Cushing's Crusade

by Tim Jeal

  ‘I expect you’re right.’

  ‘You can have a shot with it yourself later on. I’ve got a duck.’

  Derek imagined carving up furniture with it, slicing through floors, walls and window frames. A present from my father. Goes through anything except fruit cake. He picked up the towel and started to dry his hair. When he’d finished he got up and poured two glasses of whisky. Gilbert took his and said, ‘Many happy returns of last Thursday.’

  When they had toasted Derek’s forgotten birthday, Gilbert said, ‘You seem a bit down. What sort of a day have you had?’

  ‘I’ve almost certainly lost my job; my son’s rejected me. Otherwise it’s been an average sort of day, wetter than some and not as wet as others.’ He saw the sympathy in his father’s face and ended simply, ‘About as bad as it could have been. Being ironic at your expense won’t make it much better. I’m sorry.’

  Gilbert looked at the floor. ‘I wish you’d told me straight away and hadn’t let me go on about that stupid knife.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t.’ He got up and poured himself another drink. ‘I was going to meet Giles at the museum, and while I waited with the fossils, the banal but comforting thought occurred to me that my job didn’t matter at all, that my work was utterly without importance, that most work is the same and that men are not remembered for the numerous ball-bearings they produce or even for the erudite articles they write. My graveside won’t be lined with weeping archivists and lecturers; there may be a friend or two, there may not, but one person will be there: my son, whom I love. So what sort of a father I am means a thousand times more than what sort of a scholar. And so I waited for Giles with optimism. I didn’t feel oppressed by the knowledge of my tiny life-span in the vast wastes of time. With love the lamp that lights us through the darkness of countless millennia, why should I be afraid? Fossils may come and go but love endures.’ Derek took a gulp of whisky. ‘That was roughly how I reasoned it out in the Fossil Rooms of the Natural History Museum. And then Giles came and said that his mother had arranged some show and he was sorry to have kept me waiting for nothing and off he went.’ Derek put down his glass on the table and smiled at Gilbert. ‘It was a bit worse than that really because, you see, I begged him not to go, and when I’d begged him, he went; went quickly too, leaving his glove in my hand. What could I tell the fossils after that? Love endures?’

  Gilbert rested a hand on Derek’s shoulder.

  ‘Giles can’t know what life’s like for you at the moment. All he knew was that if he didn’t go to the show with his mother she’d be cross for weeks. Since he lives with her and not with you, he made the easiest choice. You might have done the same.’

  ‘Whether I’ve been temporarily stood up or thoroughly rejected, I feel rejected and you can be as sensible as a sensible man can on a sensible day but it won’t make the blindest bit of difference.’

  *

  They didn’t use the electric knife to carve with, and although the duck was good they didn’t enjoy supper much, which was a pity because Gilbert had gone to a lot of trouble preparing it and had made old-fashioned syllabub for pudding.

  Later in the evening, when looking for a biro, Derek pulled Angela’s letter out of his pocket and with it a folded piece of paper with the telephone number of The Grafton Hotel, Ramsgate. He examined both for several minutes and then went out to the phone. Having booked a double room at The Grafton for the following Saturday, now only two days off, Derek sat down to write to Angela.

  Dear Angela,

  Perhaps instead of my coming to see you at your flat, you could come to the sea with me on Saturday (the day this letter reaches you)? The Grafton Hotel, Victoria Parade, Ramsgate is palatial in appearance and was, when Henry Stanley stayed there, eighty-six years ago, very well equipped. I’m afraid I rather childishly booked a room for us in Mr Stanley’s name. (By the way he went there to get rid of an attack of gastritis: inflammation of the walls of the stomach.) The trains to Ramsgate are frequent and if you could send a telegram (Mr Stanley) about which train you’ll be on, I’ll meet you at the station. This is an arbitrary invitation given at short notice, but time gives too much opportunity for thinking which I have done a lot of in the past to no good effect. I shall go in any case since I need a change of everything.

  Derek.

  After placing his letter in an envelope, Derek went to bed. His unhappiness had lifted a little. During the night he dreamed that he shot Professor Elkin while they were both on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition.

