by Simon Edge
“Henrica!”
She looked back down at their upturned faces, and then more hands had her and she felt the icy wind of the storm as she found herself on deck, or what little of it remained. Everything below the funnel was completely submerged, and the section she was standing on rose out of the sea like a wooden rock. The wind whistled and the sea roared, and all around her people shouted and cried, urging each other to come here, where it was higher, or there, where there was something to be tied to. Above her head, she saw that some had climbed the rigging, passengers as well as sailors, where they were clinging on as best they could. Even as she watched, a young man lost his grip and fell with a scream. He narrowly missed the rail of the ship, plunging straight into the sea before the eyes of those who uselessly held their hands towards him. Henrica froze to the spot, transfixed by what she had seen, and impervious to those who were calling out to her to be sure she held onto something, to take heed of the next wave, to look out for…
And then it was upon her, hitting her so hard in the back that she knew as soon as the impact came that there could be no escaping. Her immediate thought was what a waste it had been to come so far, only to lose the battle by a simple oversight now. Her companions would think they had been right after all. She wondered what it was going to be like, to be pitched into the sea with no hope of getting out, to be turned and spun in the dark and the cold. Holy Father, receive me into your kingdom of glory. Her feet were off the deck. Then came the impact, a sharp crack on her head and shoulder – how could liquid be so hard? – and the ice-cold shock of it. Jesus receive my soul. It was hard to concentrate on praying when she was bursting for breath. And oh, the cold tore through her. But it was pointless to struggle, and she was nearly there…
North Wales, 1876
When at last the poem was done, winter was long over and the valley sang with buttercups, dandelions and cornflowers, which Hopkins now noticed as if for the first time.
His ode ran to two hundred and eight lines, across thirty-five stanzas, and he knew that he would not show it to the Rector. This was not the short explanation of the mystery of God’s works for the benefit of the ill-educated masses that his superior had requested. Even Hopkins could see that some considerable education would be required to cope with his ornate approach to language. He had gone against his brief, and it would only raise suspicions about his commitment to his calling and his vows of obedience if it was known that he had laboured at such length.
Neither did he intend to show the finished work to anyone else at the college. He had tried small sections on a couple of others – Bacon was one of them, Purbrick another – but their response had been as literal and rigid as Kerr’s. To be appreciated, it was clear it required a more literary audience.
Whether his mother and father fitted that description was a moot point, but he had sent them all the verse he had ever written and now he wrote out a copy of this one. His mother had, after all, been complicit in the venture, providing him with the newspaper cuttings in the aftermath of the shipwreck, and it was useful to be able to involve her in these aspects of his life. He had been harsh to his parents at the time of his conversion, he saw now: rushing it through before he even took his degree from Balliol, despite all their entreaties to delay. In his excitement to go over to Rome, and knowing how badly they would take it, he had even ducked telling them in person, breaking the news by post instead.
He still vividly remembered the letter he received by return.
“Oh Gerard, my darling boy. Are you indeed gone from me?” his mother had written.
He had read it dry-eyed at the time, but the phrase had gnawed at his conscience over the years, and he could not think of it now without guilt.
He hoped that sharing the poem with them might also continue to heal some of the wounds with his father. At the time of his conversion, with the memory of Papa’s more intolerant phrases ringing in his ears, he had not listened with any sympathy to the latter’s angry complaints about the harm to their position that the scandal would inflict. With the mellowing of the years, he could understand that damage more easily now, and he knew that his father had not exaggerated. He felt a measure of remorse, and if he were doing it again he would at least attempt it with more tact, even if the outcome itself would be no different. Nowadays he made a point of writing alternately to both parents, even though his natural inclination had always been to correspond only with his mother, and as he grew older there were more subjects where he found common ground with his father. Verse was not the least of these. Although it hurt his own varsity-man’s pride to admit it, his self-schooled father had far more poetry in print – three volumes, no less – than Hopkins himself had ever achieved. And while the Catholic content of his own writing was bound to jar against his father’s sensibilities, the subject of the present poem could not fail to be of interest. Like his father and grandfather before him, Papa knew everything there was to know about shipwrecks, by virtue of the family business. As the eldest, Hopkins ought to have followed in their footsteps, rather than exiling himself beyond the social pale. By taking a literary interest in this kind of matter, he might at last give his father grounds for a shred of pride.
The poem was so long that it was a labour just to write it out, made all the harder by a maddening nib that scratched and blotted, and it took him a week of snatched moments to get it finished. Then he fretted that Papa would get the stresses wrong when he read it aloud. Poetry like this was pointless unless it was spoken, but a reader who misunderstood the principles of ‘sprung rhythm’, as he had resolved to call his new metrics, might botch it completely.
