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Authors: Matthew Chapman

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BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
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After the war, he started making mechanical wooden toys and musical boxes in London, but one night the place burned down and he lost everything. He was married to a woman who had money and he liked solitude. They bought the Vicarage in Grantchester and he decided to apply his engineer’s mind to scientific instruments, which he began to do in a folly at the end of the garden. As a hobby he continued to restore and collect
musical boxes and mechanical singing birds, these latter being clockwork devices of great complexity and delicacy, birds the size of your fingernail with plumage of real feathers. They would spring out of the silver surface of the box and chirp and turn from side to side and move their beaks and wings. I still remember visiting him, sitting at his workbench in the folly, surrounded by tiny cogs and gears and brightly coloured feathers.
When my mother introduced him to my father, he had just started the scientific instrument business. The two couples had dinner in the Vicarage. Afterwards, Peter showed my father a device which at that time was still novel, a dishwasher. The two men opened it up and studied it and my father commented on a way in which the design could be improved. Although my father had no qualifications as an engineer, Peter saw how intelligent the comment was and offered him a partnership, thereby doubling the size of the company. Because of my father’s inexperience, the terms were not particularly favourable to him. Peter’s instincts, both human and financial, were correct. My father quickly became an excellent engineer and more than doubled production within a year. The first devices they made were temperature control units, small baths in which test tubes could be stood and retained at an exact and constant heat. Later on they would make refrigeration units for the same purpose, then shaker baths to keep fluids agitated for long periods, and finally computerised temperature measurement devices, one of which was used to monitor the heat of the skin of American space rockets.
Peter and my mother had met in 1936 when she was only thirteen years old and he in his late teens or very early twenties. Their families knew each other and he had been invited to a party at Conduit Head. He was at his most glamorous, having just run in the ominous, Hitler-dominated Olympics. Innocently or not, he kissed her and she never forgot it.
Eighteen years after that first kiss, they started an affair.
A day or two after the birth of my younger brother, Francis, my father noticed a letter in Clare’s handwriting addressed to
Peter. As he saw both of them every day and could easily have passed on whatever my mother might have wanted to say, he was at first puzzled and then suspicious.
He opened the letter.
It said she was glad to be having Peter’s baby even if they could not be together. ‘He took to the breast very quickly,’ she wrote, ‘just like his dad.’
My father was furious, confused, and then depressed. Everything was so entangled. The business, which had expanded out of the folly, was now in the mill and literally attached to our house. He already had two children and, in spite of everything, he still loved Clare. When he sought an explanation, Clare told him of that first kiss and how, even now, whenever Peter came into the room, her stomach ‘turned over.’ Peter was married and had a child and could not, or would not, leave his wife. Cecil decided that as far as he could, he would forgive Clare, and accept the situation without further recrimination. Francis was an exceptionally likeable child, gentle and funny, with a sweet smile. His paternity was kept secret and he was brought up as one of us, loved by all. He
was
one of us and remains so to this day, no less a brother than my other brother.
Not long after Francis was born, Peter’s
au pair
came to see my mother. ‘I’m sleeping with Peter,’ she wept, ‘and I just don’t know what to do.’ My mother did. She went around to his house and threw a brick through his window. In her early thirties, she now became wilfully promiscuous. Whether this was her way of exacting revenge on Peter for this humiliation, or whether it was simply an attempt to drown her depression in sensation, who can know? She began to drink more heavily.
This was the period when my sister and I began to discuss divorce.
Until Francis was about four years old, Peter came to lunch at the house every day and would feed him and play with him. After that—after my father and he split the business because Peter did not want to run a company which had grown so large—
he would come only once a week. Eventually, he sold all his shares in the company to my father. They remain friends.
What can you know of anyone’s marriage, even the marriage of your parents, but I suspect that in my father’s decency in forgiving my mother lay the death of this one. There is an element of unintended cruelty in such forgiveness. It gives you a possession no one should have. As she slid into alcoholism, perhaps he felt, albeit unconsciously, that like a character in Greek tragedy, her self-destruction was inevitable and deserved.
My father was an attractive and capable man. He could have left the family and had a better life, but didn’t largely for the sake of us, his children. A friend of mine once said, ‘If only my parents had divorced I’m sure I’d be happily married by now.’ But how was Cecil to know in 1956 that the wound Clare had hacked into the marriage would never heal, that after Peter would come others, and that she would not stop drinking until she entered hospital to die in 1992? Four years after Francis they had one more child, my youngest brother, Ludovic, and so by the time I was ten, we were a family of six.
