Ever After (14 page)

He saw an ichthyosaur. It is difficult to know how people will react when they see an ichthyosaur. I can understand it with Felix—though I have never had children. Yes, I can understand it with Felix (though, even then, such a man as Matthew, cognisant of the infant mortality rate of the times—they bred hard, these Victorians, and with reason—might have thought: not so terrible, one in four). But with an ichthyosaur? An ichthyosaur.

Quite probably, he had seen one before. (I too have seen ichthyosaurs, in museums, in books. I have made a point of it, in fairness to Matthew. I look at them and don’t feel that much at all.) If he had been to London, which he probably had, he would have seen in the British Museum the famous ichthyosaur, thirty feet long, discovered (first of its kind to be so unearthed) by Mary Anning of Lyme Regis—beside which awesome exhibit this half-buried specimen, perhaps some fifteen feet, was a mere baby.

Yet museums are safe, orderly, artificial places, and here, still trapped in the rock from which workers employed by the same Mary Anning were labouring to release it, within sight of the plump hills of Dorset and the ruffled waters of Lyme Bay, was the thing itself. Here, in the very spot where— Here. Now. Then. He stood face to face with the skull of a beast that must have lived, so certain theories would have held, unimaginably longer ago than even the most generous computations from the Scripture allowed for the beginning of the world (yet which must have been created, so something inside him would have insisted, by God); so long ago that the fact of its existence had been almost irretrievably swallowed up in the fact of its extinction
and only now, in the pathetically locatable nineteenth century, had it come to be known that it had existed at all; and thought— And thought what?

You have to picture the scene. You have to imagine these scenes in which for most people nothing changes, nothing is essentially different—all this drama and fuss, a passing storm, a twisted ankle—but for some people the world falls apart. I think that’s perhaps what Ruth did—all this drama! To picture how the world might be—how it might fall apart or hold, incredibly, together—in the eyes of other people.

Such a simple, unconscionable thing: to be another person.

A flapping tarpaulin. Sticky gobs of rain, a bruised, galvanic sky. The long, toothed jaw; the massive eye that stares through millions of years. He is the creature; the creature is him. He feels something open up inside him, so that he is vaster and emptier than he ever imagined, and feels himself starting to fall, and fall, through himself. He lurches on to the path, as if outward movement will stop this inward falling. He passes a startled young woman, who has fallen also, but less than her own length and on to solid ground. He blunders down another path, not the path he came up by but a path which takes him to the beach—as if to stop himself falling he must get to sea level. The storm swipes in off the sea. His hat blows off; he is soaked. Everything is lost and confused—sea, rocks, cliffs, sand—in swamping greyness.

He walks and walks, to stop the falling, all the way back to Lyme. If Lyme is still there. It is—emerging from the curtains of rain. But how pathetic and pitiable it looks; the little huddle of habitation, the quaint tumble of roofs, the cluster of rocking boats cradled in the curving arm of the Cobb.

And it was meant to be a holiday. And now it has become an experience from which he must recover, slowly convalesce. Though no one can help or nurse him but himself. No one will even know how he is not himself, how far he has fallen through himself, except himself. And the only remedy he has is to pretend. To pretend so hard that one day, perhaps, he will forget he is pretending. He will do his best, and even achieve, quite soon, some outward approximation of recovery, so that, back in Launceston that same summer, even his own father will not guess the true
extent of the damage. The lad is strangely out of sorts, to be sure. So much for the benefits of sea air. Some talk of an untimely ailment, a fever, a soaking in a summer storm. As like as not, some woman is at the bottom of it. At any rate, his son is oddly reluctant to discuss the whole Tavistock question. Well, well, let the cloud pass, give everything its time.

Matthew says nothing. And John Pearce treads carefully. But remarkable recoveries—or rescues—happen. And Matthew has a capacity for happiness. And John Pearce is doubly glad that Rector Hunt should call that afternoon about his clock, and that he should bring his daughter with him.

Or that is how I like to see it. That is how I wish it to have happened. I give to Matthew’s life that very quality of benign design that he had already glimpsed might be lacking from the universe. I choose to believe that Matthew first met Elizabeth in his father’s office in Launceston that same July. And I choose to believe that at the very first meeting Matthew would have had the overwhelming perception that here, when his thoughts had already shown him how terribly you could go adrift, was the true, sure ground of his life. That he would have felt himself falling, sinking, collapsing again, not with that fearful sense of falling into a void, but with a sense of miraculous, restoring gravitation.

The scene: John Pearce’s workshop in Bell Street, Launceston. July sunshine—let’s suppose there was sunshine—slanting through the workshop windows on to the scratched and worn surfaces of the workbenches and on to the little brass pieces—cogs, springs, levers—laid out like some miniature treasury on rectangles of black felt. Matthew would have been impressed by the improvements to the workshop. His father now employed two journeymen
and one apprentice, but he still sat, himself, at his workbench, eye-glass crammed into one eye, conforming to the image Matthew still retained of him from childhood: a vaguely magician-like figure, hunched over his little clockwork world, unwittingly miming the classic analogy for the existence of a Creator, and seeming to be engaged not only in the making of clocks but in the manufacture of this vital stuff called Time, this stuff which Matthew still thought of as being essentially human in meaning, the companion and guardian of human affairs.

