by Stephen Fry
“I’m sorry, Michael. You’re the host and whatever you say goes, but I think Edward Pissing Wallace has it coming to him.”
“Hear, hear,” said Rebecca on my left.
Oliver pointed a spoon at me. “You still don’t believe in Davey’s power, do you, Ted?”
I looked across at Anne and shrugged my shoulders. “If you must have it, then I’ll tell you. No, I don’t believe in Davey’s powers.”
“You see! He just can’t take it.” Oliver’s voice was rising in pitch. “He is granted this one chance, as we all have been here, a chance which most people would never be permitted in a thousand lifetimes, he’s granted this one chance to pull himself up by his boot-straps, this one chance to lever himself out of the swamp he’s been stuck in for all these years, this one chance to raise his eyes upwards and see the beauty of things, and what’s his reaction? ‘I’m not fucking happy. I’m miserable as bloody sin.’ Of course he’s not happy. What we’ve experienced this last week is nothing less than a divine revelation. A divine fucking revelation and we can all see it, all of us can see it and celebrate it. We’ve got at least that little inch of humility that allows us to shout and weep with unreserved joy. All of us but bloody-minded, pig-headed, stone-blind, stone-deaf, Doubting Ted.”
There were tears in his eyes. I looked down at my plate in embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” Oliver said. “I’m sorry, Ted. But the fact is, I love you, you stupid turd. You’re a friend that I love. We all love you. But you’re such a . . . such a . . .”
“It’s all right, Oliver,” said Rebecca, “we all know what he is. It’s just this, darling,” she said, turning to me, “why won’t you accept what you can see? Why would it hurt you so much just to face the truth?”
“What truth?” I asked.
“The truth,” said Oliver, “that there is such a thing as the Operation of Grace.”
“The truth,” said Rebecca, “that there really is something out there.”
“I’m not interested in what’s out there,” I said. “I’m interested in what’s in here.” I thumped my chest.
“Christ! ” Oliver banged down his fork. “Why do you have to say things like that? This isn’t a fucking sixth-form debate. There are no prizes for smart-arsed remarks here.”
“I must say,” said Max, “it’s a bit odd that a poet of all people should be the only one unconvinced by all this. What’s happened to your sense of mystery, your imagination?”
“No,” I said, “it’s not odd at all. If I was interested in mysteries and the imagination, I would have become a physicist. I’m a poet because I’m very mundane. I’m only good with what I can taste and see and hear and smell and touch.”
“Oh here we fucking go again, Pamela Fucking Paradox . . .”
“It’s not a paradox at all, Oliver.”
“So is that why you came here, then? Just to pour cold water all over us? Just to sneer up your snotty sleeve? If you can’t take it seriously, why try and ruin our happiness?”
“Of course I take it seriously. I take it very seriously indeed. Jane is my goddaughter and Davey is my godson. Whether you believe it or not I am very serious about that. Very serious indeed.”
“Well then, why . . .” Rebecca began, but was interrupted by Anne.
“I’m pressing the bell for Podmore,” she said. “I would rather we didn’t say anything while he is in the room.”
We sat in stiff and strained silence while Podmore cleared away the plates and served up the main course. I drank down two big glasses of wine. I was hot and uncomfortable. Oliver, opposite me, alternately glared and shook his head in sympathy. I had been touched when he had said he loved me.
Michael was revolving the stem of his wineglass and frowning. He threw little puzzled glances at me from time to time. Simon was scarlet and deeply uncomfortable. Max, Mary, Rebecca and Patricia had formed a strong bond and twittered loudly about the weather and politics. Every silly assertion seemed deliberately aimed in my direction, as if daring me to challenge their united front. It was like being sent to Coventry at school.
At last Podmore departed.
“Seconds away,” said Oliver. “Round Two.”
“Tedward,” Michael said, sawing at a roast potato. “I don’t understand. You are denying everything? Everything that I told you?”
