Ever After

9

The thing was that he saw an ichthyosaurus. The thing was that he had come face-to-face with an ichthyosaur, on the cliffs of Dorset in the summer of 1844 (age: twenty-five).

I see him lurching, slipping, fleeing down that wet path towards the beach. Everything is chance. It might so easily have been otherwise. He might have gone to the aid of the young woman who even then, as he scrambled blindly by, sat on the damp ground, encircled by a little attentive group, nursing a twisted ankle. Only a minute before, under the flapping tarpaulin, he would have heard her sudden cry. And if he had gone with the others to assist, if he had not lingered alone for those few mesmerical moments, his whole life might have been different. He might have married the young woman. What an opportunity missed! There she was, pale, shaken, in need of rescue and obliged to show, for all the fussing of her chaperone, an unaccustomed amount of lower leg. He might have fallen in love with this pretty invalid and lived happily ever after. Instead of which, he chose to stare into the eye of a monster.

And it was meant to be a holiday. A week’s recreation which, given Matthew’s general cast of mind, would require an element of study — he would try his hand at this fossil business — but which might not exclude (Lyme Regis was well known not only for its fossils but for its summer crop of eligible daughters) a little amorous exploration.

The facts about Matthew Pearce as they stood in the year 1844. The facts infused with a good deal of theory, not to say imagination. The Notebooks do not begin till 1854, though they begin with a backward reference to that summer day in 1844, which, scrupulous as Matthew’s memory was, might have been subject to a degree of narrative licence. The facts, mixed with a good deal of not necessarily false invention. Pace Potter, I am not in the business of strict historiography. It is a prodigious, a presumptuous task: to take the skeletal remains of a single life and attempt to breathe into them their former actuality. Yet I owe Matthew nothing less. As Ruth would have said, the script is only a beginning: there is the whole life. Let Matthew be my creation. He would have appreciated the commitment — not to say the irony. And if I conjure out of the Notebooks a complete yet hybrid being, part truth, part fiction, is that so false? I only concur, surely, with the mind of the man himself, who must have asked, many a time: So what is real and what is not? And who am I? Am I this, or am I that?

He was born in Launceston, Cornwall, in March 1819, son of John Pearce, clockmaker, and Susan Pearce. And he began the Notebooks thirty-five years later, on the day of the death of his third-born, Felix. So much for plain, hard fact.

But I prefer, to get the measure of him, to picture him early one morning, in his twenty-second year, in an inn-yard in Oxford, about to leave that city, a fully educated young man, to take his modest and unsung place (he has no fond ideas) in the world. His journey home — for in the first place the world would have meant his father — would have been by stage-coach, a matter of some two-and-a-half days on the road. Thus at this point in his life Matthew would have belonged to the Old World. But only just. Within another five years he would have been able to have made the journey, at least as far as Exeter, by train. Within another ten years Matthew himself would have helped, in his small way, to guide the Great Western Railway — then nudging along the Thames valley — as far as Plymouth.

But there is no reason to suppose that on this summer’s morning he feels himself to belong to a vanishing age. Or that he looks upon the coach and team that will transport him westwards with the sort of wistful feeling that one day, indeed, people will apply to steam engines.

I see him (I have no proof of this; I have no idea what he looked like at all) as one of those robustly sober-looking young men in whom youth puts in only a tenuous appearance. He has the solid build and steady movements of a precocious maturity. He is unostentatiously dressed, for an Oxford man, and as he stands in the bustle of the inn-yard at this unseemly hour of the morning, he shows no sign either of aloofness or of discomfort. There is even a hint that he feels at home amidst such workaday surroundings and that he is not entirely sorry to be leaving this cloistered and rarefied city.

The arm that swings his portmanteau is strong and sure. The eyes of women, more easily turned by any number of sprightly young bucks, might, having first passed over Matthew, return to him with a sense of revised judgement. The face cracks readily enough into a generous smile or to offer some casual pleasantry — he has an appealing way of hovering between thoughtfulness and affability. The gaze is open and frank and meets yours forthrightly. You would say it was an observant gaze.

