present
North Wales, the present
Dublin, 1889
North Sea, 1875
Dublin, 1889
North Wales, the present
Acknowledgements
About Lightning Books
Florida, the present day
London, 1876
Two men called Barry each read a communication on a Monday morning in May, and each of them frown. They don’t know one another, because they have been born a hundred and twenty-nine years apart, one in the old world, the other in the new, which means the two Mondays are separated by five thousand miles and fifty thousand days. And because of this gap in time, only one of the men actually thinks WTF? But the other effectively thinks it too.
It is certainly the spirit of Father Aloysius Barry’s reaction as he slits open a slim envelope, addressed in a tangled, coiling hand to his employer, at their cramped fourth-floor offices in Davies Street, Mayfair, and unfolds the manuscript it contains. Father Aloysius is used to opening submissions of little merit and is well versed in the various tactful phrases that can be employed when he returns the unwanted material. But this offering is on a different level. Written in the same hand as the envelop
e, the text looks instantly peculiar, because it is spattered with bizarre dashes and ellipses of a kind he has never seen before. The lines are neatly arranged and legible enough, but the words do not convey meaning in any conventional sense, and no amount of reading and re-reading makes them any clearer, which Father Aloysius is certain is not for want of education on his part. The effort to make something of it causes his head to spin, and it comes as a relief when he gives himself permission to stop trying. Even to his own relatively inexperienced eye, this submission is not just unpublishable: it verges on the insane. And considering the address the package has come from, that could be a matter of more than just literary concern. It will certainly need more careful handling than the usual polite refusal.
Father Aloysius sighs, puts the manuscript at the bottom of his pending pile, and hopes something will come to him by the time he reaches it. Perhaps his editor will know what to say.
For Barry Brook, author of The Poussin Conundrum, there are no syntactical thickets to negotiate, no obscure vocabulary or wild system of notation in the message he reads on his iPhone at his large, Mexican-style canal-side home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It’s just an ordinary tweet among the many from fans who remain enthralled, nine years on, by his murderous conspiracy thriller tracing the bones of Jesus Christ to a cave in southwestern France, and who don’t seem as perturbed as he is by his failure to produce a follow-up. They assume he is toiling away on a new masterwork of even greater complexity and have no idea that he sits at a blank screen day after day, month after month, transfixed by a terror that the global sensation which astonished no one more than himself was an unrepeatable fluke. He scrolls through the notifications to see if there’s anything particularly complimentary he can retweet to keep his profile up and maintain the illusion he’s still in the game.
One message stands out. It comes from a sender called @Wreckileaks, a name that seems to be making some kind of point, although he doesn’t quite understand what. It’s mildly abusive, but there’s nothing remarkable about that. Over the years he has become familiar with invective in all its forms, and at times has been so mesmerised by it that he counts himself a connoisseur. He has managed to offend the religious and the non-religious, the literate and the illiterate, the French (for setting his book in their country) and the non-French (for not setting it in theirs), and he inspires extraordinary creativity in the imaginations of those who wish or threaten on him a violent death, with a strong correlation between goriness and religious fervour (and a touching faith among all who suggest it that they are the first to think of ramming one of his precious set-squares far up his rectum). Whatever his analyst may say, there is something oddly flattering about this frenzy of hatred among people he has never met. It makes him so much bigger and more important than they are, in their sad little bedrooms spewing impotent bile into their keyboards. It makes him feel more secure, not less – although he has naturally spent a small fortune on electronic and other fortifications for his property, just to be on the safe side.
In the present case, the rudeness is pretty mild. It’s the content itself that intrigues him. The message reads: @barrybrook if you want to know the real secrets of the Vatican you cynical bastard think shipwrecks not geometry. Interested? More soon.
Maybe he needs to get a life, but he is interested and he does want to know more.
North Wales, 1875
Hopkins woke sweating in the ice-chill small hours, long before the pipes had begun their slow clank into what passed for life. He could tell without striking a light that there was at least an hour to go before the caller did his rounds, opening every door along the corridor to shout “Deo Gratias” and not budging until he received the same sleep-slack answer. Usually it was an effort to rouse himself but now, in this unaccustomed wakefulness, he lay staring up at the dark shape of the crucifix on the wall opposite the narrow window, fearful of returning to his dream.
