by Graham Swift
But this is not before the Ellison Fellow has been subjected to a concerted campaign of persuasion, across the dinner table, to release his close-kept manuscripts, there being among the assembled guests at least two other members of the History Faculty, previously briefed, no doubt, and there to voice the wider view of the Faculty that, with all due respect, he might not be the best man for the job, etc., etc. To which he responds, let it be said, with unbudging tenacity. And not before, unobserved himself, he has observed, in the kitchen (this will give some idea of the fluid nature of Potter’s soirées and his delight in mixing old and young), Potter with his hand firmly on the left buttock of one of his guests, a research graduate called Gabriella (black eyes, black hair; flashing, Italian glances), who is definitely not, as it happens, the Ellison Fellow’s type.
And whereas Potter did not know that he was observed with his hand on Gabriella’s buttock (let us be plain, his hand was thrust beneath the waistband of her undeniably fetching, tight black evening trousers, so we are not talking about the seat of her pants), it is clear to the Ellison Fellow that Potter sees Katherine, his wife, put her hand on his, the Ellison Fellow’s, wrist and, what’s more, that Katherine knows it, and doesn’t take her hand away. Which makes the Ellison Fellow, who still likes to put into his thoughts the words, if not of Hamlet, then (more appropriately perhaps) of Polonius, think springes to catch woodcocks. But since she does not take her hand away, he is forced to look into her eyes. They are blue-grey eyes. His eyes are grey. Gabriella’s eyes are black. His dead wife’s were seaweed-brown. How strange that we each have these different eyes, like jewels set in our bodies, and that when we look into someone’s eyes we think we can see who they are. These are not the eyes of a natural temptress. They seem to be pleading for his co-operation and at the same time to be saying, “I know, I married the wrong man.” And he cannot tell if she is acting.
She walks towards me across the lawn; waves; I wave in return. She is wearing a sleeveless, mutedly floral summer frock of some thin fabric, which, if it were not for the dark yew hedge behind her, would allow the sunlight to show up, in hazy outline, her still slender-but-firm body—which, let me make this plain, I have never seen otherwise exposed.
Though the point came near.
She walks with a fluid stride, which would be truly gazelle-like if there were not a touch of sheepishness about it, a self-induced and long-practised hesitancy, an air of brave cheerfulness undermined by contrition. She carries this large straw bag, out of which there peeps the glossy cap of a thermos flask and a rumpled blue-and-white-check cloth; and I know, without seeing, that also in the bag, along with the decanted, chilled white wine in the thermos, are a few choice morsels purchased on her way: the rudiments of a little déjeuner sur l’herbe. Though there will be nothing scandalous, not now, in this picture.
The straw bag is strangely affecting. It reminds me of those ubiquitous, oddly rustic “shopping bags” that were once, in those far-off days before the advent of polythene, a standard accoutrement of every woman, including even my mother, but which now seem folksy and quaint. It somehow looks right in the hand of Katherine Potter, in whose simple, flaxen tresses, vulnerable shoulders and Arcadian attire you might detect the traces of a pastoral wistfulness: a former Sixties flower-child (fallen since on thorns), a one-time student of Eng. Lit., wallowing, Ophelia-like, in simpering, whimpering poetry.
Not my type. Not my type at all.
She waves. The nurse; the convalescent. The wounded paladin; the pitying lady. These titbits stolen from the lord’s table. I think she thinks she is restoring me to life. That that is her duty now. I think she thinks it was because of her—
A little fact I omitted to mention above: When she touched my wrist that evening at Potter’s, it was as though I had forgotten that I still had a wrist, as though I had forgotten that my wrist, with its little forest of dark, pliant hairs, still belonged to me. Later, alone, I looked at my wrist and said to myself, absurdly: This is my wrist.
And when I watch her walk across the lawn, she seems to me (but don’t trust the words of someone newly snatched from the grave) like life itself. Like life itself.
