Ever After

4

There are three things which have complicated my presence in this place and made me the subject of prying attention as well as recrimination among my fellow collegiates — setting aside, that is, the principal fact that my presence here is a joke. I am speaking now of the period before my recent botched brush with death. It is too early to say, except in practical terms, how this will have affected my general status. The business of Sam’s death, which should, I suppose, be called complication number four, has not helped. I sense outrage modified by pity. Not a sweet combination. But then they do not know that I have changed.…

There was first the fact that I had been Ruth’s husband. This, along with Sam’s money, was, I soon realised, my chief asset and counted for a good deal of initial unction — no, let me say genuine cordiality. Even envy. However much the academic world likes to maintain its persona of high-minded aloofness, it is not insusceptible to a little glamour — even the vicarious, refracted glamour that belongs to the husband of an actress cut off at the peak of her success. The contemplative life secretly yearns for the active life — or, in this case, the acting life. I know this, having once been, myself, the dowdy moth, meant for some inconspicuous cranny of scholarship, yet drawn to flutter helplessly round the flame of a show girl (which is what Ruth then could legitimately have been called). I was lucky. My wings did not get burnt. They even acquired, in the fullness of time, a sort of borrowed iridescence, which seemed to linger on (I suppose it is all gone now) after her death.

Glamour, I know, having lived with Ruth, is only a kind of dressing, a trick, a concoction, the promise of something else. (Beauty, love, happiness …) It is as desirable and as meaningless as money. Yet these grave and erudite dons, these seekers after knowledge, they would trade not a little of their learning and wisdom for just a touch of glamour.

(Look at Potter. He does these absurd radio programmes. His big moment came when at last he progressed to TV. He offers watered-down or souped-up scholarship for the masses. Potter’s potted history. Talks any old bilge. Even I can tell this. We will see him soon hosting a quiz show. He is, by all accounts, a genuinely accomplished historian. Yet he feels obliged to prostitute himself, for the sake of a little dubious limelight, by turning himself into something he is not.)

I was thus regarded when I first came here, not least by Potter, as something of an intriguing novelty. Something that might add a little pep and lustre to the otherwise sober atmosphere of academic life. Fellows’ wives — and Fellows too, with a touch of resentment — itched for the moment when they could ask me what was it like, what was it really like, to be married to her? What was she really like? No one was interested in my (admittedly unsensational) thoughts on Renaissance prosody.

I was under no illusions. Iridescence lingered on, at least in the eyes of beholders. But I was fully aware (what was true of my former self is even truer of the thing I am now) that I possess no intrinsic magnetism. What worldly adroitness I can muster, what chutzpah and charm, what spring in my step (I suffered in my younger days from flat feet), I owe to Ruth. I was not slow to detect, amidst all the actual or implicit interrogation, another, unspoken question (I was used to it): Could I really have been the husband of Ruth Vaughan? What — him?

But here the pathos factor came into play. I was not only the former husband of a well-known actress. I was the former husband of a well-known actress who had died in circumstances publicly reported and lamented and officially labelled (is there no other word?) “tragic.” I was no ordinary widower. A school of thought which held that I should be treated gently — and therefore girded around with a sort of halo of knowing looks and evasions — was largely overruled by the school of thought which held that now was the very time (five months after the event) when I should be encouraged to “talk”—an excuse for fêting me liberally (if you can fête the bereaved) and milking me for the “inside story” I was supposedly bursting to tell.

And in all this, all this being the centre of dubious attention, all I wanted was to be the opposite thing, to be the dowdy, forgotten moth again. Yes, Sam was right — devious revenge or not — I accept that he was right. Perhaps I could never have coped. How much longer could I have gone on, holed up in that Kensington flat, in those roomfuls of memories, a redundant theatrical manager (my sole client had died on me), besieged by the commiserations of stage and screen, by agents, lawyers, morbid hangers-on and prurient journalists. I needed shelter, I needed sanctuary.

The contemplative life.

My period of spurious celebrity here lasted some three months. It carried me through to my mother’s death, which did not have the effect of extending the prerogatives of grief. Rather, it was about that time — summer turning to autumn and a new academic year looming — that my special privileges fell away from me like some ineffective disguise, and I began to be scrutinized for my real credentials. It was then that the general view took hold that my academic qualifications, though not entirely absent, were way below the college standard, and that, Ellison Fellowship or no Ellison Fellowship, I was an impostor.

