Ever After

11

So Matthew married Elizabeth, in Burlford church on 4th April 1845. And on that April day John Pearce would have presented the couple with the clock he had lovingly and expressly made for the purpose.

Quite possibly Matthew was in league with his father over the clock, since the Latin inscription on the brass backplate, though a perfectly apt motto for the young couple, also conveyed, being a quotation from Virgil, a sly tribute to the Rector, whose chief recreations were the Roman poet (he laboured on his own translation of the Aeneid) and bee-keeping — complementary passions, as anyone will know who has read the Georgics. And perhaps the Rector, touched by the gesture, even more touched by the union of this sweet couple, which he himself had consecrated, refrained from ever pointing out (he was no pedant after all) that the Latin was the popular misquotation, the word order being inverted in the original — as was only characteristic of the Virgilian style and, in any case, required by the scansion.

And the marriage must have been blessed and happy and Matthew’s animal nature must have been nothing lacking, because between 1847 and 1853 Matthew and Elizabeth produced four children: John, Christopher, Felix and Lucy. And when in 1854 he began his Notebooks, after the death of Felix, Matthew would refer to this whole period as “the ten happiest and most fragile years of my life.”

I see Matthew tiptoe from the side of a cot. Of two cots … I see him blow out candles; open the little brass plate and wind the clock. He watches Elizabeth at her dressing-table as she loosens her hair. She smiles at his watching smile in the mirror. And he resolves once again — though by now, perhaps, the resolve has become a reflexive, unconscious, continuous thing — not to tell her, to lock up his thoughts. It sometimes seems to him that that very smile of hers is like a warning finger raised to her lips (the way she does it with little John and Christopher), bidding him not speak, not spoil things. She brushes her hair. He feels a tug, like an anchor-chain, at his heart. And beyond the window, in the middle distance, hidden now in the dark, is Burlford church. If Elizabeth is the anchor, there is the harbour wall. And every night now (for they are living at Leigh House, on the edge of Burlford village) the chimes from the solid old tower steal across to them over Rectory Meadow.

No, I don’t believe he ever told her about that afternoon in Lyme. He kept quiet, as the Rector kept quiet about the misquoted Virgil. Perhaps he meant to tell her. Many times, perhaps, especially in those months before they were married — to get it over with, to exorcise the ghost! — he would have looked for the right moment. But his mouth would have been stopped by her innocent unsuspectingness, then by the innocent unsuspectingness of John and Christopher, and by the simple safety of silence. So that the not telling became in the end a duty for her sake, for her protection, a measure of his devotion. And, anyway, how did you begin? An ichthyosaur … And with each non-disclosure the eventual utterance became less probable, less plausible. The more it hung back from his lips, the more it receded from the front of his mind. And perhaps that was all that was necessary: Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, it will go away.

4th September 1855:

What a good-hearted, muddle-headed old soul is my father-in-law. He understands — why should he be disposed to understand? — so little of the matters I have now begun to raise with him. How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling. I could thank for ever my darling Liz and my darling little ones for opening my heart, even to the emaciation of my thoughts. But hungry thoughts sooner or later must feed.…

And the good-hearted Rector, in those days before Matthew’s “thoughts” began to fatten, may even have suffered some small disappointment that his son-in-law was not quite the vigorous whetstone to his own blunted faculties that he had hoped. To put it plainly, happiness seemed to take away some of the man’s bite. Well, well, he could hardly complain of that. His trivial loss was a measure of his daughter’s gain. He could scarcely grumble if preoccupations domestic and professional (old Makepeace duly retired in 1848, and Matthew was his own master) left his son-in-law with little time for stimulating debates in the Rector’s study on the relative merits of the Classics and the Sciences in fitting a man for life.

And, as the Rector baptised grandchild after grandchild, there was plentiful comfort and even relief to be drawn from watching Matthew mellow before the age-old influences of matrimony and procreation. Well, well, a man settles down and finds out how his heart truly lies, just as he, Rector Hunt, had done some thirty years ago. Once — he was to confide this much to Matthew, and then, as it happened, during an exchange of some heat in his study — he had wanted to be a missionary. A more daring and pioneering undertaking, surely, even than laying a railway line from London to Land’s End. But instead of finding himself among the savages of Africa, he had settled for a rectory in Devon, and the role had fitted so like a natural skin that even his aspirations to further preferment had somehow evaporated. It would have been agreeable, of course, if a little chafing from his son-in-law had shown that some sharper, keener, more venturesome man still lurked within this skin. But it would have been disagreeable if, under the test of the young man’s provocation, nothing more had emerged than that he was what he was: an amiable, amenable husk of a man.

