The New Confessions (10 page)

“Yes.… Well, I was thinking. Is maths something we invented or something we discovered? And I thought, we couldn’t have invented something as complicated as maths. The history of maths is a history of exploration. As we go we find out more. It is all there”—he waved at the general scene—“waiting to be found.”

“I suppose so.”

“And what does that tell you about the world?”

I said nothing.

“If maths in some way is already
there
 … who created it?”

“I don’t know.… God?”

“Yes. Maybe. Maybe maths proves God exists.” He looked at me. The cold air was having its usual unfortunate effect on his face, but his eyes were wide with the intensity of his thought. To my astonishment, I suddenly felt a little frightened.

“What I think,” he began slowly, “is that maths is the key to everything.” He paused. “If you go far enough, perhaps you’ll discover the meaning of life.”

I was going to scoff, but I saw that he was caught in a strange fervent mood. He drank from the flask. He was intoxicated, but not as a result of any spiritous liquor. That afternoon he went on to tell me about a mathematician called Georg Cantor, a man, he said, who had organized the infinite. He talked about set theory, transfinite and irrational numbers, and the square root of 2, and the mysteriously potent designation
aleph-null that Cantor had devised. He told me many things, most of which I understood not at all, or which promptly slipped my mind, but I will never forget the passion of his monologue. It had a quality that was rare, and, although it may be bizarre to talk about it in association with an abstract academic subject, I can find no better word to describe it than “faith.”

It was shortly after that day on Paulton Law that my uncle Vincent Hobhouse died, not from apoplexy or heart failure as we might reasonably have supposed, but from being run over by a motor bus in Charlbury High Street. I wrote a clumsy but sincere letter of condolence to Aunt Faye. She replied at once, saying how “touched” and “moved” she had been by my sympathy and concern. Perhaps her own bereavement reminded her of mine, but whatever the reason she began to write to me regularly once a week. At first I thought this a little strange, but gradually I grew to look forward to her letters with impatience. I started writing back too, and our correspondence was soon in full spate.

You will understand that, the average seventeen-year-old boy has little or no power over his affections. In my case this impotence was singular. I lived under the sway of my emotions. Even as an adult I find the struggle to resist exhausting. I possessed no resilience then. This sort of nature is both a curse and a blessing. Try to understand me as I was and do not judge too harshly when you hear what happened next.

I have always felt vividly and instantly with no mediating influence of reflection or logic. My nature gives to all my work an impulse and a motive that, however the critics may have carped, they have never denied is my prime and most valuable asset. It is a propensity that has brought me the happiest moments of my life and wreaked terrible devastation. Oonagh was the first to receive my love, and my aunt Faye was the next. She initiated my first adult, equal discourse. I fell in love with her through print. I had not seen her since that day in Waverley Station when she kissed my cheek. Now, those seconds of contact returned—and with what transforming force. I saw her dark, bruised eyes, humid and alive; smelled the odor of her perfume; felt the soft contact of her cheek with mine. I realized, with thrilling hindsight, that I had in fact loved her, unknowingly, since that moment. When the post arrived and was distributed, I held the letter unopened for minutes, my heart clubbing my ribs, my breath painfully constricted. “All my love, Faye.” I derived a hundred nuances from those four bland monosyllables. This
was my first blind passion and I celebrated it nightly with physical release.

I began to take more care over the composition of my letters, expanding them from tedious itemization of the school news into what I hoped were stylish intimations of my own character and personality. I told her of Minto’s deepening gloom about the war, of Hamish’s speculations about mathematics as the key to all nature; I whimsically embellished and exaggerated our own roles in the rugby team, as if we were a couple of knowing aesthetes pretending to be bloods for a dare. I presented her with myself stripped of any secondary defining role—child, pupil, nephew. It was a test, in its way, and I took the increasing candor and intimacy of Faye’s replies as a sign that I had passed.