A clock ticks on the mantelpiece.…

A desultory conversation in progress: Launceston gossip. John notes yet again the want of his son’s usual buoyancy and curiosity. Then the little bell in the office tinkles and John says, “Ah,” and drops his eyeglass neatly into his right hand, removes his apron, rolls down his sleeves and reaches for his jacket. “That will be Rector Hunt.”

Or perhaps there was nothing so apparently casual about this encounter. Perhaps John had said to Matthew: “The Reverend Hunt, from Burlford, will be calling by about his clock. He would be pleased to meet you.” Which is why Matthew was there. Or perhaps John, on a previous occasion, had said to the Rector, a man who, living in a household of women, felt a want of educated male conversation and a vague sense of being out of touch with the world, “Matthew will be home in July, so please call by—and you can see how the clock comes along.” But whether John had anticipated the Rector’s being accompanied by his elder daughter is another matter. And whether Rector Hunt had said to Elizabeth, “I shall be paying a call on Pearce the clockmaker—I believe his son, a Brasenose man, may be there. Perhaps you’d care to join me?” is another matter still. But why should Elizabeth have decided to attend her father about so humdrum a matter as
a clock, when she might have passed her time in Launceston much more pleasurably, at the dressmaker’s or milliner’s, say?

Matthew would have gone with his father into the office, ready to offer his hand to Rector Hunt, but his eyes would have been compelled to meet first—and have been met quickly, meekly—by the eyes (I see them as glossy brown) of his daughter. A just-detectable hiatus would have occurred in which a just-detectable mutual blush would have touched the faces of the two young people. Then, after exchanged pleasantries and at a polite inquiry from the Rector and some prompting from his father, Matthew would have found himself rehearsing what he would have already rehearsed to his father, namely his account of the opening of the Bristol and Exeter Railway and of the jubilant arrival, just two months ago now, at the Exeter terminus of the first train from Paddington. And Rector Hunt and his daughter (if with different motives) would have listened with genuine awe to his tale. Railways existed, had existed for some thirty years in Cornwall—little, narrow-gauge haulage lines serving the north coast ports. But the Rector and his daughter would never have seen a steam engine. And these hurtling contraptions, which could take a man from his breakfast in London and set him down for dinner in Devon, they would have regarded with amazement and not a little dread.

Matthew does not overdo his scene-painting, but his voice betrays a curious urgency, and he finds himself gratified, peculiarly enlightened, by the looks of astonishment and vague fear on his listeners’ faces. As the train of his description is greeted by the cheering crowds at Exeter, a train of thought passes through his mind that fills him—he cannot say how much it has to do with Miss Hunt’s look of appealing vulnerability—with a sudden gush of
liberating relief. The fear of the new, he thinks, is as primitive, as superstitious, as the fear of the old. We fear what we do not know. To the vole, the hawk is a monster of tearing beak and talons; only a man sees its aerial grace and skill. How many things that are dreadful to man might not be, in the eyes of their Maker, comely and fitting?

He moves with sudden confidence (John is amused to note how his son’s spirits are reviving) and with the aim of reassuring his audience, to give a practical and lucid account of that masterpiece of engineering, the steam locomotive, with a brief commentary on the dependability of Mr Brunel’s Broad Gauge. Elizabeth thinks: he has a way, to be sure, of making the extraordinary seem perfectly acceptable—and such a dependable, broad-gauge kind of smile. But the Rector, who cannot get beyond seeing a steam engine as a sort of tamed dragon and forgets that he has initiated the whole subject, says, “Yes—yes, indeed. But tell me, is that Philpott fellow still peddling Divinity at Brasenose?”

“But Papa,” protests Elizabeth, “you interrupt Mr Pearce.”

Matthew notices the swiftness of this intercession on his behalf and the briefest flash of a look from her (acknowledged by a reflexive tightening of the corner of his mouth) which seems to say, “See, I do this for you.”

“I’m sure”—she redeems any brusqueness with a smile—“he has so much more to tell us.”

And Matthew is only too conscious at this moment that he does, indeed, have other things to tell—he has seen stranger and more awesome things, indubitably, than railway locomotives. The possibility comes rushing to him that
she
might be the very one—the only one—that he might tell them to. But responding to the awkwardness of the situation (she notes: he is not clumsy, he has natural tact),
he saves the Rector’s embarrassment—“No, indeed, I go on at too much length”—and, turning the conversation with a deferential inquiry about Rector Hunt’s own Oxford days (aware with the corner of his eyes how the corner of hers is twinkling; aware of how her father, almost unconsciously, takes her hand and strokes her wrist), allows a cheerful exchange of reminiscence about Oxford, or rather about two different Oxfords, which each pretends, for the sake of good feeling, are the same.