She crosses the lawn and halts in front of me. “Hello,” she says. “Hello,” I say. She puts down the basket. A light breeze wafts across the garden and just for a moment it wreathes her hair about her face and flutters her thin dress against her body with almost sentient, Botticellian tenderness. The bare shoulders are infallible. Their appeal goes to some helpless spot at the centre of the chest. She starts to unload the basket. There are real napkins, real wine glasses, nothing skimped. I take the notes I have only just placed on my tray—it reconverts, you see, to its proper use—and shuffle them into my briefcase.
“I haven’t come at a wrong moment?” she says. She always says this, or something like it—“I’m not disturbing you?” “Would you rather be by yourself?” And it’s then that she wears her most contrite looks.
“How’s it going?” she says.
“Fine,” I say.
I don’t know which would hurt her more. To tell her (but I think she knows this, I think she really does) that it wasn’t because of her, no, not exactly—and so deprive her of her stricken but gratifying role. Or to tell her that it was because of her, yes, as a matter of fact—and so turn that role into a lasting, remorseful truth.
I don’t know which is true myself.
How can one person take the place of another?
She pours wine from the thermos, and condensation mists the bowl of the glass. She hands me the glass, then she says, meaning it lightly but somehow sounding reproachful, “What was that you had to hide in your briefcase?” And it’s only at this moment that I know for certain that I’m going to go through with the decision I’ve made.
“I’ll tell you—in a while,” I say.
First, we eat, we drink. We are surrounded by warmth and flowers. Under the Indian bean tree, who loves to lie with me … In far-away Chicago Potter will be just waking up. I’m prepared to bet that he is alone in his bed. I’m prepared to bet that, for once, he will not avail himself of the customary opportunities of a conference abroad. He will be the chaste scholar. And he will think a lot of Katherine, and of me.
I drain my glass, then reach over to my briefcase and take out—no, not these scribbled pages, but a complete, freshly made copy of the Pearce manuscripts. What does it matter? Who am I to raise Matthew Pearce from the dead?
“For you,” I say. “For both of you. I want you to have it now.”
9
The thing was that he saw an ichthyosaurus. The thing was that he had come face-to-face with an ichthyosaur, on the cliffs of Dorset in the summer of 1844 (age: twenty-five).
I see him lurching, slipping, fleeing down that wet path towards the beach. Everything is chance. It might so easily have been otherwise. He might have gone to the aid of the young woman who even then, as he scrambled blindly by, sat on the damp ground, encircled by a little attentive group, nursing a twisted ankle. Only a minute before, under the flapping tarpaulin, he would have heard her sudden cry. And if he had gone with the others to assist, if he had not lingered alone for those few mesmerical moments, his whole life might have been different. He might have married the young woman. What an opportunity missed! There she was, pale, shaken, in need of rescue and obliged to show, for all the fussing of her chaperone, an unaccustomed amount of lower leg. He might have fallen in love with this pretty invalid and lived happily ever after. Instead of which, he chose to stare into the eye of a monster.
And it was meant to be a holiday. A week’s recreation which, given Matthew’s general cast of mind, would require an element of study—he would try his hand at this fossil business—but which might not exclude (Lyme Regis was well known not only for its fossils but for its summer crop of eligible daughters) a little amorous exploration.
The facts about Matthew Pearce as they stood in the year 1844. The facts infused with a good deal of theory,
not to say imagination. The Notebooks do not begin till 1854, though they begin with a backward reference to that summer day in 1844, which, scrupulous as Matthew’s memory was, might have been subject to a degree of narrative licence. The facts, mixed with a good deal of not necessarily false invention. Pace Potter, I am not in the business of strict historiography. It is a prodigious, a presumptuous task: to take the skeletal remains of a single life and attempt to breathe into them their former actuality. Yet I owe Matthew nothing less. As Ruth would have said, the script is only a beginning: there is the whole life. Let Matthew be my creation. He would have appreciated the commitment—not to say the irony. And if I conjure out of the Notebooks a complete yet hybrid being, part truth, part fiction, is that so false? I only concur, surely, with the mind of the man himself, who must have asked, many a time: So what is real and what is not? And who am I? Am I this, or am I that?