  Chapter 15

  Apart from knowledge of its position on Kent’s eastern extremity, Derek’s information about Ramsgate was based on three facts: Victoria, Princess Victoria at the time, had caught typhoid on a holiday there in 1835; Frith had painted his minutely detailed picture of the crowds on Ramsgate Sands some years later; and H. M. Stanley had stayed there on doctor’s orders in 1886.

  From these facts taken together, Derek concluded that Ramsgate had been a sought-after resort throughout the Victorian Age. Taken individually, the facts made others seem likely. Victoria’s illness was proof that local sanitation had been bad in the 1830s; but since the Prince Consort had been killed by the drains at Windsor Castle thirty years later, conditions at Ramsgate were unlikely to have been exceptionally bad at the time of the royal visit. The fact of the royal visit was evidence, drains notwithstanding, that Ramsgate had been popular for many years before that, probably since the turn of the century. This made the existence of Georgian and Regency houses likely. Frith’s picture, unless inaccurately named Ramsgate Sands, led Derek to discount a rocky or pebbly beach. Since Stanley was sent to Ramsgate to get rid of a gastric complaint, it was almost certain that the Ramsgate drains had been much improved during the fifty years since Victoria’s attack of typhoid. Sewage Disposal in Victorian Seaside Towns: A Deductive History by D. Cushing MA, PhD. With such thoughts Derek amused himself in the train.

  Other thoughts called for attention. There was the question of what to say to Angela and how to behave towards her. How had she interpreted his letter? A great many interpretations seemed possible. Deserted by his wife, half-witted with lust and tormented by night-starvation, Derek suggests instant intercourse but dresses it up as a pretentious seaside fantasy. Derek, a lonely and embittered man, wishes to remind the girl whom he blames for his marital rupture that she has wrecked his life; to drive home the pathos of his story, he dreams up the backcloth of an out-of-season resort. Made thoroughly irresponsible and whimsical by repeated traumas, Derek wants me to go to the sea for no better reason than the arrival of my letter while he is reading an item about a murder in Ramsgate. Derek wants me to help him re-create a touching love affair, which blossomed on a childhood holiday at Ramsgate. His wife gone, the archivist consoles himself with his work and burrows deeper and deeper into the past. Convinced at last that he is a well-known nineteenth-century explorer, he writes unstable letters to numerous women and begins a compulsive series of journeys to hotels and houses where the explorer stayed.

  Derek obviously likes me a lot and wants to start a permanent relationship in a memorable way. I have no idea what’s going on in his head, but unless he’s raving, it could be an amusing weekend. Derek is witty, courageous and sexy and I love him enormously. If he asked me to meet him in Botswana I would go at once. On the whole Derek believed that she would come. He had, after all, left her little opportunity for refusal. During the morning, before his departure, he had left the phone off the hook.

  *

  When he saw the harbour, Derek paid off the taxi driver and got out. Apparently he was now less than half a mile from the hotel. It was nearly four o’clock. Across the wide bay to the west of the town, he could see, rising from the isolated chimneys of a power station, smoke delicately tinted pink by the sinking sun. A slight mist was forming over the sea.

  He walked up from the twin quays of the harbour and soon found himself in a perfect Regency crescent. The paint was flaking but the porches and balcon
ies were almost all intact. He passed along several similar streets and decided that he liked Ramsgate. A little farther on he reached a long elevated esplanade and looked down sixty or seventy feet to a muddle of amusement arcades strung out along the beach. In the distance, above the roofs of the deserted fun land, a sign in dead neon letters caught his eye: Nero’s Casino.

  From a distance the gigantic silhouette of the Grafton looked strikingly like the picture on the writing paper. The tower was still standing, the spiky line of pinnacles and pointed roofs was still the same, so too the long first-floor conservatory. Yet almost from the moment he saw the place, Derek felt uneasy. There were lights in a number of windows, so it wasn’t deserted, but something was definitely wrong. Drawing closer, he saw that on the ground floor, where dining-rooms, ballrooms and bars should have been brightly lit, there was almost total darkness.

  When he reached the main doors, nicely polished doors with solid brass handles, he peered into a large panelled hall lit by a single dim bulb. He walked between white columns to the foot of the stairs and saw a large board: GRAFTON HOUSE, 156 Residential Service Flats, and below a list of names.

