The Hopkins Conundrum

by Simon Edge

“You go and talk to them, of course. Tell them it’s not on, despoiling someone’s good literary name for commercial advantage.”

  She really is a good person, there are no two ways about it. He doesn’t deserve her. If he gets through this, he will honestly – he will swear it on any and every conceivable deity – try to be worthy of her.

  “And if you won’t, tell me where they live and I’ll do it myself. Now come on, try and remember. Who does that book belong to?”

  “Truly, I don’t remember. I found it on a table. You’re right, I don’t have many customers. But come on, I can’t be expected to remember who was in and where they were sitting on some specific night six months ago, which is probably what it was. I know you’re angry, and so am I, of course I am. Very angry. But I don’t think this is going to help us.”

  She is still all for launching house-to-house enquiries. It takes him a while longer, after Alun Gwynne has made himself scarce and Tim has locked up, to persuade her to let it go, for tonight at least.

  She eventually goes upstairs, and he says he will follow her up. But instead he lingers at the bar, tippling his uncle’s special single malt and contemplating how close he has come to self-destruction.

  This is what comes of trying to have his cake and eat it.

  It is now vital to keep Barry Brook as far away from the place as he possibly can.

  London, 1876

  From his open third-floor window, Henry Coleridge watched the hansoms clattering down towards Berkeley Square and wondered what on earth he was going to do about Hopkins.

  He had known him, how long was it, seven years? No, it must be more like nine or ten, and he had always had a soft spot for the odd, earnest little chap. He felt a degree of responsibility for him, even. That was what made the present situation so awkward.

  He could still recall their first encounter, when they were both on retreat at Newman’s place. He himself had been the preacher, and on the afternoon of his arrival he had been walking in that shady red-brick cloister the old man had built to make everyone think they were in the Florence of the Cinquecento, rather than the Birmingham suburbs, when an elfin boy-man, with a wispy beard that was comically out of place on his fresh, pink face, hopped out in front of him. It was funny how that verb suggested itself. It was because of his name, of course, because it wasn’t as if the little fellow actually bounced around on one leg. But he did have an abrupt, nervy sort of gait that put Coleridge in mind of an early-morning blackbird, propelling itself about a dew-damp lawn and stretching worms out of the soil. He had a jerky movement of the head, that was part of it, cocked first this way and then that in deepest contemplation, without any thought of how the world might perceive him. That was what warmed you towards him, of course, his utter lack of guile. And it was bold of him to put himself forward like that, for all his shy demeanour.

  “Excuse me, is it Dr Coleridge? I’m Hopkins, on the teaching staff here, you know. I think I was at Balliol with your cousin Ernest. We were great friends, but I haven’t seen him for a while. Do you? See him, I mean. How is he?”

  Coleridge told him such tidings of young Ernest as he had, although they were only second cousins and there was a large age-gap, so these were fairly limited. They went on to exchange pleasantries about the finish of the building, the standard of the pupils and so forth, while Coleridge inwardly cringed at the thought of this delicate creature at the mercy of a class of unruly boys. In the evening they took a cup of coffee together, and on the second night they talked more. He remembered being taken aback by Hopkins’ stridency on the subject of country walks.

  “Imperceptiveness about nature is like wilful ignorance of God’s presence,” the little fellow had insisted, his eyes blazing up at Coleridge.

  He proceeded to rail on the subject, as if he were reliving unsettled arguments from the past. For someone of such hesitant physical manner, he was remarkably firm in his opinions.

  But it turned out that what he really wanted to talk about was his very recent conversion and the distress it had caused his family, who were blameless, if narrow-minded, Anglican folk. The father was in trade, marine insurance, if memory served, and Hopkins was not just the eldest but also the prodigy of the family, an Oxford man who was likely to be the only one of his several siblings to enter any university. So he was carrying the burden of great expectations, and he was now predictably accused of squandering his education and throwing away his prospects.

