Cushing's Crusade

I wrote
Cushing’s Crusade
when I was twenty-eight, immediately after completing an extensively researched life of David Livingstone. So my choice of an impoverished archivist as my fictional protagonist owed much to my pursuit of documents in a number of small colonial and African-orientated archives. I had left the BBC three years earlier to become a full-time author and was already keenly aware of the difficulties of earning a living though my writing. Archivists, like most writers, earned very little, but had to be intelligent and hard-working to do their job effectively. People in the wider world of work, with less intelligence and dedication than scholars or writers, seemed to earn more than them and to be on secure career paths enabling them to support themselves with a lot less difficulty. It occurred to me that this gulf might be fertile ground for a novel.

So my hero, Derek Cushing, would be painfully aware of his wife’s disappointment with him for earning so little and for doing a type of work which few people knew about or respected. Diana needles Derek the whole time in the hope that she will one day prod him into being more assertive, but he is determined not to oblige her with the show of manly indignation he believes she is inviting. Instead he fights back using calculated acquiescence and appeasement as his weapons. Why should he do the obvious and emulate well-off and self-satisfied people whom he has no respect for?

An old university friend, Charles, is affable and rich and working (in Diana’s eyes) in a far more interesting field than her husband’s. He owns a modern art gallery. Derek suspects Diana is having an affair with Charles, but he does not allow even this to goad him into raging at her. ‘The sheer dedication, almost passion, of his ineffectuality soon win us over,’ wrote the
Guardian
’s critic to my relief. I had been determined that Derek, with his disaster-prone tendencies, should not be seen merely as a down-beat loser, but rather as someone who, though doing himself no favours, could still hold his own in challenging circumstances. With his lunatic jealousies, and his civilised self-lacerating jokes, there’s no denying that he
can
be a figure of fun. Yet he is never that to his thirteen-year-old son, who laughs at all his jokes, even when they aren’t funny. In return Derek does his best never to let the boy down – which he manages, until an astonishingly vexatious series of events unfold from the dunking of his watch in seawater, causing him, at the end of a disastrous afternoon, to miss a train, find ‘slippery solace’ in a field, and afterwards to confess his misbehaviour to his son and then to his wife, fatally alienating both of them
and
his new girlfriend too.

Only at the point of losing everything does Derek finally acknowledge that moderation has let him down badly and that anger and selfishness will be needed urgently if he is to reclaim even part of his family and his self-respect too. By ditching his habitual view of himself as a non-combatant in his marital war, at the eleventh hour he prevents comedy turning into tragedy.

Most reviewers thought that the book was funny and moving and my best to date. But though it won a national prize in Britain, the Americans found it too British to publish. The supportive New York editor who had published my first two novels had just killed himself and no new publisher had stepped forward to take his place. My agent tried to persuade Heinemann to give me a generous two-book contract, but he got nowhere. This was before prizes had much impact on sales. I was married by now, and Joyce and I had a child and hoped to have more, though I could not see how (even with Joyce working) I could afford to write literary fiction for a while. Perhaps I should have been braver. Anyway, I signed up to write two historical novels and then a biography, and then another biography, and more historical novels and a memoir, and somehow the moment never came when I could spare the time to write another contemporary novel. Nearly forty years have passed and at last the moment may have come.

Tim Jeal

April 2013

On a fourth-floor balcony of Abercorn Mansions Diana Cushing lay flat on her face with her breasts flattened under her; the ornamented railings cast a pattern of regularly spaced stripes across her bare back. Her husband Derek squatted beside her, rubbing sun-oil into her tanned and slightly perspiring skin; absently he rolled the balls of his fingers back and forth along her vertebrae. A faint smell of melting tar and petrol fumes rose from the street below. Derek could feel the top of his head smarting; the sun had caught his bald patch. He got up quietly and stood watching his wife for several moments, until satisfied that her deep and regular breathing did undoubtedly mean that she had fallen asleep. Then he slipped through the french windows into the flat. This was an excellent opportunity to wash the kitchen floor.

Five weeks before, Diana had unexpectedly sacked their
cleaning
woman and, since then, had done no dusting or cleaning herself. On his return from work every day Derek had washed up the dishes, emptied his wife’s ashtrays, done a little hoovering, attended to the cat’s tray and thrown out the kitchen garbage; but none of this had significantly arrested the general deterioration of the flat. To start with, partly because Diana’s behaviour was often unpredictable, and partly because he had always made strenuous efforts to avoid arguments of any sort, Derek had been content to say and do nothing. But then, when Diana’s inactivity continued into its fourth week, and she not only rejected his suggestion that they should employ another cleaner, but also told him that he was to stop all forms of cleaning himself, Derek realized that he was
involved. By then the dust on the table-tops was thick enough to write legible words in.

