Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Howard Jacobson
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Part Two
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Copyright
About the Book
Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century – and by Barney as a ‘prurient little Victorian ratbag’.
This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her ‘rampant marvellings’, to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and growing as he stomps the wild Atlantic cliffs on long, morbid walks, tampering with the truth, tangling with the imperious Camilla – and telling a riotous tale.
About the Author
Howard Jacobson is the author of eleven novels and four works of non-fiction. He won the Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing in 1999 for The Mighty Walzer. His latest novel, The Finkler Question, won the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
Also by Howard Jacobson
Fiction
Coming from Behind
Redback
The Very Model of a Man
No More Mister Nice Guy
The Mighty Walzer
Who’s Sorry Now?
The Making of Henry
Kalooki Nights
The Act of Love
The Finkler Question
Non-Fiction
Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)
In the Land of Oz
Roots Schmoots
Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy
FOR ROSALIN – WHO INSTIGATED, HATCHED AND REARED THIS, AND LOOKED TO ME TO LEGITIMIZE IT MERELY.
PROLOGUE
Remember to keep faith with those three great sources of your strength: Earth, Sea and Air. Walk barefoot on the Earth whenever you can. Learn to swim, and return to the Sea from which all life originally came. And always wear as few clothes as possible. It is important to allow the Air to circulate freely around those parts of the body which are not usually exposed to it.
And don’t forget: it is no good working on your body if your mind is drugged with cigarettes and television.
Lance Tourney, Lad of Destiny: A Boy’s
Guide to Health and Confidence
Signs are, even to my drugged eye, that the village is finally coming out of winter. I am not witnessing a return to robustness and sanity exactly – that’s too much to expect down here, so far from the soundness of cities, so deep into the obsessional neurosis of Nature – but there is an atmosphere of fragile convalescence abroad, as if the patients have been allowed their first unaccompanied turn around the walled gardens of the institution.
The wind has dropped. The water in the harbour rocks itself, brooding on its delusions. The squinting sea birds look as if they believe they might just eat again. Those hoteliers who changed wives or husbands at the start of the off-season – hoteliers are always the most romantic and expectant inhabitants of any remote place – have changed back again and are freshening up their Vacancy notices. Autographed copies of this year’s print run of Lionel Turnbull’s pamphlet (Lance Tourney is, of course, a pen-name) have started to appear in the post office and the village stores, and Lionel himself has begun those naked ritualistic swims which will continue every morning now until the Atlantic freezes over again. And already the first serious walkers of the season have arrived in their fetishistic boots and with their Ordnance Survey maps in protective plastic packets tied around their necks like bibs.
I meet them in the early morning during my penitential walks along the harbour walls or out on the cliff paths, and although they all nod me a bracing greeting or wave their blackthorn sticks, I can see that I am an extraneity and a blemish for them. In my long sleek-piled fur coat (resembling ocelot and bought on an Austin Reed charge account) and my Bally slip-on snakeskin shoes decorated, rather tastefully I’ve always thought, with a delicate gold chain and having the added advantage of slightly built-up heels, I am not what they have taken a week off work and kissed goodbye to their children and strapped methane stoves to their backs to find. At a stroke I domesticate the cliffs for them. Many of them, I fancy, will spend the rest of the day in a pet, not even noticing the wild sea below; fearing that at the next precipitous turn of the path, beneath the overhanging crags, above the foaming waterfall, they will come upon more like me, wearing jewels and stoles, contradicting one another in broken accents, and picnicking on smoked salmon sandwiches from the boot of a white Daimler. That’s the extent to which I have blotted their landscape.
But if my being here is a disagreeable shock to them, imagine what it is to me!
I have just been sitting on the rocks watching a group of schoolgirls watching Lionel Turnbull preparing for a swim. Whether Lionel saw the schoolgirls or whether the schoolgirls saw me it is impossible to say. We were all, in our own ways, separately engrossed. With the exception of a neat square rug of hair on his chest and back Lionel is a smooth man. Bobbing about in the water he is indistinguishable from the brown seals he has befriended. Anyone familiar with rustic persiflage will be able to imagine the sorts of jokes that circulate about Lionel and his relations with those seals. For all the influx of summer tourists this is still essentially a farming community – there isn’t anything that farmers find improbable.
