by Graham Swift
I was under no illusions. Iridescence lingered on, at least in the eyes of beholders. But I was fully aware (what was true of my former self is even truer of the thing I am now) that I possess no intrinsic magnetism. What worldly adroitness I can muster, what chutzpah and charm, what spring in my step (I suffered in my younger days from flat feet), I owe to Ruth. I was not slow to detect, amidst all the actual or implicit interrogation, another, unspoken question (I was used to it): Could I really have been the husband of Ruth Vaughan? What—him?
But here the pathos factor came into play. I was not only the former husband of a well-known actress. I was the former husband of a well-known actress who had died in circumstances publicly reported and lamented and officially labelled (is there no other word?) “tragic.” I was no ordinary widower. A school of thought which held that I should be treated gently—and therefore girded around with a sort of halo of knowing looks and evasions—was largely overruled by the school of thought which held that now was the very time (five months after the event) when I should be encouraged to “talk”—an excuse for fêting me liberally (if you can fête the bereaved) and milking me for the “inside story” I was supposedly bursting to tell.
And in all this, all this being the centre of dubious attention, all I wanted was to be the opposite thing, to be the dowdy, forgotten moth again. Yes, Sam was right—devious revenge or not—I accept that he was right. Perhaps I could never have coped. How much longer could I have gone on, holed up in that Kensington flat, in those roomfuls of memories, a redundant theatrical manager (my sole client had died on me), besieged by the commiserations of stage and screen, by agents, lawyers, morbid hangers-on and prurient journalists. I needed shelter, I needed sanctuary.
The contemplative life.
My period of spurious celebrity here lasted some three months. It carried me through to my mother’s death, which did not have the effect of extending the prerogatives of grief. Rather, it was about that time—summer turning to autumn and a new academic year looming—that my special privileges fell away from me like some ineffective disguise, and I began to be scrutinized for my real credentials. It was then that the general view took hold that my academic qualifications, though not entirely absent, were way below the college standard, and that, Ellison Fellowship or no Ellison Fellowship, I was an impostor.
And it was then that the Pearce manuscripts, which my mother’s death released into my hands, came—in more than one sense—to my rescue. I should explain that the terms of the Ellison Fellowship are generously vague. The incumbent, with all the resources of the College and the University at his disposal, is at liberty to pursue whatever line of scholarly research he wishes. The question of the duties he owes in return is left largely a matter of unwritten agreement. I had already undertaken—primarily to give myself something to do, but also to show willing and spare the College embarrassment—some supervision of students. After a gap of fifteen years, I found myself once more speaking to these strange, young—even younger now—people. (They too blurted out their little condolences.) I flattered myself that my teaching was not ineffective, though how much this depended on my students’, like others’, suspending their usual rigorousness of appraisal, I don’t know. But now I was to understand that because of certain “feelings” in the Faculty (I will come to this) the continuation of my tutorial services was under review.
What was really under review was not my teaching but my whole contribution to scholarship. What exactly was the line of research for which College and Faculty were providing me with such superlative amenities? It looked very much to them—it looks the same to me too (Sam, you bastard!)—that my line of research, apart from a little desultory and random browsing, was doing nothing at all.
But then, with my mother’s death, there was Matthew Pearce. There were Matthew Pearce’s notebooks and his last letter to his wife, Elizabeth, which had survived miraculously Uncle Ratty’s depredations and my mother’s successive “clear-outs” and incinerations, not to mention Matthew’s consignment to the murky recesses (ah, but it seems I am heading that way too) of family failure and disgrace.