In the spring of 1916 I asked her for a photograph. It required some courage, and until it arrived, I was in a constant sweat of trepidation that I had gone too far. But it came, a snapshot. Faye, in the country, leaning on a five-barred gate, her curly hair in a loose bun, her smudged, debauched eyes narrowed by her smile. One hand held the top of a dog’s leash and the other the knuckly end of a blackthorn walking stick. On the back she had scribbled, “Shipton-Under-Wychwood. March ’16.” Who had taken it? I wondered. Probably Peter, her son. It was too well composed to be little Gilda’s or Alceste’s work. I opened the accompanying letter and began to read.

There was more stuff about Donald, sweet Donald, but I could not read on. I felt as if I were about to burst into tears. I experienced a sense of such towering injustice that I could hardly speak. What gave Donald Verulam the right, I demanded, to occupy a place in my aunt Faye’s good favor? For what possible reason could he have taken on these responsibilities? On what conceivable grounds did he ingratiate himself with a member of
my
family, whom he hardly knew? I was outraged, brimming with hurt and disappointment. I, who could only write to her, had to accept that Faye’s life was not centered on my weekly letters as mine was on hers. I was in the grip of an irrational jealously so intense it made me want to vomit.

We like to laugh, do we not, at the baroque passions of high adolescence, but we cannot deny that they control and guide us during those few hot palpitating years. It is an unsettling, overwhelming power and one that most people will never feel so vehemently again, indeed, will never want to be so ruthlessly led by. Adult life, if it is to function at all, demands a moderation of these extremes. From time to time, however, they break out—lava cracking the pumice—and dominate with the same rampaging potency. What is lust, adult lust, after all, but the desire to recapture the heady sensations of adolescent sexuality?

Personally, I have never lost that youthful capacity to
feel
, in its raw vital state. Thank God. This is what sets me apart from the many, hamstrung by decorum and convention, stifled by notions of respect and status. Even today, I can reexperience my seventeen-year-old jealousy, feel its grip at my throat, its claw in my guts. It was unfocused and indiscriminate. I did not see Donald Verulam as a rival, more as an interloper, destroying an ideal duality. But it would not let me go. I could not forget my love for Faye, could think only that he was there with her, and I was apart. One idea came to dominate my thoughts: I had to see her, if only for a few hours. I had to run away.

“What do you expect’s going to happen?” Hamish asked unsympathetically, when I told him my plan. “Do you think she’ll want to marry you the instant she claps eyes on you?” This was what I did not want to hear. I knew he was right. Faye Hobhouse, attractive widow, was being comforted through her period of mourning by Donald Verulam. They were two adults. I was a seventeen-year-old boy. But a darker fear, a more profound dismay tugged at me, unarticulated. All I knew was that I had to see her, present myself to her as I now was, erase the image of the child she had kissed at Waverley Station. I tried to make Hamish see this.

“But then what?”

I did not know and confessed as much. All I knew was that I had to interpose myself between Faye and Donald Verulam. I had to see her and let her see me.

Hamish agreed to help, even though he thought I was a complete fool. In fact I think he admired my single-mindedness, however crazily motivated. We made plans for my escape. We pooled our financial resources, which proved more than adequate. The subterfuge was simple.
Before dinner on Sunday there was a roll call, as there was at every meal. After dinner I would cycle not to Galashiels or Thornielee but in the other direction to more distant Innerleithen. There I would buy a ticket to London and board a 10:30 train, which, after a couple of changes, would get me to Reston, arriving there in plenty of time to meet the 11:55 overnight express from Edinburgh to London, King’s Cross. I chose Innerleithen to forestall for as long as possible any information emerging about my destination. People buying tickets to London were rare enough events as it was on that Tweed Valley branch line. I would be easily remembered. Minto would send Angus to Thornielee and Galashiels as soon as my absence was discovered. I might get a day or two’s start before they thought of asking further up or down the line.

There lay between us the unspoken knowledge that Hamish would become implicated. He would do his best to cover up my absence in the dormitory. A simple lie—that I had been taken ill and put to bed in the small sanitorium upstairs—would be sufficient. Our dormitory leader, a simple lad called Corcoran, would think nothing untoward, especially if Hamish made the pretense of taking my toothbrush and pajamas upstairs. Such complicity would inevitably result in a flogging from Minto. As we discussed the details of the escape (where to hide a bicycle, where to get enough carbide for the lamp—it was a fourteen-mile journey to Innerleithen), I became more upset at the price Hamish would have to pay.