For the first fifteen years or so, we did not acknowledge she was an alcoholic, though to any modern family it would have been as obvious as a confession. Living with her was to live with two women, the woman of the morning, bright and funny and loving, and the woman of the evening, cruel and despairing. So different were these two that to speak to the woman of the morning about the woman of the night before seemed somehow indecent and unfair. And so we didn’t.
When she started to fall down stairs, however; when the ambulance had to come in the night, when she lied to the doctors at the hospital and told them my father had hit her, then we began to discuss it and tried to get her to do something; but to her AA was shameful, for toothless boozers in the gutter. When we suggested it, she wouldn’t take part in the discussion. She was an intellectual, albeit one who often mocked intellectualism, and she was the great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. AA was not
for women like her. Whatever the complicated causes—genetic depression, shame, or the weight of history—the solution she chose was brutally simple. She wanted oblivion, and alcohol would do the job.
Had she been from a family with less money, she would have hit a wall. Instead she hit stoicism and denial, and so, with every year, her drinking got worse. Sometimes she would drink wine, sometimes whisky, sometimes gin, and in the summer, cider. She would drink out of a mug instead of a glass and hide bottles all over the larder. Once or twice it seemed as if she tried to stop. My father tried drinking with her, refusing to drink with her, speaking to her about it, and ignoring the whole thing. Nothing worked. Sometimes there would be a period of days where she would not drink, or an even longer period where she seemed to drink in moderation. When she was not drinking, her eyes often wandered away, their expression so intensely melancholy it almost resembled fear. And then she’d have a drink, and in those first moments I would see a look of relief pass across her face which reminded me of how I felt when I scalded my hands to quell the itch; release from endless tension, the voluptuous rewards of failure.
Ludovic, who remained stranded in the worst of her decline after the rest of the children had departed, swears that when he opened the front door—long before he saw her—he could tell if she was drunk or not. I left home as soon as I could, but when I came to visit at weekends from London, I had the same sensation as I drove down the lane and hit the gravel yard. Her unhappiness seemed to cause even the bricks and mortar to exude despair. And when one’s worst fears were confirmed, such a weight of sorrow, such a feeling of being let down: the beautiful house, the wind and the trees, the sound and smell of the river, all extinguished by this pervasive gloom.
The children scattered away from her. Sarah took to the road, off to India and Nepal. I went to live in London and then Los Angeles. Francis moved to London a few years later. Ludovic, unable to stand any more of her corrosive tongue and overwhelming
misery, was sent to school in America. Eventually, Sarah and Ludovic returned to live not far away in Cambridge, but none of us ever went to the house without our guard raised, and none of us could help her escape her misery. Her incisive comments, her scathing wit, were seen less and less often. Now she would sit at the table, eyes frequently closing, and simply groan with despair at any comment she did not agree with. Sarah, who got on least well with her as a child, came to be closest to her in the last years of her life.
In her late fifties, ill health and overweight brought on by decades of drinking and smoking slowly began to take from her the few things she did enjoy. The vast Norfolk beach, the one where she had shown me shrubby sea-blite (for which I rewarded her by giving it to her as a nickname), was now too far away for her to reach. Walks in search of elusive flowers and birds became rarer. Before long, she could only stand at the kitchen window, staring through the bottom of her glass at the river flowing toward her. One day she lost all interest in making the meals around which the family had united in praise. Cooking, she now claimed, had never given her pleasure and she had simply decided to stop. The kitchen garden was abandoned. Perhaps she knew already what my father was doing and felt too fundamentally betrayed to continue these last fundamental acts of nourishment.
Cecil, who for thirty years lived under the suspense of what each evening would bring, fell in love with someone else, an old family friend. One night he was speaking to her on the phone when he felt Clare’s presence behind him and turned.
Now the final agony began.
I must have gone to sleep at some point, because I wake up and find myself exhausted and hung over. Gloria cooks me breakfast, a slab of ham, fried tomatoes with herbs, and biscuit with gravy. How anyone stays under 300 pounds. in this place is a miracle that can only be attributed to heavy smoking. Eventually, I will go to almost every eating establishment along the highway and
in none of them find anything that would remotely fit the Surgeon General’s definition of a healthy meal.
Wheezing and bilious, I stumble outside and sit on the porch. It’s still raining. The magnolia tree sheds. Gloria comes out and smokes in the other rocking-chair. She looks bleary and ragged, but seems remarkably calm for someone who is about to relinquish a dream and enter what could so easily be a nightmare.