And it was then that the Pearce manuscripts, which my mother’s death released into my hands, came — in more than one sense — to my rescue. I should explain that the terms of the Ellison Fellowship are generously vague. The incumbent, with all the resources of the College and the University at his disposal, is at liberty to pursue whatever line of scholarly research he wishes. The question of the duties he owes in return is left largely a matter of unwritten agreement. I had already undertaken — primarily to give myself something to do, but also to show willing and spare the College embarrassment — some supervision of students. After a gap of fifteen years, I found myself once more speaking to these strange, young — even younger now — people. (They too blurted out their little condolences.) I flattered myself that my teaching was not ineffective, though how much this depended on my students’, like others’, suspending their usual rigorousness of appraisal, I don’t know. But now I was to understand that because of certain “feelings” in the Faculty (I will come to this) the continuation of my tutorial services was under review.

What was really under review was not my teaching but my whole contribution to scholarship. What exactly was the line of research for which College and Faculty were providing me with such superlative amenities? It looked very much to them — it looks the same to me too (Sam, you bastard!) — that my line of research, apart from a little desultory and random browsing, was doing nothing at all.

But then, with my mother’s death, there was Matthew Pearce. There were Matthew Pearce’s notebooks and his last letter to his wife, Elizabeth, which had survived miraculously Uncle Ratty’s depredations and my mother’s successive “clear-outs” and incinerations, not to mention Matthew’s consignment to the murky recesses (ah, but it seems I am heading that way too) of family failure and disgrace.

It is quite possible, entirely plausible, in fact, that she never knew she had them. There was more “junk” than you would credit, for a woman given to severing herself from the past, in those two old, rotting leather suitcases — one with its brass locks completely seized up. I took it upon myself to open them. Sam seemed unduly angered that I should have done so — I can understand this now — but he calmed down when the contents were made known. In fact, the occasion seemed to mark the end of the dazed, quarrelsome mood into which my mother’s death had thrown him. “I’m sorry I bit your head off, pal.” I didn’t show him the photograph of Uncle Jim. But I showed him the notebooks, which he quickly flipped through, then returned to me with a shrug. And I showed him the cutting of my mother’s singing début. “No, no, you keep it, kid. I’m sorry I yelled at you. You keep it all.” There was the old, avuncular look in his eye.

But my mother had certainly known about Matthew Pearce. And so had I — from an early age — if only because of the clock: the little mantel clock with a rosewood case that was made in 1845 by Matthew’s own father, as a present for his son and his bride, and which has served as a wedding gift over successive generations ever since. Ruth and I received it in 1959. Since our wedding was an impromptu, unannounced affair, we received it rather late in the day. Nonetheless, my mother felt it proper we should have it. It was one of few heirlooms she cherished and did her duty by. It used to tick and chime away, amongst relics — long since discarded — of the “India days” in our old home in Berkshire. I don’t know what my father made of it. Then it kept watch over Ruth and myself, first on our various mantelpieces in London, then in the cottage we bought in Sussex in 1975 and made increasing use of, Ruth’s schedule permitting, up until her death. Now it sits here — that is, on the sturdy mantelpiece of my august Fellow’s chambers — one of a little nucleus of objects I brought with me from the flat. I sold the cottage over a year ago. The cottage, of course, was where Ruth died.

It has a gentle, modest tick-tock. A crystalline, elfin chime. Inlaid in the rosewood, above the face, are little scrolls, rosettes and a pair of cupids. On the hinged brass plate at the back, which covers the winding mechanism, is engraved M. & E. 4th April 1845, and above this, the motto, Amor Vincit Omnia. All of which my mother interpreted for me long ago, before our Paris days.

“It’s Latin, darling. You’ll learn Latin at school. ‘Love conquers all.’ If only it were true.”

Then she told me the tale, such as she herself knew it, and with a tolerant sigh, of Matthew Pearce. A rare exception to her story-telling habits.

Now that I have the Notebooks, now that I know so much more about Matthew, the clock has taken on a new significance for me — not that it wasn’t always an object of special value. If its discreet face had eyes and a mouth, it could tell me so much more (than even my scholarly surmises) about Matthew — and Elizabeth. It is a simple deduction that Matthew himself must once have opened the little hinged plate and turned the key. But only now does that fact seem extraordinary, mysterious, teasing — like the fact that Matthew wrote the sloping, regular hand (expressing such irregular thoughts) that fill the Notebooks. That when I open their pages, I open, I touch, the pages that he once touched. I occupy, as it were, his phantom skin.