“He’ll flog you,” I blurted out.

“Bound to happen one day.”

“Look, just promise me, don’t let him flog you twice. Tell him everything straightaway.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not that brave.”

I wanted to touch him in some way—show my immense gratitude—but I knew it was out of the question.

“I won’t forget this, Malahide,” I said, my voice cracking slightly.

“You helped me once,” he said. “Just paying you back.”

A fortnight after Faye had sent me her photograph, I left school to join her. It was May 24, 1916. That night for dinner we had mutton broth and rabbit and onions. Hamish gave me most of his portion. After dinner we had an hour of free time before we were required to be in the schoolhouse. Lights-out was at 9
P.M
.

Hamish and I met by the side of the stable block and walked through
the small wood, past the art rooms, and on to a spinney of trees where we had hidden the bicycle. It was a fresh cool evening with high, heavy cloud. There was a smell of honey in the air from the sycamores and a circling wood lark whispered high above us. A dull, bluey light lay over everything.

I was going to cycle along a dirt track that led to the home farm, skirt that and its noisy dogs on foot, then freewheel down the steep lane that led to the Galashiels-Innerleithen road. If all went well I should arrive at the station just after ten. The one obstacle we had not managed to overcome was my apparel. I still wore my kilt (hunting Stewart) and my short coat. We arrived at school in our uniforms and departed thus: our own clothes were forbidden. I was by now quite unselfconscious in my kilt, but for the first time in my life was leaving Scotland for England. Somehow, the thought of being kilted in London unsettled me. But there was nothing to be done. I had a long overcoat and with a bit of luck anyone catching sight of my stockinged legs beneath it might think I was wearing plus fours.

I pulled the bicycle out from a clump of bracken. We debated whether to ignite the carbide, but I decided to wait until it got darker. I felt a sudden foreboding: my reason belatedly asserting itself. Fool, it seemed to say, abandon this mad idea.… But it was too late now.

“You’d better get going,” Hamish said. “Good luck.”

“Right,” I said. I got on the bicycle. “Now, remember—”

“On you go.” He grinned, showing his large teeth. I felt hot-eyed with inarticulate gratitude. He gave me a shove, and I bumped off down the track towards the home farm. I would not see him again for three years.

Everything went as planned, at least on my side. The ride to Innerleithen was actually quite entrancing. The road followed the Tweed, and to my excited eyes the slow river and its fragrant meadows grew ever more hauntingly beautiful in the darkening, dusky light. I bought my ticket to London, one way, third class, price one pound fifteen shillings, and made my connection successfully at Reston.

Sometime after midnight, sharing a smoky, blurry compartment with two sailors and someone who looked like a commercial traveler, I crossed the border into England. I left Scotland behind me and along with it my youth. Even at the time it seemed epochal enough. I knew somehow that nothing would be the same after this particular adventure. I did not think of the future, of my meeting with Faye. I
was happy in the present moment, and there was nothing in my past, I felt, to make me want to cherish it. I hunched into my overcoat collar and tried to go to sleep. It took me an hour or so to achieve it. The sailors talked (they were rejoining a dreadnought in Southampton) and drank something from a bottle. The commercial traveler tried to engage me in conversation, but my taciturnity proved too much for him. I looked out at the dark countryside and tried to memorize, as if taking a talismanic inventory, the strange names of the stations we flashed past—Pegswood, Morpeth, Croft and Northallerton—as we traveled down England.

I recount the following events exactly as I recall them happening. I make no excuses for myself or my bizarre behavior. I was seventeen. Please remember.

The sun shone in London. I was astonished at how much warmer it was than Scotland. I felt I had entered another climate. I was not overawed by the city; if anything, the traffic in Edinburgh seemed heavier, though here the noise was more concentrated and the streets were distinctly less clean. I took an underground train from King’s Cross to Paddington. My kilt drew few curious glances. I realized at Paddington, where I saw a battalion of the Highland Light Infantry disembarking, that kilts had become reasonably commonplace south of the border since 1914.