Once he had peeled off his posing pouch which he wears under his exercise briefs which he wears under his swimming trunks which he wears under his perambulating shorts, Lionel stood for a while with his legs apart and his arms raised, for the purpose, I guessed, of letting the air circulate around those parts which had been stored away all winter. Then, with slow rhythmic movements, he began the sort of examination of himself that is recommended to women for the location of unfamiliar lumps in the breasts; except that he didn’t confine himself to one area, but examined his neck and his armpits also, and the region of his lumbar ganglion and his prostate, his rib cage, his kidneys, his liver, and, with lingering deliberation, his testicles. This was too much for the schoolgirls who, being visitors to the village, had never before seen an adult male standing on argillaceous rock and rolling his balls minutely around the outstretched palm of his hand.
It puzzled me also, I must confess, although I didn’t almost fall into the sea with laughter, because if those were cancer lumps Lionel Turnbull was searching for then he must have let himself go quite badly over the winter. Chapter V of Lad of Destiny states categorically that cancer is merely a consequence of lifestyle, being ascribable entirely to smoking, television, and bad bodily habits. From the confident manner in which he plunged finally into the water I deduced that he had found nothing in his body that shouldn’t have been there, but it has not gone without my noticing it that he thought he might.
There is something about this part of the world – it might be the light or the towering cliffs or the perpendicular fields and meadows – all offering incomparable opportunities for high profile – that attracts exhibitionists. A year and a half ago a whole family of them took a winter let on a small holiday cottage in the harbour. Grandmother, mother, two sons, and a daughter-in-law. That’s only approximate – domestic confusion as to who is related to whom and how is not uncommon in this neck of the woods. The rule of thumb seems to be that if a person sharing your house looks twice your age then there is a good chance it is your parent and oughtn’t, therefore, to make a habit of sharing your bed – at least not until you’re married; otherwise it’s fairly open slather. Anyway, in the case of the family of exhibitionists, I can say for sure that there were three women and two men, and that the National Trust didn’t take at all kindly to the manner in which they disported themselves both within the cottage and without it. Just in case that sounds unreasonable, let me make it clear that the cottage stood inside the area designated as the harbour, and that the harbour is the property of the National Trust. Gossip had it that they received an official typed complaint on Trust notepaper, in response to which the grandmother (if that was who she was) sent back a signed group photograph of them all lined up against the harbour wall in a state of Nature, the women concealing their ultimate immodesty behind their National Trust membership cards and the two men more flagrant in their National Trust ties. Was it the colour of their skins, she sent a covering note to enquire, that the Trust found out of keeping? This was a sly allusion to an argument which was occupying the attention of the village at the time, on the issue of the colour of the motor cars the Trust preferred the villagers to own. For that jibe alone their emmet foreignness and impudicity might have been forgiven, but the youngest son, the ostensibly unmarried one, went and blew it.
As long as he merely roamed the cliffs, in his earrings and his bright orange wig, with his ornithologist’s binoculars strapped around his neck and his cock hanging out of his trousers, nobody gave him any trouble. If you came upon him unexpectedly he would immediately put his glasses to his eye. Whether this was exquisite tact or complete confusion as to his role – an inability to make up his mind whether he was a shower-off or a looker-on – who could say? For my part I was never very interested in him. But Camilla – there! I’ve named her at last, my beloved and much-missed Camilla, whose spirit fills and frets this place for me – Camilla was, in that perverse way of hers, entirely sympathetic to him. Unforgiving of just about everybody, enraged by the smallest omissions of her friends, she was massively tolerant of aberrations. And according to her, this was an aberration every bit as massive as her tolerance. He had shown it to her in a queue at the post office once, and she had understood immediately how tragically limited were his options. ‘You’ve no idea what an enormous size it is,’ she tried to explain to me. ‘I can see why he has to show it, the poor bugger. There’s absolutely nothing else he could possibly do with it.’
Well, she was wrong there. One thing he could do with it was to trundle it up the hill to the village school, poke it through the protective railings, and get the children – girls or boys, he didn’t much care which – to measure it. And that was how, one afternoon, the village parents found him: standing on the old slate wall, one arm hooked around a cast iron railing, his binoculars pointing out to sea, his trousers open, and all their pretty ones gathered round him with their tiny rulers and protractors.
Camilla was a Parish Councillor again that year, but although she liked to make matters of public morality her own there was nothing she could do, even in her official capacity, to soothe parental wrath. This was not the sort of subject, either, that she was likely to be at her most understanding about. She didn’t throb parentally herself. She didn’t much care for children. And she certainly didn’t believe they were in possession of any innocence worth troubling oneself to protect.
