Arcadia (8 page)

Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it
was enough, you were in there and you bloody
know.
Valentine: Are you
talking about Lord Byron, the poet? Bernard: No, you fucking idiot, we’re
talking about Lord Byron the chartered accountant. Valentine:
(Unoffended)
Oh
well,
he
was here all right, the poet.

(Silence.)
Hannah: How do you know? Valentine: He’s
in the game book. I think he shot a hare. I read through the whole lot once
when I had mumps—some quite interesting people—Hannah: Where’s the book?

Valentine: It’s not one I’m using—too early, of course—

Hannah: 1809.

Valentine: They’ve always been in the commode. Ask Chloe. (Hannah
looks to
Bernard. Bernard
has been silent because he has been
incapable of speech. He seems to have gone into a trance, in which only his
mouth tries to work.
Hannah
steps over to him and gives him a demure
kiss on the cheek. It works.
Bernard
lurches out into the garden and can
be heard croaking for’Chloe ... Chloe!
⁹
)

Valentine: My mother’s lent him her bicycle. Lending one’s
bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is. My mother is in a
flutter about Bernard, and he’s no fool. He gave her a first edition of Horace
Walpole, and now she’s lent him her bicycle.

(He gathers up the three items [the primer
,
the
lesson book and the diagram] and puts them into the portfolio.)
Can I keep
these for a while?

Hannah: Yes, of course.

(The piano stops.
GUS
enters hesitantly from the
music room.)

Valentine:
(To
Gus) Yes, finished ... coming now.
(To
Hannah) I’m trying to work out the diagram. (GUS
nods and smiles, at
Hannah
too, but she is preoccupied.)

Hannah: What I don’t understand is ... why nobody did this
feedback thing before—it’s not like relativity, you don’t have to be Einstein.

Valentine: You couldn’t see to look before. The electronic
calculator was what the telescope was for Galileo.

Hannah: Calculator?

Valentine: There wasn’t enough time before. There weren’t enough
pencilsl (He flourishes Thomasina’s lesson book.)
This took her I don’t
know how many days and she hasn’t scratched the paintwork. Now she’d only have
to press a button, the same button over and over. Iteration. A few minutes. And
what I’ve done in a couple of months, with only a
pencil
the
calculations would take me the rest of my life to do again—thousands of pages—tens
of thousands! And so boring!

Hannah: Do you mean—?

(She stops because
GUS
is plucking
Valentine’s
sleeve.)

Do you mean—? Valentine: All right, Gus, I’m coming. Hannah:
Do you mean that was the only problem? Enough time?

And paper? And the boredom? Valentine: We’re going to get
out the dressing-up box. Hannah:
(Driven to raising her voice) Vail
Is
that what you’re saying? Valentine:
(Surprised by her. Mildly)
No, I’m
saying you’d have to have a reason for doing it.

(Gus
runs out of the room, upset.)

(Apologetically)
He hates people shouting. Hannah: I’m
sorry.

(Valentine
starts to follow
Gus.)

But anything else? Valentine: Well, the other thing is, you’d
have to be insane.

(Valentine
leaves.

Hannah
stays, thoughtful. After a moment, she turns to the
table and picks up the
Cornhill Magazine.
She looks into it briefly,
then closes it, and leaves the room, taking the magazine with her.

The empty room.

The light changes to early morning. From a long way off,
there is a pistol shot. A moment later there is the cry of dozens of crows disturbed
from the unseen trees.)

Bernard
is pacing around, reading aloud from a handful of
typed sheets,
Valentine, Chloe
and
Gus
are his audience,
Gus
sits
somewhat apart, perhaps less attentive,
Valentine
has his tortoise and
is eating a sandwich from which he extracts shreds of lettuce to offer the
tortoise.