Derek was aware that continued avoidance of a serious
discussion
of the situation was behaviour which might justifiably strike an outsider as insane indifference. Well-balanced people do not as a rule pretend that serious disturbances do not exist; and yet he had discovered with a sense of shock that he had no intention of bringing matters to a head. He was convinced that Diana’s
lethargy
, far from being a cry for help or the result of some
psychological
disorder, was a calculated assault on him; a plot to make him assert himself and act positively, to force him out of his usual acquiescence to her moods and wishes. The challenge was
equivalent
to a command to change his character. So why not acquiesce again and do what she wanted? Why not end the idiotic impasse and please her with a sudden burst of explosive male dominance? Why creep into the kitchen like a criminal and
furtively
clean the kitchen floor, instead of demanding that she, or somebody else, do it?

Derek’s answer was simple: by refusing to be assertive, he was
really
asserting himself. By rejecting her challenge, he was
preserving
his true persona. Not only that, he was saving her from self-deception and the mistaken belief that a display of decisive and authoritative behaviour on his part would reflect a real change of heart rather than a piece of enforced acting. He was not and never had been strong-willed and positive, and, at
thirty-eight
, he felt no obligation to attempt to be so. Moderation,
compromise
, humility and an honest desire to fall in with what other people wanted, were qualities to be cherished rather than reviled.

Derek squeezed out his mop and looked at the results of his efforts on the kitchen floor. The dirt had become so ingrained that a scrubbing-brush was called for. He was working on all fours when Diana came into the room some ten minutes later. Derek remained on his knees.

Diana was three years younger than Derek and, as he freely and often admitted, had weathered the years considerably better than himself. Her long auburn hair was still untinted, and although her cheekbones had become more pronounced, Derek
thought this a distinction rather than an imperfection. Nor did he consider the faint crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes or the few delicate lines traced across her high forehead in any way
detrimental
. She was a little heavier around the hips than when they had met fourteen years before, but since Derek had then thought her a little thin, this was simply an improvement. And her slightly slanting eyes, which he had always thought her greatest asset, were just as enigmatic with their subtle colour which changed in certain lights from honeycomb-flecked brown to yellowish green.

Since Diana remained silent, Derek went on scrubbing, expecting at any moment to be attacked; but when she spoke it was quietly.

‘What’s this?’

Derek’s gaze moved obediently upwards from her knees, past her floral pants and still-bare stomach and breasts, to her upheld right arm. In her hand was a small green card.

‘A hospital appointments card,’ answered Derek, scrubbing with less vigour.

‘Yours?’ she went on lightly.

‘You found it in my jacket pocket.’

Diana smiled pleasantly and let the card fall on to the wet floor.

‘Cancer? A kidney transplant? A ruptured artery?’

‘Piles,’ murmured Derek, getting up with slow dignity.

‘Didn’t you think it worth telling me about?’ she snapped with sudden ferocity. Derek explained that he had undergone a series of rectal injections which were meant to shrink the offending veins, and that he had not wanted to cause distress before the results were known, and that although he now suspected that an operation was probable it was not certain, and that he was sorry if his well-intentioned silence had proved counter-productive and caused annoyance.

‘You mean you forgot to tell me,’ said Diana, making for the door.

‘What would you like for supper?’ Derek called after her.

She turned in the doorway and looked at him sadly. ‘Why do
you always have to make your conciliatory gestures so obvious?’

Derek picked up the bucket of dirty water and poured it down the sink. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘because if you didn’t notice them, they wouldn’t conciliate.’ He tossed the scrubbing-brush into the cupboard under the sink and added, ‘But if you do notice, they become obvious. It’s a bit of a problem,’ he ended lamely.

Diana made a plopping noise with her tongue, and said with a toss of her head, ‘I’ll have what
you
want for supper, if that small decision doesn’t prove too much for you.’

She was about to go again when Derek put in, ‘I didn’t forget about the injections. It isn’t the sort of thing one forgets;
especially
when there are a dozen students peering up one.’

‘You just forgot to
tell
me,’ she replied, leaving the room.

*

Derek was getting supper ready when his son Giles came in. He looked flushed and angry.

‘She’s lolling about on the balcony with her bosoms bare.
Anybody
could see her.’

Giles was thirteen, but small for his age. For the last six months he had been wearing glasses. Derek finished scraping the last of the carrots.

‘She
can’t
sit out there like that,’ went on an outraged Giles.

Derek came and rested a hand on his son’s shoulder.

‘She can, I’m afraid; not that there’s anything wrong with her breasts or breasts in general. In Africa …’

‘We’re not in Africa,’ the boy cut in furiously. ‘I might have come back with some friends.’

‘What would they have said?’ asked Derek with genuine interest.

Giles shrugged his shoulders and looked away.

‘“Never knew your mum was a nudist.” Stuff like that. “Went to tea with Cushing and his mum showed us her tits.”’ Giles picked up a carrot and took a large bite. The week before, Diana had laughed at her son for locking the bathroom door. He wasn’t ashamed of his first pubic hair, was he? With his mouth full of carrot, Giles muttered, ‘Not that I’d want to bring anybody back with the flat like this.’

‘She’ll soon snap out of it,’ said Derek soothingly.

