The Hopkins Conundrum

by Simon Edge

  He paused, waiting for his satirical barb to hit home, and was gratified by the ripple of laughter he got – with him, this time, not at him.

  “…But the Welsh poet repeats an entire alliterative phrase. The effect is to bind the two halves of a line together, as in “Splaine did it splendidly”, so that you are using ‘spl’ and ‘n’ and ‘d’ twice over. I use the phrase rhetorically, you understand, not as a commendation of Mr Splaine’s arguments tonight.”

  More laughter.

  “Another device the Welsh bards have is to divide the line into three parts, where the end of the first part rhymes with the end of the second part, while the second and third are bound together by alliteration. Thus we might say “Henry Kerr / went too far / walking”, so that Kerr rhymes with far, while went and walking are linked by alliteration, and of course the last word, walking, would rhyme with the end of another line using the same system. When this system is repeated line after line, it produces a hypnotic effect, as if one were being swirled in a vortex of language. Let me give you one more example…”

  But the attention he had won at Rickaby and Splaine’s expense now ebbed, and his words seemed to be having a hypnotic effect of their own on his audience. While Kerr, the honest sea-dog without a line of verse in his soul, was frowning with the effort to follow, the rest of the theologians had either glazed over or were sniggering like first-year novices.

  The debate went overwhelmingly the other way.

  As the hungry theologians filed out in search of supper, the Rector called Hopkins back.

  He had only become aware that his superior was in the room towards the end of his peroration, and it had occurred to him that he was openly admitting his disobedience in continuing to learn Welsh, as well as his continuing interest in poetry. Now he braced himself for the reprimand.

  But the Rector’s eyes were smiling.

  “That was an interesting discourse, Mr Hopkins,” he said. He was an Irishman and his voice still bore the mark of his origins.

  “Thank you, Father. I fear you are being kind to spare my feelings. I bored where I sought to enthuse. And the debate was roundly lost, so my advocacy is proved failed.”

  This was not false modesty. He was embarrassed by his headstrong performance.

  “You do yourself disservice. It was a passionate advocacy.”

  “Please don’t think I mind about these things as much as I may have given the impression.”

  “No, Mr Hopkins, I don’t believe you mind about the Welsh language as much as you argued.” The Rector used his authority gently and his scrupulous politeness was difficult to read. “But poetry, I fancy, is another matter…”

  He left the suggestion hanging.

  Hopkins looked at the worn carpet in search of inspiration.

  The Rector was moving towards the door.

  “This shipwreck in the Thames is a terrible business,” he said, holding it open. “Have you been following the reports?”

  “Dreadful. It has been a terrible year at sea.”

  It seemed like only the other week that the Schiller had gone down. They had all been gripped by that event too, although on that occasion it was the sheer number of casualties that had shocked them, not the fate of religious women of their own persuasion.

  “God truly works in mysterious ways, but he has his reasons for everything,” sighed the Rector.

  “It is not for us to question his purpose, only to accept that he has one.”

  “Quite so, Mr Hopkins. Would that the ill-educated masses would see it that way. In these atheistic times, such tragedies, as the newspapers call them, are wont to play into the hands of the godless.”

  “It is therefore incumbent on us to explain…”

  “Yes, Mr Hopkins, to explain! That is precisely what we must do. A short poem might be fitting, don’t you think? Just a few lines, to put the present human suffering in the context of God’s majesty? It’s merely an idea.”

  And without another word, the Rector turned and strode away down the broad, low corridor, the wings of his robe flapping behind him.

  North Sea, the present

  Chloe cannot precisely explain why she is so discreet about her passion for the poet. Keeping quiet about it has just always come naturally. Perhaps it’s because she was hopeless at English at school and she studied biochemistry at uni: she is not the kind of person who is meant to like serious literature, and deep down she has an unspoken fear of being ridiculed for daring to entertain such pretensions. Of course that doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny – it’s years since she has seen anyone from school, and even if it weren’t, it’s hard to imagine any of them giving a toss what she reads – but the habit of hiding her interest away has become ingrained. It’s something she has got used to keeping in a box marked private.

  But the poetry is no less important to her for that. She loves the guy’s work, positively adores it. She especially loves the idea that she can read the same lines over and over again and carry on finding new meanings, depths, subtleties in them. That’s so different from her experience of reading a novel where, if she really likes it, she can’t read it again for ages because she already knows what’s going to happen, and instead she has to start searching for something fresh that she likes as much, which is often easier said than done. With the poems, the re-reading is the best part. They start off so blurred as to be totally incomprehensible, but then, as she gets to know them better, the picture comes magically into focus, like when she takes a photo on her phone using the zoom setting, or the way the view through a misted-up morning windscreen gradually clears. She is reassured that this also seems to be most people’s experience of the poet. In fact, none of his work was published until long after his death because he was so far ahead of his time, and his own age was baffled by it. Knowing that has deepened her sense of affinity: she likes the idea of coming to understand someone who was generally misunderstood by everyone else. Of course she knows he is no longer viewed as baffling or unpublishable, quite the contrary. Perhaps that’s another reason for keeping him private: so that she can convince herself he really is her own personal challenge.