‘The only thing you’ve got to worry about,’ she told the near murderous mother of one little girl, ‘is what this has done to her expectations. I myself don’t see how men can be anything but one big disappointment to her after this.’
‘I very much doubt that the experience will turn Colin into a homosexual,’ she assured the harbour master’s wife. ‘But if it does, look on the bright side – one more homosexual in the world means one less compliant wife and mother.’
It took the police though, not Camilla’s reassurances, to forestall the terrible vengeance demanded by outraged decency and to escort the five frightened flashers safely from the village.
It seems to be doing me some good, forcing myself to remember actual words that Camilla spoke. Her presence has been getting unhealthily generalized and diffused of late, particularly when I’m not walking the cliffs or following the course of rambles that we used to take together deep into the Valency Valley. There has been a touch of Heathcliff about me recently, I fear, that is if someone who is called Barney Fugleman and what’s more looks as if he is called Barney Fugleman can approximate to such a gentile, such a Christian, such an English, such an essentially Cornish spinster’s fantasy. But then why not? Might it not be possible to show, without going so far as to claim Jewish parentage for her Liverpudlian gypsy foundling, that it was precisely someone such as me, swarthy and saturnine and inhospitable and liable to vent my spleen on other people’s pets, that the poor girl dreamed about, my fur coat and Bally shoes notwithstanding, in the back room of that draughty rectory? It’s not out of the question. I’ve stirred the imagination of more than one lonely bookish vicar’s daughter in my time. Either way, it’s a surprise to me how morbid I’ve become. I listen to voices in the wind for God’s sake! I trudge moors. I haunt country graveyards. Dogs I have always wanted to kick and I might myself, at any time, have hung up Isabella Linton’s – the more the worms writhe, and all that – but now, I swear, and this is absolutely uncharacteristic of me, if I knew what an ash tree looked like or where one was to be found I could very easily fall to dashing my head against it.
To convey the extremity of my condition let me tell you that I toyed, for longer than I care to admit, with the notion of having all Camilla’s words printed in a different type-face – in something thin and spectral and wraith-like, in tribute to her rarity and other-worldliness and ventriloquial genius. The only thing that changed my mind was the realization that Camilla herself would have hated it. She didn’t see herself as a wraith. And she loathed every kind of tricksiness. Her preference, in all things, was always for simplicity and directness. As indeed, when I am myself, is mine. This was one of the many fastidiousnesses that united us. Together we were very choosy in our ideas of what constituted good art. We couldn’t stand, in just about equal measure, novels that took an interminable time telling you who was telling the story and how he came by it, both of us being perfectly at home with the convention of invisible omniscient narrators, no matter what people said about the breakdown of social certainty and the consequent necessary fictiveness of fabulists. We had no patience for films that could in any way be described as experimental, enigmatic, or surreal; and we could not abide plays that were about tramps, lunatics, savages without language, the terminally infirm, or the problem of writing plays. When I think of the number of theatres we stormed out of together and the quantity of paperbacks we tossed into the fire to keep us warm in winter, or into the sea to keep us young in spring, my heart aches.
Stuck out here, so far from the civilizing amenities, all efforts to keep in touch with written or spoken English were labours of love. We had to drive for an hour to find an even moderately well-stocked bookshop. If we wanted to see a play in the West End we had to set out early in the morning, leaving food for the cats, messages for the milkman, and the telephone number of the hotel we were staying at in case anyone important to us died while we were away. And yet before ten minutes of the first scene had elapsed we were up out of our seats – often on the front row, sometimes in a box – and into the nearest bar. We weren’t particularly interested in drinking; we just wanted somewhere quiet to sit where we could talk over the insult that had just been delivered to our intelligence. We didn’t just sneer; we discussed and analysed conscientiously. Our conversations on these occasions were almost certainly the best things on anywhere in London.
In the second of our summers together (the really good one) I think we must have seen as many as twenty-five plays without getting to the final act of any of them. One – I suppose it must have been a Pinter – we walked out of before a single character had even said anything. On top of that we consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges. I remember that I even tossed in a Norman Mailer but Camilla dived in – she was a stupendous diver – and rescued him. I think she detected my unclean unliterary motive. I knew that she had a soft spot for Norman Mailer and that for him she might leave me. We were very much in love that summer. We had a ball.
I didn’t worry too much about Norman Mailer. There didn’t seem any realistic danger of his turning up here with a rucksack, so far from the jazz and the booze and the hot bitches and the hellish stench of home. It was already stretching probability that I should be here, and I was not, more’s the pity, Norman Mailer, I did not have his rival distractions, and I had come for a purpose.