‘Will she?’ Giles looked almost tearful. ‘It’s not as though she’s writing any articles or anything. I lent her two of my geology books but she hasn’t read a word.’

Knowing Diana’s lack of enthusiasm for Giles’s passionate interest in stones and fossils, Derek was not surprised. ‘Give her a bit more time,’ he said. ‘She’s been depressed. Nobody likes doing anything when they’re depressed.’

Giles looked at his father derisively. ‘If she hit you over the head with a frying-pan, you’d say she couldn’t help it because she was depressed.’

‘A bit of an exaggeration,’ laughed Derek.

‘Is it?’ asked Giles.

‘I do know what I’m doing,’ replied Derek with apparent assurance.

‘Everything,’ came back Giles. ‘And you’ll go on doing
everything
till you tell her where to get off.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ replied Derek as lightly as he could manage.

‘Nobody else’s father would stand for it,’ the boy threw out scornfully as he walked out of the room.

Derek started to peel the outer skins off the onions. Soon tears were running freely down his cheeks.

*

The following afternoon Derek was sitting at his desk in the manuscript room of the Afro-Asian Institute, where he had been the archivist for the past eleven years. An extraordinarily idle man would not have considered the job demanding. There had been few major additions to the manuscript collection during the past decade, and the routine task of maintaining the catalogue of printed books occupied little time. Apart from answering the occasional queries of historians and biographers and helping readers to locate material, Derek was free to pursue his own research on European expansion in East Africa between 1870 and 1900.

An hour earlier Derek had had to shut every window in the room to reduce the noise of the relentless pile-driver on the
building-site across the street. Now the place was like a
greenhouse
and Derek felt no inclination to work. Instead he idly watched Professor Elkin, one of the only two readers working in the room, take off his jacket and roll up his shirtsleeves as though preparing himself for some formidable manual task. The
professor’s
arms were impressively hairy; the backs of his hands, even the backs of his fingers up to the knuckles, were covered with thick black hair. Derek speculated whether he had hairs all the way up his back; there was no doubt that naked he would make an imposing spectacle. In buses, tubes and shops Derek beguiled tedious moments by seeing people as animals.
Red-haired
people with their white eyebrows and eyelashes were pigs, small boys with large front teeth were rabbits, and Professor Elkin was undoubtedly a large lowland gorilla. Gorillas came in the main from western equatorial Africa. The professor’s interests lay on the other side of that continent. With exaggerated care his hairy hands were opening another manuscript box and soon his learned eyes were scanning the contents of Folder ‘A’: ‘Thirty-Seven Letters from Sir Harry Johnston to the Colonial Office’. Derek began to doze in the afternoon heat; inside the professor’s skull the events following the annexation of
Nyasaland
flickered into fitful life; in the far corner of the room a small Kenyan thumbed his way through page after page of agricultural statistics to find details about the migrant cocoa farmers of southern Ghana. For Derek it was a fairly typical working
afternoon
.

Most of Derek’s marital problems stemmed from Diana’s youthful admiration for academics. In the days of their courtship he had capitalized on this, making sure, whenever they had gone together to a museum or art gallery, that he had previously read up on what they would see. He had thus been able to appear far better informed than he really was; well informed moreover on a wide range of subjects; not simply a narrow specialist scholar. He had not told Diana a great deal about his work since he had felt sure than an air of mystery would lend it a greater dignity than any detailed exposition. So Diana, who had been reading a great many Russian novels at the time, had mistakenly supposed that
Derek’s research, even though in a confined field, would throw light on universal matters: objective reality, the nature of truth and similarly exalted concepts. Diana had married her scholar before the publication of his first two books:
Economic 
Imperial
ism
and
Cultural
Relativism,
and
Economic
Imperialism:
A
Reassessment.
Her disillusion with scholars and scholarship dated from her reading of these books, both of which she found turgid, wordy and narrow.

For a while, by flogging his rapidly tiring intellect into bursts of energy that left him nervous and exhausted, Derek had
managed
to preserve a little of his wife’s former admiration for the variety of his knowledge and interests. But this could not, did not last. He needed time to take on new ideas, but since he was with Diana all the time he never had a chance. Her demands increased; like an eager oil magnate she tapped her husband’s head, without restraint or an eye to the future; soon she had sucked his resources dry. Once she had seen businessmen, lawyers and scientists as men pursuing mundane and trivial objects in comparison with the scholar’s elevated pursuit of pure knowledge. Now she could not conceal from Derek that, in her opinion, to be an academic was to be an emotional and mental bankrupt: a man who had never had the courage to take his chances in the real world.

At half-past four Derek woke with a start, his shirt soaked with sweat; somebody was telling him something. He recognized Diana’s voice and sat up abruptly.

‘Another arduous day in the archives,’ she said, looking down at him.

‘Must have dropped off,’ he muttered. Since Diana had not been out of the flat for over a month, he suspected she had come to cause a scene. He braced himself for the coming onslaught. But she seemed unnaturally cheerful and amiable.

‘Time we went shopping together. You need some new clothes.’

‘Do I?’ asked Derek hesitantly.