Yes, when you got him alone, there was something strangely muted and docile about his son-in-law, for all his fine, vigorous qualities, something almost — the Rector would not have seen it at first, then berated himself perhaps for overlooking the obvious, while simultaneously adjusting to a not unflattering irony — something almost suppliant. Of course! It was Matthew who looked to him. It was the younger man who in these changing times, in a profession which exposed him to so much modern upheaval and innovation, looked to the older man for guidance and certitude. As why should he not to one approved as a spiritual father?

But perhaps it went further than this. Gilbert Hunt could not have helped noticing, as the years passed, how Matthew’s links with his own father grew thinner, how his visits with Elizabeth to Launceston grew more infrequent and how John Pearce, even with the incentive of becoming a three-fold, four-fold grandfather, seemed to shy away from the close-knit atmosphere of Burlford. The Rector perhaps put this down to some wary residue of Methodism. Later, he would have revised his opinion. Later too, Elizabeth would have perhaps confided in him that there had been some difference of feeling between Matthew and his father: something to do with Matthew’s not advancing himself further in the world. So, Burlford parish was not far enough in the world for the former apprentice of Launceston, and all Matthew’s attainments failed to sate the clockmaker’s pride? Matthew was not doing badly. He had advanced far enough in the world for a God-fearing man — and advancement, in the world or in the Church, was a ticklish thing.…

In any case, before this point was reached, it would have seemed to the Rector that Matthew had transferred onto him from his own father a paternal status that it was difficult not to accommodate. And, remembering that sanguine young man he had first encountered in John Pearce’s premises, he could not have imagined the almost prostrate state in which Matthew would come to him, ten years later, yes, in the Rectory study, after little Felix had died, and demand an explanation, a reason. Nothing less.

He uttered the usual formulae. He spoke of God’s will. What else could he have done? God knows, his own heart was afflicted cruelly enough by his little grandson’s death and he grieved for both parents, though it was Elizabeth who seemed better able to bear this loss of one quarter of her issue. God knows, he found it hard enough, in this thick glut of family tears, to keep his own eyes dry and remember his priorities as a clergyman. And yet (could he ever be forgiven?) he could not deny that thrill of pure joy when (God’s will not seeming to suffice) he had put his arms round Matthew in a silent, receptive embrace, while a voice inside him uttered the equation: he has lost a son, I have found one.

And that was when the trouble really began. If that scene ever really took place (I imagine, I invent), then how deluded the older man was. He could not have guessed how this son-in-law, who had so far failed to be his friendly sparring partner, would one day become his earnest antagonist, on terms beyond any he could have predicted.

I see Elizabeth turn from the dressing-table, put down her hairbrush. I don’t believe that these Victorians were really, when it came to it, so Victorian. So demure and strait-laced. I don’t believe they were a different species, who propagated their kind by some method less intimate and passionate than ours. John, Christopher, Felix, Lucy. The atmosphere at Leigh House in those early days was surely ripe with love; as sticky, as fertile, as any pullulating little patch of ground that Matthew would have stooped over with his magnifying glass and collecting bottle, ready to trace yet more evidence of nature’s astonishing irrepressibility.

For that was how the villagers of Burlford must now and then have come across him, on Jacob’s Hill or in Loxley Wood, though not yet with the haunted and furtive looks he would later display when discovered in this way. Far from it. Like as not, he would wave to you and give you the time of day and tell you something savouring rather of one of Rector Hunt’s harvest-tide sermons, about how all creatures were exquisitely adapted to their purpose in creation. Which was obliging of him.

To be sure, he had his scientifical fancies, did the Rector’s new son-in-law — beetle-hunting and the like. But he was a good sort, for all his being a Cornishman larded over with Oxford learning. He made a fine picture with his young wife at church on a Sunday and said his Amen as loud as anyone, and any man who could marry the Rector’s favourite daughter with the Rector’s own blessing was good enough for Burlford and should hold himself, what’s more, a privileged mortal. He didn’t put on airs or hide the twang in his voice. All in all, he seemed to have his head set square on his shoulders and his feet square on the ground, and everything as it should be in between, judging by results. More to the point, when he stopped jawing about bugs and caterpillars, he could lean against a gate with you and tell you all that was worth knowing about the field in front of you, just by looking. Which showed he had a care for those who lived by the land and wasn’t just a lackey to the folk in Tavistock who got rich quick (and poor again just as quick, no doubt) by burrowing about underneath it.…

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought. And Matthew did not lack for work. I see him, as his neighbours saw him, riding off over the hill to a world that was changing even more rapidly than his father-in-law’s misgivings could encompass.

