by Ned Beauman
The following year, Erskine discovered that a Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language would soon be meeting in Paris. He was determined that Pangaean should be considered, and so he embarked on the second edition of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon, addressing at least a few of the criticisms he’d heard from both its British enthusiasts and his devil’s advocate Thurlow. Half-convinced that Esperanto was a cosmopolitan conspiracy, he now decided that Pangaean ought to help purge its speakers’ moral sense as well as their rational sense. But he wasn’t so crude as to simply take words out, as some of his competitors did – that would only speed the language’s corruption by slang. Instead, he chained up the syncategoramata so that you could perfectly well still say things like ‘homosexual’ and ‘pacifist’ and ‘cuckold’, but a sort of great semantic inertia would push down on your tongue. And as Erskine thundered through his own creation, the Black Hundreds thundered through the Jewish districts of Bialystok. Most of them were drunk and so the Jews were able to mount a hasty self-defence, scattering the hooligans with chains and hammers and pistols, but both of Sinner’s aunts were raped, his grandfather lost an eye, and all their things were smashed. Sinner’s grandfather decided the city was even worse than the country and moved the family back to Fluek, where Sinner’s father would stay until he was twenty-two, saving money for a ticket to America.
In 1903 the Delegation met as planned to decide between Esperanto and Waldemar Rosenberger’s Idiom Neutral. (Pangaean and Orba were never really in the running.) The Delegation appointed a Committee. The Committee appointed a Commission. The Commission dissolved the Delegation and instead appointed a Union. The Union appointed a Committee and an Academy. The Academy appointed an Association. It was all done very logically, and yet so many in the international language movement did not recognise the authority of the Delegation, the Committee, the Commission, the Union, the other Committee, the Academy or the Association that they all gave up without a final report ever being issued, just as Moscow’s Committee on the Improvement of Jews had given up exactly a hundred years earlier after it could not decide whether rabbis, cantors, teachers, ritual slaughterers like Sinner’s great-great-grandfather, and other functionaries should fall into the category of useful Jews or useless Jews.
(So in fact no new language, not even Esperanto, triumphed. Yet long after Erasmus Erskine’s death in 1912, Pangaean maintained a small foothold in Europe. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that when the Jews had enslaved the world they would wish to establish a universal language, and later banned the teaching of both Pangaean and Esperanto throughout the Third Reich, even though arguments were advanced that they might help to purify German by preventing the assimilation of foreign words. After the invasion of Poland, the Gestapo chief in Warsaw received specific orders to imprison members of the Zamenhof family. Zamenhof’s son was shot and both his daughters died in the Treblinka concentration camp, although his daughter-in-law and grandson did escape. Meanwhile, Stalin believed that a world revolution should have a world language, and tried to learn both Pangaean and Esperanto. He failed, and decided to ban them from the Soviet Union, ordering the withdrawal of the postage stamps that had already been issued in Pangaean by over-eager subordinates. Neither Erasmus Erskine nor Philip Erskine would ever hear the true story about the Pangaean, the Esperantist and the Jew who walk into a jail cell in Vilnius in 1939. ‘Shalom,’ says the Jew. ‘Saluton,’ says the Esperantist. ‘Ilaksh,’ says the Pangaeaphone. None can understand each other; all starve.)
But by 1905, Erskine was worrying less about the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language than about some suspicions he had concerning his wife. She was behaving secretively and writing lots of letters. Twice now he had come back unexpectedly early from trips to London and heard doors opening and shutting that had no reason to be opening and shutting. And often, when Richard Thurlow was paying a visit, Erskine would come into a room and the other two would abruptly stop talking, then interrupt each other in their rush to cover it.
So one day, having announced a week in advance that he would be attending a meeting of the Westminster Pangaean Club, he went out and hid in the stables where he could watch the road up from Scranville. At about noon, Thurlow’s carriage arrived. Erskine waited another half-hour and then went into the house and tiptoed to the drawing room. Pressing his ear to the shut door, he could hear his wife and his friend, just as he’d suspected, making the most revolting animal noises. He flung open the door.
There they were, on the chaise-longue. They looked up, faces full of shock and shame. Between them, thrown open indecently, was a book of Orba grammar.
He turned and walked away, holding back tears. ‘I’m sorry, Erasmus,’ Thurlow shouted after him. ‘Lydia and I just find it such a great deal easier than, er. …’
Erskine went to his study, picked up his notes for the third edition of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon, went outside, threw them in the pond behind the house, and watched them sink down beneath the water to join the lost kingdom of Kumari Kandam, in the optimistic pursuit of which he spent the remaining seven years of his life.
11
APRIL 1936
Philip Erskine put down his pen and looked over what he’d written. He couldn’t send any of this to his father. He would have to start again tomorrow, perhaps go back to the United Universities Club and take a second look at the papers in their library. His boxer was snoring in the spare bedroom. He got up and went into his laboratory. Although he’d been busy with the biographical essay, he had still found half an hour a day to supervise the breeding of his beetles and he was making excellent progress. Their germ plasm was improving faster than he’d dared hope. For the first time in his life he realised the contentment a project like this could bring.
