Jackson's Dilemma (2 page)

Contrary to his expectations Edward did not see very much of the girls even after the delayed departure of their mother shortly before Christmas, after which the girls went to Paris, returning to London and reappearing in early spring in Lipcot and again meeting Edward in the street, when they told him they had again rented the same cottage. After that - well, after that - the girls now staying on at their cottage wanted to play tennis. Edward hastily refurbished the tennis court at Hatting. They wanted to ride. Edward did not ride, but he arranged for them to have ponies. Edward did not like long walks, but the girls did and they all went on long walks and Edward read the map. The girls wanted a swimming pool and Edward told Benet that there must be a swimming pool. The girls teased Edward, they made fun of him, they called him solemn. They were often with Benet and with Benet’s friends, some of whom Edward began to tolerate. In all this time however they had not set foot in Hatting Hall. At last Edward, who was absolutely averse to entertaining, noticed the now continual hints, and gave a lunch party. Indeed it took Edward himself some time before he became thoroughly aware of what was going on, what it was all about, that he was falling madly in love with Marian, who was madly in love with him. Only later did he discover that everyone at Penndean, and at Hatting, was ‘in on it’, not of course excluding the inhabitants of the village who were taking bets in the pub.

How had it all so gently, so quietly, so inevitably come about?
Can
I be happy, Edward wondered to himself, can my dark soul see the light at last? There he was now, early in the morning, sitting upright at his desk on the first-floor drawing room of his house in Notting Hill. He was breathing deeply and expelling his breath in long gasps. He could feel his heart hitting his ribs violently. He put his hand to his chest, the palm of his hand feeling the force of the blows. He sat there quietly, silently. Tomorrow he was to be married in the little fourteenth-century church upon the hill near Hatting Hall.

 

Suddenly something terrible and unexpected occurred. The window pane had cracked and fallen inward, showering the carpet with little diamonds of broken glass. The sound of the report seemed to come a second later. A pistol shot? He leapt to his feet, crying out, as he remembered later. An assault, an attempted assassination, a nearby bomb? Then he thought, someone has thrown a stone through the window. He stepped quickly across, grinding the glass under foot, and looking down into the street. He could see no one. He thought of rushing down but decided not to. He turned back into the room and began to pick up the gleaming fragments of glass, looking about him as he did so, at first putting them into his pocket then into the waste paper basket. Yes, it was a stone. He picked up the stone and held it, then dusted it with his other hand to remove the specks of glass. He put the stone carefully upon the mantelpiece. After that he drove in his beautiful red car to Hatting Hall.

 

On the afternoon of the same day Benet was, or had been, busy making arrangements for the evening dinner party. Arrangements for tomorrow’s wedding were, so far as he knew, complete. He had discussed every detail with the Rector, Oliver Caxton. The wedding was to be at twelve o‘clock. The service would be the usual Anglican wedding service. The church was normally visited by the Rector, who was in charge of other parishes, once or twice a month, and on special occasions such as weddings, funerals, Christmas, and Easter. Curates just now were hard to come by. The congregations on ordinary occasions (Sunday and matins only) consisted sometimes and at most of Benet, Benet’s visitors, Clun the Penndean gardener, his daughter Sylvia, three or four women from the village, in summer perhaps two or three tourists. Uncle Tim, Benet’s late uncle, had regularly read the lessons. Benet also used to read the lessons. Now Clun sometimes did. Benet had now given up except for special occasions. Sometimes in winter the Rector conducted the service in the otherwise empty church. Of course the Barnells were Quakers, but there was no Meeting near Lipcot, and the plain Anglican service contained, in accord with wishes from Penndean, periods of silence. There was at present no piano. Benet did not object. As for the two beautiful young people, the radiant hero and heroine of the scene, they had at first demanded a scrappy civil wedding, but had been overruled by the bride’s mother, Ada Fox, who unfortunately was unable to be present, and by Mildred Smalden, a holy lady, friend of the Barnells. Benet had wanted a ‘proper show’, as he thought Uncle Tim would have wished. How very sad that Uncle Tim was no longer with them. Concerning the number of the guests, the young pair had prevailed, there were to be
very few.
There was to be champagne and various wines (Benet did not like champagne) and all sorts of delicious things to eat, sitting, or standing, or walking about, at Penn after the wedding, immediately after which the two children (as Mildred called them) were to depart for an undisclosed destination in Edward’s Jaguar.