Who has heard of the copper rush of southwest Devon (you see, Potter, I have done my homework), which came and went over a century ago? Forget your Klondikes and your Californias. Who has heard of Josiah Hitchens of Tavistock, “King of Copper,” who in 1844, the same year that Matthew Pearce encountered an ichthyosaur and also happened upon Elizabeth Hunt, discovered in a wood in the Tamar valley a copper lode so rich that it would form the basis for almost two decades of the biggest copper mine in Europe and within two years return its shareholders eight hundred per cent. The “mine”—that is, a chain, a family of mines (Hitchens must have regarded them as his children), which multiplied themselves along the course of the lode: Wheal Maria, Wheal Fanny, Wheal Anna-Maria, Wheal Josiah (naturally), Wheal Emma … Collectively known as Devon Great Consols.

Then there were all the lesser, hopeful ventures spawned by Hitchens’ discovery — including the Wheal Talbot mine, in which a certain James Neale would have a dominant interest. Then all the attendant enterprises (all work for Matthew): quays on the lower Tamar (ore out; coal in), canals, pumping systems, even the Consols’ own railway.

Under the guidance of his moribund senior partner, Matthew would have acquired the sought-after skills of a mining surveyor and watched the sinking of shaft after shaft. Beneath the day-to-day bustle of it all, the uncanny irony must surely have struck him. That he should be plunged, so literally, so nakedly, into the realms of Geology. That he should be lowered — for sometimes it must have been required of him — into those subterranean zones from which no one returns without having their view of life on the surface modified. When he rode back over the hill to Burlford and took in the timeless cluster of rooftops and church tower, the rookeried beeches behind the Rectory, how did it seem? Like a welcome refuge? (After all, he and Elizabeth might have chosen to live in Tavistock itself.) Or, more and more, like some piece of brittle, nostalgic scenery?

24th June 1856:

I perceive the Rector apprehends the literal undermining of his parochial security. Tavistock marches outwards — underground! Says: “My dear Matthew, I fear there will soon be nothing left of our familiar surroundings but a precarious crust. When you ride into Tavistock, do you not expect at every moment your swift descent into the lower world?” Answer, to the point: “I assure you, sir, we surface dwellers are in no such danger.” Do not say: “But the picture we cherish of our familiar world may be a thin crust for all that.”

And then there was the railway. By 1849 it had reached Plymouth, with further track laid in Cornwall. A little matter, in between, of spanning the Tamar estuary at Saltash: it would take ten years. Matthew worked on the Ivybridge-to-Plymouth section and on the projected Tavistock branch line, and, as early as 1848, would have been involved in the preliminary surveys and geological soundings for Brunel’s great Saltash bridge. It was during this time that Matthew himself was first introduced to Brunel (these little glimpses of the great — you can see why Potter is keen) and came under the spell of the engineer’s mixture of practical genius and formidable energy.

18th August 1854:

… I have grasped the meaning of I.K.B.’s perpetual cigars: he must have them, as furnaces must have chimneys — they are lit from within.

(So Brunel was a smoker too.)

And it was during this time which marked the high tide of Victorian endeavour and the high tide of Matthew and Elizabeth’s marriage that the couple, like true devotees of the new age, travelled to London (by express train, naturally) to see the Great Exhibition.

11th September 1855:

I remember — but four years ago — how we journeyed up to see the Exhibition. I do not think there could have been two happier people. It was her first journey of any length by train, and she was full of the astonishment of the thing — how it could not be possible that the cattle and the hedgerows and barns and millponds passed by so quickly and smoothly, as if they moved, not us; and how London, which she had never seen, was surely too far a place to be reached so rapidly. And I was full of how it was all, indeed, quite possible, giving a reprise — she acknowledged it — of my observations on that day we first met, and expounding the further mysteries of gradients and viaducts and cuttings and tunnels, until she threw up her hands and said, “Stop it, stop it, please! I would rather admire than know!” Whereupon I said, continuing to tease, “I grant you the joys of ignorant wonder, but, to quote your father — that is, to quote one of his quotations: ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ ” (giving a fair imitation of the Rector’s best scholastical style). Whereupon we laughed like children out of school, apologising, in his absence, to the good man.