Of course the village has had its share of literary celebrity. Even leaving aside Lance Tourney, Camilla and myself, and the dozens who are at this very moment scribbling down their dreams in low-rent fishermen’s cottages all around the harbour, this spot is consecrated by one who came and courted here, and roamed and wrote awhile, and returned famously, full of remorse and rhyme. Many of those who visit today, whose mornings I interrupt and spoil up on the cliffs, are on a sort of pilgrimage and have come to inspect the church and walk the valley, to see the stiff escarpments, to stride the purple strand, to lose themselves in the flounce flinging mists. Don’t think that you detect any irony; you won’t hear a word against such pilgrims from me. After all, Camilla made her living out of them. And I welcome tourists for the very reason that the National Trust fears them: there is a good chance they will eventually wear away the countryside.
Let them come in their thousands. It’s not their fault, individually, that they cannot read a word of the melancholy poems and novels they have journeyed here in order to topographically reconstruct. The whole culture conspires to blind them. Camilla was always very wary of my conspiracy theories; she believed she could smell in them the airless odour of ghetto fears. But we differed not a jot about this one: some rural plot it is, hatched over the centuries in countless village halls and parlours, that convinces the English there is an indissoluble connection between literature and lakes, between meaning and mountains, between poets and peasants, between honesty and haylofts. I remember one long hot afternoon, sitting with Camilla on the little wooden bridge halfway up the valley, dangling our bare feet in the water, discussing this and related topics. It must have been a very hot day because I do not take willingly to uncovering my feet. I always like to feel that I am fully dressed and ready for flight. Another ghetto fear. I think the pretext – for our discussion, not my barefootedness – was the news we’d received that morning that Lilian Stinsford, a woman who occasionally worked for Camilla at the school, had been taken into hospital and was not expected to return from it. Lilian Stinsford had been a blooming energetic townswoman brought down here, kicking and screaming every inch of the way, by a husband in retreat from the modern world. He put her in a white thatched cottage in sight of the sea, gave her advice, babies, and more advice, and scratched together a pittance himself painting birds on local slate and selling them to the tourists he abhorred. They became a familiar sight around the village, Ken and Lilian Stinsford, once their children grew up and got the hell out, he stooping to croon over some marvel of growth or colour in the hedgerows, his face contorted into a horrible simulacrum of simple pleasure, she always a foot or two behind and to leeward of him, tossing pebbles into the fields or swiping at flowers with the stick he’d carved and insisted that she carried, her hair a pure white, her eyes puffed out with the poison of unused life. ‘And not once has that man paused to consider the wrong he’s done her,’ I recall Camilla saying. ‘Not once in the thirty years he lived here. But then why should he? Who or what in this place could ever plant the idea of erroneousness in his mind? He goes out into his garden in the morning, feels the pulse of God beating evenly in the soil, detects the same unhurried rhythm in his own breast and in that of his goats and chickens, and therefore knows that his poor frenzied wife is the anomaly, not him. Women don’t have a chance in Nature, Barney. The heat and the tempo are against them. Nature belongs to men. Look at a ploughed field – have you ever seen anything more brutal or tyrannical in your life? All farmers are fascists, Barney. By instinct. The only future for women is in the cities. Not that there’s any future for poor Lilian.’
I can still see Camilla swinging her legs as she spoke, absently kicking the surface of the stream, her toes painted a deep Clytemnestra purple, frightening away the summer flies that had paused to feed and cool off.
‘Admit I’m right,’ she said, after I’d failed to respond. ‘Admit that there isn’t a single person in the village that isn’t sorry for Ken for being stuck with a neurotic wife. Decent old Ken who just wanted to paint birds and collect worms in peace. Admit that the assertion of the male will begins, like everything else, in the country.’
What could I say? I wouldn’t have argued with her if I’d wanted to. She looked brown and strong and immovable. And I was sitting on the very edge of the bridge. True, the stream was shallow, but I couldn’t swim an inch and was quite capable of drowning in a hip bath. And anyway, I didn’t wish to quarrel with her. I didn’t think anything good came out of Nature either. Even food had nothing to recommend it to my taste until all trace of the earth had been grilled or sautéed out of it. I was the last person to argue that it wasn’t the same with human beings.
