Ever After (26 page)
The Great Western. An iron tentacle stretching from the capital to Cornwall, in which the bridge over the Tamar would be the last and most prodigious link. But more than that. More than just a railway. The very name suggests an idea, an aspiration, an epic, insatiable yearning. London, Bristol, Plymouth and— Why stop at Land’s End? Even before the railway had reached the Thames valley, and while Matthew was still a student at Oxford, the steamship
Great Western
(designer, I. K. Brunel) had docked for the first time in Manhattan. As if, stepping off the platform at Paddington, one could be propelled, in one continuous movement and by the same stupendous force of burning coal and hissing steam, from the old world to the new. As if all those expresses that hurtled by me, while I watched from the embankment, really brought with them, after all, the tang, the ozone-tug, of the ocean.
Perhaps Brunel, like old Sir Walter before him (another tobacco man), was irresistibly drawn by the siren call of the West. The inexorable direction of destiny. The sunset way. The realms of gold.
Fuel, fire, ash. The famous photo of Brunel taken in Napier’s Yard in Millwall in 1857. He stands before coils of colossal chains. Top hat; rumpled frock-coat; muddied boots; jaunty pose; hands in pockets; cigar in mouth. He looks like anything but a serious engineer. He looks like an impostor, a charlatan—a circus-owner, the proprietor of a gambling saloon. As if the trick of fame is to be something
other than you really are, to know that you have come into the world only to play a part.
He has two years left to live.
Local legend has it (I read up on Brunel) that Brunel died by jumping in despair from his Tamar Bridge. But this was not so. The bridge was opened, after ten years in the building, by the Prince Consort in May 1859. Broken in health by overwork (Matthew was right), Brunel was not there. But Matthew and his in-laws were there—and so was Matthew’s father. And Brunel himself was not, in the end, denied one last look at his masterpiece. With no cheering crowds or waving flags or royal guests, and lying on a specially prepared truck, he was pulled slowly, as if on a hearse, by one of the GWR’s original broad-gauge locomotives, under the massive piers and ironwork, over the glittering river.
Si monumentum requiris
… It still stands, it is still there, still bearing its designer’s name, and still bearing the (diesel-powered, narrow-gauge) expresses into Cornwall. To build a bridge! To span a void! And what voids, what voids there were. He would never know. Need never know. These happy bridge-builders, these men of the solid world (these level-minded surveyors). He was safe. Safe in his sunset glory. Safe within the limits of an old, safe world. Only seven months after his bridge was opened and only two months after his death, Darwin would publish (some come to fame by building, some by—) his
Origin of Species
.
2nd May 1859:
… The occasion a strangely subdued one, compared with the triumph two years ago (I.K.B. then in splendid command) of the positioning of the first truss. Adorned by royalty and all the pomp of celebration, but marred by the sad absence of the presiding genius; and marred,
quite spoilt—I must say it—so far as our little family outing was concerned, by the unhappy presence of my father.
Inexcusable! Unforgivable! And yet I forgive him, I forgive him. He had as much right as any of us to be there, to be lending his voice to the public applause—and, to be sure, he was not alone in finding the occasion worthy of a bumper or two. But it was inexcusable of him so to have sought us out, quite purposefully, among the crowd, in such a flagrant state of inebriation as must have offended grossly my whole family and the Rector and Mrs Hunt, not to say have humiliated me utterly before them all. And if his intention had been to humiliate me (though I do not think it truly was), then he might have been more consistent than to proclaim to the whole company that, but for my want of ambition and excess of circumspection, I might surely have been as famous a man as Brunel—when circumspection and a sense of proportion were once, so I recall, the very watchwords of his paternal counsel.
Yet who am I to admonish, let alone disown, my own father, when his plight is perhaps not so far, not so very far, from my own? Dear God, along the road of life we are destined to lose so much, the absence of which we can never make good! “Is not Brunel,” he ranted, “one of our greatest men?” “A great man,” I answered, as pointedly as I was able amidst the embarrassment, “and also a very forlorn one. They say he is dying.” Whereupon I noticed a visible flutter pass over his expression before he continued, for all to hear, pretending not to have marked my words, and actually clapping my back, “And yet I’m proud of the boy! Proud of the boy!”
The boy! Yet I do believe he meant it. I do believe that in his mockery he was expressing his pride.