I ask her to tell me about the house. She says it was built by W. F. Thomison, M.D., who was the chief physician for the Dayton Coal and Iron Company and also the attending physician at William Jennings Bryan’s death. The house used to sit where the street now is, but was put on rollers and dragged by mule to its present position in the late 1890s to make way for boom-time traffic. It was easier to move a house in those days because there was no plumbing or wiring to deal with. In fact, according to Gloria, a man would sometimes, at the request of his wife, move his house several times ‘until the light came through the kitchen window just so.’
When she returns inside, I go and look at a plaque by the front door. To my astonishment it tells me that the house was indeed built by W. F. Thomison, but adds an almost spooky detail. He built it for his wife, Ella
Darwin
.
The word ‘wow’ comes to mind and I waste the rest of the day trying to track down some relatives. Eventually I find a Darwin down in the local library. Her name is Henrietta and she’s married to local historian Seth Tallent. Both are in their seventies and are funny and charming. Henrietta trots off home and returns with a family tree.
Seth says, ‘I’ll bet you didn’t expect to find some country clodhopper on the family chart, did you?’
The chart, however, proves inconclusive. It all begins with a William Darwin coming over from England a couple of hundred years ago, but it’s impossible to see if he was related to my branch before he left.
Later, back in New York, I put in some more work on this,
encountering, among others, a Darwin popcorn farmer down in Alabama, but in the end conclude, alas, that the connection cannot be proved, much to my sorrow and even more, I suspect, to the sorrow of the popcorn farmer.
Heyall Is a Lake of Fah
When I return from my fruitless genealogical quest, I find that Gloria has another dinner date. After her husband left, her friendship with the man who owned the ranch on the hill deepened. Lester, a doctor, was also going through a divorce and they comforted each other. It was he who gave her the cut-off scrubs. He has also given her two horses. After a while Lester, a doctor, met a woman named Ruth-Anne and they all became friends. Tonight they’re going out for their last dinner. Ruth-Anne arrives in a red Jaguar. She’s a pretty woman with short hair and a pleasant shy quality. Gloria squirts out two generous beakers of wine and they get in the car to drive the forty-five minutes to Chattanooga to meet Lester, whose surgery is there.
I head back out to Ayola’s. An incredibly sad song is playing. A man sings and a little girl interjects with questions like,
‘Que pasa, Papa
?
’
Eventually it ends with the father saying
‘Adios, chiquita.’
I look out the window and see that the cops are feeding across the highway at Long John Silver’s tonight. Leaving the restaurant I encounter a large woman. On her neck is a hickey that got infected. It’s not a pretty sight and the two burritos and the iced tea ($7.95) lunge into my throat. I manage to contain them and start cruising around town, killing time until Gloria returns. There’s a defeated-looking strip mall right behind the restaurant so I tool over there and give it the once-over.
Two porky ten-year-old girls throw a little bouncing ball around the parking lot. Behind them is a shop entitled Get-It-N-Go: Video & Tanning. I remember that when this contraction
of ‘and’ into ‘n’ first began in England my father, disapproving pedant that he is, would walk into a ‘Fish ‘N’ Chip’ shop to demand ‘two orders of fish
ENNNN
chips, please.’ Not far away is Kwik Kash Title Pawn. Then there’s Mountain Air Natural Foods, which contains no food whatsoever, only a sparse scattering of vitamins on shelves. Discount Outlet can be discounted: it’s gone.
Godzilla
plays at a tiny, shabby modern theatre, the name of which has dropped off, leaving only the word ‘inema.’ Next door is the Gem Shop—Diamonds, Gold, Engravin (no g). In the window is another sign, ‘Pearls in June. Sale 30 per cent off. Remember Dad’s Day, Sunday JUN E21.’ How or why the E got moved fifteen inches to the right to join 21 is a mystery. Then there’s Dollar General Store, Ekerd Drugs, and Shop-Rite.
I enter Shop-Rite. Actually, it’s not a bad shop. Amazingly, the shelves have little signs listing the content of the fruit above. It’s a lost cause, but you have to admire the plucky optimism of the gesture. I buy some apples from under a sign that states, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ Very lofty. All I’m looking for is some fibre to help shunt the burritos through before they shape up into something nasty and hurt me on the way out.
In the checkout line ahead of me is a stringy thirty-year-old redneck in clean overalls, no shirt, a baseball hat and worn-down work boots. I check his neck and it is indeed red, a ruddy, brick red. He’s carrying a jumbo-size bottle of Coke and orders a tin of Skoal chewing tobacco. Now he dumps about a hundred pennies, nickels and dimes (no quarters) onto the counter.