It is quite possible, entirely plausible, in fact, that she never knew she had them. There was more “junk” than you would credit, for a woman given to severing herself from the past, in those two old, rotting leather suitcases—one with its brass locks completely seized up. I took it upon myself to open them. Sam seemed unduly angered that I should have done so—I can understand this now—but he calmed down when the contents were made known. In fact, the occasion seemed to mark the end of the dazed, quarrelsome mood into which my mother’s death had thrown him. “I’m sorry I bit your head off, pal.” I didn’t show him the photograph of Uncle Jim. But I showed him the notebooks, which he quickly flipped through, then returned to me with a shrug. And I showed him the cutting of my mother’s singing début. “No, no, you keep it, kid. I’m sorry I yelled at you. You keep it all.” There was the old, avuncular look in his eye.
But my mother had certainly known about Matthew Pearce. And so had I—from an early age—if only because of the clock: the little mantel clock with a rosewood case that was made in 1845 by Matthew’s own father, as a present for his son and his bride, and which has served as a wedding gift over successive generations ever since. Ruth and I received it in 1959. Since our wedding was an impromptu, unannounced affair, we received it rather late in the day. Nonetheless, my mother felt it proper we should have it. It was one of few heirlooms she cherished and did her duty by. It used to tick and chime away, amongst relics—long since discarded—of the “India days” in our old home in Berkshire. I don’t know what my father made of it. Then it kept watch over Ruth and myself, first on our various mantelpieces in London, then in the cottage we bought in Sussex in 1975 and made increasing use of, Ruth’s schedule permitting, up until her death. Now it sits here—that is, on the sturdy mantelpiece of my august Fellow’s chambers—one of a little nucleus of objects I brought with me from the flat. I sold the cottage over a year ago. The cottage, of course, was where Ruth died.
It has a gentle, modest tick-tock. A crystalline, elfin chime. Inlaid in the rosewood, above the face, are little scrolls, rosettes and a pair of cupids. On the hinged brass plate at the back, which covers the winding mechanism, is engraved M. & E. 4th April 1845, and above this, the motto, Amor Vincit Omnia. All of which my mother interpreted for me long ago, before our Paris days.
“It’s Latin, darling. You’ll learn Latin at school. ‘Love conquers all.’ If only it were true.”
Then she told me the tale, such as she herself knew it, and with a tolerant sigh, of Matthew Pearce. A rare exception to her story-telling habits.
Now that I have the Notebooks, now that I know so much more about Matthew, the clock has taken on a new significance for me—not that it wasn’t always an object of special value. If its discreet face had eyes and a mouth, it could tell me so much more (than even my scholarly surmises) about Matthew—and Elizabeth. It is a simple deduction that Matthew himself must once have opened the little hinged plate and turned the key. But only now does that fact seem extraordinary, mysterious, teasing—like the fact that Matthew wrote the sloping, regular hand (expressing such irregular thoughts) that fill the Notebooks. That when I open their pages, I open, I touch, the pages that he once touched. I occupy, as it were, his phantom skin.
The little brass winding-key, with its trefoil handle, is, so far as I know, the original key. After we acquired the clock (I told Ruth its history), it somehow became Ruth’s self-appointed task to keep it wound. It was a point of some concern to her that she should not allow the clock to stop, at least—given her frequent trips away—while she was able to attend to it. I wind it now. Ever since that moment of panic, less than two days after her death, when I remembered that the clock had not been wound (but it had not stopped), it has been my resolution never to let the clock wind down. I cannot explain this. This was before Matthew entered my life. When I wind the clock, I hold the
key which Ruth once held, and holding the key that Ruth once held, I hold the key once held by Matthew.
The people go; the patterns remain. Something like that …
It is a moot point why this little clock which presided not only over Matthew’s marriage but over his scandalous divorce, and seems to have presided since over a good many marred marriages, including my mother’s to my father, should have become such a token of nuptial good will. Elizabeth might so readily have disposed of it. She might—who knows?—have picked it up and sent John Pearce’s loving handiwork smashing to pieces. Yet, when her second marriage had already fallen on hard times (this would have been after she received Matthew’s letter) she gave it to her daughter as a blessing on hers.
