Arcadia (9 page)

Bernard: Right!—forget it!

Hannah: Sorry—

Bernard: No—I’ve had nothing but sarcasm and childish interruptions—

Valentine: What did I do?

Bernard: No credit for probably the most sensational
literary discovery of the century—

chloE: I think you’re jolly unfair—they’re jealous, Bernard—

Hannah: I won’t say another word—

Valentine: Yes, go on, Bernard—we promise.

Bernard:
{Finally)
Well, only if you stop
feeding
tortoisesl
Valentine: Well, it’s his lunch time.

Bernard: And on condition that I am afforded the common
courtesy of a scholar among scholars—

Hannah: Absolutely mum till you’re finished—

Bernard: After which, any comments are to be couched in
terms of accepted academic—

Hannah: Dignity—you’re right, Bernard.

Bernard:—respect.

Hannah: Respect. Absolutely. The language of scholars. Count
on it.

(Having made a great show of putting his pages away,
Bernard
reassembles them and finds his place, glancing suspiciously at the other
three for signs of levity.)

Bernard: Last paragraph. ‘Without question, Ezra Chater
issued a challenge to
somebody.
If a duel was fought in the dawn mist of
Sidley Park in April 1809, his opponent, on the evidence, was a critic with a
gift for ridicule and a taste for seduction. Do we need to look far? Without
question, Mrs Chater was a widow by 1810. If we seek the occasion of Ezra
Chater’s early and unrecorded death, do we need to look far? Without question,
Lord Byron, in the very season of his emergence as a literary figure, quit the
country in a cloud of panic and mystery, and stayed abroad for two years at a
time when Continental travel was unusual and dangerous. If we seek his reason—
do
we need to look far?

(No mean performer, he is pleased with the effect of his
peroration. There is a significant silence.)

Hannah: Bollocks.

Chloe: Well, I think it’s true.

Hannah: You’ve left out everything which doesn’t fit. Byron
had been banging on for months about leaving England—there’s a letter in
February—

Bernard: But he didn’t go, did he?

Hannah: And then he didn’t sail until the beginning of July!

Bernard: Everything moved more slowly then. Time was different.
He was two weeks in Falmouth waiting for wind or something—

Hannah: Bernard, I don’t know why I’m bothering—you’re arrogant,
greedy and reckless. You’ve gone from a glint in your eye to a sure thing in a
hop, skip and a jump. You deserve what you get and I think you’re mad. But I
can’t help myself, you’re like some exasperating child pedalling its tricycle towards
the edge of a cliff, and I have to do something. So listen to me. If Byron
killed Chater in a duel I’m Marie of Romania. You’ll end up with so
much
fame
you won’t leave the house without a paper bag over your head.

Valentine: Actually, Bernard, as a scientist, your theory is
incomplete.

Bernard: But I’m not a scientist.

Valentine:
(Patiently)
No,
as a scientist—

Bernard:
(Beginning to shout)
I have yet to hear a
proper argument.

Hannah: Nobody would kill a man and then pan his book. I

mean, not in that order. So he must have borrowed the book,
written the review,
posted it,
seduced Mrs Chater, fought a duel and
departed, all in the space of two or three days. Who would do that?

Bernard: Byron.

Hannah: It’s hopeless.

Bernard: You’ve never understood him, as you’ve shown in
your novelette.

Hannah: In my what?

Bernard: Oh, sorry—did you think it was a work of historical
revisionism? Byron the spoilt child promoted beyond his gifts by the spirit of
the age! And Caroline the closet intellectual shafted by a male society! Valentine:
I read that somewhere—Hannah: It’s his review. Bernard: And bloody well said,
too!

(Things are turning a little ugly and
Bernard
seems
in a mood to push them that way.)