‘Should be a few dollars thar,’ he says, grinning in embarrassment.
The checkout girl politely picks up the coins one by one, counting them as the rest of us wait patiently in line. I notice that the redneck’s hands are shaking violently. I wear a pouch around my waist in which I’m carrying $500 in cash, a camera that cost me $1,500, and a wallet containing two credit cards good for $30,000 apiece.
I look away almost in shame and study some tabloids on a nearby stand. ‘Bible Predicts 2nd Great Depression,’ says one of them.
The redneck’s trembling hands pick up some change and he departs with his nutrition. I pay for my apples and follow him out. He gets into a rusting pickup and drives away.
Suddenly I feel depressed. I came down here in part, I must confess, to poke fun at just such hillbillies as this, but I didn’t take into account the reality of rural poverty. I remember the man on the bus. ‘The only drawback to living in the country is you get less opportunity.’ Yes, and there’s something claustrophobic and scary about this. Where do you go out here in the boonies when the well runs dry? Furthermore, compounding the problem of maintaining a snide, superior tone, everyone’s been so damned
nice
to me. For seventy-five years people have been coming down here to mock, from Mencken to me, and all day long I’ve been running around asking questions and everyone’s been ‘just as nice as all get out,’ which means as open and friendly as you could wish.
I must locate a cliché soon or I’m in trouble.
I drive alongside the railroad track, along a street of shabby one-storey wooden houses with cluttered porches. At the end of the road, where the town is starting to thin out, I see, to my amazement, a sign:
‘Tent Revival 7:00’
Around the bend, a marquee with a blue-striped roof is pitched on the grass beside a small, plain brick church. Parked alongside the church is an ancient bus painted mauve. It’s evening but the rain has stopped and the air is thick and humid. The sides of the tent are open to let what little breeze there is blow through, so I blow in with it.
A preacher in his early fifties, dressed in narrow black pants, a white shirt and black tie is up on a small raised platform at the front. There’s a pair of guitars up there and an electric piano to one side, but no one’s at them. The preacher’s shouting at twenty or thirty po’ white folk. He yells and jumps on and off the little stage and pumps his arms, and then he quietens down and speaks soothingly, temptingly, stretching out the words. He can switch
from one style to the other in a second and it’s a fine performance.
‘God wants to give you a new life, new way, new worrrrld. Old Devil say, well you don’t know, you might wanna come back, I’ll take you. But if you ever git in the King’s Highway, if you ever git set free …’
‘Tha’s right.’
‘Set free, set free …’
‘Yeah, Preacher.’
‘Set free! Set free!’ He reaches a pitch and now lowers his voice to a croon. ‘Set freeee, set free …’ He wipes his sweating brow and takes a breath. ‘They got a lot of po’ black people around here, there’s a lot of po’ black folks in this nation, jes like there’s a lot of po’ white folks. Well, I’ll tell ya, I betcha tonight we could go to every black folk, every black person in Rhea County, say, “You’re po’, ya up against it, ya havin’ a hard time, ain’tcha friend? How about being my slaaaave? How about going back in under slavery? How about goin’ back, let me ruuuule over you and make your decisions. You jes give up your freedom and be my slave.” You won’t find a one that’ud say, “Oh, that’ud be good, take me back.” No, no,
no
! You know why? Ooooh, that taste of freedom! That taste of freedom!’
‘Amen!’
‘That’s right, yessir, brother.’
‘God wants to set you free tonight, set you freeee. Been saved twenty-three years ain’t never tasted another drop of alcohol.’
‘How long is that, brother?’
‘Been saved twennnnty-three years, ain’t never smoked a joint of dope.’
‘Amen.’
‘Been saved twenty-three years, ain’t been out with no other woman.’
‘Praise the Lord.’
‘Been saved twennnnty-three years, ain’t never been in another dive or honky-tonk. Been saved twenty-three years, ain’t
robbed and stolen or cheated. I made a lot of mistakes. I been misled, I’ve got stubborn, I’ve tripped up, I’ve disobeyed, but I ain’t never liked it.’
‘That’s right, brother.’
‘Oh, no, what I like is, I like bein’ saaaaved, bein’ a chiiiild of God, bein’ borned again. That new worrrrld, that new life … Oh, tonight I feel so happy, can’t explain it.’