But as he bent down to examine the case containing one of the most promising strains, he saw that in one place the glass was badly cracked. Angry, he went into Sinner’s room and woke him up. They’d been living together now for nearly a month. The boy still slept all day like an old cat, but he seemed to be recovering from his illness. The pink was seeping back into his skin, and he wasn’t dragging his feet so much as he walked – once or twice Erskine had even noticed him bouncing on his toes as if he were back in training. Also, the undershirts that Sinner borrowed from Erskine no longer came back smelling so acrid, which was fortunate, since Erskine sometimes wore them himself for a day or two before passing them on to Mrs Minton to be washed.
‘Why did you do that to my equipment?’ demanded Erskine.
‘What?’
‘You have attacked one of my glass cases. Why?’
‘I ain’t been in there for ages.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘The damage is obvious. You’ve made threats on the subject before.’
‘Yeah, I have, so do you think I’ll be afraid to tell you when I smash up your fucking things? I ain’t touched them.’
‘We shall see.’ Erskine walked to the door and then turned back. ‘By the way, as I’m here: quite soon I must go down to my family home in Hampshire for two weeks. My father is holding an important conference.’ He waited, hoping that the boy might ask if he could go too. The boy did not, so he said, ‘Obviously I cannot leave you alone here for that long. If you wish, you may come with me to Claramore.’
‘Come with you?’
‘Yes. I can’t force you.’
‘Expect it’s a bit posh for me.’
‘You could come as my manservant.’
‘Manservant? Think I’m going to dress you every morning?’
‘Good God, do you really think I would want you to? No. Nothing of the sort. You would have no actual responsibilities in private. You would just have to play the part in public. And I think you could do a plausible enough job. Of course, you would be fed and watered as part of the bargain. And you would be witness to history. Albeit witness through the keyhole.’
�
�Supposed to be a treat for me, is it?’
‘I’m merely extending an opportunity. An opportunity you will never have again.’
‘Why do you want me there so much?’
‘It’s only that my observations are proving very fruitful. It would be a shame to halt them entirely.’
Sinner shrugged. ‘Oh, what the fuck does it matter, then? Long as there’s better grub than the old bag downstairs brings up.’
‘Very well. In that case you’ll need to be my chauffeur as well as my valet. I’ll arrange for some driving lessons. And some more new clothes.’
Erskine went out happy. He had been beginning to worry that the conference wouldn’t be much fun. Earlier that day, on the telephone to his sister, he had said, ‘By the way, has Father made a mix-up over the dates? In my diary it’s the same week as the Olympics. That can’t be right, can it?’
‘Oh dear, you’d better not mention the Olympics in his earshot.’
‘Why not?’
‘He didn’t realise, and then Mummy saw it in the newspaper and told him, and of course now he’s too stubborn to postpone. He says the Olympics are a waste of time.’
‘But all the important fascists are going off to Berlin for them.’
‘Yes, exactly, but luckily Daddy hates all the “important fascists” – and by the way it’s rather laughable the way you utter that phrase with such reverence. Although he’s heard Mosley isn’t going to the Olympics, so he might still come.’
‘But he hates Mosley in particular.’
‘Yes, but he’s having to invite everyone he can think of now, otherwise there will only be about three of us at the “conference”.’
‘I must say, I rather wish I was going to the Olympics too.’
‘Don’t be silly, Phippy, you hate sport.’
Erskine did hate sport, but he loved watching athletics, and also he desperately wanted to meet Hitler. ‘Not always, Evelyn.’
‘Oh, you’ll never guess who else might come.’
‘Who?’
‘The Bruiselands.’
‘Leonard Bruiseland?’ said Erskine. This was their father’s second cousin.
‘No, I mean the whole family.’
‘All of them?’
‘Not the wife, of course. But all the rest. It’s an utter disaster.’
It was, indeed, an utter disaster. But at least now Sinner’s presence would more than make up for his father’s inevitable bad mood and for the terrible Bruiselands. He went into the laboratory, and remembered that there was still the problem of the cracked glass. Could it have been Mrs Minton? But the door to the laboratory was always locked when she came up. As he stood there, puzzled, he became aware of a loud, repeated clicking. It was coming from the very same case. He bent down again, and could hardly believe what he saw. A beetle was smashing itself again and again against the glass, its movements jerky and unreal like the skip of a gramophone needle. Each time, the glass shuddered and the crack grew wider. And just then, as he watched, the beetle shot out of the case with an explosion of glass and soil and flew straight for the opposite table, on which there was a sack of live earthworms that Erskine had ordered from a fishing shop in Richmond. It punctured the bag with a meaty thud and then the bag began to shiver. Erskine screamed.
‘Roach! Roach! Come, for God’s sake!’
Sinner came in and stared at the bag.
‘Get it out!’
‘Get what out?’
‘The beetle. Get it out of there before it gets away. But don’t kill it.’
‘How am I supposed to do that?’