You got them backwards, darling. Caroline was Romantic waffle
on wheels with no talent, and Byron was an eighteenth-century Rationalist
touched by genius. And he killed Chater. Hannah:
(Pause)
If it’s not too
late to change my mind, I’d like you to go ahead. Bernard: I intend to. Look to
the mote in your own eye!—you even had the wrong bloke on the dust-jacket! Hannah:
Dust-jacket? Valentine: What about my computer model? Aren’t you going to
mention it? Bernard: It’s inconclusive. Valentine:
(To
Hannah) The
Piccadilly
reviews aren’t a very good fit with Byron’s other reviews, you see. Hannah:
(To
Bernard) What do you mean, the wrong bloke? Bernard:
(Ignoring
her)
The other reviews aren’t a very good fit for each other, are they? Valentine:
No, but differently. The parameters—Bernard:
(Jeering)
Parameters! You
can’t stick Byron’s head in your laptop! Genius isn’t like your average grouse.
Valentine:
(Casually)
Well, it’s all trivial anyway. Bernard: What is? Valentine:
Who wrote what when ... Bernard: Trivial? Valentine: Personalities. Bernard: I’m
sorry—did you say trivial? Valentine: It’s a technical term. Bernard: Not where
I come from, it isn’t. Valentine: The questions you’re asking don’t matter, you
see.

It’s like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The

English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn’t
matter.
Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific
progress. Knowledge.

Bernard: Really? Why?

Valentine: Why what?

Bernard: Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities?

Valentine: Is he serious?

Hannah: No, he’s trivial. Bernard—

Valentine:
(Interrupting, to
Bernard) Do yourself a
favour, you’re on a loser.

Bernard: Oh, you’re going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides.
Spare me that and I’ll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don’t confuse
progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great
philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite
happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal
spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t
think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars—big bangs,
black holes—who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status?
All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?

CHLOE: Are you against penicillin, Bernard?

Bernard: Don’t feed the animals.
(Back to
Valentine)
I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair,
I think I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.

Hannah:
(Loudly)
What the hell do you mean, the
dust-jacket?

Bernard:
(Ignoring her)
If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge
it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it
standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me
out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night
of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright
meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ There you are, he wrote it after coming home
from a party.
(With offensive politeness.)
What is it that you’re doing
with grouse, Valentine, I’d love to know?

(Valentine
stands up and it is suddenly apparent that he
is shaking and close to tears.)
Valentine:
(To
chloE) He’s not
against penicillin, and he knows

I’m not against poetry.
(To
Bernard) I’ve given up on
the grouse. Hannah: You haven’t, Valentine! Valentine:
(Leaving)
I can’t
do it. Hannah:
Why?
Valentine: Too much noise. There’s just too much
bloody
noisel

(On which,
Valentine
leaves the room.
chloE,
upset
and in tears, jumps up and briefly pummels
Bernard
ineffectually with her
fists.)
chloE: You bastard, Bernard!

(She follows
Valentine
out and is followed at a
run by
GUS.

Pause.)
Hannah: Well, I think that’s everybody. You
can leave now, give

Lightning a kick on your way out. Bernard: Yes, I’m sorry
about that. It’s no fun when it’s not among pros, is it? Hannah: No. Bernard:
Oh, well ...
(he begins to put his lecture sheets away in his briefcase, and
is thus reminded ...)
do you want to know about your book jacket? ‘Lord
Byron and Caroline Lamb at the

Royal Academy’? Ink study by Henry Fuseli? Hannah: What
about it? Bernard: It’s not them. Hannah:
(She explodes)
Who says!?

(Bernard
brings the
Byron Society Journal/rom
his
briefcase.)
Bernard: This Fuseli expert in the
Byron Society Journal.
They
sent me the latest ... as a distinguished guest speaker. Hannah: But of course
it’s them! Everyone knows—Bernard: Popular tradition only.
(He is finding
the place in the journal.)
Here we are. ‘No earlier than 1820’. He’s
analysed it.

(Offers it to her.)
Read at your leisure. Hannah:
(She
sounds like
Bernard
jeering)
Analysed it? Bernard: Charming sketch,
of course, but Byron was in

Italy ...

Hannah: But, Bernard—1
know
it’s them.

Bernard: How?

Hannah: How? It just
is.
‘Analysed it’, my big toe!

Bernard: Language!