The very last quality he emanates — he climbs up, naturally, to take his seat on top behind the coachman — is lack of balance. Stability, rather, an intuitive sense that all things must have their basis, might be called his tacit watchword. He will become a surveyor. That is an unambitious, even lowly profession for a man with an Oxford education. But Matthew is shrewd enough not to leap ahead of his talents — three years at Oxford have taught him that he is neither an idler nor a genius — and both Matthew and Matthew’s father (though perhaps Matthew’s father rather more) are shrewd enough to foresee that there will be much call in the years ahead for versatile surveyors, and that a surveyor with the asset of an Oxford education might go far, even given the limited spheres in which surveyors operate.

And look at it another way. It is true that in the coming years, great engineers and designers would win for themselves immortal fame — it would be Matthew’s lot to know at least one of them (and feel a touch of pity mixed with his admiration) — but no surveyors. Yet what, in essence, was the surveyor’s task? It was to establish the true ground of things; to provide a basis, a sure foundation on which the works of others might be raised. Was it not, literally, fundamental? It was as essential as it was unspectacular. It had nothing to do with risk and hazard; everything to do with stability and trust.

And trust, merging imperceptibly with the deeper stuff of faith, might have been the other, silent watchword of this dependable-looking young man. In his portmanteau is his mother’s Bible. Matthew would have referred to it often in private and been able to quote large parts of it by heart. And now, in 1840, after three years’ exposure to scholarly scepticism and the rigours of science, he would not have relinquished the belief that every word it contained was the literal and immutable truth. The world, too, must have its basis, and the nature of this basis had been indelibly intimated to him long ago on his mother’s knee. The central fact of life was there. It was a wondrous thing, this central fact, a wonderful clarifier, encourager and liberator. It meant that the profounder questions of existence were settled and one was free to go out on to the surface of the world and do good, practical work. And the surface of the world only brought you back to the central fact: nature’s handiwork, and man’s too, since it exploited the unchanging laws that were part of nature’s design, was evidence of God’s.

The coachman cracks his whip. They leave the city. The sun fills the green bowl of the world.

A further reason Matthew might have given for choosing a career unlikely to be meteoric or all-consuming was simply that it allowed time for other things. If Oxford had shown him he was no scholar, he recognised in himself a naturally inquisitive mind. He liked to be out and about, to get the touch and tang of things (he looked forward to this stage-coach journey which others would have regarded as a three-day purgatory), to look, take note, assess, compare — all admirable habits for a surveyor. In this sense, Oxford had constrained him (the truth was, perhaps, that he had shielded his mind from some of Oxford’s more unsettling influences). He thought of his interests as being ranging and extra-curricular: natural history, geology, the ever-absorbing study of his fellow men.

Geology, of course, bore directly on his chosen profession. But Matthew had not yet begun to sound (it would come, before that holiday in Lyme) those intimate links between geology and palaeontology which were not essential to a surveyor’s broad understanding of rock and soil, that mysterious paradox by which this study of dead stones offered the clue to Life itself.

Geology drew him, in the first place, precisely because it was the science of solidity, the very key to that thing on which all human endeavours began and must surely come to rest. Ask Matthew, aged twenty-one, what he most loved about the world, and he might well have said: land. He couldn’t have said where the passion came from — from the rolling prospects from his native Launceston — but it is there. Matthew loved land as a surveyor and a believer in God should. “And the little hills rejoice on every side …” His palm sometimes tingled — he wouldn’t have known how to explain it — to reach out and stroke the contours of a particular landscape, as one might stroke the flanks of a horse or the head of a child.

And he will have plenty of cause to feel such an itch, plenty of opportunity for geological reflection, as his coach carries him across the broad belly and down the crooked limb of England, over limestone and sandstone and peat and clay, through an old, old world.