Erskine wasn’t sure. A better solution occurred to him. ‘Get the big box from my bedroom and shake out all my clothes on to the floor and then bring it in here.’ This was his tuck box, a heavy oak casket with a lock in which he had kept sweets and biscuits and money while he was at Winchester, where he had often fantasised about locking himself inside until term ended. It had once belonged to his grandfather.
Sinner, following Erskine’s frantic orders, put down the tuck box, took the lid off the broken glass case – ‘Oh, so I’m allowed to touch this bleeding thing now, am I?’ – picked it up, tipped the soil and the other beetles into the tuck box, picked up the sack of worms, stuffed it down on top of the soil, shut the tuck box, and sat down heavily on its lid.
‘What was that, then?’ said Sinner afterwards.
‘That was Anophthalmus hitleri,’ said Erskine, going to get the key to the box. He saw that a sliver of glass was still embedded in his palm. ‘The first of the species.’
Erskine knew he ought to perform some proper tests on the specimen, and tomorrow he would. But in his heart he already knew that he had succeeded. In so little time, he had done it. With the help of his theories, his experiments, and also, in some less tangible way, his nightly examinations of the boy, he had bred this beetle as mighty as a rat or a dog, this Seth Roach among insects, this creature of snuffed candles and iron railings and dried blood crushed up in the fist of science, and it still had the deconstructed swastika on its wings, prouder than ever. He had proven his genius. He imagined vast maternity wards named after him, babies doing calculus and callisthenics in their first weeks of life. He imagined himself dictating his autobiography to a diligent male secretary. He imagined his eighty grandchildren, free of even the faintest smut on their characters. He imagined himself inside the tuck box with the worms and the beetles. He hurried into the kitchen for a glass of water.
That evening, as a tepid April rain fell on London with all the sincerity of a hired sales gimmick for umbrellas, he cleared his desk of pamphlets on Pangaean and sat down to write a letter to Herr Hitler in which he would enclose a single preserved specimen of the beetle. Hitler, of all people, would understand Erskine’s work: this magnificent leader for whom hunched shoulders, spindly legs and slack mouth were all an irrelevance, a spelling mistake that could not obscure the meaning. In fact, thought Erskine, Hitler might have no personal use for his theories: when the Führer impregnated some ravishing blonde before breakfast he could probably push the zygote to apotheosis by sheer force of will. But he would still see the importance of lemniscate breeding to a rational future, and would surely smile at the tiny tribute that Erskine had paid by giving his name to this beautiful new species, uninterested in the inevitable quibbles from the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature about whether Anophthalmus hitleri was distinct enough from Anophthalmus himmleri to have its own official classification. So Erskine didn’t care that there was only a remote chance that such a busy statesman would find the time to sit down and read some Englishman’s obsequious letter, let alone reply. He would write anyway.
12
When I am in a stressful situation, I often like to ask myself: what would Batman do in my place? I find Batman so inspiring – his intelligence, his tenacity, his self-sacrifice – that it sometimes makes me slightly tearful. But the trouble is, it’s hard to imagine Batman in a Little Chef.
I don’t mean that flippantly: it’s a fundamental problem. Most of the places where I spend most of my life – NHS doctors’ waiting rooms, the local twenty-four-hour corner shop, Happy Fried Chicken, my ex-council flat, the tarmac playground down the road where I go when I want to sit down in the fresh air – seem to distill their peculiarly English ambience from that feeling you get when your mother wipes snot from your nose with her sleeve on the bus. In fact, both the shipwrecks of stained municipal concrete that dominate my neighbourhood and the shabby little concerns that grow like mould in their interstices might have been deliberately designed to exclude my vengeful hero.
On a practical level, people forget that Batman doesn’t just look cool next to art deco architecture, he is closely adapted to it. It’s a lot easier to scale a building covered in cornices, spires, arcades and geometric gargoyles than one whose sole bit of ornamentation is a supermarket shopping bag snagged on a weatherproof plastic anticlimb Prikla Strip. (Superman, by contrast, has his famous power of flig
ht, which has long since skipped the jurisdiction of Newton’s laws; consequently, he is serenely indifferent to niggling physical context. This is the second reason why he is closely harmonised with Corbusian architecture; the first, and more obvious, being his not-quite-human faith in human perfectibility. And that’s funny, in a way, because of course if there’s one man who really could build the Radiant City, it’s Lex Luthor.)
But that’s not really the point. The point is the total lack of glamour. These places aren’t even dirty in quite the right way. Batman would look ridiculous. He would get chewing gum stuck on his boots. That can’t happen. And meanwhile Grublock’s lustrous developments are for people whose main form of villainy is complicated campaigns of perfectly legal tax avoidance, so they’re no use either.
All in all, then, you will understand how happy I was when I escaped from the Welshman in my flat, doing exactly what Batman would have done, I think, if he were one of the world’s six or seven hundred trimethylaminuria sufferers rather than one of the world’s six or seven greatest martial artists; and you will understand how happy I was when I measured up to Batman for the second time in a row as I sat there in the Little Chef.