Then she said suddenly, “Why — that is it! We should call him Felix!”—for she was then newly with child for the third time. “Is not that a happy name?!” “So it is another boy?” I said. “Of course,” she said. “And how can you tell?” “I simply can. Was I wrong with John and Christopher? You see, my dear Matty, in this case I know and you must admire.”

And a boy it was. And I will never forget how her eyes sparkled, how we laughed, with the countryside rushing past us. And those words still ring in my ear: “I would rather admire than know.”

The green valley, the church, the ivied Rectory, the huddled cottages, the copse, loud with rooks, behind the churchyard. An image out of a picture book of ye olde England, but it still exists. I should go there, perhaps (in my condition?). A sort of pilgrimage. A legitimate piece of field research. I can imagine it. There will be chicken wire in the church porch to stop birds nesting — there always is. And there will be a little, charred, utilitarian enclave in one corner of the graveyard, with a heap of grass cuttings and discarded flowers and an ancient, rusted incinerator. There always is. And they will still be there. Or some of them. Not Matthew, of course. Nor the elder brothers. Nor Lucy. But the Rector, and Mrs Rector. And Elizabeth. Real people, real bones (not this cast of characters). And, with a headstone older than them all (the graves of infants are always affecting), Felix.

22nd April 1854:

Today, after falling ill of scarlet fever on Sunday night, our darling Felix died, beyond the doctor’s saving, at half-past six in the morning, aged one year and ten months.

I don’t understand him. I never sought him out, I could do without him. But there he is, washed up before me: I have to revive him.

I don’t understand him. The Notebooks don’t begin until 1854, with the death of his son. And they end in 1860, with the departure of Matthew from Burlford and from his wife and children for ever. And throughout that six-year period Matthew must have lived, to the world at least, the life he had always lived; must have ridden off every day over the hill to his work, and slipped into bed beside Elizabeth and sat with her in their pew on Sundays, as if nothing had changed.

The Notebooks must have been secret, even from the Rector, to whom his “thoughts” were not. The entries are sporadic — whole months go by with not a word written. And at any time during those six years (but how many times did he do this?) Matthew might have looked around him at all that he had and said, indeed, What is the difference? What difference does it make? And even on that very last day — it was a fine June day: he even found time to note the fleecy clouds and the roses in the Rectory garden — he might have walked up on to Jacob’s Hill, looked down at his house, at the village, at all that sweet, unaltering make-belief, and, with a simple turning of a switch inside him and a sealing of his lips, returned to embrace it.

22nd April 1855:

Is there not in our minds, no less than in physical nature, a power of regeneration and renewal? Are we not lopped and smitten only so we will grow again? I thought it so once. “Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

9th August 1856:

Such a lovely day, blessed day. Unbroken sunshine and the breeze not bringing in clouds but seeming to sweep and cleanse the air. In the evening, at the imprecations of Lucy, who seemed to decide that today she must be my constant consort, took the gig and made a brief excursion with her round and about the village. Such a sweet evening, such a rare light over the valley, and the tops of the trees in Rectory Copse stirring as if with a consciousness of delight. On such a day why should we resist what we credulously call the “evidence of our senses”? “And the firmament sheweth his handywork”! Coming back, Lucy fell at once fast asleep, even in the jolting gig. Had to be lifted, still sleeping, from it. Observed how in her sleep she passes the back of her hand deliberately across her eyes, just as her mother does. Thought how a future husband will treasure that gesture just as I treasure it in Liz. No thing, perhaps, is truly separate from another. What right have I to make hostages to my conscience my children, my wife and all that is dear to me? When I know, truly, I would lay down my life, on the instant, for my daughter and her brothers and their mother, why can I not do the lesser thing and make a sacrifice of my doubts?

24th October 1856:

Raise again with the good Rector the question of Extinction. N.B., not Death — Extinction. The Rector would have it that I confuse — because he himself, perhaps, confuses — the two, and that my discoursing on the latter is merely the old cavilling at the former. I am not so foolish as to take issue with mortality. I will bow to Divine Will — however volatile that Volition — in the individual (have I not done so?). But in the species?

These fossils of mine, quips he, are fast becoming the “insuperable bone of our contention.” But I will not be jested into submission. Question: Is the Creator to be viewed as a mere Experimenter? Why should the Maker who fashioned Noah, and gave him such provident instructions, make what he unmakes? He answers: Being the Creator, he would have every right. I answer: Yes, but what reason? He answers: Did not God repent of his Creation? Was not the Flood sent to punish all flesh with destruction, saving only the seedstock in the Ark? And might not these creatures (viz. “my fossils”) be the remains of those living things destroyed in the Flood, their shapes “monstrously altered” by that great Catastrophe? Answer: Anatomy not so flexible, nor distortion so uniform. And, in any case, “these creatures” were extinct (by any reckoning) before the Flood.