  “My mother blames me for springing it on her, and it’s true that I didn’t take her into my confidence earlier. But how could I? It would have upset her for nothing if I had ended up deciding against it, so I had to be certain of myself before saying anything. But now she’s saying I came over on a whim. I can understand why she thinks so, because I was so careful not to give them any inkling until I was sure it was the right thing. But of course it’s not true, not for a moment.”

  There was no question of second thoughts, but Hopkins was fretting about the further distress this lady would suffer from his next thunderbolt, namely that he planned to seek holy orders.

  “Coming on retreat this weekend was a way of testing myself, to see if I really have a vocation. Of course everything would be so much simpler if I hadn’t. But I’m afraid I really have, and it’s weighing very heavy on me.”

  Coleridge was not sure what advice to offer. His own conversion had been calmly received, but the middle classes took this sort of thing much harder.

  “Perhaps you could delay, to give them time to come round. If you have a vocation, you will still have it next year, or the year after.”

  “No, I will not delay.” Those eyes flashed again. “None of us knows how long we are put on this earth, and it would be disrespectful not to follow the calling, now that I know I have it. But it gives me no satisfaction to wound my people at home like this, honestly it doesn’t.”

  In the event, of course, there was even worse in store for the young man’s poor parents. Not only did their firstborn become a priest, he also joined the Society of Jesus, a step which must to them have seemed an act of the most wilful extremism. And some of the blame must attach to Coleridge himself, he later learned, because he was the first member of the Society that Hopkins ever met. He had put a human face on the order, apparently, and effectively put the idea into the little fellow’s head – even if Coleridge was not sure that “human” was the first epithet his nervous young assistant Barry would use of him.

  Everyone crossed everyone else’s path fairly regularly in the Society, and it was no exception with himself and Hopkins. The most recent occasion had been when he led a retreat at that damp Welsh outpost where the chap was now a theologian. He still looked absurdly young, but at times he had the air of an old man. His eyes bothered him, as did his feet, and he groused about these ailments no end. That he did not fit seamlessly into the community was apparent from various glances and smirks that Coleridge detected; but as a fellow convert, he himself had always prized difference and did not wholly share the Society’s disapproval of singular personalities. He would not call himself this strange, intense man’s friend; that would be going too far, and in any case friendship was not really permitted within their ranks. But he was happy to acknowledge a genuine affection.

  The object of this affection had never given the slightest hint, so far as Coleridge could recall, of literary ambition until a letter arrived out of the blue a few months ago, and even then he had gone into little detail. He had simply said he was working on a poem about the maritime tragedy at the mouth of the Thames the previous winter, and asked if he could send it to the magazine in due course. Coleridge had written back to say he would of course be delighted to take a look at the finished work. Had he perhaps even said he was looking forward to it? He hoped not, but he wouldn’t put it past himself; he had been known to give authors false optimism.

  On the desk behind him, on top of a detailed analysis o
f the Ritualism trials by an elderly priest in the Midlands and a flamboyant poem in neat iambic tetrameter from an Oxford undergraduate by the name of Wilde, the dot- and dash-spattered manuscript glared reprovingly up from the top of the pile nearest his blotter. Young Barry had devised a system of these piles, understood only by himself. He occasionally tried to explain it to Coleridge, who took as little notice as possible. All he knew was that Hopkins’ extraordinary… whatever it was… seemed to appear at the top of one or other of them roughly once a fortnight. It would be much easier if he could summon the courage to plant the wretched thing definitively on the pointed spike on the far corner of his desk, but he could never bring himself to go that far.

  He glowered at the street below, where a hansom driver had got a wheel stuck in a tram-rail and was engaged in a furious set-to with a tram driver. Coleridge had looked down from the same window when they first introduced these public trams. Back then they ran on wooden rails, which just sat on the surface of the road and caused havoc for everyone else. Only later had they been dug into place so that other vehicles could drive over them, and he well remembered the disruption that had caused, when for a while it seemed that every road in the city was being dug up. The row was getting louder now, as passengers on the top deck of the tram added their own encouragement to the hansom driver to get his carriage shifted. A gaggle of street-boys were adding to the chaos by trying to make the horses shy. Finally a policeman appeared, blowing a whistle, which dispersed the boys. It was remarkable how fast they vanished when they put their minds to it.