“It’s not a question of denying, Michael. I don’t deny anything you said about your father, I don’t deny anything you . . .”
“Woah, woah!” said Oliver. “Just a Molly Moment. Michael’s father?”
I looked towards Michael, who shrugged and nodded his assent. I told the story of Albert Bienenstock and his horses and Benko, his batman. Not news to Rebecca or Anne, obviously, but everyone else, even Simon, was amazed.
“Well, you see!” said Patricia, nudging me. “It’s inherited. Skipping a generation. The whole thing’s inherited.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” I said. “I’m sure of it, in fact.”
“Well, what do you doubt, for God’s sake?” demanded Oliver, thoroughly exasperated.
“Look,” I said, “you might as well all know the reason I came here. I was asked.”
“Asked?”
“By Jane. I bumped into her in London a couple of weeks ago. She told me . . . well, she didn’t tell me very much in fact. She told me that her leukaemia had gone and that there had been some kind of miracle at Swafford last month while she had been staying here. That’s all she told me. She wanted me to find out the rest for myself.”
“Which you have.”
“Which I have.”
“So what’s the problem?” asked Michael.
“There’s no problem,” I said. “No problem at all.”
“But Davey?” said Oliver. “What do you think about Davey?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes!” Oliver screeched.
“Steady on, Oliver,” said Michael.
I could well appreciate the note of hysteria in Oliver’s voice. I tried to sound as neutral and dispassionate as possible. I really had no idea how anyone would react to what I had to say.
“I think that Davey . . .”
The door opened.
“What is it, Podmore?” Annie asked in a tone of voice that, for her, was distinctly sharp.
“I beg your pardon, Lady Anne. There is a telephone call for Lord Logan in his study.”
The annoyance around the table was colossal. I was relieved. The diversion gave me a few minutes to collect my thoughts and arrange what I had to say in some kind of coherent order. If I’d had a piece of paper and a pencil I would probably have jotted down headings. Anal old Ted.
Michael stood up. “Damn,” he said. “I’m sorry. If it has come through on my study line it must be America and it must be urgent. I shall be as quick as I can. Please hang on for me, Ted. I want to hear everything that you’ve got to say.”
We passed a fraught three minutes in silence. I drank another glass of wine, to looks of recrimination from everyone.
Michael returned and closed the door behind him.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said, resuming his seat. “Ted, go on, please.”
“What was I saying?”
“Oh, Lord save us, he’s drunk now,” said Oliver. “You were going, Teddy bear, to give us the benefit of your expert opinion of Davey.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Well, I think the key is this. David is a sensitive boy and a proud boy.”
Max laughed and the others joined in. Oliver snorted his contempt.
“That’s it, is it? ‘David is a sensitive boy and a proud boy.’ End of analysis. I think you’ve said enough, dear. If anybody is proud and sensitive, it’s Edward Wallace. Too proud and sensitive to believe what conflicts with his lumpish theories or t
o admit it when even he can see that he’s wrong.”
“Leave it, Oliver!” said Michael in a tone fierce enough to make everyone jump. “I want to hear what Ted has to say. Now more than ever I have to hear it. You’ll find out why. For the time being, just be quiet.”
I stared at him in some puzzlement. He looked back at me with an expression of great intensity and—I believe I recognised it even then—of great fear. With the benefit of hindsight, it must certainly have been fear. At the time I couldn’t understand the look at all.