But he does not care to be launched again on the question of Time. He looks at me, indeed, with the scowl of a man who begins to feel I take up too much of his. Yet he once, not long ago, gave it freely enough. He was once not a little glad that, after some ten years his son-in-law, I opened up my thoughts to him and put him, in his words, “on his theological mettle.” We should not, he says, from the small vantage of our private grievances, call to task the universe and its governance. No, no, perhaps. But we regularly, it seems, do the opposite thing and suppose, from our private contentments and the smooth running of our local affairs, the compliant disposition of all things. Example: I am a surveyor; I go out with my yardstick to measure the field. I am told by Lyell here, whose Principles of Geology rests at my elbow and whom I do the credit of re-reading, this time with my eyes open, that the universe is a thing beyond all known calculation. No matter: in order to measure the field it is not necessary to measure the universe, and I will swear, for all Lyell can tell me, that the field I tread today, after diligently perusing his work, is the same field I trod yesterday and that three feet still make one yard.

25th October 1856:

If Lyell is right, and I cannot — without shutting my eyes — pronounce him wrong, then the Book of Genesis is not a history but an allegory — and an imperfect one — and my father’s frail chronometers are of little avail in estimating the immense periods of Geological Time. Suppose that aeons elapsed before the Creator made Man, before the world became such as we see it to be, and that the six days of Genesis are properly to be counted in millions of years; then the entire record of human history is as a wink in the world’s duration. And if the world existed so long without Man upon it, why should we suppose that futurity holds for us any guaranteed estate and that we occupy any special and permanent place in Creation?

29th October 1856:

Walked with the Rector before dinner over Jacob’s Hill. Fine autumn weather, the bracken turning. Ventured — with caution — to raise again above questions. Answers: Bah! Who but the Almighty could have raised mountains and levelled plains? I answer: Lyell could tell him. Offer to lend copy.

Question rather is: Why should the Almighty have been so slow? If He ordained for us a privileged position between the brutes and the angels, why did He place us there so late? Anticipate the Rector’s answer: God not to be reckoned by temporal gauges; all is one sub specie aeternitatis; “a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday,” etc., etc.

6th November 1856:

Dined in Tavistock with Neale, who will be chief venturer in Wheal Talbot, and Mr Benson, a visiting acquaintance of his, a Manchester man and something in cotton. Neale a sound enough fellow. Mean to invite him some day to Burlford. Benson harder to fathom. Proposes: (1) to acquire of Neale, and similarly of others, the exclusive right to refine the arsenopyrite waste from Wheal Talbot, which can hardly be objected to by Neale, who would otherwise have the task of its disposal; (2) to export said arsenic to the American plantations to curb the American boll weevil, thus benefiting—“a pretty chain of consequences”—not only the planters but the economies of Devonshire and Lancashire.

Asks (Neale having told him, doubtless, of my “bug-hunting”) whether I am acquainted with the boll weevil—“a prodigious devourer of cotton.” Answer: “No, I am not familiar with that species, but is there not a blight upon the cotton trade more detrimental than the boll weevil? I mean the blight of slavery.” Answers: “Indeed, sir, there is much sentiment aired nowadays on the subject of slavery, much of it, I observe, by those who do not object to wear cotton on their backs or who fondly suppose that slavery is an evil unmet with in our own happy land. You do not know our Lancashire factory hands. You would find them also an interesting species. I assure you that were you to view the conditions under which the mass of them exist, you would consider the miners here in Devon to be blessed in comparison. It would be an interesting experiment, would it not, to remove one of your negroes from his shackles in the Carolinas and set him down, a free man, in the din of one of our Manchester mills? Would he thank us, I wonder, for our Christian mercy?”

9th November 1856:

Estimation: from one mature oak tree, in a seed-bearing year, some 20,000, or, say, two bushels, of acorns. (This from calculations upon my own observation of the oaks in Loxley Wood.) Of which but some hundreds will root as seedlings (failure in germination; eaten by birds and animals). Of which again barely some ten per cent (nibbling by animals; want of light — your bracken is your enemy of your oakwood) will remain after the first three years.