I nodded and smiled, but before I could get around to shaping a fuller answer we were disturbed by a couple of wonder-struck students from Camilla’s summer school. Camilla had founded the school three or four years earlier – before my time, that is – on the shrewd hunch that there would be some amongst the annual literary pilgrims who would welcome serious organization, the provision of expert lectures, properly researched and conducted rambles, and above all the opportunity to meet like-minded enthusiasts in an atmosphere conducive to devotional exchanges of findings and opinions. On perfect days like this Camilla sent everybody off in different directions, with copies of the poems, in order to find the field where and the bridle path from whence and the high cliff whither. Well, wasn’t this the little bridge on which? Yes, yes, it was. How clever of them to have recognised it! And had they also noticed on the way the selfsame small weir and the very stepping-stone? Camilla was marvellously encouraging and informative. To an untrained eye she even appeared to have a passion for her subject. But then he was her living.
Long after the ecstatic intruders had left us – Camilla had sent them next in search of the stony stile – we remained quiet, brooding separately. It really must have been a marvellous day, because I can distinctly remember taking off my tie and rolling up my shirt sleeves and commenting on how nice it was out here. Such avid naturism was not called out of me without good reason. But my words served only to remind Camilla of her theme. Her anger against mankind in general had been aggravated, it seemed, by her being forced to recall the one man in particular, that presiding genius who had grieved upon this little bridge. ‘And when the woman has been bullied and harried unto death,’ she said, assuming that I had been following all her silent thoughts or that I was smart enough to fill in the gaps myself, ‘when she has attained to the only peace and independence she is likely ever to have known, then along he comes again with his bent back and his remorse and his generous gift of guilt, making her death yet one more triumph for him, muscling in once more on whatever dignity or sympathy or attention happens to be going. Another Hamlet taking on all-comers in Ophelia’s grave. Fucking men with their obtrusive fucking guilt!’
I didn’t take it personally at the time – I seemed a long way from country graveyards then – but there is no possibility of my not noticing now that some of the flak from Camilla’s firing was meant to come my way. Guilt was one of my words. It helped me to understand myself. I believed I carried it in every pocket and that the weight of it was the reason I bent slightly at the knees. It’s certainly the reason I’m not entirely upright now.
Don’t mistake me, though. The guilt I’ve always been interested in is not the usual variety of cosmic unworthiness. I’m not a self-hater. I don’t wonder what such a creature as I is doing crawling across the face of the earth. I don’t feel that I’m largely to blame for starving Africans or camps of futureless refugees. What I’m referring to is a very particular sense of having let women down, not just the odd woman and not merely at random, but as it were the whole sex, systematically.
Perhaps a fragment of family history will help me to explain more exactly what I mean.
On the night he was married my father turned in his sleep, slipped both his hands inside the pure white nightdress of his softly slumbering wife – this is my mother I’m talking about: I have the right to heightened language – and murmured, ‘Lucetta, ah Lucetta, comme tu est douce! Que je t’aime!’
This was a surprise to both of them, for not only could my father speak no French, my mother’s name was Rachel.
To this day my father swears that he was as innocent as Adam of knowledge of any other woman, had never even heard of anyone called Lucetta, and that his whispering for her in his first sleep as a husband was just another example of that atrocious luck that has dogged him all his life when it comes to remembering my mother’s name. God knows whether he is telling the truth. Certainly my mother did her best to understand the sorts of associative confusions that might have been behind her receiving anniversary flowers accompanied by a card ‘To my darling Rose’, and gifts of jewellery on her birthday ‘For Golda’. But I know for a fact that she had never been happy about the letters my father sent her all those years ago from Germany – he had entered Hamburg with the British 2nd Army, just a month before my fifth birthday – addressed to ‘Liebe Helga’.
In fairness to him it must be said that he has made no better a job of remembering the names of my wives. The only time he got my first one’s right was on the day I was marrying my second. ‘Here’s to Barney and Sharon,’ he proposed, raising a tumbler of champagne, for all the world the proudest and the happiest of fathers-in-law; only Sharon had not, for reasons to do with good taste, been invited. Camilla – how vividly I recollect it! – roared with amusement. But she was capable of doing something like that while having her own thoughts.
