Our Tragic Universe (47 page)

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ I frowned and remembered the scratching at the door in Dartmouth. ‘Maybe because it’s frightening and creepy that way.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. But if the universe is somehow conscious, then everything about living in it is different. It takes free choice away from you somehow. I don’t want to live in a universe with a fixed meaning, and the end of mystery. The universe should be unfathomable. You shouldn’t be able to fix the meaning of the universe, just as you shouldn’t be able to
reduce
Hamlet
or
Anna Karenina
to a sentence or say what they “really mean”. I want a tragic universe, not a nice rounded-off universe with a moral at the end. And I don’t think looking for a final meaning for the universe is rewarding either. Tolstoy tried, and his results are far less interesting than his fiction.’

‘What were his results?’

‘A religion called Tolstoyanism. I guess it is interesting in a way. He advocates vegetarianism and pacifism. But he also claims to have all the answers, which I don’t want particularly.’

‘What led to all this?’

‘He had a breakdown when he was in his fifties. By then he was famous and successful and had a big house and a family, but he couldn’t see the meaning of life. So he set out on a spiritual odyssey and went madder and madder, squeezing the universe for its last drops of meaning, desperately trying to get some sense out of it and find out exactly why he existed. When he eventually tried to explain his idea of the afterlife to Chekhov – a place that Chekhov describes as being like “jelly”, where you dissolve and lose your individuality, but live on for ever – Chekhov just didn’t understand it. It seemed pointless to him. He wasn’t bothered about the meaning of life in general, but life as it is lived. He was more interested in what people around him said and did. He was obsessed with the detail of life. Tolstoy always saw his own writing as “teaching” and had his breakdown partly because he was so anxious that he didn’t have anything to teach. But Chekhov only ever saw his own writing as the formulation of questions, and so didn’t need to have a crisis about it. While Tolstoy was founding Tolstoyanism, Chekhov was gardening, and trying to cope with his TB. In the last letter he wrote before he died, he complained of German
women’s dress-sense. Interesting, though, that Tolstoy managed to write these vast novels – before he had his breakdown, that is – and Chekhov never did, even though he wanted to. Mind you, Tolstoy was rich and Chekhov was poor. I think I identify more with Chekhov.’

While we had been talking, we had somehow started to hold hands again.

‘So if you saw a fairy …’ Rowan said. ‘What would you do?’

‘You were going to tell me something about fairies, weren’t you? The Cottingley Fairies.’

‘Yes. But first I’m interested. What would you do?’

‘What would I do? I don’t know. Probably tell myself I hadn’t seen it.’

‘But because you want the universe to make less sense, not more? I mean, you wouldn’t go out and look for evidence of more fairies, for example? You’d rather look the other way?’

‘Yeah, I think so. I’d want to be uncertain about what I’d seen.’

‘Me too. I thought I was weird.’

‘You are weird. I think most people do want to know things for definite.’

‘Oh. That’s probably true.’

‘But you didn’t see fairies?’

He laughed. ‘No. Neither did the girls from Cottingley who claimed they had. At least, they almost certainly didn’t. My grandparents lived just down the road from where it all happened, and they believed in the Cottingley Fairies, which made it all a bit of a shock for me later when I found out they didn’t exist – the fairies, that is, not my grandparents. The basic
story is that in 1917 two girls, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, took photographs of fairies. Frances kept getting into trouble for playing in Cottingley Beck – a kind of stream – and ended up telling her mother she went there to see the fairies. No one believed she’d seen fairies, so she borrowed her father’s camera and set off to lure them out so that Elsie could take a picture of them. When he developed the photo her father thought it was a fake. But Frances’s mother was involved with the Theosophists, and eventually news of this extraordinary photograph got back to Arthur Conan Doyle. He ended up writing a book about it. Perhaps like Tolstoy, Conan Doyle discovered spirituality later in life. His book
The Coming of the Fairies
is quite bizarre. He absolutely believed in the story of the fairies, and the photographs, and saw them as evidence for a complex spirit world. It took years for Frances and Elsie to own up to the fact that they had faked the photographs. In fact, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. They kept hinting at it in the sixties – on chat-shows and in magazine interviews. At one point they admitted that the cut-out images had been stuck to trees with hat-pins. In the end they admitted that they’d faked “all but one” of them, and said that they really had seen fairies but couldn’t get them to keep still for real photographs.’

‘That’s amazing,’ I said. ‘What did they look like, these fairies?’

‘They looked like cut-out illustrations from fairy stories.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah. You’d think so, if you saw them now. But Conan Doyle saw something else. Or he wanted to see something else. It wasn’t just him – all sorts of “experts” looked at the pictures. One woman said that this was the discovery of a new world, even while commenting that the fairies were artificial-looking
and flat, and that one of the gnomes had hands like fins. This was, of course, because Frances and Elsie hadn’t done a very good job of cutting him out. What fascinated me wasn’t whether or not the fairies “really existed”, but why and how those girls faked them, and why people like Conan Doyle believed it would be impossible for these girls – one merely the daughter of a mechanic – to have the depth of character to forge anything. He was much more prepared to believe in fairies than to believe in these girls, in fact. But Elsie had been working in a darkroom at a greeting card factory, faking pictures of dead soldiers and their families looking happy together. She had good technical experience making composite photographs. And Frances was an interesting character. She had grown up in South Africa and must have been pretty freaked out to end up in Cottingley. I certainly was when I lived there for a while before university. One of the really strange things is going from a hot country to a cold country. The cold doesn’t hit you for a few days; it’s as if you’ve got out of a warm bath at first, and you carry some of the heat with you. But when it does hit you, it’s awful. You need more clothes, and you feel like you’re starting to rot inside them. And everybody stays indoors all the time, in the cold and the dark. I could easily imagine Frances going out on the first warm day of spring and seeing magic and mystery and fairies. I also like the story of how the photograph ended up in the hands of Conan Doyle. By chance, Elsie’s mother’s Theosophical Society meeting that night was all about fairies. So she happened to say that her daughter had this picture, and so on. The girls didn’t set out to be notorious, but they were, for their whole lives.’