Estimation: A hen salmon of ten pounds from our Tamar will deposit, say, 10,000 eggs, of which perhaps only a quarter are made fertile and of these the vast bulk will be destroyed as eggs, in the larval stage or as parr. For this (being itself one of the lucky survivors) it performs, unstintingly, its gruelling and eventually fatal yearly journeys from the sea.

Estimation: The pheasant (this from Wilson, the gamekeeper) will lay, say, twelve eggs in a year. Of which (assuming no vigilant and protective Wilson) some three or four will be lost as eggs to weasels and other nest-robbers — not counting the frequent destruction of whole clutches — and of the surviving nestlings some three or four again will fall to predators or, as young birds, to the trial of their first winter.

The same pattern, if the margin of waste narrows, among the higher animals. If we suppose the human species to be above the harsh husbandry of nature, then we need but look to our own systems of economy (N.B., Benson’s factory hands). Two minutes in the company of our copper miners will prove that they are Toms, Dicks and Harrys; but are they not perceived as so many man-units, quantifiable (and expendable) at cheap rate?

Conclusions. (a) Bad: That nature is a pitiless arithmetician and gross cozener, hiding behind her bountiful appearance the truth that the greater portion of Creation exists only as a tribute to Destruction.

(b) Good (but conditionally): That nature is indomitable in her promulgation of life. What expense will she not spare to maintain her own? But this the tenacity of the blind. If disposed by the Almighty and All-seeing, why not with more thrift?

10th November 1856:

“And herb for the service of man”? If the cotton plant were created so we might not lack for clothing, why the boll weevil? And all the nations of pests.

15th November 1856:

The Rector has returned my Lyell. Confesses he has progressed so far but found it bewildering ground. It is the ground under our feet! Concedes he will not judge what he cannot pretend to have studied. A humble way of wishing the subject closed. But I perceive a kind of challenge in this embargo on further parley. I have spoken; he has heard me. This is the gist of it. He has allowed me, for so long, to be the advocatus diaboli in his study; he has answered me with patience, with sympathy, even with pleasure in the envigoration of the exercise — but now, if I truly mean to persist in all this, would I consider very carefully the consequences?

Meanwhile, under this enforced truce, he does not shrink from outfacing me indirectly. He pre-empts me from the vantage of his pulpit and counters me in his choice of text — I am sure these things are intended especially for me. This Sunday’s sermon: “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed; and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”

And still I go and sit in our pew and listen while he thus dares me before the unwitting congregation. And still I kneel and pray, and my heart is uplifted by the words of the Bible, which I cannot believe, no, no, are mere fancy, mere poetry, like the Rector’s Virgil. Dear God, I do not want to hurt the dear old man. And only when I put on again my Sunday hat, do my “thoughts” return. Only at the church gate does my conscience meet me once more and charge me with desertion.

I trust — I know — he will not speak to Elizabeth. Is not that the true measure of my hypocrisy? That I keep from my own wife what I impart to her father, wishing to spare her, being her father’s daughter, the full pain of disclosure, when I daily injure and perplex her with my furtive preoccupation; and she, dear Liz, patiently supposes that periodically I must wrap myself in weighty but necessary “studies.” Surely she suspects. But surely if I were to tell her all, she would only commend me to her father’s counsel. Surely, one day, taking the matter into her own hands, she will speak to her father. And there will be the poor Rector in a fine state of contortion.

6th July 1857:

My dear little Lucy! Such a sweet mixture of trustingness and forwardness. I confess she has become my favourite. I endeavour to instill in her what, increasingly, is absent in me and to teach her to see what I discern less and less: an immanent Divinity in all things. As this morning, when we passed a memorable hour in the sunshine, observing the butterflies on our buddleia bush. I had thought she had no mind for her lost little brother, but today, when I explain how short is the life of the butterfly, she pierces my heart by remarking: “Poor things, like Felix.”

“This is the Large White,” I say, “and this is the Tortoiseshell — you see, each wears its own apparel — and this the Red Admiral, who is called admiral not because he is a naval gentleman but because he is to be admired: do you not agree?” She asks: “But why should each kind be dressed the same?” A big question. I answer. “Why, so we can recognise them and tell one kind from the other and know their names.” Answers: “But that is silly, Papa, they cannot all have the same name. I would rather they had names of their own, like you and me.”