He spent another ad lib hour devising a proper system of notation to aid the reader. This consisted of the normal acute accent, a circumflex, a rounded circumflex with a dot inside, a tilde, a rounded circumflex without a dot, a long arc over three or more syllables and a long upside-down arc. Each sign corresponded to a particular stress. He then set about marking up the text itself. It needed care, because there was a danger of an arc or a tilde blotting out a word to make it illegible. But he was pleased with the result when he had eventually finished. It was straightforward and foolproof, and he was confident that any reader would be grateful for the guidance it offered. He could even see this system catching on, like a phonetic alphabet or musical notation for metrics, with futures generations of schoolchildren perhaps using it to declaim in the classroom.
There was one final copy to be made. Vanity and self-promotion were of course to be avoided; but having laboured for four months, was it so unreasonable to entertain a hope of publication? Not in his own name, Heaven forbid, nor in any showy place for all the world to see. But the Society had its own monthly journal, a very decent one, in which Dr Newman himself had published verse. By a stroke of good fortune, Hopkins had known its editor as long as he had known anyone in the Society – longer, for he had met him before he even joined. He had written to him a few weeks earlier and been flattered to receive an immediate response saying that, while there could be no guarantee of publication, any contribution of his would of course be given very favourable consideration. That meant he could be confident that his work would be read, rather than languishing at the bottom of a publisher’s pile, as he knew happened all too often if you didn’t know anyone. It helped that, as well as being a Balliol man, Coleridge bore one of the most distinguished names in English poetry. He would read Hopkins’ ode with an educated eye, not with the blank incomprehension of a Purbrick or a Kerr. He would understand. And he would doubtless appreciate the notation.
That further copy took another week. When it was finally finished, Hopkins vowed to throw himself back into the life of the college, paying proper attention to sermons and essay-readings and being generally less distracted in his dealings with his fellow theologians.
But he also had some phrases about that kestrel circling in his head, so it might not do any harm to get them down on paper and start
some notes for a sonnet…
North Wales, the present
It is a pleasant autumn Saturday afternoon, and Tim is serving a party of cyclists who have stopped for a break at one of the wooden picnic tables he has set up in the car park. Their lightweight racing bikes are lined up alongside the outside wall, and the riders have taken off their spiked shoes, which are lying around in the grass. A couple of them are still wearing their helmets, which seems bizarre to Tim, and it’s probably an indication they won’t be staying for another after they have finished the round of bitter shandies he has just brought them. But their bright Lycra jerseys give the place a bit of life, and Tim is actually whistling as he carries his tray back inside, having ventured what he hopes are friendly wisecracks about saddle-sores.
The tables, like many new developments at the Red Lion, are Chloe’s idea.
Since that first visit she has come back every other weekend throughout the summer, taking to the life with the enthusiasm that emigrant townies are always meant to have for the countryside. It is an enthusiasm that has eluded Tim himself until now, but some of it is beginning to rub off. She has searched for the entrance to the prehistoric caves over the hill on morning walks; she stops at farm gates to buy new-laid duck eggs, home-cured ham or fresh-pulled lettuces, none of which Tim has ever noticed on his way to Morrisons; and in the evenings she is happy to help out behind the bar, or more accurately take it over. She says it takes her back to her barmaiding days as a student, although it must have been a woeful student bar if the Red Lion is anything like it. And she does have a brightening effect on the place, literally so, with her flaming pony tail bouncing about as she humours Alun Gwynne, stoops to make a fuss of the slumbering Macca, treats anyone else who happens to wander in as a long-lost friend and generally cheers the place up. Slowly but surely, her presence helps the business improve, and there are some Saturday nights when you need more than one hand to count the customers.
That doesn’t mean the place is anywhere near viable. Despite her initial reaction to his copy of The Poussin Conundrum – now stashed safely away – Tim hasn’t given up on his project to put the valley on the map for high-spending, treasure-hunting crazies. He just needs to find the right way to sell it to Chloe. If he can persuade her that their rural love nest would be even more idyllic if they were flush with cash from tourists on the Grail Trail, rather than on the verge of bankruptcy, and that he is doing their local man’s memory a favour by introducing him to the masses, he doesn’t see why he can’t continue with the plan.
He is particularly confident given his ongoing exchange of emails with Barry Brook – he has splashed out on a new laptop – about the nuns, the college and the treasure that never eyesight got. There’s a temporary stumble when Brook wants photographic evidence of the inscription that Tim says he found on the terrace steps, and Tim says he tried his best to get one but was thwarted by the security guards. This overstates the role of the woman in the tweed skirt and the gatekeeper at the lodge, and the inscription is of course a figment of his own imagination, but it’s certainly true that the place doesn’t welcome prying lenses.
However, this failure to present evidence seems to make Barry grouchy, and now he starts echoing Alun Gwynne.
If these nuns were carrying secret Vatican cargo, surely any treasure hunt should focus on the ship itself, not some backwater in Wales, he writes in an email.
At this, Tim loses patience. In his own reply he lets rip, advising Barry to remember that: (a) the treasure doesn’t actually exist; (b) the point is to give his readers something to get their sleuthing teeth into; (c) if those readers are going to follow a trail, it will be a lot more practical for them to do so on dry(ish) land than on a treacherous North Sea sandbank; (d) he (Tim) is only working for a “modest tip fee” which isn’t even definite; and (e) working out how it all fits together is Barry’s own job. In a final blast, he observes that if he were capable of turning all this into four hundred pages of the kind of drivel that stupid people think is profound, then he would be the gazillionaire pulp novelist, not Barry.