But he tries. He tries to explain it in terms of what it would be like trying to describe the world to a blind man. While he’s doing that (because I know where that’s leading) I look around. There are no black people here. In the row across from me are three fat women draped in long dresses, a trio of featureless profiles, heads dumped in a tutu of fat; hard, depressed eyes and set mouths but neither jaws nor necks. The men are thinner, thinned out by labour perhaps, and wear jeans and plaid shirts. They are of all ages and, to my surprise, are more vocal than the women. There are some kids too, eyes exhausted in the heat, pensive, a little wary, as if they know that pretty soon the preacher’s going to do a one-eighty on the King’s Highway and start screaming about the terrors of hell.
Looking over my shoulder, I see a man at the back with a Bible clutched against his chest like a child clutches a teddy-bear. He’s a clean-cut, unimpressive little fellow with round-rim glasses and a moustache. Thirty years old, sandy red receding hair, white shirt, tie. He projects none of the raw growl of the preacher but has a sanctimonious, proprietary air to him, so I go over and ask him if he thinks it would be okay for me to take some photos. The answer is no, but I discover he’s the pastor of the church, one Leland Frazier. Turns out the preacher up on stage is a jail preacher. Leland asks me where I come from and I tell him England. I ask what a jail preacher is doing here. He’s about to reply when the preacher starts shouting and sobbing so loud we can’t hear each other.
‘And Jesus says, “Except you be born again, you cannot
seeeeeee
!!!”’ he yells. ‘I was blind but now I
see!
I see the hand of God in ever’thing!’
A young woman walks in from the rear of the tent and starts to play the electric piano, which now accompanies the preacher as he hollers on. As if obeying a signal, a number of men walk down to the front of the stage and prostrate themselves. It’s funny because they’re all wearing sneakers and the soles stand up behind them bright and geometric like toy ducks at worship behind their masters.
‘He’s doin’ a revival for us,’ Leland says.
‘Ah,’ I say, trying not to smile at the sneakers.
The preacher’s yells swoop down into a tone of soothing seduction, a voice one might use while stroking a child’s head at bedtime. ‘They’re comin’ to the Lord Jesus tonight. Tha’s enough. He’ll take care … He’ll take care of it. “I need a new life, Preacher, pray for me.” That’s enough, come to God, he’ll take care of it. “Help me, Preacher, I got so backslidden in my heart, ain’t nothin’ there but coldness and indifference.” So down, so out, so discouraged, so defeated, so doomed and down! Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, salvation is at hand! Come to Jesus, he’ll take care of it …’
And now the electric pianist begins to bang out the tune for ‘Amazing Grace,’ and everyone starts to sing. It’s a song I happen to like, a sweet sound from my own past in the little schoolhouse in the English countryside, and I’m almost getting teary-eyed when Leland comes in from the side with a sly, knowing expression on his face.
‘So, it’s no coincidence that you happened to stop by here tonight I don’t think, do you?’
‘Maybe not,’ I say, thinking of how in need I was of a good solid cliché for the book. And Leland drops right into the scheme, still looking up at me sideways like a salesman sniffing out a weakness to slink in on.
‘Are you saved? Do you know what that means?’
‘Er, saved?’
‘Yeah. Goin’ to heaven instead of heyall.’
‘I don’t know, like I say, I’m from England, we think about things a little differently.’
‘I understand that, I understand that, but God thinks the same way. He thinks the same over here as he does over thar, do you know that? Old-time preachers used to preach the same way over thar as we do over here. I read after ’em, they’s from England, used to be some great preachers, but they’re slidden away, farther and farther from God, over in England.’
‘In England?’ I ask, the patriotic nerve (more or less dead) brought to life for a second as I think of the comparative crime statistics, particularly those for murder.
‘We are over here too. America’s goin’ farther and farther away from God.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘seems like everybody’s religious.’
‘Not saved.’
‘How do you get saved then?’
‘Through the Lord Jesus Christ. See the Bible here tells us that it’s not by good works that we’ve done … See a lot of people says, “I’ve been pretty good. You know, I ain’t never killed nobody [interesting definition of ‘good’], you know, I ain’t never been a really bad thief,” but God says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works lest any man should boast.” See it’s not in works, it’s not in how good that you are.’
‘So what does “by grace” mean?’
‘Grace … Grace is this. God sayeth “For God so loved the world that whosoever believeth in him should not perish.” He don’t want nobody to go to heyall. It’s a gift, see, it’s something He’ll give to you that you don’t deserve, you don’t earn it. “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” That means you. You’ve sinned.’
Me? My God,
yes. If he only knew. I cannot confess the worst of it, not even here. I’ve stolen, cheated, lied, fornicated, and written scripts for Hollywood, and that’s not the half of it. I am to sin what the L.L. Bean catalogue is to rugged outerwear.
BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
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