  Her capacity to memorise huge chunks of the work comes as a surprise to her, because she has never shown any other aptitude for rote learning. That reinforces the impression that she has some kind of special relationship to the poet, and reciting him by heart has become a particular pleasure. It took her months to crack the masterwork, but she got there by dint of determination and plenty of practice. She knows she probably ought to get out more, but it’s more creative than binge-watching box sets, which is what most of her friends seem to do of an evening. And she at least has something to show for it – a party piece, as it were, although it’s nothing of the kind because she has never been to the kind of party where she would dream of performing it.

  Crossing the North Sea by ship has an unsettling effect on her. Warm and secluded as she is in her hiding place in the upper bows, she can’t resist going out on deck once she has re-read the relevant stanzas. She is well aware that this beery, boxy, ro-ro car ferry has as little in common with a nineteenth-century passenger steamship as she does with a nineteenth-century German nun. Whenever she tries to picture the nuns themselves, she sees them walking these wide carpeted corridors with their sturdy metal doorways, and it’s very hard to detach herself from these surroundings. But once she steps onto the deck and gets a blast of wind and rain, she really does feel plunged into the world of the poem. It’s not actually possible to lean over the side of the ship – for reasons she would thoroughly approve of with her professional hat on – but there is scarcely anyone else out here, and if she immerses herself in the weather, she can blank out most of her twenty-first century surroundings. At this remove from the waves, it’s hard to judge how big they are. But staring out into the night, with just a few distant points of light from other ships, she can ima
gine the fear anyone might feel if the elements chose to assert themselves. She doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife, but the loss of her own father to cancer nearly ten years ago has left her with a powerful sense that the memory of the dead can live on, as long as those remembering them want it to. Out here, she feels as if she can commune with everyone on that ship, including the poor passenger she had read about who survived a massive shipping disaster on the same route only a few months earlier and then found himself reliving the same experience. He was either incredibly unlucky to be shipwrecked twice in one year, or incredibly lucky to survive twice. Maybe it doesn’t have to be either/or: he was both at the same time. Chloe is coming to realise that life is like that.

  She shivers, and realises she has been away from the rest of her group for far too long. They are probably worrying about her. As she steps back inside through one of the big metal doorways, she has decided she owes it to the memory of those poor creatures to be a bit less secretive about her literary interest. Who knows? There may even be some like-minded souls somewhere who really would appreciate her party piece.

  When she gets home, she holds to her resolution and does some googling. Sure enough, there is a fan club – it describes itself in more sober terms, but that’s basically what it is – which every now and then meets up in locations relevant to the poet’s life. She even discovers that the next event, just a couple of months off, isn’t so far away. It’s a weekend occasion, so there’s no reason why she shouldn’t go. She wonders who she can ask to go with her, but she rules all her friends out as fast as she can think of them. ‘Dead poet’ and ‘lecture’ are less-than-thrilling prospects for most normal people. But she still wants to go, and there’s no earthly reason why she doesn’t drive over there on her own. She knows North Wales from family holidays when she was a kid, and the roads have got much better since then, so she could get there in an hour and a half on a good day. And she will still be obeying her resolution even if she does go alone, because she will no longer be solitary once she gets there.

  Sending off her cheque and keying the date into her calendar give her a tingle of excitement. It would not be most people’s idea of adventure, but it’s oddly satisfying to be following her own nose for a change, just to see where it will lead her.

  North Wales, the present

  It is four days since Tim sent his email to Barry Brook, and he is getting concerned that he hasn’t received a reply. The guy is usually pretty prompt, so it doesn’t feel right that he hasn’t come back now. If he were up for the idea, surely he would want to know more and reply immediately. That means he has cooled on it. Either that, or Tim’s message hasn’t got through. It has got lost in the ether or gone straight to junk, or Barry just hasn’t noticed it among the screeds of communications he must get. But the name Wreckileaks is eye-catching, and Barry ought to have been looking out for it. So that brings Tim back to thinking that the guy’s heart isn’t in it any more.

  In that case he will just have to win him round.

  As he thinks about that, his mind keeps returning to the phrase in the poem that he has highlighted for Barry: under a roof here. He thinks back to the unsmiling old gatekeeper who turned him away at the entrance. The bloke is probably only doing his job, but there’s nothing like being told you’re not allowed to see something to make you want to see it all the more. It’s tantalising. Of course it’s ridiculous for Tim to get reeled into his own inventions, but it is frustrating to have come close enough to see that roof but no further. And somehow it seems important now, as if getting inside will boost his chances of finding something to rekindle Barry Brook’s interest.