Yes, he is glad to be free of this dreamy city with its fogs of ideas (I know the feeling). Out among real things. He has a handicap, a blemish, which he has endured and tried vainly to eradicate for three years: his accent. It is a Cornish accent, an east Cornish accent, but to most Oxford folk it is a yokel’s burr. From time to time it has miserably betrayed him by substituting a “bain’t” for an “isn’t.” But now, as he travels ever south-westwards, he relishes the release of allowing it progressively to return. He even prankishly indulges it (let’s suppose) before some enforced travelling companion, some dapper fellow-baccalaureus (let’s imagine) going as far as Bath, for whom “land” only has a meaning when it is translated into “income.”

Matthew’s father married Matthew’s mother in 1817. It seems to have been a union which demanded compromises, since the former was of the Methodist persuasion, while the latter was of staunchly Anglican stock. But John Pearce, like many of his kind, perhaps, when improved prospects presented themselves, was prepared to remodel his faith so far as to exchange chapel for church. His marriage, in short — since Susan’s father, once certain conditions were met, was not ill-disposed — was the means of his setting himself up in trade.

From his father Matthew would have inherited the conscientiousness, the self-reliance and that same will to self-improvement which stemmed from his submerged Methodist heritage. But from his mother he would have inherited his simple, sanguine faith. Susan Pearce was perhaps not exceptionally God-fearing: she merely accepted absolutely the traditions in which she had been raised and took parenthood responsibly enough to become in Matthew’s earliest years his moral instructor. The instruction apparently consisted almost entirely of direct readings from the Bible, with her comments and interpretations, though she seems to have been not averse to the occasional digression and to telling tales, as Matthew would later describe them, “of the old days.”

None of this, perhaps, would have had such far-reaching effects on Matthew, were it not for the peculiar vividness of his mother’s personality and for the fact that she died suddenly when he was only eleven and she was thirty-two, so that her memory became a shrine for all his religious feeling. At an early age there was cruelly brought home to him religion’s intricate connection with mortality. The Bible would remain for him the sole consolation for his mother’s inexplicable departure, the only true reply to death. Though, for all his early training, he does not seem to have been able to sustain the same trauma from the opposite end: the death in 1854 of his son Felix, aged two. Rather, this heralded the collapse of Matthew’s spiritual certainty. However, by this time Matthew would have retained not only the undimmed memory of his mother but the memory of his encounter with an ichthyosaur.

His mother’s death would also have made clear to Matthew, if he did not guess it already, that his father had married not just as a means to material advancement. Until in later life he succumbed increasingly to drink, John Pearce does not seem to have been given to extravagant displays of emotion. But his son must have perceived what was seldom voiced: John did not remarry; grief became an abiding fact of his life. And it must have dawned on Matthew sooner or later that the loss of his mother was the beginning of his father’s own gradual abandonment of his faith.

One result of his bereavement might have been John Pearce’s return to the chapel. He turned, rather, to the world. He was the former industrious apprentice who had assiduously bettered himself so as to run his own modest workshop and his own modest household: it now meant everything to him that the amelioration should be continued in his son.

Only some intuition of the inner motive at work could have kept young Matthew from rebelling against the cajoling, insistent overseer his father must have become. It was all a form of tribute — a mutually binding tribute to his dead mother. On that basis Matthew would have learnt to serve rather than resent his father. He would have understood the responsibility placed upon him and grown up with a sense of obligation and duty as springing from some tenderer source than mere obedience. His appetite for knowledge would have been released and, behind all the paternal coercion, blessed. And all this would have reached its apogee on that day when, against all the laws of social expectation (though his father was now operating a thriving business and his clocks were sought after by the local gentry), a place was secured for him at Oxford. His father’s features, so long the stern features of a determined taskmaster, must have at last allowed themselves a broad, proud grin.

And now, as Oxford recedes behind him, Matthew imagines the scene of his homecoming. His father will be waiting in the market square. He will not be cowed by his son’s attainments, nor parade them too vainly before his neighbours; but nor will his son be cowed any more by his once overbearing father. They will greet each other amicably, as equals. In the White Hart they will clink glasses (one Methodist pledge John has long abjured), and Matthew will be aware of a sense of mission fulfilled.