  He slid the sash down to shut out the noise of the disturbance. Not only was Hopkins’ submission at the top of the pile once more, but today there was also a letter from the chap himself, asking when it would appear in print. Not whether, mind, but when. The elderly editor sighed and picked up the manuscript. Perhaps it had mellowed in the weeks it had been sitting there. The handwriting was still ghastly, and the dots and dashes execrable. But he would do his best to ignore all that and focus on the text itself.

  The exclamation mark at the start of the second line was horribly ugly, and a dreadfully accurate harbinger of all that was to follow. The rhyme scheme was clear enough, but the rhythm was utterly senseless. Even if you indulged the riotously irregular line lengths, you still couldn’t get it to scan and, despite the absurd notation, he had no idea how any of it was meant to sound.

  The second stanza was just as bad. The first half was histrionic but comprehensible. Then the syntax seemed to get so frenzied, it lost all self-control, rendering itself both dizzying and nonsensical – an unforgivable combination. Coleridge was prepared to allow that the heart might be trodden hard down by the sweep and the hurl of God, if he had any idea what the hurl of God actually was, and that such a heart might swoon, but whose was the horror of height? The circling structure of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause was so bewildering, it made his head spin. He could see it was an achievement of sorts for the phrase horror of height actually to induce vertigo. But it was a demonic kind of trickery that had no place in decent literature.

  On he struggled. There were the sentences that didn’t end where the stanza did, but came to an abrupt halt halfway through the first line of the next one. This, he supposed, was modernity. If so, he didn’t like it any more than he liked the clattering of the trams outside. What was any rational person to make of four syllables in the first line and fifteen in the last? As the ghastly work wound on, there were rhymes so vulgar they belonged better in the music hall than in a piece of religious poetry. The word leeward (which he knew was pronounced in nautical parlance loo-ard) was matched with the run-over rhyme drew her/ Dead, and then with endured. Was that meant to be a joke? Any schoolboy producing doggerel like that could expect to be beaten for brazen irreverence. No wonder Hopkins had made such a hash of his own teaching posts.

  There was also the question of what the man was doing writing poetry of this length at all. The college rector would surely never sanction it. Hopkins was writing like a madman, and he was almost certainly breaking the rules of the Society. Oughtn’t Coleridge to alert someone?

  But that felt horribly disloyal. It would be snitching, a betrayal of literary confidence, and he would never do it to a friend. Feeling a headache coming on, he decided there was only one course of action for now. Gathering the sheaves of the perishing manuscript and tidying them into a neat pile, he shoved Hopkins’ poem at the bottom of Barry’s farthest and tallest stack, where he wouldn’t have to see it or think about it again for a very long while.

  North Wales, the present

  Tim seems to have averted the immediate crisis. In the initial uproar of Chloe’s discovery that some Judas has been planning on selling the poet’s name for thirty pieces of Barry Brook, he is in a frenzy of panic and self-recrimination. In the ensuing days, he tries in vain to think of ways of putting Brook off – unfortunately lines like it’s all been a terrible mistake or I’m sorry I made it all up won’t do any good when it was all so obviously made up in the first place – before concluding that his only real option is not to encourage the guy any further. But a couple of weeks on, there has been no further word from Brook, Chloe is not in quite so warlike a mood – she has stopped talking about interrogating everyone in the valley – and Tim is no longer convinced that he has destroyed the best relationship he has ever had through greed and stupidity. He has had a damn good try, but luck and – if he says so himself – a degree of nimble-wittedness seem to have carried him through.