It had started as a pageant of obscene torment. There was a boy from school who had taught him the first of many lessons in disappointment; then a friend’s younger brother, running goose-flesh naked during the summer vacation; a coalman’s boy, randomly glimpsed during an afternoon walk and preserved in the photograph of his memory, the forehead smudge of grime completing the sense of angelic fall; and finally Dolben himself, not handsome exactly, but captivating, with the promise of a romantic interior world for anyone privileged to enter – and condemning anyone else to a miserable exclusion. In the dream they were on the meadow together, walking beside the Isis as they had done on one of those three perfect, never-to-be-forgotten days; but nothing held its form for long and the scene mutated to some lewder river where Dolben announced his intention to swim. Hopkins himself had also meant to bathe, but when he tried to undress he was thwarted by a stubborn collar stud, buttons that popped back through the hole he had just pushed them out of, knotted laces that were beyond untangling; and all the while Dolben was stripping. The dreamer’s depraved subconscious had been more than ready to supply the detail for a body that he had never seen in life: milky white shoulders, surprisingly broad (odd that you could be surprised by something your own imagination had invented, but it seemed you could); a wisp of hair at the middle of a plate-flat breast; a mole on the tender skin at the top of the left arm. Running towards the water, this gangling boy-nymph presented a dimpled haunch and musky cleft, as his observer continued to struggle with his wretched trousers. Hopkins’ apparel twisted itself with Gordian spite and he could only look on as Dolben plunged into the lucky pool – alone at first, but then there were two of them. His imagination knew with certainty – because it had invented the likeness – that this was his undeserving rival.
The pair of them splashed together with a feigned innocence, but then the rival was there no longer, ordered away by whatever part of the brain was in charge of this sleep-show, and Dolben was alone in mid-stream, suddenly choking and gasping for breath. There was only the dreamer to watch, helpless from his bed-bound, sheet-wound river-bank, as the water closed over poor Dolben’s head. That was the moment when reason had taken mercy and reminded him that waking was possible. He had pushed gratefully off the muddy bottom of his dream and broken the surface of his lonely little cell, as drenched as if he had really been in the river.
As his breathing slowed, Hopkins inserted an exploratory hand beneath his nightshirt. He was relieved to find that those earlier scenes had not caused any emission. But his pillow was sodden with sweat. He turned it over to use the dry underside. His nightcap was also damp. He peeled it off and flung it aside, pulling the rough counterpane up around his ears, then pushing it away again. Physical discomfort was the only remedy for the desires that had produced that revolting tableau. Forcing himself out of bed, he padded shivering along the oblong of threadbare carpet to his washstand and winced as he splashed water from the ewer onto his forehead. He had a fantasy vision of plunging his whole face into the bowl, holding it under to match poor Dolben, and losing himself to an oblivion where such dreams would never trouble him again. It was of course a sin to contemplate it. Even if it wasn’t, he doubted he was brave enough to endure the cold.
And then he remembered that more recent set of drownings, the event everyone had been talking about the day before. The terrible account that Kerr had read from the newspaper, shocking them all because it came so soon after the Schiller tragedy, must have put the notion in his mind, and his own wanton fancy had supplied the rest. He shook his head, as if that would dislodge the memory of the dream, and splashed a little more water from the bowl, welcoming its icy jolt now.
Still not striking a light, he ventured off the carpet onto the cold tiles. He lifted the lid of his window seat and groped for the familiar rope handle. They had been told as young novices that any more than twelve strokes was vain-glory. He pulled his nightshirt over his head and knelt at his prie-dieu, below the dark square that would lighten into a portrait of Savonarola, his medieval hero, as the
sun came up. With a wild flick, he flung the knotted chords over his shoulder. For a first effort it was feeble – the ropes barely tickled. He put more strength into the next stroke, getting a better reach so that one of the knots whipped round to nick his flank. His breath quickened and he warmed to the task as the force he put into each stroke pushed back the cold of his room and gave his bare skin something else to tremble about. Never. Again. Must these. Filthy. Visions. Come.
He was sweating again as he reached the point of vain-glory, and continued well beyond.
Bremen, Germany, 1875
They were not just expected, which was perfectly natural considering they had written ahead to book their passage. They were actively awaited. The company had grasped that they were coming unchaperoned, and someone had written a note next to their names saying that they should be made as comfortable as possible. It was kind, but also a little alarming. Henrica would have preferred to travel with less fuss and less attention. Perhaps that was always going to be a vain hope.
“There’s no need to go near steerage,” said the clerk in the offices of the shipping line. He lowered his voice with a theatrical glance at the rougher queue beside them tailing out of the door. “The working man can be boisterous on the crossing. Drink is the culprit. But the purser will do all he can to keep you undisturbed. In first-class we could of course have guaranteed your comfort, and in second-class we can only try. But it’s lucky the ship is so empty. One of you will have a cabin to herself, instead of having to share with a stranger.”
“Empty?” said Henrica. “Everywhere seems so crowded.”
“Crowded?” The clerk laughed. “There’s room for eight hundred passengers, but we have barely one hundred today. There are just only six first-class passengers, and twenty-five of you in second.”
“Why so few?”
“Nobody likes to travel in December, dear lady, unless they have good reason.”