What he will not be aware of, not until, years later, he confides the realisation to his notebook, is that while it is he who has enjoyed the benefits of education, it is really his father who is the more free-thinking, the more forward-looking and certainly the more calculating. It is John who, adroitly exploiting the connections of his clockmaker’s clientele, has secured for Matthew (he will start next month) a position with the Exeter firm of Westbrook and Cross, newly appointed consultants to the Bristol and Exeter Railway. And it will be John who, some four years later, will write to his son, pointing out that one Robert Makepeace, a crusty soul who runs a surveyor’s business in Tavistock and has so far found no junior partner to his permanent liking, is ailing and contemplating retirement. Tavistock is not Exeter, and a partnership in the Exeter firm is almost guaranteed, but now that the Bristol and Exeter was complete, the railway would forge its way westwards across the county to Plymouth: Matthew, with all his experience, would be well placed. And, as Matthew surely knew, Tavistock was no longer a sleepy market town: the talk now was all of copper mining. Here was an opportunity for Matthew not only to acquire a business of his own but to extend his experience into new fields.…

The coach rocks and trundles on through the long, midsummer day, through the drowsy heart of England. As evening sculpts the hills of Somerset, it rattles into the honey-stoned, eighteenth-century city of Bath. Matthew’s graduate companion, who has tried him all day with his stabs of wit, proposes a night’s dissipation—“one last bachelorly bout before we wed the stern bride of the future.” Matthew resists the wilder suggestions in the proposition but submits to supper and a good deal of claret before his companion finally takes his leave — whether to some house of the night or to the clutches of a guardian aunt, Matthew cannot be sure.

He goes to bed drunk. Upsets a candle. It would be like him, the next morning, to be a little ashamed of his behaviour. Nearly twenty years later, recalling, with some wistfulness, the days when his father’s abstinence was total, he will remember his saying, as they passed some grinning, lolling drunkards in a Launceston street: “They have swallowed the devil and now he makes them feel pleased.” But now, standing at his inn-chamber window, open to a starry sky, feeling the lift of the world beneath him like the pitch of a ship, he cannot resist a certain festive mockery of his own inner seriousness. We are not who we think we are, only figures in some eternal, amoral masque.…

There is a strong conservative streak in Matthew’s nature — an instinct, for all his inquisitiveness, for not looking too far about him, or looking only at what he wishes to see; and a tendency, for all his self-reliance and capability, to take a good deal for granted. During his spell at Oxford, the Tractarian question has been raging; but there is no evidence that, young man of religious conviction, he interested himself in the turmoil of an old Church facing new times. Nor, while he was at Oxford, does he seem to have pursued, though the opportunity was there, those areas of scientific debate which in later life he would grapple with for himself, as if they were new.

He sees himself as setting out to take his place in an advancing (if essentially unalterable) world: it is really his father who will have put him there. He thinks he has decided, himself, on his future profession: it is really his father, with his own instinct for not setting his sights too high, who has chosen it for him. And though John Pearce is no gambler (one Methodist vow he has not abjured) and would frown at his son’s forsaking the noble duty of Work so far as, for example, to dabble in railway or mining shares, Matthew would be astonished that his father’s dreams for him, if only when under the influence of brandy, extend beyond his becoming merely an accomplished, successful surveyor for the rest of his life.

It might also be claimed that there is in Matthew’s nature a strong capacity for happiness. Contentment, at least. A man who likes to think — and who does not like to think. Who has time for ideas but is peculiarly at home in the world of things. Who has no sense of his own importance but no vague notions, either, of his own abilities. Who has no airs and graces but a natural social ease — he is at home with people too. Who has the knack of knowing and not knowing.

Look at him now as, his journey resumed, the coach bears him onwards. Look into this bluff, obliging, earnest, amiable, in no way special face, which combines, right now, the stolidity of a man twice his age and the innocent glee of a child released from school. He has — he doesn’t know it yet — depths.

