The Last Crossing (24 page)

For two hours we briskly strode along in silence, Simon’s pale face aglow with joy and the bright lunar light. At our feet the white lane gleamed like paper cross-hatched with the shadows of beeches and elms. Here and there a window shed its light or a dog barked as we passed a silent cottage, but these were the only signs of life.

Solitude salved my embarrassment, and I began to feel that, just as once we had shared unspoken thoughts and feelings in childhood, I was entering into a wordless communion with my brother. Impulsively, I threw my arm over his shoulder and was rewarded with a smile of sheer delight. He whispered to me, “This is the world. Not that.”

Like so much of what Simon said, this was not comprehensible. “Not that” might refer to the university, or perhaps my reluctance to be seen by amused onlookers as we left the town. But the implied criticism caused me to remove my arm from his shoulders and say, “Surely the world is everywhere.”

My brother stopped and gazed about him. “Yes, you are right,” he conceded. “But it is difficult to feel and know the world in certain places.”

“Perhaps I feel the world, hear it, under different conditions than yourself. You must not be dogmatic, Simon.” I felt it would be false of me to be anything but perfectly frank.

“I am filled with happiness here. Does your perception of the world promote your happiness?”

I sidestepped the question of happiness. “My perception promotes my comfort. It permits me to make my way in the world.” I thought for a moment and attempted to reverse the pressure he was bringing to bear. “If you continue as you seem intent on doing, you will pay a price. Your path -” I hesitated, gesturing to the road, “will not be as easy and plain as this byway. Fairy moonbeams do not provide a steady light.” He slowly nodded. It was painful to watch. I feared I had wounded him dreadfully. “I have hurt you,” I said.

“You grow more like Father every day.”

“Nonsense. How can you possibly say that?”

Without answering my question, Simon resumed walking. “You were made to marry, I think,” he said, another impenetrable remark.

I retorted, “I mean to be a painter. Don’t you know? Painters keep mistresses.”

“We are a family of dissemblers,” he said. My brother gravely pursed his lips, a judge momentously weighing a sentence. “And I am the greatest dissembler of us all,” he said at last.

I could not help but laugh at this self-accusation. Nothing could be more patently ludicrous than his claim of dissembling. From childhood on, Simon had never been capable of concealing any of this thoughts or motives. But my dismissal of his claims to dishonesty had upset him. Once more he halted, tapping his staff on the ground. His voice rose. “You are more obvious than I, and always have been. You have always yearned for love, Charles. Father’s love. But you were ashamed to ask it of anyone but me. You felt your need a weakness, a weakness that could only be revealed to someone weaker than yourself. You took me for that person. But now my peculiarities, as you would describe them, have made our attachment a burden to you. So you must seek love, affection elsewhere. Do not follow your present course. It is a dead end. The dead end of the perfect English gentleman. Go away. Go to Italy, or to France,” he said forcefully. “You are not strong enough to resist Father, to find love and freedom here. You care too much for the approbation of others.”

I shot back, “So your vast experience with the fair sex recommends to me a foreign wife. Which is your preference? The Italian or the French?”

“Both of us,” he said, “frozen in a pose.” Simon touched his hat, his cloak significantly. “I edge towards honesty. But this is only a first step. I must learn courage by degrees.”

“Riddles.”

My brother reached out, clasped his hand to the back of my neck, and drew me close, so near I could feel his warm breath on my face. “I would not have you think ill of me. Do not think ill of me, whatever happens,” he said. At that moment, he looked so beseechingly
into my eyes that I can recall his expression even now, years later, the swollen moon and tiny stars riding above his shoulder. With vehement emphasis he recited to me, “ ‘To the just-pausing Genius we remit / Our worn-out life, and are – what we have been.’ ”

“Arnold,” I said.

“Arnold.”

“And what does it signify?”

“We are not alone, Charles. Given time, the spirit of the universe will accept us. For the present, it asks us simply to be. To be ourselves and not someone else’s dream of us.”