A small number of wedding guests were to be present at Benet’s dinner table that final evening. Benet knew Ada well and her daughters very well, having become recently something of a ward to the girls and thus a convenience to their flighty mother. Marian, who loved ‘creating’ things, was spending the last day and night in London completing some secret ‘surprise’ and would drive down very early on the wedding day. Edward, in spite of protests, was to return to Hatting on the morning before. Rosalind, who was of course to be her sister’s bridesmaid, was also coming ‘on the day before‘, with Mildred. Two other guests, friends of Benet, were Owen Silbery, an eccentric painter, and a young man who worked in a bookshop called Thomas Abelson, a friend of Owen, nicknamed ‘Tuan’ by Uncle Tim, and likely to arrive by taxi from the distant railway station. Rosalind and Mildred were to stay in the house, in the ‘old part’, usually closed up, supposed to be haunted, bitterly cold in winter, but now delightfully opened up and prettified by the maid Sylvia. Tuan was to stay in the guest bedroom in the main part. Owen stayed in the village pub, as he always insisted on doing, being a special friend of the proprietor. The pub was called the Sea Kings, with a sign of a pirate ship painted by Owen. In fact Lipcot was not near the sea, but the pub had borne that name for a long time, centuries it was said.

 

 

 

Benet was alone in the library. In the library there was silence, as of a huge motionless presence. The books, many of them, were Uncle Tim’s books, they had been in their places since Benet was young. Many of the books still glowed, faded a fainter red, a fainter blue, the gold of their titles dusted away, emanating a comforting noiseless breath. Most of Benet’s books were still in London. (Why still? Were they planning a sortie to take over the library at Penndean?) Benet’s uncle had died leaving Benet so suddenly in absolute possession, here where from childhood he had lived more as a guest or a pilgrim, a seeker for healing. But even when Uncle Tim was away in India some pure profound gentle magic remained. The books did not know yet, but they would find out that Tim had gone, really gone away for ever.

Benet’s father, now long deceased, had been Uncle Tim’s younger brother. Benet’s paternal grandfather, a lover of the classics, had named his elder son Timaeus and his younger son Patroclus; appellations which were promptly altered by their owners to Tim and Pat. Benet (who narrowly escaped being called Achilles) called his father Pat and of course his mother Mat. Benet’s full name was William (after William Penn) Benet Barnell. He had early suppressed the William and of course rejected Ben. The origin of Benet, passionately clung to by its owner, was not clear, except that it had something to do with his mother and with Spain. Pat always claimed that he, Pat, was unlucky and ‘put down’. However he made what seemed to be a sensible, even happy, marriage with sweet Eleanor Morton, daughter of an amicable solicitor, and training to be a singer. However Pat did not like music. He was also, as Benet soon found out, dissatisfied with his son. He wanted a daughter. He once asked Benet if he would like a little sister, to which Benet shouted ‘No, no, no!’ In any case no more children came. Pat’s ill luck continued. Eleanor died quite early on in a car crash, Pat driving. Pat himself, a dedicated smoker, died of lung cancer, by which time Benet had grown up, had left the university, where he had studied philosophy, and followed his father into the Civil Service. Benet had loved his parents and regretted later that he had not revealed his love more openly. Remorse.

Uncle Tim (he did not marry, neither did Benet) was for Benet, and indeed for others, a romantic and somewhat mysterious figure. He had been involved in ‘various wars’. He had left the university without a degree but had been (this much was known) a talented mathematician. He became, using this talent no doubt, an engineer, and somehow thereby came in contact with India, where he then spent much of his life, returning at intervals to England. During his absences Pat ‘took over’ Penndean, but more often, to Benet’s chagrin, rented it.

Nobody quite discovered what Uncle Tim did in India, after his war, except perhaps building bridges. Perhaps they simply did not ask him; even Benet, who adored him, did not ask him until late in his life when Tim gave him what sometimes seemed to Benet strange answers. Pat used to say that his brother had ‘gone native’. Uncle Tim more than once asked his family to visit India and to see the Himalayas. Benet longed to go but Pat always refused. Late and at last Uncle Tim started spending longer and longer times at Penndean and then settled down there altogether.