“Well,” I said, slowly, “as I say, David is proud and sensitive. He loves poetry and he loves what he thinks of as Nature with a capital ‘N.’ He is not quite as intelligent as he would like to be, but then which of us is? He is not unintelligent, you understand, he is intelligent enough to glimpse valuable and serious ideas and to be maddened that they are beyond his reach. Because so much that he prizes is out of his intellectual grasp he imagines he can leap at the truth of things by intuition or with the help of some deeper agency, some spirit of nature. He cannot believe that God could have granted him the sensitivity to respond to beauty and ideas without also giving him the mental equipment or artistic talent to participate actively in them. I don’t think any of this is uncommon with a fifteen-year-old. It would be bizarre and horribly inappropriate if David was in fact as intelligent and precocious as he wanted to be. The intellect grows, like any other part of the mind or body. Davey is different from most children, however, because he is so extraordinarily sensitive. Some sensitive children just suffer in silence. But David is extraordinarily proud as well as extraordinarily sensitive. He hates his inadequacy. He cannot bear it. It has driven him to a miserable and dangerous hysteria. Some proud and sensitive children in similar situations fantasise that their parents are millionaires. Davey’s father already is, so that would hardly be feasible. Some fantasise that they are foundlings, or aliens, or special agents, or capable of unsupported flight, or invisible, or possessed of supernatural powers. And that is what David has chosen. Supernatural powers. It wouldn’t usually matter, because under normal circumstances everyone around such a child would tease or straight-talk its delusions away. But you have all fed them, which is absurd and irresponsible and, I believe, immensely dangerous. Davey’s hysteria has grown and grown and overtaken the entire household.”
I took a giant swig from my glass of claret.
It was Oliver, naturally, who broke the silence. He stared at me with disbelief. “How can you sit there and say all that? We know what we have seen.”
“No you don’t,” I said. “You haven’t the faintest idea what you’ve seen. Believe me when I say this. David is possessed of no extraordinary powers whatsoever. There is nothing miraculous he has done or can do. He is a very, very, very ordinary child with a more than ordinary helping of, as I said, pride and sensitivity . . .”
There was a noise outside the door and we all straightened into silence again.
The door did not move.
“Come in!” shouted Michael.
Still no response. With a click of irritation, Michael strode to the door and opened it. The corridor was empty. Michael looked down it to right and left.
“Oh dear,” said Anne, “do you think Podmore has been listening?”
“Probably just the wind,” said Michael, closing the door and returning to the table. “There’s another storm on the way.”
It was true that the wind had begun to howl around the windows and down the flues.
“Carry on, Ted,” said Oliver, with a savage growl. “I think you were saying that we are all very irresponsible and absurd and that Davey is a very, very, very ordinary child.”
“A very ordinary child who needs a great deal of kindness and understanding if he is not to slide into hysterical chaos,” I said.
“But you’re a mass of contradictions,” said Max. “You’ve just admitted that Michael’s father’s powers could have been inherited and now you say that there aren’t any powers.”
“I have said no such thing.”
“He is drunk,” said Patricia. “If anyone needs kindness and understanding, it’s you, Ted.”
“I need my share, certainly,” I said.
“We can all play armchair psychiatrists, can’t we, Ted?” said Rebecca. “We could, for instance, examine the mind of the ageing poet.”
“Quite,” said Oliver, “the man who believes that spirituality is his province and his alone. The man who thinks that a glimpse of art and the infinite is only granted to hairy-arsed curmudgeons who drink hard liquor and understand Ezra Pound. The man who struggles so hard for his own poetry that he has developed a theory that denies the possibility of inspiration in others. ‘If I have to flounder in the mud sweating and straining, then it must be true that everyone else on earth has to as well.’ That’s your grand ‘philosophy,’ isn’t it? The sight of an innocent child given grace as a divine free gift just chokes you to death, doesn’t it?”
“You may think I appear very graceless,” I said. “But you must . . .”
“Graceless, darling? Why ever should we think that? Your own inspiration dried up years ago and you’ve lived on rotten credit ever since. As an ugly old fraud yourself, anything of any beauty or authenticity has to be mocked and rejected. Graceless? Lordy Lord, no.”
“Let’s leave character out of it for the moment,” said Max, with boardroom crispness, “and concentrate on facts. Do you deny, Ted, that Edward’s life was saved?”
“No,” I said. “I have to confess that I cannot deny that.”