The little brass winding-key, with its trefoil handle, is, so far as I know, the original key. After we acquired the clock (I told Ruth its history), it somehow became Ruth’s self-appointed task to keep it wound. It was a point of some concern to her that she should not allow the clock to stop, at least — given her frequent trips away — while she was able to attend to it. I wind it now. Ever since that moment of panic, less than two days after her death, when I remembered that the clock had not been wound (but it had not stopped), it has been my resolution never to let the clock wind down. I cannot explain this. This was before Matthew entered my life. When I wind the clock, I hold the key which Ruth once held, and holding the key that Ruth once held, I hold the key once held by Matthew.

The people go; the patterns remain. Something like that …

It is a moot point why this little clock which presided not only over Matthew’s marriage but over his scandalous divorce, and seems to have presided since over a good many marred marriages, including my mother’s to my father, should have become such a token of nuptial good will. Elizabeth might so readily have disposed of it. She might — who knows? — have picked it up and sent John Pearce’s loving handiwork smashing to pieces. Yet, when her second marriage had already fallen on hard times (this would have been after she received Matthew’s letter) she gave it to her daughter as a blessing on hers.

But I think I know why. There is surely no other explanation. She kept the clock, and passed it on, for the same reason that she kept the letter and the Notebooks. For the same reason that the clock has kept its perversely benign status (“One day, sweetie, when you get married …”). For the same reason that we keep, in spite of all, in spite of ourselves, certain things it proves impossible not to keep.

Matthew was a clockmaker’s son, from Launceston in Cornwall, who one day fell in love with the daughter of a vicar from a village in Devon and married her and had children, and it seemed they would all live happily ever after. Then one day Matthew told the vicar that he no longer believed in God. Result: scandal, divorce, Matthew’s unseemly exit from the village, never to show his face there again …

Thus, my mother’s version (“They took things seriously in those days, darling”), first told to me one day as she wound the clock, when I must have been seven or eight, and never significantly enlarged since.

The Notebooks; the letter to Elizabeth: my “line of research.” There is no stipulation in the terms of the Ellison Fellowship that prevents the appointee from switching subjects. Complication — resentment — number two. I had no wish — whatever the College planned — to give up my scheduled tutoring of first- and second-year students in the Elizabethans and Jacobeans (always my strong period). But I happened to have drop into my lap what is the dream of every scholar, if granted to few, not even to those proudly inured cases (this place abounds with them) who have toiled for decades, heroically but aridly in their chosen fields, without ever stumbling across the spring of something Original or New. I was the owner of hitherto undiscovered material, of fresh data, of (I am quoting Potter now, but what the hell?) “an historical document of enormous value — a testimony to the effects on a private life of ideas that shook the world” (he had slipped — anticipatorily, perhaps — into his media style).

It was therefore my duty — let alone my new-found, galvanizing purpose — to give full priority to this matter. To see that it was properly presented (a book: editorial preface; introduction; notes) to the world of learning, if not to the public at large. My only mistake was to have spoken when I did to our resident whiz kid (history of Victorian ideas a speciality); to have shown him (goddammit!) the manuscripts. To have become, once more, persona grata at the Potter dinner table — an enviable privilege, I gather — but no longer for my cachet (though Katherine Potter is another matter) as a refugee from show-business and grief.

Potter’s argument was, of course, that by the same token that I had a duty, in respect of the manuscripts, to the community of learning, so I had a duty to entrust my material to a specialist best equipped to serve that purpose: i.e., an historian, i.e., Potter, him.

You see, we old, doddering savants, we harmless, cloistered fools, are real cutthroats, when it comes to it. There is no fury and spite, no venomous chicanery, like that of the thwarted scholar. We are bandits, pirates, pillagers, when it comes to that all-important stuff: recognition. I can see now why men have duelled over questions of attribution, why they have come to blows in laboratories, why they have fought over who shall be first to name some particular species of plant or spider — why they have journeyed to the ends of the earth just to find some hitherto unknown species on which to bestow their names. No one owns knowledge (Potter’s own argument): what does it matter if the unimagined Amazonian beetle is named after Miller or Müller or Martini?

So why should I be so possessive? Why not yield to Potter, to the community of learning, the pool of knowledge, or whatever? Why should I hug Matthew Pearce to me and not want to let him go? What is he to me? And why should it be my task to set him before the world?

And I have not even begun to write the “book”—the “edition”—which is my purported justification for being here. Perhaps now, in my changed state, I never shall. I don’t know at what point the “book,” the scrupulously scholarly exercise, ceased to matter, if it ever mattered. You see, it is the personal thing that matters. The personal thing. It is knowing who Matthew Pearce was. And why he should matter so much to me. And why things mattered so much to him, when (what difference did it make? What difference does it make?) he might have gone on living happily ever after.