20th August 1857:

To the Rectory for dinner. The first such occasion for some time. I observe the Rector cannot altogether restrain the animosity formerly confined to his study, though his good wife and Elizabeth mark nothing more than an unwonted testiness, for which they chide him, and he, good soul, is duly contrite. I introduce the subject of Brunel’s bridge, the first great truss for which is to be positioned next month; whereupon he adopts the popular stance of fearful and scornful incredulity. “But surely,” he exclaims, “the thing is impossible!” I see his drift: he will not attack me, not before Emily and Liz, but he will attack the bridge, which I defend, for its unholy presumption. “You tell me,” he says, in the manner of an ipso facto denunciation, “that the distance to be spanned is nigh on a thousand feet, and each truss will weigh over a thousand tons!”

How we human beings are so easily dismayed by effects of scale. The Saltash bridge is indeed a thing of vast proportions, but it is no less practicable, no less conformable to the laws of physics, than one of my father’s quietly ticking clocks. With a sketch or two and some mathematics, I could show — I offer to do so, but the Rector forbids such dinner-table science — how such a mighty thing is achieved. To be sure, there are many who take the immensity of I.K.B.’s schemes as a measure of his vainglory and as an omen of his ruin. But it is their calumny which inhibits his success, not the man’s own scrupulous calculations.

I confess that I too, on first meeting I.K.B., had my qualms. I shuddered — not only at the fierce effluvia of his cigars but to encounter one so plainly marked out, so naturally prepared for exceptionality; and my awe converted itself into that unthinking and superstitious suspicion that in some way he transgressed.

Transgressed what? Nothing more, I would say now, than the bounds of normality. Why are some picked by fate and some not? Why are we not all Brunels? That is the conundrum out of which we construct the false charge of impious presumption. And how much more, for me, was that mystery deepened by my observing, on further acquaintance, the ordinary human limits of the man. He is no sorcerer. He has sacrificed his health for his work, which only proves he is flesh and blood; and though he is beset by a thousand obstacles and is prey to a thousand practical anxieties, I do not believe — I do not assert this out of pride — that the roots of his soul have ever been rocked as mine have been or that he could have achieved what he has without the ballast of a steady conscience.

To build a bridge! Is not that one of the noblest of man’s endeavours? To link terra firma with terra firma; to throw a path across a void. The ignorant say it defies nature, yet it rests upon her co-operation. And I might profess to the Rector — if only I might still believe it — that such an enterprise only bespeaks the work of Him whom he serves. That our science attests a greater omniscience; that the Almighty has given to the humblest bird the gift of wings with which to perform the same feat, but only to man has He given the power of Design, which is the first principle of His universe.

6th January 1858:

Illogicality of nature. Lavishes attention on the individual (fall of each sparrow?) but sacrifices individual to species. Cares only for continuation of the stock. Should result in uniformity and conformity. Yet nothing more apparent in nature than diversity, differentiation, distinction. Why this?

Answer. (a) Bounty and inexhaustible resourcefulness of the Creator. So Creation may be wonderful in the sight of man. So we may rejoice in the skill of Him who made us and know Him thereby. “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom has thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.”

Objection. We see only what we are pleased to see and are too apt to find in nature’s variety, in the infinite invention of her forms and colours, an aesthetic inspiration. We observe the butterfly but not the grub. We lament its brief, gorgeous life, but not that of the worm snatched by the bird. And what of the pretty plumage of the redbreast and the chaffinch as they go about their murder?

Answer. (b) Diversity makes possible interdependence of creatures, i.e., one would not be without the other: e.g., the spider, the fly; the bee, the flower, etc.

Objection. Makes of all creatures predators, plunderers or parasites — or victims of the same. Even-handedness or blindness of nature? Cares for the field vole and the buzzard?

Further illogicality of nature: Man. Uniformity and conformity firm principles within the species. A crow is a crow is a crow — for all his lack of insignia. Why, then, does individuality and the sense of individuality so profoundly imbue the species man? When I behold a crow I see only a crow. I do not feel the loss of one crow in a score, and it makes little sense to me to speak of a crow’s “identity.” Yet when I look at my little Lucy I see a creature whose identity, I know with absolute conviction, is unique and cannot be replaced. And this would be true even for the man I may meet in the street tomorrow and never see again.

Why in the human species should reproduction so belie its name? Why—argumentum ad absurdum—should not all human beings be the same? And why should the resemblance between offspring and parents, which we like to think of as so strong, be, in fact, so imprecise and tenuous?

Answer. Because this is the palpable proof, registered in our innermost being, that we are elevated over the beasts, that we partake of the divine, that we possess a soul.