  But as the panic abates, and he no longer fears so urgently for his new-found domestic security, Tim begins to reconsider his situation. In this calmer, more balanced light, he is no longer the author of his own near-destruction and is instead the victim of an over-scrupulous moral code.

  “It’s not fair,” he complains to Alun Gwynne one quiet weekday afternoon when Chloe is safely in Manchester, emphasising the word with all the satisfaction of someone lighting on le mot juste after a painstaking search. Now he sees it clearly, the unfairness is spectacular and Chloe’s literary piety is downright unreasonable, especially considering all the initiative that Tim has shown, and the effort he has expended, to get to this point. Hooking in Barry Brook is surely a massive achievement. Anyone else would see it as grounds for congratulation.

  “Women are difficult creatures, landlord. Always have been, always will be,” says Alun.

  Tempted as Tim has been to tell the old fool never to show his face in the Red Lion again, as punishment for revealing his Grail scheme to Chloe, he can’t afford to bar his best customer – particularly when Alun is also his best and only confidant. He also knows the stupid bastard may have done him a favour by allowing him to see the strength of Chloe’s reaction before he blurted out something himself.

  In that ghastly moment when it all came out, and he saw his relationship unravelling before him, he was completely prepared to abandon his Grail scheme if it meant not being dumped by Chloe. He was panicking at the prospect of losing her, and holding onto her was the only thing he cared about. Being rich and happy would be nice, but if he could not have both, domestic fulfilment was the option he instinctively preferred.

  Now, however, he is not so sure. Examining his situation more calmly, he doesn’t see why it’s so wrong to want to be both rich and happy. And if Chloe herself is the main impediment to the former, is there any guarantee she will help him achieve the latter? Angry as he has been at Alun, he can now see that the old boy knows a thing or two about the opposite sex.

  “What is it about me and women?” he says morosely, pulling another pint of special for each of them. He knows it’s not sensible for a publican to seek solace via his own beer taps, but for the moment he is past caring.

  Alun reaches down to hand Macca a biscuit.

  “Were you married in the past, landlord?”

  “Haven’t I mentioned Nadine?”

  He can’t believe he hasn�
�t. Then again, Alun Gwynne never mentioned his own wife, and Tim never used to get lubricated in his own bar.

  “Well, I wondered if there had been someone. But I didn’t like to pry.”

  “No secrets there.”

  “What was she like?”

  Tim shrugs.

  “She was warm, affectionate, she would donate money to anything, especially if it involved animals. The problem was she was also daft. Just not very bright, you know, in a harmless kind of way, but it got on your nerves after a few years. And she believed in all that Poussin stuff. Fell for it big-time. That’s where I got the whole idea. I thought I’d told you.”

  “So that’s why you parted? Literary differences?”

  “No!” Tim snorts mirthlessly. “Differences over something else. Marriage vows.”

  “So you…?”

  “Me? No, not me. I was faithful. Always had been. I took it seriously. She was the one who wasn’t.”

  “I see,” says Alun Gwynne, taking refuge in a sip of beer. He seems to realise these are dangerous memories. “Did you love her?”

  Tim is not used to this kind of talk with anyone, let alone with Alun Gwynne. The easiest thing would be to pull away now, start sluicing the floor and make it clear these cosy confidences are not going to happen. But he hears himself saying: “I did once. I’m sure I did. By the end, though? No.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you did. So in a sense…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, in a sense, she freed you from your own vows.”

  Tim opens his mouth to say something, then thinks better of it. It didn’t feel like being freed at the time.

  Alun Gwynne seems to anticipate him. “But it still made you angry?”

  “I nearly killed the guy. He was…”

  He wants to go on, but it’s hard, even after all this time.

  Alun is waiting, and Tim forces himself. “He was my best friend. His name was Pete. Best man at our wedding. So I lost both of them. You can see why it hurt.” He starts wiping down the bar so Alun can’t see his eyes glistening. But to his surprise he feels strangely unburdened just by getting it out in the open. For years he has not even been able to say Pete’s name, even in his head.