“Is this the speech of a Christian?”

He avoided justifying himself. “Why are we on this road? To arrive at London. We think London exists because we have seen it with our own eyes; we believe it still stands on the strength of daily reports-articles in the newspaper, your friend Tom Budge’s stories about his visit to Kew Gardens a fortnight ago. But we cannot know for sure it still stands until we reach it ourselves. There may be no city awaiting us at the end of the road.”

“That is preposterous,” I said.

“And the universal spirit, Genius, God, where is It, He?” Simon said. “He, It, is to be found in the reports that we poor human beings have been filing for centuries, reports of encounters, reports of intimations, reports written and spoken in every language known to man. None of them the same, but all sincere. To pursue the ‘just-pausing Genius’ is the only proper aim of life.” Concluding his homily, Simon was immediately lightened. He released his hold on me and was himself – old, happy Simon. “Remember Mr. Jacks?” he said. I nodded. Jacks, the head gardener at Sythe Grange, dead for years.

“Remember when we were ten or eleven, and he gave us porter to drink?”

“Yes. I remember.”

“It made me drunk, Charles. I have never been drunk since. But I have never forgotten the feeling. Lying in the grass with the sun on my face. I tell you, I felt equal to anything.” He patted the satchel
that hung at his side. “I have bread and cheese and porter. Let us break our journey.”

And we did. I in my kerseyside trousers, soaking my buttocks on wet grass under a hawthorn bush. We ate contentedly and then walked on contentedly, walked on through the hind end of night, through the false dawn, and through the morning sunshine until, bone-weary, we glimpsed the smoke rising from the chimneys of London, and at last entered the city, saw the men and women bustling about the streets, bent on their own purposes. That sight of London at the end of the road was the closest I have ever come to belief.

And I must confess to myself, if no one else, that despite my best efforts to keep hope alive, and my determination to pursue the search for him, with every day that passes the conviction grows that I shall never see Simon alive again. Perhaps I am already what the old country people call the left twin. The survivor of the cruellest separation: those who shared a womb torn from one another in the world.

Jacks once told Simon and me a story about a young woman who suffered from the dark thrush, whose mouth was filled with ulcers and infection. And a small boy, whose twin had died only a year before, was brought to her, and when he had blown his breath in her mouth three times, she was cured. The left twin, it is said, has the power to heal. But not himself.

I
t being Sunday, and over his brother’s strenuous objections that they keep to the task, press on, Addington has magnanimously granted the men a day of rest. He has decided to mark the Sabbath with a rousing good gallop. After a two-mile run, the sorrel straining under him, the chuff of lungs, the chuck of legs, he savagely reins him up. The gelding sidles, dances, switches his hindquarters while Addington clucks his tongue soothingly. Finally, the animal settles, drops his head to graze, and Addington surveys his surroundings with approval. Mile upon unimpeded mile of firm turf over which to race. All it lacks is a few hedges and gates to sail over and it would be the peak of perfection.

Addington is in high spirits, certain that in a short time he will be in the pink of condition, fit as Nero’s fiddle. The rash that mottled his thighs all last year is gone and with it the ache in his joints. So much for Dr. Andrews and his simpered warnings.
Captain Addington, a venereal complaint is a most indolent disease. It will sleep, sir, it will lull you, but when it awakes
 … 
I have made a most thorough study of its character. And what I recommend to my patients is a strict regime of regularly administered medicaments – mercury, antimony, and iodide of potassium. A most efficacious and salutary prophylactic against the advance of the ailment, don’t you know
. Emphatically,
We must be vigilant, Captain
. So the vigilant dosing began, went on month after month, without any improvement in his symptoms or his well-being. Injections of mercury and applications of it to the skin.
Going out to dine, his body smeared with mercury, gleaming like a sardine under evening dress.