  This evening he has one customer, who has been nursing the same drink for the best part of an hour. Unusually, it’s not Alun Gwynne, but the gloriously named Hugh Pugh, a pensioner with bloodhound bags under his eyes and the kind of beard-and-no-moustache combination that has become fashionable among the young, but which makes Hugh Pugh look like a Confederate general. After a long absence, he has rallied from illness and managed to complete the short distance from his cottage to the Red Lion – Tim could genuinely throw a stone and hit Hugh’s front door – with the aid of a gleaming motability scooter, which is currently the only vehicle in the car park aside from Tim’s Suzuki.

  Tim tries to get Hugh to tell him everything he knows about the college. But unless the whole village is engaged in a conspiracy of silence (actually it’s a thought – he makes a mental note to try it on Barry Brook), what he knows is very little.

  “There must be some stories about that old place, eh?” Tim nods encouragingly.

  Hugh Pugh shrugs. “It’s a big house with a lot of Englishmen in it. Catholic Englishmen, from the look of them. They keep themselves to themselves, which suits me very well.”

  “But surely… I don’t know… someone from the village works there, or delivers the milk, or cleans the chimneys? You know, stuff like that – and they tell stories about it?”

  Hugh Pugh takes a long swig of his beer – perhaps he’ll even order another one – and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. His brow is furrowed with a frown of deep thought.

  “Well, yes, I suppose they do,” he says eventually. “Griff Wynne from over the hill delivers their milk, I imagine. But he delivers mine too. Has done for thirty years. And I don’t imagine he has many stories to tell about me. Or am I missing something?”

  Tim shakes his head and admits sadly that no, he probably isn’t.

  If this were a proper, thriving pub in a proper, thriving village, there would be some customer who knew the college well, with a sister who did the laundry or a nephew who mended the boiler, and who (crucially) would understand the concept of gossip. But if it were a proper, thriving pub in a proper, thriving village, Tim wouldn’t have to invent a crackbrained scheme to entice a writer of pulp thriller trash over from America just to keep his business going. As if to prove the point, Hugh Pugh downs the rest of his drink and lowers himself laboriously off his stool.

  “Time to call it a night, I think, landlord.”

  It’s all of eight-thirty.

  “Right you are, Hugh. Mind how you go.”

  When Alun Gwynne eventually shows up, he isn’t much help either.

  “The Roman Catholics have always kept themselves to themselves,” he says, “and everyone in the village is either chapel or English. No offence meant, landlord.”

  “None taken.”

  “So there’s not a lot of crossover, as you might call it. I can ask around for you if you like, but I’m not hopeful. Nobody is very interested in them, you see.”

  Tim did see, but it was maddening. How could people not be interested in a mysterious all-male society of outsiders who had been living among them, with their weird clothes and weirder haircuts, for a century and a half? At least he imagined they had weird clothes and weird haircuts. The truth was, he had never knowingly clapped eyes on one of these outsiders either. To Tim, that heightened the mystique; to Alun and Hugh, not so much, clearly.

  “There is one thing you could try though, landlord,” says Alun Gwynne, draining his pint glass and nudging it with subtle but definite intent across the bar.

  “Let me get this one for you, Alun. Half, is it?”

  “That’s very good of you, landlord. I think I’ll have a pint, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” smiled Tim through gritted teeth. “So what’s the other thing I should try?”

  “Well, have you thought of looking the place up on the internet? You can find all sorts on there, you know.”

  It’s true – amid all that research, he hasn’t actually googled the place. If he weren’t wasting his life trying to make chirpy conversation with two of the most depressing old men in North Wales, he might have had a chance to do so. But he can never remember the name of the college, so he doesn’t quite know what to search for. Lots of l’s, y’s and w’s and not
a single vowel, like pretty much everything else in the area; that’s all he knows. So he makes Alun Gwynne write it down, and when customer and mutt have eventually departed, he closes up, pours himself a generous double measure of good Scotch from a private stash of his uncle’s that he has found in the cellar, and boots up his laptop.

  Sure enough, the place has a website. It isn’t completely shut off from the outside world: you can go on retreats there. Tim is not entirely certain what a retreat is, but from the descriptions, it’s plain he would have to do a lot of Bible study, and not just the Book of Job. Tim isn’t sure he’s capable of masquerading as any kind of devout Christian, let alone a Catholic. There are also some pictures of the interior: the chapel, the library, a day room. It’s all pretty austere and institutional, although there is a surprisingly ornate garden with formal terraces and paths climbing the hillside and views out to the Irish Sea. The site offers some of the building’s history too, with a mention of their man. Nothing about hidden carvings, secret passages or mysterious underground chambers, but you can’t have everything.

  He checks his emails before shutting down. Joy of joys, there is actually a reply from Barry Brook.

  Hey man, it says, I have to say I’m intrigued. The story sounds a blast and I really appreciate that you brought it to me. Of course I have some questions, like, what’s in it for you? What are you looking for? I can maybe offer you a modest tip fee if it comes to something, but only if it does. And it would help if you could give me more about the place itself: some atmosphere about this valley of yours, and of course anything about the building where the guy was writing. Priests’ holes, secret inscriptions, geometric layouts – you know the score. I’m sure you know the place well, so give me what you’ve got as soon as you can. I’m listening.