“And Lilac?” said Oliver. “And Jane? And me? And Clara? Can you deny us? Look at what’s in front of your great fat nose, man!”
“All right, Oliver, calm down,” said Michael. “Let’s get this straight, Ted. Are you saying that my son has absolutely no powers whatsoever?”
“No!” I cried. “No, I am not saying that! I think he is a remarkable and wonderful boy. I think he is, in his own way, a miracle. Not magical, but uncommon enough to be a miracle in this world. I think he has powers that are as rare as they are beautiful.”
“I’m going mad!” said Patricia, clutching her hair. “You said a moment ago, ‘David is possessed of no extraordinary powers whatsoever. He is a very, very, very ordinary child.’ Your exact words. And half a minute later . . .”
“I stand by every word I have spoken,” I said.
There was an almost unanimous shout of rage at this perversity. It was brought to a shocked silence by Anne.
“Oh be quiet, all of you!” she stormed. “You just don’t see, do you? You just don’t see! You told Ted that he couldn’t see the truth when it was right under his nose, but it’s not Ted, it’s you. It’s all of you. Ted is absolutely right. Everything he has said is absolutely right and consistent and you just can’t see it.”
“Annie! My love, I don’t understand!” Michael stared across at his wife in bewilderment.
“I’m sorry, Michael,” I said. “I’ve been playing games with you.”
“Games? You’ve been playing games?”
“Well, not games precisely. Just getting a bit of my own back perhaps. Allowing you to misunderstand. You asked me whether or not I thought your son had any powers whatsoever and I said that he did. I said that he was a remarkable and wonderful boy. What you don’t understand, what only Annie understands, is that I wasn’t talking about Davey.”
Still he couldn’t see. None of them could see.
“Not talking about Davey?”
“No,” I said. “I was talking about Simon.”
“What?” Oliver whipped round on Simon, who sat there, fork hovering in front of his face, and mouth open in consternation and alarm.
“Oh look . . .” he said. “Come on, Uncle Ted . . . I mean . . .”
“I’m sorry, Simon,” I said, “but the truth
must be told.”
Anne leant forward and placed a hand on Simon’s arm.
“Ted! Annie! Explain . . . please, tell me what’s going on,” said Michael.
“You saw yourself how it all began two years ago, Michael,” I said. “For the time being we’ll call it the first miracle. You came into the room when Edward was lying suffocated and almost unconscious from asthma. Simon did what any sane human being would do. He pumped the boy’s arms back and forth and tried to get the breathing started. He pummelled the ribs. A few seconds later, sentimental hysterical David elbows him out of the way, frightened by such violence and completely ignorant of the need for it. He has just laid a hand on his chest when you and Annie walk in, at the very moment that the results of Simon’s commendable first-aid became apparent and Edward is starting to cough and splutter. You see the hand laid on the chest and you instantly think of your father, who despite his own obvious good sense was very nearly bamboozled himself into thinking that he had done something extraordinary with his batman’s sore foot. Some time later you tell Davey this story and the stupid boy, who had probably only laid his hand on the chest to feel for the boy’s heart-beat or something equally useless, believes he has inherited a mystical power from his grandfather.”
“But . . . you can rationalise anything like that,” said Patricia. There was a hint of doubt in her voice, however.
“Rationalising a sunset doesn’t make it any less beautiful,” I said. “Nor is it designed to. Simon is thoughtful, practical, unsentimental and kind. He is also entirely without ego. It never occurred to him to take credit or demand thanks for what he did. Davey on the other hand . . . well, just think about it. Just consider the sequel. Michael and Annie decided that Davey’s miraculous healing of Edward should remain a secret. Michael because he didn’t want his son to be hounded or feared in the way Albert had been, Annie because she could see what Michael believed and how much it delighted his sense of separate family pride. She was also afraid that Michael might think she was in some way jealous of Davey’s apparent gifts. Which, of course, is precisely what you did think, isn’t it, Michael?”