He was born in Launceston, Cornwall, in March 1819, son of John Pearce, clockmaker, and Susan Pearce. And he began the Notebooks thirty-five years later, on the day of the death of his third-born, Felix. So much for plain, hard fact.
But I prefer, to get the measure of him, to picture him early one morning, in his twenty-second year, in an inn-yard in Oxford, about to leave that city, a fully educated young man, to take his modest and unsung place (he has no fond ideas) in the world. His journey home—for in the first place the world would have meant his father—would have been by stage-coach, a matter of some two-and-a-half days on the road. Thus at this point in his life Matthew would have belonged to the Old World. But only just. Within another five years he would have been able to have made the journey, at least as far as Exeter, by train. Within another ten years Matthew himself would have helped, in his small way, to guide the Great Western Railway—then nudging along the Thames valley—as far as Plymouth.
But there is no reason to suppose that on this summer’s morning he feels himself to belong to a vanishing age. Or that he looks upon the coach and team that will transport him westwards with the sort of wistful feeling that one day, indeed, people will apply to steam engines.
I see him (I have no proof of this; I have no idea what he looked like at all) as one of those robustly sober-looking young men in whom youth puts in only a tenuous appearance. He has the solid build and steady movements of a precocious maturity. He is unostentatiously dressed, for an Oxford man, and as he stands in the bustle of the inn-yard at this unseemly hour of the morning, he shows no sign either of aloofness or of discomfort. There is even a hint that he feels at home amidst such workaday surroundings and that he is not entirely sorry to be leaving this cloistered and rarefied city.
The arm that swings his portmanteau is strong and sure. The eyes of women, more easily turned by any number of sprightly young bucks, might, having first passed over Matthew, return to him with a sense of revised judgement. The face cracks readily enough into a generous smile or to offer some casual pleasantry—he has an appealing way of hovering between thoughtfulness and affability. The gaze is open and frank and meets yours forthrightly. You would say it was an observant gaze.
The very last quality he emanates—he climbs up, naturally, to take his seat on top behind the coachman—is lack of balance. Stability, rather, an intuitive sense that all things must have their basis, might be called his tacit watchword. He will become a surveyor. That is an unambitious, even lowly profession for a man with an Oxford education. But Matthew is shrewd enough not to leap ahead of his talents—three years at Oxford have taught him that he is neither an idler nor a genius—and both Matthew and Matthew’s father (though perhaps Matthew’s father rather more) are shrewd enough to foresee that there will be much call in the years ahead for versatile surveyors, and that a surveyor with the asset of an Oxford education might go far, even given the limited spheres in which surveyors operate.
And look at it another way. It is true that in the coming years, great engineers and designers would win for themselves immortal fame—it would be Matthew’s lot to know at least one of them (and feel a touch of pity mixed with his admiration)—but no surveyors. Yet what, in essence, was the surveyor’s task? It was to establish the true ground of things; to provide a basis, a sure foundation on which the works of others might be raised. Was it not, literally, fundamental? It was as essential as it was unspectacular. It had nothing to do with risk and hazard; everything to do with stability and trust.
And trust, merging imperceptibly with the deeper stuff of faith, might have been the other, silent watchword of this dependable-looking young man. In his portmanteau is his mother’s Bible. Matthew would have referred to it often in private and been able to quote large parts of it by heart. And now, in 1840, after three years’ exposure to scholarly scepticism and the rigours of science, he would not have relinquished the belief that every word it contained was the literal and immutable truth. The world, too, must have its basis, and the nature of this basis had been indelibly intimated to him long ago on his mother’s knee. The central fact of life was there. It was a wondrous thing, this central fact, a wonderful clarifier, encourager and liberator. It meant that the profounder questions of existence were settled and one was free to go out on to the surface of the world and do good, practical work. And the surface of the world only brought you back to the central fact: nature’s handiwork, and man’s too, since it exploited the unchanging laws that were part of nature’s design, was evidence of God’s.
The coachman cracks his whip. They leave the city. The sun fills the green bowl of the world.