But I think I know why. There is surely no other explanation. She kept the clock, and passed it on, for the same reason that she kept the letter and the Notebooks. For the same reason that the clock has kept its perversely benign status (“One day, sweetie, when you get married …”). For the same reason that we keep, in spite of all, in spite of ourselves, certain things it proves impossible not to keep.
Matthew was a clockmaker’s son, from Launceston in Cornwall, who one day fell in love with the daughter of a vicar from a village in Devon and married her and had children, and it seemed they would all live happily ever after. Then one day Matthew told the vicar that he no longer believed in God. Result: scandal, divorce, Matthew’s unseemly exit from the village, never to show his face there again …
Thus, my mother’s version (“They took things seriously in those days, darling”), first told to me one day as she wound the clock, when I must have been seven or eight, and never significantly enlarged since.
The Notebooks; the letter to Elizabeth: my “line of research.” There is no stipulation in the terms of the Ellison Fellowship that prevents the appointee from switching subjects. Complication—resentment—number two. I had no wish—whatever the College planned—to give up my scheduled tutoring of first- and second-year students in the Elizabethans and Jacobeans (always my strong period). But I happened to have drop into my lap what is the dream of every scholar, if granted to few, not even to those proudly inured cases (this place abounds with them) who have toiled for decades, heroically but aridly in their chosen fields, without ever stumbling across the spring of something Original or New. I was the owner of hitherto undiscovered material, of fresh data, of (I am quoting Potter now, but what the hell?) “an historical document of enormous value—a testimony to the effects on a private life of ideas that shook the world” (he had slipped—anticipatorily, perhaps—into his media style).
It was therefore my duty—let alone my new-found, galvanizing purpose—to give full priority to this matter. To see that it was properly presented (a book: editorial preface; introduction; notes) to the world of learning, if not to the public at large. My only mistake was to have spoken when I did to our resident whiz kid (history of Victorian ideas a speciality); to have shown him (goddammit!) the manuscripts. To have become, once more, persona grata at the Potter dinner table—an enviable privilege, I gather—but no longer for my cachet (though Katherine Potter is another matter) as a refugee from show-business and grief.
Potter’s argument was, of course, that by the same token that I had a duty, in respect of the manuscripts, to the community of learning, so I had a duty to entrust my material to a specialist best equipped to serve that purpose: i.e., an historian, i.e., Potter, him.
You see, we old, doddering savants, we harmless, cloistered fools, are real cutthroats, when it comes to it. There is no fury and spite, no venomous chicanery, like that of the thwarted scholar. We are bandits, pirates, pillagers, when it comes to that all-important stuff: recognition. I can see now why men have duelled over questions of attribution, why they have come to blows in laboratories, why they have fought over who shall be first to name some particular species of plant or spider—why they have journeyed to the ends of the earth just to find some hitherto unknown species on which to bestow their names. No one owns knowledge (Potter’s own argument): what does it matter if the unimagined Amazonian beetle is named after Miller or Müller or Martini?
So why should I be so possessive? Why not yield to Potter, to the community of learning, the pool of knowledge, or whatever? Why should I hug Matthew Pearce to me and not want to let him go? What is he to me? And why should it be my task to set him before the world?
And I have not even begun to write the “book”—the “edition”—which is my purported justification for being here. Perhaps now, in my changed state, I never shall. I don’t know at what point the “book,” the scrupulously scholarly exercise, ceased to matter, if it ever mattered. You see, it is the personal thing that matters. The personal thing. It is knowing who Matthew Pearce was. And why he should matter so much to me. And why things mattered so much to him, when (what difference did it make? What difference does it make?) he might have gone on living happily ever after.
5
Plymouth, 12th April 1869
My Dearest Elizabeth,
I beg you to forgive this liberty in writing and in reawakening the pain of some nine years ago. Yet I take the further liberty of presuming that perhaps in those nine years I have not been wholly absent from your thoughts (as you, indeed, have lodged permanently in mine) and that you may agree with me, at least on our little private scale of things, that the past is not easily to be dismissed.