10th June 1854:

We are all aware, though none of us announces the fact, that today would have been the second birthday of little Felix. One and a half months dead — as if such posthumous calendars were significant. We go to the graveside, though I truly believe poor Felix, if he could speak, would bid us not to mark the inaugural day of a life so wastefully short.

A blooming, midsummer’s day. Swallows swooping around the church tower. A day designed to banish dark thoughts. Yet the thought does not escape me that it is almost ten years ago to the day that I made my excursion to Lyme. How I knew nothing then of my darling Liz, of my John, Christopher, Lucy and poor Felix. And yet how neither the passage of ten years nor all the heaped contentments they have brought me can expunge from my memory that former incident. How different my present powers of patience, of humble submission to Providence, had I not taken that journey. God knows how much since then I have pretended. God knows! — but there, in a phrase, is the essence of my pretence.

How earnestly have I endeavoured to persuade myself that I was the victim of some circumstantial or atmospheric “effect.” Was not the tableau perfect? The darkening sky, the lightning flashes at sea, the flapping and straining of the tarpaulin pitched above the exposed skull. I recall every detail. The sudden cry of the young woman who had slipped on the wet surface further down the path, so that everyone rushed from the enclosure to attend the accident, leaving me alone with the creature.

Why did I not rush too? To assist the damsel in distress. A little common gallantry might have saved me.

Yet I know — ten years cannot undo the knowledge — that what followed was not a moment of unreasoned panic and confusion but a moment of acute perspicacity. Truly, I was to rush too, a little while after the others, from under the tarpaulin; to rush quite past the little group helping the young lady, who must have regarded me with astonishment. I recall a cluster of umbrellas bouncing in the wind; the pale face of the victim (victim!) supported by one of her party while she tried the strength of her ankle; mud on her garments. But of what little note to me was this touching scene of mere human misfortune.…

He saw an ichthyosaur. It is difficult to know how people will react when they see an ichthyosaur. I can understand it with Felix — though I have never had children. Yes, I can understand it with Felix (though, even then, such a man as Matthew, cognisant of the infant mortality rate of the times — they bred hard, these Victorians, and with reason — might have thought: not so terrible, one in four). But with an ichthyosaur? An ichthyosaur.

Quite probably, he had seen one before. (I too have seen ichthyosaurs, in museums, in books. I have made a point of it, in fairness to Matthew. I look at them and don’t feel that much at all.) If he had been to London, which he probably had, he would have seen in the British Museum the famous ichthyosaur, thirty feet long, discovered (first of its kind to be so unearthed) by Mary Anning of Lyme Regis — beside which awesome exhibit this half-buried specimen, perhaps some fifteen feet, was a mere baby.

Yet museums are safe, orderly, artificial places, and here, still trapped in the rock from which workers employed by the same Mary Anning were labouring to release it, within sight of the plump hills of Dorset and the ruffled waters of Lyme Bay, was the thing itself. Here, in the very spot where— Here. Now. Then. He stood face to face with the skull of a beast that must have lived, so certain theories would have held, unimaginably longer ago than even the most generous computations from the Scripture allowed for the beginning of the world (yet which must have been created, so something inside him would have insisted, by God); so long ago that the fact of its existence had been almost irretrievably swallowed up in the fact of its extinction and only now, in the pathetically locatable nineteenth century, had it come to be known that it had existed at all; and thought— And thought what?

“… The moment of my unbelief. The beginning of my make-belief.…”

You have to picture the scene. You have to imagine these scenes in which for most people nothing changes, nothing is essentially different — all this drama and fuss, a passing storm, a twisted ankle — but for some people the world falls apart. I think that’s perhaps what Ruth did — all this drama! To picture how the world might be — how it might fall apart or hold, incredibly, together — in the eyes of other people.

Such a simple, unconscionable thing: to be another person.