‘I guess they couldn’t let Conan Doyle down, once he believed in their fairies?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So the “reasons” for the fairies are very complex, in the end – almost as complex as fairies themselves. Hmm.’ I sipped my wine. ‘I reckon everything is more complicated than people think, not simpler. And there’s so much that people feel they can’t say, or can’t ever explain to anyone.’

Rowan sighed. ‘That’s certainly true.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, of course.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better go. Lise is getting the last train back from London. I need to go and pick her up from the station.’

‘Oh.’

He took his hand away from mine. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t know why you’re apologising to me. You’re right. You should go.’

‘Meg …’

‘Look, Rowan, I’m not cross. I’ve got no claim on you, and who knows what would happen between us if we were single. It might be awful. Maybe I only want you because you’re attached. But you said that you wanted to feel passionate and free again. So why don’t you just do it? Leave Lise. Not to come and move in with me – you could go travelling, or anything you wanted. You find out what things feel like by acting them out in your professional life. I can’t understand why you don’t do it in your real life.’

‘You do want me?’ he said.

‘Of course. I thought you knew that. You do know that, or you wouldn’t keep apologising to me all the time and making me feel as if I’m making demands that you can’t satisfy – which, by the way, I’m not.’

‘But you do want me.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s so complicated,’ he said. ‘But can I kiss you, just once more?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I leaned towards him, and we kissed.

‘I shouldn’t be doing any of this.’

‘Neither should I. I’m not going to be your mistress. You know that.’

‘Of course. I wouldn’t ask you to be. But I can’t leave Lise. You know that too.’

‘Why not?’

He sighed. ‘It’s not simple. It’s not as if we have young children – or even any children. It’s not as if Lise has a terminal disease. But she does need me. I do a lot for her mother, for example. And Lise herself has terrible anxiety attacks, and I’m the only one who can talk her down from them. There are other things. We own a house. We have a holiday booked for later in the year. We’ve got a joint bank account. Our lives are completely bound together.’

‘I’m not being cruel,’ I said, ‘but it sounds like a normal relationship to me. It’s never easy to leave. I didn’t even know I was going to leave Christopher until the last minute. I’m not saying you should go out and pursue your own selfish adventures, having dumped someone who was holding you back. That’s not exactly going to make you feel good about yourself. But can’t you just talk to Lise and tell her how you feel?’

‘That would be dynamite. She’d say I was abandoning her for you, and then if we – me and you – did try something together, she’d be convinced she was right. She’d try to ruin my
life. I know what she’s like. If I split up with her, the one thing I couldn’t do would be to get involved with you.’

‘God.’

He looked at his watch again. ‘We’ll talk soon?’

‘Maybe. I guess so.’

He got up, slipped on his jacket and walked to the door.

‘I want you too,’ he said. ‘Very much. I wish I could do something about it.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

And then he left.

I sat on the sofa for a long time, watching the fire burn and listening to the sea outside sucking gently on the sand, lapping at it and licking it and kissing it. I imagined it nibbling and nuzzling the shingle, breaking it down, breaking it down, saying ‘Shhh’ and ‘Please’. It sounded as gentle as a whisper, as a promise. But as the night went on, the sea began to throw itself on the sand harder and harder, and the sand breathed ‘Yes’ and they drowned in one another, all night long.

‘I’ve got the answer,’ Josh said.

It was half past five on the evening of Kelsey Newman’s talk, and Totnes was bathed in twilight. Rumour was half empty or half full, depending on how you looked at it. Almost all the wooden tables had little signs on them saying they were reserved at 7, or 8, or 9 p.m., and most people were just having after-work drinks. There was a family sitting looking at menus at a big table by the window. Two women with crew-cuts and feminist earrings sat together at the other window. Well-thumbed
newspapers were strewn around on the bar. An old Barrington Levy track was playing. I knew it from my Brighton days when I used to sometimes go with Christopher to score dope from an old Rasta DJ who kept trying to sell us vinyl as well.

‘Hello,’ I said to Josh, and sat down. ‘What was the question?’

‘The question was, “Why can only some people do magic in Kelsey Newman’s universe?” But let’s order first, and get some wine and stuff. I can drink now that I’m not on such strong medication. I’m going to dazzle you with my improved theory of the universe. Then I’m going to dazzle Kelsey Newman with a super-improved version, once you’ve picked up all the flaws.’

‘What time’s he on? I’ve forgotten.’

‘Seven p.m. in Birdwood House.’

‘OK.’

‘I think we’ve got enough time for dinner and pudding. In case you’re worried, Christopher isn’t going to burst in on us. He’s gone to live with Becca.’

‘God. What about Milly?’

‘She’s gone too. Having Christopher in the house didn’t really make it easier for her and Dad to get back together, as you can imagine. What do you want to drink?’

‘Sauvignon? But whatever. I’ve got to drive back later. And of course I want to be able to concentrate on what Newman’s got to say. That’s such a shame about Milly.’

‘Well, shall we get a bottle? That way you can have two glasses, and I can have about three. I think that will be OK.’

‘Yeah. OK.’

‘I’ll order some food when I get the wine. What do you want?’

‘Oh, a pizza with extra chillies and no cheese, thanks. Here’s some money.’ I gave him a
£
20 note. ‘I’ve got some news for you when you get back. And then you can tell me your theory of everything.’