A further reason Matthew might have given for choosing a career unlikely to be meteoric or all-consuming was simply that it allowed time for other things. If Oxford had shown him he was no scholar, he recognised in himself a naturally inquisitive mind. He liked to be out and about, to get the touch and tang of things (he looked forward to this stage-coach journey which others would have regarded as a three-day purgatory), to look, take note, assess, compare—all admirable habits for a surveyor. In this sense, Oxford had constrained him (the truth was, perhaps, that he had shielded his mind from some of Oxford’s more unsettling influences). He thought of his interests as being ranging and extra-curricular: natural history, geology, the ever-absorbing study of his fellow men.
Geology, of course, bore directly on his chosen profession. But Matthew had not yet begun to sound (it would come, before that holiday in Lyme) those intimate links between geology and palaeontology which were not essential to a surveyor’s broad understanding of rock and soil, that mysterious paradox by which this study of dead stones offered the clue to Life itself.
Geology drew him, in the first place, precisely because it was the science of solidity, the very key to that thing on which all human endeavours began and must surely come to rest. Ask Matthew, aged twenty-one, what he most loved about the world, and he might well have said: land. He couldn’t have said where the passion came from—from the rolling prospects from his native Launceston—but it is there. Matthew loved land as a surveyor and a believer in God should. “And the little hills rejoice on every side …” His palm sometimes tingled—he wouldn’t have known how to explain it—to reach out and stroke the contours of a particular landscape, as one might stroke the flanks of a horse or the head of a child.
And he will have plenty of cause to feel such an itch, plenty of opportunity for geological reflection, as his coach carries him across the broad belly and down the crooked limb of England, over limestone and sandstone and peat and clay, through an old, old world.
Yes, he is glad to be free of this dreamy city with its fogs of ideas (I know the feeling). Out among real things. He has a handicap, a blemish, which he has endured and tried vainly to eradicate for three years: his accent. It is a Cornish accent, an east Cornish accent, but to most Oxford folk it is a yokel’s burr. From time to time it has miserably betrayed him by substituting a “bain’t” for an “isn’t.” But now, as he travels ever south-westwards, he relishes the release of allowing it progressively to return. He e
ven prankishly indulges it (let’s suppose) before some enforced travelling companion, some dapper fellow-baccalaureus (let’s imagine) going as far as Bath, for whom “land” only has a meaning when it is translated into “income.”
Matthew’s father married Matthew’s mother in 1817. It seems to have been a union which demanded compromises, since the former was of the Methodist persuasion, while the latter was of staunchly Anglican stock. But John Pearce, like many of his kind, perhaps, when improved prospects presented themselves, was prepared to remodel his faith so far as to exchange chapel for church. His marriage, in short—since Susan’s father, once certain conditions were met, was not ill-disposed—was the means of his setting himself up in trade.
From his father Matthew would have inherited the conscientiousness, the self-reliance and that same will to self-improvement which stemmed from his submerged Methodist heritage. But from his mother he would have inherited his simple, sanguine faith. Susan Pearce was perhaps not exceptionally God-fearing: she merely accepted absolutely the traditions in which she had been raised and took parenthood responsibly enough to become in Matthew’s earliest years his moral instructor. The instruction apparently consisted almost entirely of direct readings from the Bible, with her comments and interpretations, though she seems to have been not averse to the occasional digression and to telling tales, as Matthew would later describe them, “of the old days.”
None of this, perhaps, would have had such far-reaching effects on Matthew, were it not for the peculiar vividness of his mother’s personality and for the fact that she died suddenly when he was only eleven and she was thirty-two, so that her memory became a shrine for all his religious feeling. At an early age there was cruelly brought home to him religion’s intricate connection with mortality. The Bible would remain for him the sole consolation for his mother’s inexplicable departure, the only true reply to death. Though, for all his early training, he does not seem to have been able to sustain the same trauma from the opposite end: the death in 1854 of his son Felix, aged two. Rather, this heralded the collapse of Matthew’s spiritual certainty. However, by this time Matthew would have retained not only the undimmed memory of his mother but the memory of his encounter with an ichthyosaur.