A flapping tarpaulin. Sticky gobs of rain, a bruised, galvanic sky. The long, toothed jaw; the massive eye that stares through millions of years. He is the creature; the creature is him. He feels something open up inside him, so that he is vaster and emptier than he ever imagined, and feels himself starting to fall, and fall, through himself. He lurches on to the path, as if outward movement will stop this inward falling. He passes a startled young woman, who has fallen also, but less than her own length and on to solid ground. He blunders down another path, not the path he came up by but a path which takes him to the beach — as if to stop himself falling he must get to sea level. The storm swipes in off the sea. His hat blows off; he is soaked. Everything is lost and confused — sea, rocks, cliffs, sand — in swamping greyness.

17th June 1854:

An impossibility, a contradiction: to pray for belief. He knows everything. He “unto whom all hearts be open.” He punishes me with Felix’s death, for perpetrating this impossibility. Or: for my false belief, the belief in my own pretence.

Or: Felix’s death: merely a proof.

18th June 1854:

No, I will not believe it. I will acknowledge the insoluble mathematics of nature, the wanton waste and the resourcefulness of her economy; that compared with the brief life of countless creatures, my Felix may be said to have lived an age; that everywhere, if seeds and eggs be counted, examples abound of gross destruction so that few may survive; that humankind, albeit leniently accommodated, is not excused from this scheme. But I cannot believe that in this prodigious arbitrariness there is any purpose that grants life to a child only to withdraw it after two years; that it is not the case, rather, that he might as well not have existed; that he holds, in truth, in the great course of things, no place, value or identity compatible with the vain fabric of loving recognition that I, that we all, have built around him.…

He walks and walks, to stop the falling, all the way back to Lyme. If Lyme is still there. It is — emerging from the curtains of rain. But how pathetic and pitiable it looks; the little huddle of habitation, the quaint tumble of roofs, the cluster of rocking boats cradled in the curving arm of the Cobb.

And it was meant to be a holiday. And now it has become an experience from which he must recover, slowly convalesce. Though no one can help or nurse him but himself. No one will even know how he is not himself, how far he has fallen through himself, except himself. And the only remedy he has is to pretend. To pretend so hard that one day, perhaps, he will forget he is pretending. He will do his best, and even achieve, quite soon, some outward approximation of recovery, so that, back in Launceston that same summer, even his own father will not guess the true extent of the damage. The lad is strangely out of sorts, to be sure. So much for the benefits of sea air. Some talk of an untimely ailment, a fever, a soaking in a summer storm. As like as not, some woman is at the bottom of it. At any rate, his son is oddly reluctant to discuss the whole Tavistock question. Well, well, let the cloud pass, give everything its time.

Matthew says nothing. And John Pearce treads carefully. But remarkable recoveries — or rescues — happen. And Matthew has a capacity for happiness. And John Pearce is doubly glad that Rector Hunt should call that afternoon about his clock, and that he should bring his daughter with him.

Or that is how I like to see it. That is how I wish it to have happened. I give to Matthew’s life that very quality of benign design that he had already glimpsed might be lacking from the universe. I choose to believe that Matthew first met Elizabeth in his father’s office in Launceston that same July. And I choose to believe that at the very first meeting Matthew would have had the overwhelming perception that here, when his thoughts had already shown him how terribly you could go adrift, was the true, sure ground of his life. That he would have felt himself falling, sinking, collapsing again, not with that fearful sense of falling into a void, but with a sense of miraculous, restoring gravitation.

The scene: John Pearce’s workshop in Bell Street, Launceston. July sunshine — let’s suppose there was sunshine — slanting through the workshop windows on to the scratched and worn surfaces of the workbenches and on to the little brass pieces — cogs, springs, levers — laid out like some miniature treasury on rectangles of black felt. Matthew would have been impressed by the improvements to the workshop. His father now employed two journeymen and one apprentice, but he still sat, himself, at his workbench, eye-glass crammed into one eye, conforming to the image Matthew still retained of him from childhood: a vaguely magician-like figure, hunched over his little clockwork world, unwittingly miming the classic analogy for the existence of a Creator, and seeming to be engaged not only in the making of clocks but in the manufacture of this vital stuff called Time, this stuff which Matthew still thought of as being essentially human in meaning, the companion and guardian of human affairs.