Hannah: He’s wrong.

Bernard: Oh, gut instinct, you mean?

Hannah:
(Flatly)
He’s wrong.

(Bernard
snaps shut his briefcase.)
Bernard: Well, it’s
all trivial, isn’t it? Why don’t you come? Hannah: Where? Bernard: With me. Hannah:
To London? What for? Bernard: What for. Hannah: Oh, your lecture. Bernard: No,
no, bugger that. Sex. Hannah: Oh ... No. Thanks ...
(then, protesting) Bernardl
Bernard: You should try it. It’s very underrated. Hannah: Nothing against
it. Bernard: Yes, you have. You should let yourself go a bit. You might have
written a better book. Or at any rate the right book. Hannah: Sex and literature.
Literature and sex. Your conversation, left to itself, doesn’t have many places
to go.

Like two marbles rolling around a pudding basin. One of them
is always sex. Bernard: Ah well, yes. Men all over. Hannah: No doubt. Einstein—relativity
and sex. Chippendale—

sex and furniture. Galileo—‘Did the earth move?’ What the hell
is it with you people? Chaps sometimes wanted to marry me, and I don’t know a
worse bargain. Available sex against not being allowed to fart in bed. What do
you mean the right book? Bernard: It takes a romantic to make a heroine of
Caroline

Lamb. You were cut out for Byron.

(Pause.)
Hannah: So, cheerio. Bernard: Oh, I’m coming
back for the dance, you know. Chloe asked me.

Hannah: She meant well, but I don’t dance.

Bernard: No, no—I’m going with her.

Hannah: Oh, I see. I don’t, actually.

Bernard: I’m her date. Sub rosa. Don’t tell Mother.

Hannah: She doesn’t want her mother to know?

Bernard: No—/ don’t want her mother to know. This is my first
experience of the landed aristocracy. I tell you, I’m boggle-eyed.

Hannah: Bernard!—you haven’t seduced that girl?

Bernard: Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a
library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—1 spotted something between
her legs that made me think of you.
(He instantly receives a sharp stinging
slap on the face but manages to remain completely unperturbed by it. He is
already producing from his pocket a small book. His voice has hardly hesitated.)

The Peaks Traveller and Gazetteer—
James Godolphin
1832—unillustrated, I’m afraid.
(He has opened the book to a marked place.)
Sidley
Park in Derbyshire, property of the Earl of Croom ...’

Hannah:
(Numbly)
The world is going to hell in a
handcart.

Bernard: ‘Five hundred acres including forty of lake—the
Park by Brown and Noakes has pleasing features in the horrid style—viaduct,
grotto, etc—a hermitage occupied by a lunatic since twenty years without
discourse or companion save for a pet tortoise, Plautus by name, which he suffers
children to touch on request.’
(He holds out the book for her.)
A
tortoise. They must be a feature.
(After a moment
Hannah
takes the
book.)

Hannah: Thank you.

(Valentine
comes to the door.)

Valentine: The station taxi is at the front ...

Bernard: Yes ... thanks ... Oh—did Peacock come up trumps?

Hannah: For some.

Bernard: Hermit’s name and cv?

(He picks up and glances at the Peacock letter.)
‘My
dear Thackeray ...’ God, I’m good.

{He puts the letter down.)

Well, wish me luck—
{Vaguely to
Valentine) Sorry about

... you know ...
{and to
Hannah) and about your ...

Valentine: Piss off, Bernard.

Bernard: Right.

(Bernard
goes.)

Hannah: Don’t let Bernard get to you. It’s only performance
art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It’s
not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat
show. Bernard’s indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on
television.

Valentine: I don’t care to be rubbished by the dustbin man.
{He
has been looking at the letter.)
The what of the lunatic? (Hannah
reclaims
the letter and reads it for him.)

Hannah: The testament of the lunatic serves as a caution
against French fashion ... for it was Frenchified mathematick that brought him
to the melancholy certitude of a world without light or life ... as a wooden
stove that must consume itself until ash and stove are as one, and heat is gone
from the earth.’