  Derek walked outside again. To the right of Grafton House, built onto the side of the tower, and set back several yards, was a modern building. Derek had no difficulty making out the illuminated sign over the wide plate-glass doors: THE GRAFTON HOTEL. He was still feeling irritated and disappointed when he started laughing. Standing by himself in the growing darkness, he went on laughing for several minutes. It had been outrageous to suppose that a place the size of Grafton House could have kept going in a small resort like Ramsgate. Derek had imagined being shown the old steam rooms and ozone baths, had seen himself eating thin slices of bread and butter in a forest of aspidistras and palms, had almost heard the large brass gong summoning the handful of guests to dinner. And all of it pure fantasy. The steam baths would be used as storage cellars, the piping and boilers would have been ripped out and sold long before the last war. There was no call for feeling maudlin about what had been inevitable from the moment the upper-middle class had taken to continental travel between the wars.

  A small nylon Christmas tree was shimmering on the receptionist’s desk. Muted music filled the room. The walls were strikingly papered with a red and black abstract design which contrasted with the plain grey carpet. The chairs and sofas were upholstered in navy blue. But although the red on the walls was still a strong red and the navy of the chairs true navy, the place looked tired already. Here and there the wallpaper was coming away, and the backs of the chairs looked a little too shiny.

  Behind the desk the girl was reading a book.

  ‘I booked a room. Name of Stanley.’

  The girl flicked over the pages of a large diary.

  ‘Number seven, Mr Stanley. Would you like to see it now?’

  The girl was worried that he had no case. He could see her looking over his shoulder to see whether he had parked a car outside.

  ‘I may go out for a bit first. I don’t need to see the room.’

  ‘Most people like to.’ She sounded suspicious. Possibly suicides were the only guests uninterested in their rooms. A full orchestra had started Moon River. Derek couldn’t see any of the speakers. The noise seemed to come from overhead.

  ‘Have there been any messages for me?’

  ‘I’ve just come on.’

  ‘Could you look?’

  She searched through some papers on a shelf under the desk and lifted up a telegram. Her eyes narrowed and she went red.

  ‘Yes?’ said Derek.

  ‘Sir Henry Stanley KCB?’

  ‘GCB.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s much the same sort of thing.’

  She handed him the telegram and he ripped it open.

  IF KNIGHTHOOD PREMATURE SORRY MR STANLEY STOP YOUR PHONE DEAD STOP IMPOSSIBLE COME GOOD REASON HONEST STOP WANTED TO BE WITH MR STANLEY AT THE SEA STOP

  The girl had watched him while he read the telegram and was looking at him expectantly. Derek folded the paper carefully and placed it in his pocket. He inclined his head a little and murmured, ‘I have to be elsewhere.’

  On the esplanade the words of a telegram which he wouldn’t send came to him: BECAUSE IT COULDN’T BE AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN—BETTER THAT IT NEVER WAS STOP

  Derek felt deep disappointment but would not dignify it with self-pity and unhappiness. Doubtless her reason for refusing was good: a dying mother, father, uncle, granny, dog, cat, or other domestic companion. A swollen ovary or foot. An infectious skin disease or long-awaited evening with a favourite Nobel prize winner. Perhaps a combination of such reasons. No cause for wounded pride; she’d wanted to come. No rejection after all; just inconvenience and bathos. The actor enters with rhetoric and flourish and the lights fuse. Under the scrutiny of television cameras the scalpel melts like heated plastic as the famous surgeon prepares to make his first incision. The concert pianist plays the opening notes with artistic gusto and finds his fingers firmly stuck to the keys. Those long familiar with such things do not laugh but look away and pass on by. Derek began to walk. Only a quarter to five and already it was dark.

  In a small garden in front of Grafton House Derek made out the outline of a statue. He went to examine it. A. W. N. Pugin 1812-1852. The famous architect’s hair was snow white with accumulated seagull’s droppings. His sightless eyes stared out through the thickening mist towards the French coast. Derek set out for the station.