A clock ticks on the mantelpiece.…

A desultory conversation in progress: Launceston gossip. John notes yet again the want of his son’s usual buoyancy and curiosity. Then the little bell in the office tinkles and John says, “Ah,” and drops his eyeglass neatly into his right hand, removes his apron, rolls down his sleeves and reaches for his jacket. “That will be Rector Hunt.”

Or perhaps there was nothing so apparently casual about this encounter. Perhaps John had said to Matthew: “The Reverend Hunt, from Burlford, will be calling by about his clock. He would be pleased to meet you.” Which is why Matthew was there. Or perhaps John, on a previous occasion, had said to the Rector, a man who, living in a household of women, felt a want of educated male conversation and a vague sense of being out of touch with the world, “Matthew will be home in July, so please call by — and you can see how the clock comes along.” But whether John had anticipated the Rector’s being accompanied by his elder daughter is another matter. And whether Rector Hunt had said to Elizabeth, “I shall be paying a call on Pearce the clockmaker — I believe his son, a Brasenose man, may be there. Perhaps you’d care to join me?” is another matter still. But why should Elizabeth have decided to attend her father about so humdrum a matter as a clock, when she might have passed her time in Launceston much more pleasurably, at the dressmaker’s or milliner’s, say?

Matthew would have gone with his father into the office, ready to offer his hand to Rector Hunt, but his eyes would have been compelled to meet first — and have been met quickly, meekly — by the eyes (I see them as glossy brown) of his daughter. A just-detectable hiatus would have occurred in which a just-detectable mutual blush would have touched the faces of the two young people. Then, after exchanged pleasantries and at a polite inquiry from the Rector and some prompting from his father, Matthew would have found himself rehearsing what he would have already rehearsed to his father, namely his account of the opening of the Bristol and Exeter Railway and of the jubilant arrival, just two months ago now, at the Exeter terminus of the first train from Paddington. And Rector Hunt and his daughter (if with different motives) would have listened with genuine awe to his tale. Railways existed, had existed for some thirty years in Cornwall — little, narrow-gauge haulage lines serving the north coast ports. But the Rector and his daughter would never have seen a steam engine. And these hurtling contraptions, which could take a man from his breakfast in London and set him down for dinner in Devon, they would have regarded with amazement and not a little dread.

Matthew does not overdo his scene-painting, but his voice betrays a curious urgency, and he finds himself gratified, peculiarly enlightened, by the looks of astonishment and vague fear on his listeners’ faces. As the train of his description is greeted by the cheering crowds at Exeter, a train of thought passes through his mind that fills him — he cannot say how much it has to do with Miss Hunt’s look of appealing vulnerability — with a sudden gush of liberating relief. The fear of the new, he thinks, is as primitive, as superstitious, as the fear of the old. We fear what we do not know. To the vole, the hawk is a monster of tearing beak and talons; only a man sees its aerial grace and skill. How many things that are dreadful to man might not be, in the eyes of their Maker, comely and fitting?

He moves with sudden confidence (John is amused to note how his son’s spirits are reviving) and with the aim of reassuring his audience, to give a practical and lucid account of that masterpiece of engineering, the steam locomotive, with a brief commentary on the dependability of Mr Brunel’s Broad Gauge. Elizabeth thinks: he has a way, to be sure, of making the extraordinary seem perfectly acceptable — and such a dependable, broad-gauge kind of smile. But the Rector, who cannot get beyond seeing a steam engine as a sort of tamed dragon and forgets that he has initiated the whole subject, says, “Yes — yes, indeed. But tell me, is that Philpott fellow still peddling Divinity at Brasenose?”

“But Papa,” protests Elizabeth, “you interrupt Mr Pearce.”

Matthew notices the swiftness of this intercession on his behalf and the briefest flash of a look from her (acknowledged by a reflexive tightening of the corner of his mouth) which seems to say, “See, I do this for you.”

“I’m sure”—she redeems any brusqueness with a smile—“he has so much more to tell us.”