Objection. But why should the divine express itself in the imperfect? Since, if the essence of speciation is trueness to type, the species man is infested with randomness. Not a useless randomness, perhaps, since it equips us for a complex social existence in which, as we say, it “takes all sorts”; since it gives us our Brunels as well as our blacksmiths, and allows us all indeed (oh, misnomer!) to feel “special.” But would it not be the grossest piece of fabrication, to construct upon a condition so shifting and fickle — upon the chance mutations of progeniture and the lottery of identity — the notion of what is eternal, immutable and godlike in our nature?

Hamlet’s mother says to Hamlet, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” What is the difference between belief and make-belief? What makes us give to any one belief (since it is only a matter of shifting, tuning the mind) the peculiar weight of actuality? “For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Little Felix was barely two. Ruth was forty-nine. A child of two, one has hardly begun to know. And an ichthyosaur. An ichthyosaur.

Who lets a Big Question upset his small, safe world? When matters reached their head, Rector Hunt, who still clung, perhaps, to the belief that that “inner man” in him, that former would-be missionary, might save the day, must have cursed Charles Darwin, not for his assault on religion — that could have been dismissed, he could have consigned the man to the realms of irrelevance so far as his congregation was concerned — but for timing the publication of his outrageous work so as to clinch his son-in-law’s apostasy, bring scandal on his family and parish, and smash for ever that image of himself as a spiritual champion. What was Darwin to him? What is Matthew to me? “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”

“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ ”

And, for contrast and to go back to where it all seems to have begun (what was an ichthyosaur to anybody?), consider the life of Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis, who was only twelve years old when she stumbled on that first thirty-foot fossil skeleton.

Was she horrified? Was she shaken? No. Was her universe turned upside down? No. True, she was only a child. But she was a shrewd enough twelve-year-old. She sold that first skeleton for twenty pounds. She went on to discover not only more ichthyosaurs but the first specimens of plesiosaur and pterodactyl, and she made a living and a name for herself out of her flair for fossils. Lyme Regis enjoyed a tourist boom. Renowned and learned men came to call. These included, one day, no less a person than the King of Saxony, to whom Mary is supposed to have remarked, pertly but without falsehood: “I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.…”

Perhaps all her life Mary only saw herself as a successful purveyor of wonders, a dealer in Mesozoic freaks. Leave others to ponder the meaning of her treasure trove. Was she happy, this daughter of a humble carpenter (she buried him when she was eleven and dug up a monster when she was twelve), who lived her life and found fame among bones? It was not a long life. When Matthew came to Lyme and, quite possibly, met her, she was forty-five. She would die two years later, of breast cancer. Would she have wanted (silly question) some other kind of life? Did it please her to know that posterity would not forget her? Did she ever reflect that her fate was little different from that of that unsuspecting ichthyosaur, that particular ichthyosaur, that expired long ago in some embalming lagoon, little knowing that after millions of years it would be resurrected by the touch of a twelve-year-old girl into the amazed consciousness of another race of animals, and be placed on show in one of their great museums?

Alas, poor ichthyosaur …

And everyone has this saving counter-logic, this belief in make-belief. Yes, that may be so, but — it’s not the end of the world.

I see a graveyard scene. Not Hamlet juggling a jester’s skull. A family group. Two are no more than infants, and there is a third child, not present, who is too young even to know what has happened. There is Elizabeth and there is Matthew. And there is the Rector, performing manfully one of the more testing duties of his clerical career. Pale spring sunlight on the hummocked turf, the tiny coffin.

What do I know of Matthew? I conjure him up, I invent him. I make him the protagonist (a touch of Potter’s TV temerity) of this “dramatized version.” I drag him into the light. He might have been no more than the bland words on a mossy gravestone. Sleeping inscrutably beside his wife and little son. Instead of which.

If he hadn’t married a rector’s daughter. There might have been no terrible rupture, he might have spoken without destroying, without being condemned. The day might never have come, fifteen years later, when he stormed out of the Rectory, leaving the Rector, head in hands, in his study and still in that ridiculous bee-keeping garb, and walked back to confront Elizabeth — who might, on that June evening, have picked up the clock, the clock of their union, and smashed it against the wall: there! If all creation was at fault, who cared about a little clock? But she didn’t. Plainly she didn’t.

The rescue of his marriage becoming a trap. But what was the trap? He loved her and she loved him: the world was good again. And wasn’t that the case, wouldn’t that be just as true — a question even a rector’s daughter might have put to him — whether it was God’s world or not?