  *

  Alone in his compartment Derek watched the lights of Ramsgate, Broadstairs and Margate grow indistinct. A bend in the track extinguished them. Derek imagined Professor Elkin on the night-train on his way to Inverness. He imagined Giles and Diana playing an intimate game of chess. If Angela had come, the following day would have brought back the old problems. But respite, however brief, was not negligible. And if here and now had lived vividly enough to shut out tomorrow, that would have meant more achieved than a weekend’s anaesthetic. A precedent for other isolated days when past regrets and future wishes could be thrown out of doors.

  It would have been so right if she had come; so easy and so right. A special time made by circumstances and not by effort. The mist, the residential service flats, the new hotel and white-haired Mr Pugin overlooking Nero’s Casino. Nor did such randomly engineered chances come often. Without that picture of the hotel there would have been no invitation. Possibly he would never again achieve such planned lack of planning. He had probably been as surprised by his invitation as she had. And yet an hour and a half after his arrival he was on his way home.

  There hadn’t been many special times for years now. Ten years ago they’d happened every now and then, fifteen and twenty quite frequently. One or two even happened with Charles, when they’d been friends and not long-standing acquaintances. They’d been twenty or twenty-one. Charles had borrowed a friend’s father’s cottage for a weekend. Two girls with them. A bright January morning in a Norfolk market town. Sex still as new and intriguing as Charles’s first car. The plastic washing-up basin at the cottage had perished, so they chose another. Derek had just bought a frozen chicken. He had started tossing it high in the air, catching it in the basin. A crash as the rock-hard bird smashed through the blue plastic like a stone through glass. The most perfectly funny thing that had ever happened, at the time.

  The train was crossing the bridge over the Medway; the lights of Rochester reflected in the black water. Derek took the telegram from his pocket and read it again. He paused over the last sentence. WANTED TO BE WITH MR STANLEY AT THE SEA. Derek had brought photostat copies of several letters written by Stanley during 1886, the year in which he had spent his brief stay at Ramsgate. He had intended showing them to Angela. Now as the train sped on, he pulled them from his overcoat pocket and read them by himself. Poor Stanley, back from the Congo and waiting in vain for Leopold of Belgium to offer new work. In 1887 he would find a different challenge but no help to him the year before in London or res
ting by the sea. He wanted marriage, but the man who’d founded the Congo Free State and traced that river from its upper reaches to the sea didn’t dare ask any woman in case he was refused. A workhouse childhood lived with him still, with all its humiliations. At seventeen he’d slept several nights with a girl in New Orleans. She’d been scruffy and had short hair. He’d thought she was a boy. When he’d seen her breasts he’d become confused. Weren’t they painful? he asked. They seemed to be swollen and inflamed by boils. His own chest was not like that.

  And at forty-five Stanley had got no further with women to judge from the letter Derek was reading. ‘I have found a young lady whom I can appreciate, but whether she can win me over & above Conventional Platonism is very doubtful. I don’t believe she exists who can do that.’ Another letter written three months before: ‘My timidity is unconquerable. To propose and be refused would be my death. Were I assisted by a good friend to push me forward at the back I might venture. I am rich enough to keep half-a-dozen economically—I am in perfect despair. There is one I know that I should be tempted to propose to, but my timidity will prevent it.’ At fifty, after the end of the Emin Pasha Expedition which brought Stanley more fame than his meeting with Livingstone, he at last found the courage to propose. He was surprised to be accepted.

  Derek stuffed the letters back into his pocket. They were passing through South London now. He shut his eyes and saw Stanley sitting despondently by himself eating his lunch in Grafton House. Afterwards an hour in the ozone bath and then a walk down the esplanade under a cold March sky before coming back for a solitary tea.

  In the tube on his way home to Abercorn Mansions, Derek realized that he no longer felt depressed. He would be jolly with his father and tell him the air had done him good. You didn’t stay long. Anything go wrong? Nothing at all. I drank in the essence of the place and left. Could any man have done more? Very likely his father would tell him the story about his aunt Nadine who had been driving in an open car on a road skirting the Sandwich Golf Club when a golf ball unexpectedly removed the tip of her nose. She held it in place and it was stitched on later. In cold weather a thin blue line showed where the skin had been broken. You went to Ramsgate? Really. Well, my aunt Nadine lost her nose in Sandwich just along the coast. As the tube came into Marble Arch, Derek surprised his fellow passengers with a sudden fit of laughter.