And Matthew is only too conscious at this moment that he does, indeed, have other things to tell — he has seen stranger and more awesome things, indubitably, than railway locomotives. The possibility comes rushing to him that she might be the very one — the only one — that he might tell them to. But responding to the awkwardness of the situation (she notes: he is not clumsy, he has natural tact), he saves the Rector’s embarrassment—“No, indeed, I go on at too much length”—and, turning the conversation with a deferential inquiry about Rector Hunt’s own Oxford days (aware with the corner of his eyes how the corner of hers is twinkling; aware of how her father, almost unconsciously, takes her hand and strokes her wrist), allows a cheerful exchange of reminiscence about Oxford, or rather about two different Oxfords, which each pretends, for the sake of good feeling, are the same.

“No, no, Dean Philpott must have retired before my going up.”

“Ah, quite so. There would have been, I suppose, that man Newman.…”

And Elizabeth listens. And the Rector, on the verge of a theological disquisition, brings himself up suddenly with the remark (his turn for apology) that he has quite forgot the time and must be on his way. Whereupon Elizabeth says, and everyone laughs: “Indeed, Papa, you have quite forgot the time, for you have quite forgot the clock!”

The way things begin. The auguries of happy-ever-afters. A clockmaker’s shop, where time ticks impartially away. Perhaps Matthew was aware that this first encounter with his wife-to-be had been engineered by his father and was the work of a witting or unwitting match-making by the two elder parties. But what did this matter, when he could be unswervingly sure that if he had met Elizabeth in some other circumstance, wholly free of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring and wholly subject to chance, he would have experienced the same thrilling emotion of a foregone conclusion?

Call it — heaven-sent.

A sober scrutiny might have judged that a man who had lost his mother when he was small, and remembered her most clearly as the woman who had read to him from the Bible, might well be drawn to a clergyman’s daughter; and that in that bumbling, kindly figure of Rector Hunt (the way his hand had touched hers) he saw something his own father could not offer. But this would have been to ignore the young man of only twenty-five, who, for all his, by now, increasing and debilitating proneness to thought, still possessed, in spite of himself, a healthy animal nature. He falls in love, heavily, thickly, thankfully (is there any other way?). He is still — thank God — open to experience. He sees himself, indeed, as “saved”—returned to the sweet, palpable goodness of the world.

He goes back into the workshop with his father and is strangely, tenderly struck by his familiar presence. The way his leather apron and his eye-glass seem to wait for him; the way the brass components on the bench have an almost sentient, obedient distinctness. Things fit, things have a purpose.

That evening, his steps light and every breath fresh and clear, Matthew strolls down from his father’s house to the knoll at the edge of town on which stand the ruins of the castle. Once, his mother used to take him on this same walk, and used to tell him, like some made-up tale to warn impudent young boys, how men, wicked men, had once been hanged in public right here on the castle green. The air is soft and aglow. A breeze caresses the peaceful curves of the landscape, and Matthew is prompted by that old urge, that old itch in the palm — as if he were capable, now, of such a giant reach. Perhaps he need never tell her — better never to tell her — about his “thoughts.” Let them be banished like demons.

“The little hills rejoice …” The land of the living.

He watches a buzzard hang over the hillside, then drop from its shelf of air. He looks eastwards across the valley, where the Tamar severs Cornwall from Devon, and is struck by the pleasing notion that, like the best lovers of old, he and Elizabeth dwell on different sides of a divide.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth, riding home to Burlford in the carriage with her father, displays a tendency to pensive, absorbed silence. Several times the Rector ventures to strike a conversation, but then, with perhaps a smile to himself, thinks better of it.

I invent all this. I don’t know that this is how it happened. It can’t have been like this simply because I imagine it so.

That night, in the White Hart, there would have been a bloom about his son’s features — more than could be ascribed to an evening’s stroll — which John Pearce would have been too shrewd not to see the cause of. Just as he was too shrewd to dwell, for the time being, on the Rector’s visit earlier that day. But, calling for another brandy and water, and knowing full well that Burlford was only three miles from Tavistock, he would have chosen his moment and said, “Now, about old Makepeace. What do you say?”