Such a dismissal is what I must now seem to be attempting, since I find myself here in Plymouth with a trunk containing the residue of my possessions, which I will shortly accompany to the New World. New Life also, I would say, but I do not know whether the one thing confers the other—nor, if it does, whether I am fit subject for the metamorphosis.
In deference to Old Life—our old life—I send you, since they have no place, I think, in the trunk, the notebooks that I began to keep after our poor Felix died, and kept, intermittently, until the dissolution of our marriage. What you will do with them—read them, ignore them, keep or destroy them—will not be for me to know. But I could not offer you this my last farewell (for that is what it is, my dear Liz) without offering you also the testimony of the man you once knew and (this is no presumption) loved. Perhaps it may reconcile you to the pain I caused you, perhaps only revive that pain. For you may charge me with the fact that had I confided to you, at an earlier stage, the things I confided only to these notebooks, then matters might never have reached their fatal pitch between us, and I might never have become, even before they did so, increasingly a stranger to you.
Yet I am not the first, I imagine, to have had a conscience about having a conscience, and to have struggled to keep doubts under guard while maintaining a sanguine face to the world, like a sick person wishing not to infect others.
What good, you will say, was my well-intentioned deception, if it served only to tear me, and us, apart? But at least I return to you now that part of me of which you had every right to be jealous—though never once, my long-suffering Liz, did you upbraid me with my private and late-night assignations at my desk.
I have added, excised, changed nothing. As to the temerity of my affronting you with what I might have spared you, I can only hope that as we grow older, we grow more forgiving, and plead that I still believe what I came to believe then—was this not the root of the matter?—that though ignorance may be bliss, happiness is not to be purchased by a refusal of knowledge. Where there is evidence, so we must look, so we must examine.
Keep them, burn them—they are evidence of me.
I sail in the Juno on tomorrow’s evening tide. Plymouth Sound will be my last picture of England. I mean to take the train to Saltash and take one final look at the Bridge: that for particular memories, and my small part in its construction.
Do not ask what I shall do in the New World. In a new world there should be work enough for surveyors (if I still have credit as a surveyor). And I am not alone, it seems, in being drawn thither. The streets of Plymouth, as a
lso, they say, of Falmouth and Fowey, are full of miners awaiting passages, some with their wives and children still about them, all putting a brave face on their exodus.
Times have changed. I do not mean to wound you. I have heard that Wheal Talbot is all but finished and no capital is left to explore for tin. You will think I write only out of vengefulness. True, I am human; I can summon few tender thoughts for the man who has taken my place with you. Yet I pray (ah, you will say, me—pray?) that fate—let me use that word—will not be unkind to you in these harsh times.
The same prayer for our little ones, though I know they are little ones no longer. They are grown up and old enough to have families of their own—is it so? I had hoped that they—but enough of that. Bid them farewell from me. May they be a comfort to you. I miss my Lucy.
The same prayer, if they will accept it, for the Rector and his dear Emily. They age well, I trust. Your father owes to me not a few of his white hairs. But white hairs become a clergyman, and he is a good shepherd, who is rid now of the black sheep of his flock. Salute my old adversary!
I should tell you—but perhaps you know—that my own father breathed his last in Launceston some four months ago. Since then only the necessity of putting his affairs in order has kept me from my present purpose. I was at his side at the end, as I have been these last years. We had become friends once more, after the cooling of our relations. In truth, I always loved my mother more than I loved him, and he had always known it, though only in his last days could we freely acknowledge this to each other, as he could acknowledge what his whole life, for all its lapses, has manifested: his undying faithfulness to her memory. There is no justice or logic in our favouring, in certain circumstances, the dead over the living (who surely have greater claim to our benevolence) and crediting the flame of remembrance more than the warmth of life. But perhaps in these last years I have done something to restore the balance.