Thinking of the books, Benet recalled how Tim, who, though no scholar, loved reading, used to utter, again and again, his ‘quotes’ or ‘sayings’, ‘Tim’s tags’ lines out of Shakespeare, sentences out of Conrad, Dostoevsky, Dickens,
Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows,
Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘Another step Mr Hands, and I’ll blow your brains out.’ When he was dying Benet heard him murmur, ‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.’ Of course Benet had had his classical education, but had inclined to the philosophical side. His sense of the Greeks had come to him later, distantly from memories of his grandfather, and from Tim and Tim’s books. In a strange way the books, which were indeed not all ‘classics’, were somehow deeply soaked in some spirit of the Ancient World. Benet had sometimes tried to analyse this atmosphere, this rich aroma, this trembling resonance, this
wisdom,
but it eluded him, leaving him simply to bask within it. He recalled now, something which Tim liked to picture again and again, the moment when Caesar, angry with the Tenth Legion, addressed them as
Quirites
(citizens), not as
Commilitones
(fellow soldiers)! Benet, even as a child, instantly shared the grief of those devoted men as they hung their heads. There were some magic things which these books and utterances had in common. A favourite inner circle,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lord Jim, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, Kim.
Tim also liked Kafka, which might have seemed strange, but on reflection Benet understood that too.

Pat used to say of Tim that he remained ‘absolutely childish’. This was perhaps an aspect of his character which Benet saw rather as a heroic romanticism. Some years ago Benet, accidentally talking to an Indian diplomat at a Whitehall party, mentioned casually that his uncle worked in India, and was amazed to find that the diplomat had heard of Tim. He said of him, ‘Dotty, crazy, but brave as a lion.’ Benet was sorry that he had then lost track of the diplomat, not having even discovered his name. Tim’s books were indeed adventure stories, as Benet saw them in his own childhood; but as he grew up he saw more in his uncle and his tales, a sort of warm ringing undertone, a gentle compassionate light or sound, an awareness of the tragedy of human life, good and evil, crime and punishment,
remorse.
Tim must have seen terrible things in India; perhaps done terrible things, which he might or might not have regretted, but which, in the sunny peace of Penndean, were never spoken of. The strange sound was then a sort of silent pain, which he rehearsed again and again among his broken heroes - Macbeth with bloody hands, Othello having killed his wife, the bizarre devastation of Kafka’s people, T.E. Lawrence, Jim jumping from the ship. For consolation, Kim and the Lama. Another thing which Pat said of Tim was that he was covered all over in sugar. Benet (then adult) objected. It was not sugar. It was a sort of faintly beautiful profound grief. Alice listening to the Mock Turtle weeping. When Tim was dying he was reading
Through the Looking Glass.
This was a strange point at which Benet often paused. Well, why not? Was not Lewis Carroll a mathematician? Tim did not display his mathematical mind to his family, though he did once try to explain Gödel’s theorem to Benet. Building bridges? Pat, and Benet when young, thought of Tim’s Indian activities as those of some simple labourer; then, after he had (as Pat said) ‘gone native’, as a descent into some sort of occult necromancy. A regular joke was to ask Tim if he could perform the Indian Rope Trick, then laugh when Tim took this seriously and started to explain. To Benet alone, in later years, Tim, now old (confused some said, but Benet never accepted that) spoke of the magic of mathematics, of calculating prodigies, of the deep reality of human intelligence, beyond words and outside logic. Many people in India, he said, could easily master contrivances beyond the comprehension of the brightest Cambridge scholars. It only dawned later on Benet why Tim tenderly avoided playing chess.

 

Leaving at last the silence of the library, Benet moved towards the drawing room, pausing in the hall to survey himself in the long mirror. The hall was large and rather dim, deprived of the sunlight of the summer afternoon; it contained an old Sheraton writing desk, never opened, and was the only part of the house to have parquet flooring. The mirror was also dim, a little smudged at the sides. Ever since childhood Benet had wondered what he looked like. This wonder was connected with ‘Who am I?’ or
‘What
am I?’ Benet had discovered quite early in life that Uncle Tim shared this lack of identity. They sometimes discussed it. Does everyone feel like this, Benet had wondered. Tim had said that no, not everyone did, adding that it was a gift, an intimation of a deep truth: ‘I am nothing.’ This was, it seemed, one of those states, achieved usually by many years of intense meditation, which may be offered by the gods ‘free of charge’ to certain individuals. Benet laughed at this joke. Later he took the matter more seriously, wondering whether this ‘gift’ were not more likely to precede a quiet descent into insanity. Later still he decided that, after all, ‘I am nothing’, far from indicating a selfless mystical condition, was a vague state of self-satisfaction experienced at some time by almost anyone. Yet more profoundly he wondered whether Tim, thought by so many of his friends and acquaintances to be ‘rather dotty’, were not really a receiver of presents from the gods.