And so our day was clouded—ruined. And henceforth, no doubt, I shall have to withstand ever more vinegared inquiries from the Rector as to my father’s “health.” A neat means he shall have for deflecting the usual direction of our conversations. What a trifling matter is a great
and triumphant feat of engineering (not to say the question of ultimate causes), that it can be overshadowed by a family quarrel. And poor I.K.B., not long for this world. And yet his bridge will remain, surely, long after he and I are gone (and I am quite forgotten), a lasting memorial.…
I read up on Brunel; but I do not research my own father. I summon up Matthew, but I do not try to know my own father. My nameless, engine-driving, killed-in-the-war father. And why should I, when I never got to know the living, breathing man whom I took to be—? What difference does it make? The true or the false. This one or that one. The world will not shatter because of a single—misconception.… There I sit on the embankment above the canal and the railway line, and I do not spare a thought for him. He is far away, as it happens, on the far side of the Atlantic, and if he were at home, he would soon put an end to these bicycle rides. I am thinking of the roving, heroic lives of engine drivers. And I am so ignorant of how the world is changing, will change. Of how already like clumsy dinosaurs are these quaint, cacophonous steam trains, which, as they split the summer peace, fill me with such a sense of unsurpassed power.
He did it because of me. Because of me. Because there I was; and I wasn’t— I was the last straw. He did this thing: I know it can be done. He wanted—I see it now—to be something other than he was. He wanted all the deathly, death-defying magic of recognition, renown. This road to fame; these valleys of death. But he couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t turn the blind eye. It makes a difference. Oh it makes a difference! If I had known.
Look. The age of steam trains is already over—devoured by the ruthless age of ballerinas. I sit in the little
école
,
mouthing some rigmarole from La Fontaine, with the April sun dancing at the window, and only streets away—if I had known—he is coming to his decision. This cancelling of the self by the self. To be or— Pull the trigger, then it won’t matter any more. April in Paris: surely this isn’t the end of the world? The patter of typewriters, the smell of coffee. But he really does it, he isn’t pretending or playing Hamlet. Little pieces of his hot, bright skull scattered across the floor. My father! My father!
He left Burlford in 1860. He never wrote another word in the Notebooks. But he didn’t throw them away, didn’t destroy them. Why? What were they for? Who was supposed to read them?
These notebook-keepers. This jotting urge. This need to set it down.
Is it possible that in the midst of his torment of soul (his what?) one tiny corner of Matthew’s eye was aimed at posterity? Some reader hereafter. Some unknown accreditor. “… and I am quite forgotten …” A small plea, after all, for non-extinction. A life, after all, beyond life.
Is it possible, in other words, that he was thinking of
me
?
And what did he suppose that I should think of him? Did he consider, being a one-time fossil-collector, that he might turn into just another fossil himself? That his spiritual torment might become just another thing of the past, and future generations would shrug at the meaninglessness that once so appalled him?
(Shrug! All the pills in the bottle.)
And Elizabeth? And Elizabeth. It must have seemed to her such a simple and terrible thing. It must have seemed to her that nothing, least of all the mere thoughts in a man’s head—albeit her own husband’s head—could counterweigh that undeniable, years-old possession of love, that palpable access to happiness. And did he suppose that the death of Felix was something she hadn’t felt too? That she
didn’t nurse too that aching, child-sized absence, which only made more precious, nonetheless, the treasure they
kept
? What did it matter what he had or hadn’t faith in (though she wouldn’t have put it this way to her father), so long as he had such still-remaining happiness (was the whole stock ruined?) before him? And if it mattered so much that he rejected it, then it must mean that he’d never truly valued it. That he was pretending. That
he didn’t really love her
.
That’s what it must have felt like when she woke at night to an empty space beside her and knew that he was still down there at his desk: that he was deserting her. She must have thought of ways to get him back.
Who is Elizabeth? What is she? I see her as a warmhearted, trusting, perhaps rather brittle girl, emerging suddenly from the chrysalis of life at the Rectory into the full bloom of womanhood. Any man, perhaps, might have been the touchstone; it happened to be Matthew. It was her fortune, and her misfortune, to marry Matthew. And strange that this robust and outgoing man, to whom she had looked to lead her, some way at least, out of the sheltered existence that she could admit now had been hers, should himself slip so easily into domesticity and family-hood, should choose to settle, after all, right here in Burlford, under the eye, as it were, of the Rector and her mother, should even seem now and then to need a sort of shelter himself. It must mean he was happy; that she made him happy.