After pressing send he realises he has gone way over the top and he will probably never hear from the guy again. Another triumph for Notso Cleverley.
But the response comes straight back:
Dude, cool it. You’re right and I get it. I’m up for this, really I am, and I’ll be on it as soon as I’ve wrapped up my current project. Please, don’t give it to anyone else. I love the idea and I’m looking forward to working together on it. The tip fee doesn’t have to be quite so modest!
Tim opened that three or four days ago, and it has put him in such a good mood for the rest of the week that he has been rehearsing possible ways of broaching the subject with Chloe.
Unfortunately Alun Gwynne beats him to it.
“Oh yes, it’s a good scheme all right,” the old fool is saying as Tim comes in from serving the cyclists. “If you can get this fellow Barry Brook to talk the place up by turning our boy into a sort of poetic Poussin – yes I like the sound of that, don’t you? – then this valley could become a touristic goldmine.”
Of all the various ways of bringing the subject up, this is the worst possible option. That is confirmed by the look on Chloe’s face, which goes from bemusement to disbelief and then to outrage in the time it takes Tim to set his empty tray on the bar counter. He has a mental image of himself standing on top of a tower of chairs, clawing frantically at the air as Alun Gwynne kicks the bottom one away and the tower begins to topple.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she’s saying, oblivious to Tim’s presence. “Explain this to me properly. You’re saying the poem is about the Holy Grail?”
“No, it’s not actually about the Holy Grail – but if you could make people think it is…”
Tim has managed to scoot round the back of the bar behind her and is now making frantic cut-throat gestures at Alun Gwynne, who looks from one to the other nervously.
“I m-may have got it wrong,” he says.
“Yes you may,” glares Tim, but Chloe waves at him over her shoulder to shut him up.
“I don’t understand. What possible connection is there?”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know rightly. You’d have to ask… erm...”
He shoots another nervous glance at Tim, who is willing him to have a heart attack and die on the spot.
But Chloe still wants answers, and she is more persuasive than Tim – especially when she is flushed pink and her blue eyes are shining with anger.
“Well,” Alun stumbles, “as I understand, there’s an argument, so to speak… or a case to be made… that the ship in the poem may have been carrying something more important than passengers. That could have been why the poet made such a fuss of it. Only he couldn’t spell it out, because he didn’t want everyone to know, which is why the language is so tough to understand, do you see?”
Chloe still hasn’t looked at Tim. “And this nonsense is going to be in a new Barry Brook thriller?”
It sounds so ridiculous, maybe she’ll just laugh. That would be nice, to see her laugh and laugh, and then he and Alun will join in and maybe everything will be all right.
“Well, I can’t say for certain,” says Alun. “It’s not settled, I don’t think.”
“You just said that was the idea. To persuade him to write it so his readers will all believe it and then they’ll come and despoil the valley.”
So much for laughing. She now turns on Tim, eyes blazing.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
Oh well. They have had a good few months, and it was too much to expect to have it all. Not with his own anti-Midas capacity to turn all that is golden into lead.
“Because I, erm…”
“So you did know about it!”
Know about it?
“And you’re just prepared to stand by and let them get on with it?”
A pinprick of hope begins to glimmer. Let them get on with it. Whatever the doddering old idiot has said, he has somehow missed out the crucial part about it all being Tim’s idea. Emboldened, Tim can see a way out.
“No, if you’ll let me get a word in, I didn’t know about it. Where did you say you heard this?”
They both turn on Alun, and Tim makes more cut-throat signs behind Chloe’s back. Alun swallows.
“I didn’t. I mean, I don’t know. I just heard it on the … grapevine, as it were.”
“We can’t let it happen.”
Chloe is more passionate than Tim has ever seen her.
“There must be copyright, literary executors, something like that. Or the authorities in the college…”
“St Vowelless’s?”
“If you must call it that, yes. They’d help put a stop to it, wouldn’t they? But we also need to know which cynical bastard is responsible for the whole idea. Are you sure you don’t…. Wait!”
She has wheeled round and is pointing at Tim.
“You had a copy of that stupid Poussin book!”
So the reprieve was illusory and this is it, the moment when it all falls apart and he is revealed as an unprincipled, money-grabbing philistine without the slightest interest in literature or the natural heritage of the valley, and he loses the hottest, nicest, sanest girlfriend he can ever hope to find. Notso has surpassed himself.
But, by some miracle, that’s not what she’s saying.
“You remember? I found it on the bar and you said a customer had left it. Who was it? You haven’t exactly got many regulars and hardly anyone else ever comes in, so you must be able to remember. Come on, it’s important. Try to think.”
“Oh… y-e-e-e-e-s!” mugs Tim. “I do vaguely remember… But what would we do if we do know whose it is?”