Bernard: ‘Did it happen? Could it happen? Undoubtedly it
could. Only three years earlier the Irish poet Tom Moore appeared on the field
of combat to avenge a review by Jeffrey of the
Edinburgh.
These affairs
were seldom fatal and sometimes farcical but, potentially, the duellist stood
in respect to the law no differently from a murderer. As for the murderee, a
minor poet like Ezra Chater could go to his death in a Derbyshire glade as
unmissed and unremembered as his contemporary and namesake, the minor botanist
who died in the forests of the West Indies, lost to history like the monkey
that bit him. On April 16th 1809, a few days after he left Sidley Park, Byron
wrote to his solicitor John Hanson: ‘If the consequences of my leaving England
were ten times as ruinous as you describe, I have no alternative; there are
circumstances which render it absolutely indispensable, and quit the country I
must immediately.’ To which, the editor’s note in the Collected Letters reads
as follows: ‘What Byron’s urgent reasons for leaving England were at this time
has never been revealed.’ The letter was written from the family seat, Newstead
Abbey, Nottinghamshire. A long day’s ride to the north-west lay Sidley Park,
the estate of the Coverlys—a far grander family, raised by Charles II to the
Earldom of Croom ...’

(Hannah
enters briskly, a piece of paper in her hand.)

Hannah: Bernard ...! Val ...

Bernard: Do you mind?

(Hannah
puts her piece of paper down in front of
Valentine.)

Chloe:
(Angrily)
Hannah
.

Hannah: What?

CHLOE: She’s so
rude!

Hannah:
(Taken aback)
What? Am I?

Valentine: Bernard’s reading us his lecture.

Hannah: Yes, I know.
(Then recollecting herself.)
Yes—yes—that
was
rude. I’m sorry, Bernard.

Valentine:
(With the piece of paper)
What is this?

Hannah: (To Bernard) Spot on—the India Office Library.
(To
Valentine) Peacock’s letter in holograph, I got a copy sent—

Chloe:
Hannah!
Shut up!

Hannah:
(Sitting down)
Yes, sorry.

Bernard: It’s all right, I’ll read it to myself.

Chloe:
No.

(Hannah
reaches for the Peacock letter and takes it
back.)

Hannah: Go on, Bernard. Have I missed anything? Sorry.

(Bernard
stares at her balefully but then continues to
read.)

Bernard: The Byrons of Newstead in 1809 comprised an eccentric
widow and her undistinguished son, the “lame brat”, who until the age often
when he came into the title, had been carted about the country from lodging to
lodging by his vulgar hectoring monster of a mother—’ (h ann ah’s
hand has
gone up)—
overruled—‘and who four months past his twenty-first birthday was
master of nothing but his debts and his genius. Between the Byrons and the
Coverlys there was no social equality and none to be expected. The connection,
undisclosed to posterity until now, was with Septimus Hodge, Byron’s friend at
Harrow and Trinity College-’ (Hannah’s
hand goes up again)—
sustained—
(He
makes an instant correction with a silver pencil.)
‘Byron’s contemporary at
Harrow and Trinity College, and now tutor in residence to the Croom daughter,
Thomasina Coverly. Byron’s letters tell us where he was on April 8th and on
April 12th. He was at Newstead. But on the 10th he was at Sidley Park, as
attested by the game book preserved there: “April 10th 1809-forenoon. High
cloud, dry, and sun between times, wind southeasterly. Self-Augustus—Lord
Byron. Fourteen pigeon, one hare (Lord B.).” But, as we know now, the drama of
life and death at Sidley Park was not about pigeons but about sex and
literature.’

Valentine: Unless you were the pigeon.

Bernard: I don’t have to do this. I’m paying you a compliment.

Chloe: Ignore him, Bernard—go on, get to the duel.

Bernard: Hannah’s not even paying attention.

Hannah: Yes I am, it’s all going in. I often work with the
radio on.

Bernard: Oh thanks!

Hannah: Is there much more?

chloE:
Hannah!

Hannah: No, it’s fascinating. I just wondered how much more
there was. I need to ask Valentine about this
(letter)—
sorry, Bernard,
go on, this will keep.

Valentine: Yes—sorry, Bernard.

chloE: Please, Bernard!

Bernard: Where was I?

Valentine: Pigeons.

chloE: Sex.

Hannah: Literature.

Bernard: Life and death. Right. ‘Nothing could be more eloquent
of that than the three documents I have quoted: the terse demand to settle a
matter in private; the desperate scribble of “my husband has sent for pistols”;
and on April i ith, the gauntlet thrown down by the aggrieved and cuckolded author
Ezra Chater. The covers have not survived. What is certain is that all three letters
were in Byron’s possession when his books were sold in 1816—preserved in the
pages of “The Couch of Eros” which seven years earlier at Sidley Park Byron had
borrowed from Septimus Hodge.’