She has soft brown eyes and the smile of newly awakened, newly indulged instincts; the clear conscience and undissipated emotions of a clergyman’s daughter. What did she think of her husband’s “interests”—the specimen-collecting, the reading-up in learned tomes and journals? Perhaps they seemed, at first, endearingly, if vexingly, like
her father’s interminable devotion to Virgil. Men seemed to need these “enthusiasms,” which rapidly became so all-consuming. She had thought, perhaps, that her own sex, with its needlework, sketching and piano-playing, was lacking in this respect. But now, watching little Christopher at play, watching the earnestness with which he went about it—a furrow in his brow just like one in Matthew’s—she would have felt more of concern than envy for these curious menfolk. But she would no more have dared knock on Matthew’s study door and urge him, for his own sake, to stop, than she would have dared ask her father (though perhaps she had the subversive thought) why he, a minister of the Christian church, should spend so much time in the company of a
pagan
poet.
She has deep-brown hair and a soft, ripe bosom. And she is perfectly capable, now that she has discovered her instincts, now that she knows, beyond all girlish dreams, the full extent of her power to give and receive love, of concurring absolutely with that motto (what if they
were
the words of a pagan poet?) which Matthew’s father had had inscribed for them. Yes.
Amor vincit
.
2nd March 1860:
Neale here again for Sunday dinner. And playing very merrily afterwards with John and Christopher and offering them fine exhortations as to how they are almost grown men now, with “places to take in the world.” Cannot help supposing that these visits are encouraged by Elizabeth in collusion with her father, so as to preserve our Sundays from the animosity that now so often springs up between myself and the Rector following our church-going. Suspect also that the Rector has had private words with Elizabeth about the parlous state of my father’s affairs—how, in plain terms, if I do not have a care and desist from lending my father money, the taint will spread to my own reputation.
Neither of these suspicions becomes me. Yet suspect also that Elizabeth wishes, out of an understandable and not uncharitable motive, to put Neale before me as an example of what
I
should be, and, indeed, once was before my falling off of these last months. That is: sanguine, cheerful, dependable, steady in my responsibilities and successful in my affairs. Yet cannot, for the life of me, see myself in Neale (or him in me) at all. Distrust my former liking of him. Despise my own distrust and upbraid my own seeming want of character. Should perhaps be simply jealous and act the plain part of jealousy. Nothing, in fact, might better restore me in my Lizzie’s eyes—proving I was a creature still of direct and vivid emotions, and not the remote occupant of my own incapacitating thoughts.
Yet I disdain to be—even as I become the very thing—the pallid husband resenting the vigorous interloper. And I disdain (pride! Oh, pride!) to engage in matrimonial histrionics, when it is indeed my “thoughts” which are the nub of the matter.
Neale asks, in seeming candour or in seeming tact, after my father. Wheal Talbot fares well. Neale, in truth, is a rich man, an eligible match, slow to take his pick, and the story goes that he pays court to the fair daughter of one of our reduced gentry—or, rather, that she pays court to him. He observes that Benson (do I remember our “scourge of the boll weevil”?) does well enough out of his arsenic licence, and wittily remarks that while he extracts the “cordial” of the mine, Benson extracts the poison. Adds that Benson may be obliged shortly to interrupt his war against the weevil, if the States, as seems almost certain, go to war themselves. Might advise him that at such time it would be opportune to buy back the arsenic rights and thus secure, against future vicissitudes, another basket for his eggs. Might remind him also that Wheal Talbot does not command the richest section of the lode, and he would do well to sink exploratory shafts for tin while there is time and capital. But this perhaps would be only my “circumspection” speaking—who now
sees any perils in the copper market?—and I do not wish Liz to suppose that I resent Neale’s success.
But these pages should not be a furtive laboratory in which I analyse my wife. God forbid that she should think that that is the object of these “studies” of mine. Truly I believe that—still—she would never dare touch a single page of these notebooks without my permission. Yet, while I closet myself repeatedly in their fellowship, has
she
not a right to be jealous?
What would I do without her? What would I have become without her? What price should I not pay not to lose her? I do believe she would forgive and forget all my strange humour of late, if I would only, as she once, so warily, entreated me, call upon my better nature and “be myself again.”
“Better nature”? What, in any of us, is our “better nature”? And what does it mean—is this what we love and respect in each other?—to “be oneself”?