It is a mistake to surrender oneself into another’s hands. Day by day, he had felt himself grow more feeble, more lethargic, more
womanish
. But that is finished. No more poisoning himself. No more mercury, no more iodide of potassium, no more antimony. Nothing but a touch of Fowler’s Solution, three drops in a glass of port before sleep, the lightest of medicines. Placing himself in the hands of the sovereign physician, healing Nature, that is the ticket. Strenuous exercise, sunshine, invigorating air, game freshly killed and freshly prepared, there’s the true remedy.

All those doses of quicksilver can destroy a man. Heavy droplets of mercury circulating through the body, infesting the brain, weighing down every thought, here was surely the root of his dark imaginings, the explanation for the bony-ribbed, scabby, grey horse upon which he had sat so many nights at Sythe Grange.

Who was that chap at school, the one with the ampoule of mercury? Edson. Its properties fascinated the little beggar. He would slide it out of the vial in a single, shivering globule and, with a mad look in his eye, mash down hard on it with his thumb, sending myriad drops scurrying all about the tabletop like tiny silver mice. Then, playing cat, Edson would carefully bat them back together into a gleaming orb, shatter them all over again, giggling to himself.

But now the grey horse fades night by night, becoming at worst a fitful phantom compounded out of the dregs of quicksilver still circulating in his system, a small, treacherous whirlpool spinning round memories of Dunvargan: a twisted face here, a hand clenching him there, hollow whispers.

But he is confident this too will pass like the sores, the discolouration of his teeth. Ghosts are banished by daylight corporeality, by clamping his legs to the barrel of a horse, by basking in hot sun, by inhaling fresh air.

This is what he was born to do. Live like a Mongol khan. Eight hours in the saddle, a return to camp with quarry slung across the saddle-bow, a crackling fire, meat, wine, laughter, stories. The business
at Sythe Grange, stealing into the night with a longbow, dodging the gamekeeper and his minions, risking mantraps and spring guns, all that had simply been an invalid’s attempt to combat torpor, to stir sluggish blood with a dose of artificial danger. The red deer a sacrifice to propitiate the savage gods of his malady.

How else was an active man to keep on his mettle? The old men had taken his career from him. Colonel Oates berating him after the Irish rioted. After Oates had dressed him down like that, treated him like a schoolboy, thoroughly humiliated him, what choice had he but to resign? Elderly officers pushing down the strong for fear of losing their places and, if you dared to stand up for yourself, they cast you down even further. Reminded you of your place.

So be it. He has found his place, his element. No longer suffocated by the stale breath of old duffers, finally at liberty to fill his lungs freely. At last, in command. See how he’d brought that half-breed neatly to heel.

Of course, Charles is an annoyance. He, too, needs to be taught it is not his place to carp at every decision made, nag him to rush about looking for Simon. Only fools like Charles and Father cling to the ridiculous hope he is alive. There is nothing to be found but a corpse, and small chance of that. Charles ought to enjoy this jaunt, like he is doing.

The hunting is wonderful. Three antelope, a dozen prairie chicken, a mule deer bagged yesterday. A sportsman’s paradise under his very nose and Charles chooses to pick flowers with that woman.

No sign yet of any grizzlies,
Ursus arctos horribilis
. Let the county toxophilites call Horace Alfred Ford the greatest English archer after they learn the Captain has brought down one of the great bears armed with nothing but a longbow. Face it, overcome it, that’s what defines a man.

Mr. Ayto will write that exploit up very thrillingly and he is certain Charles can be prevailed upon to do him a capital illustration for the book. There it is in his mind’s eye, ravening bear erect on its hind legs, pawing the shaft buried in its throat, and there he is,
a mere arm’s-length away from those terrible teeth and claws, cool and collected.

He often mulls over titles for his book in moments such as this.
A Gentleman Nomad in the Great American Desert. The Rambles and Adventures of Captain Gaunt
. Perhaps Mr. Ayto can do those one better; he is, after all, the man of letters.