Hannah: Borrowed?

Bernard: I will be taking questions at the end. Constructive
comments will be welcome. Which is indeed my reason for trying out in the
provinces before my London opening under the auspices of the Byron Society
prior to publication. By the way, Valentine, do you want a credit?—‘the game
book recently discovered by.’?

Valentine: It was never lost, Bernard.

Bernard: ‘As recently pointed out by.’ I don’t normally like
giving credit where it’s due, but with scholarly articles as with divorce,
there is a certain cachet in citing a member of the aristocracy. I’ll pop it in
ad lib for the lecture, and give you a mention in the press release. How’s
that?

Valentine: Very kind.

Hannah: Press release? What happened to the
Journal of English
Studies}

Bernard: That comes later with the apparatus, and in the
recognized tone—very dry, very modest, absolutely gloat-free, and yet
unmistakably ‘Eat your heart out, you dozy bastards’. But first, it’s ‘Media
Don, book early to avoid disappointment’. Where was I?

Valentine: Game book.

chloE: Eros.

Hannah: Borrowed.

Bernard: Right.’—borrowed from Septimus Hodge. Is it conceivable
that the letters were already in the book when Byron borrowed it?’

Valentine: Yes.

chloE: Shut up, Val.

Valentine: Well, it’s conceivable.

Bernard: ‘Is it
likely
that Hodge would have lent
Byron the book without first removing the three private letters?’

Valentine: Look, sorry—1 only meant, Byron could have borrowed
the book without asking.

Hannah: That’s true.

Bernard: Then why wouldn’t Hodge get them back?

Hannah: I don’t know, I wasn’t there.

Bernard: That’s right, you bloody weren’t.

chloE: Go on, Bernard.

Bernard: ‘It is the third document, the challenge itself,
that convinces. Chater “as a man and a poet”, points the finger at his “slanderer
in the press”. Neither as a man nor a poet did Ezra Chater cut such a figure as
to be habitually slandered or even mentioned in the press. It is surely
indisputable that the slander was the review of “The Maid of Turkey” in the
Piccadilly
Recreation,
Did Septimus Hodge have any connection with the London periodicals?
No. Did Byron?

Yes! He had reviewed Wordsworth two years earlier, he was to
review Spencer two years later. And do we have any clue as to Byron’s opinion
of Chater the poet? Yes! Who but Byron could have written the four lines
pencilled into Lady Croom’s copy
of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’—

Hannah: Almost anybody.

Bernard: Darling
_T

Hannah: Don’t call me darling.

Bernard: Dickhead, then, is it likely that the man Chater
calls his friend Septimus Hodge is the same man who screwed his wife and kicked
the shit out of his last book?

Hannah: Put it like that, almost certain.

Chloe:
(Earnestly)
You’ve been deeply wounded in the
past, haven’t you, Hannah?

Hannah: Nothing compared to listening to this. Why is there
nothing in Byron’s letters about the
Piccadilly
reviews?

Bernard: Exactly. Because he killed the author.

Hannah: But the first one, The Maid of Turkey’, was the year
before. Was he clairvoyant?

chloE: Letters get lost.

Bernard: Thank you! Exactly! There is a platonic letter
which confirms everything—lost but ineradicable, like radio voices rippling
through the universe for all eternity. ‘My dear Hodge—here I am in Albania and
you’re the only person in the whole world who knows why. Poor C! I never wished
him any harm—except in the
Piccadilly,
of course—it was the woman who
bade me eat, dear Hodge!—what a tragic business, but thank God it ended well
for poetry. Yours ever, B.-PS. Burn this.’

Valentine: How did Chater find out the reviewer was Byron?

Bernard:
(Irritated)
I don’t know, I wasn’t there,
was I?
(Pause. To
Hannah) You wish to say something?

Hannah: Moi?

chloE: I know. Byron told Mrs Chater in bed. Next day he
dumped her so she grassed on him, and pleaded date rape.

Bernard:
(Fastidiously)
Date rape? What do you mean,
date rape?

Hannah: April the tenth.

(Bernard
cracks. Everything becomes loud and overlapped
as
Bernard
threatens to walk out and is cajoled into continuing.)