The odd thing about this idiosyncrasy of my father’s is that names are in a sense his living. I’ve never known what precisely he does in that comfortable room of his in Somerset House, directly above a Tuscan column and with wide views over the Thames, except that he is involved in some way with births and birth certificates. In earlier times, when his job was new to him and he had a young family to entertain, he would come home, take off his coat, and without further preliminary explanations rattle off the latest batch of cruel and comic christenings, the day’s dirty tricks that parents had played upon their children. ‘Ivor Soredick,’ he would say, as we all fussed around him, bringing him tea and helping him off with his shoes. ‘Greta Warmley, Eva Brick, Nelson McCollum, Noah Arkwright, Ava Crisp, Russell Spring, Albert Bridge, Clyde Banks, Treta Wright, Atossa Day.’ And after supper, if we were lucky, he might remember some more. ‘Mavis Sphincter, Nola Blower, Rosina Hattrick, Yule Grocock, Rosy Titball, Neil Downs, Melvyn Bragg, Carrie Waters, Ellen Evans, Willie Wanklyn, Montague Gaylord, Butch Walker, Patricia Plaything.’
On some nights he would go on for hours. There is no possibility that he could have made these names up. There were too many of them. And we never caught him out repeating any. He simply remembered them. He saw them once and he never again forgot them. From which it must follow that there was nothing organically wrong with his memory. Some other explanation must therefore be found for why he so often suffered amnesia when he came to address or give something to his wife, and why he so frequently confused her with other women, real or imaginary, who might or might not have enjoyed some separate and individual existence in his life.
Guilt, of course, is where I’m heading, guilt husbandly and filial, guilt personal and atavistic, but I’ve no objection to pausing briefly, on the way, at guilt’s greatest ally, love. ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee,’ I tried to convince Camilla on countless cliff walks or valley rambles, ‘Before I knew thy face or name.’ But I was never successful. ‘You’d say that to anyone,’ she told me, ‘you’ve said it to I’ll never know how many others.’ Which showed how far she was from grasping what I was telling her. It wasn’t her fault. No member of her sex can ever understand how, for a man, love is a continuum. They cannot bear the idea that all previous women are but a dream of them, because that must mean that they themselves are but a dream of someone else. It’s no coincidence that Plato was a man.
‘I don’t want to be a part of your continuum, thanks very much,’ Camilla told me, as though this was an area where either of us could exercise any choice. Lucetta might just as well have protested against popping up in my father’s wedding-night dreams. My poor father – he is only a man like the rest of us; no wonder he could never be absolutely certain who his wife was: sometimes I have woken up next to Camilla and not known whether she was herself or my mother or my cousins or Sharon or the little girl whose head I split open on bonfire night, 1947, because her fireworks rose higher in the sky than mine.
And so, although Camilla happened to be the last and best, and although these are exclusively her haunts I try each day to track her down through, strictly speaking I walk this wild western shore, attired as if I’m on the way to a wine bar, for all of them.
That is not, of course, and I am the first to admit it, any kind of adequate explanation of how I came to have wound up here, washed up like that bit of exotic wreckage that was found on the rocks this morning – a splinter of a roulette table, the fishermen reckoned, from some capsized pleasure boat. And if I am ever to get away with a clear conscience and a clearer head – yes, that is my intention, despite the liquid looks I am getting from the local bean-eaters and other assorted fantasists I meet in the pubs and who want to tell me that they can see I have fallen fatally for the place as they have done – if I am going to escape, then I must follow Camilla’s old advice to me and come clean. I don’t expect it to be easy. It is not in the grain of my nature to be candid and confessional. ‘I’m an embroiderer,’ I told Camilla, I don’t know how many times. ‘I’m interested in the filigree around the edges of the truth.’ ‘You mean you haven’t got a straight bone in your body,’ she used to reply.
Ours was, as I think I have already made plain, a very verbal, argumentative connection.
Well, I can’t argue with you now, Camilla. But wherever you are, prepare to admit that you were wrong. Turn your fine stern eyes in this direction. Look at me. See how straight I’m growing. Watch how clean I’m coming.
Cleanish, anyway.
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
[1]
I’D BE PREPARED to say that it was my own fault for tampering with the secret arts, except that that confers too much dignity on all parties. This isn’t a Faustian story.
All I had done was act on some passing marital impulse, to please and pacify a wife and, while I was at it, confound a cheap and easy charlatan. And even though things had got a bit beyond me I would still have been all right – I had already convinced Sharon that continued conjugal harmony depended on her willingness to stop saying, ‘But that’s amazing!’ – if only the local necromantic press, namely The Finchley Zoist and Astral Traveller, had not got hold of my story, or if only I had not got hold of it. I can still hear the noise it made – I’m referring to the actual noise of the actual paper, not publicity – as it came crashing, unsolicited – it goes without saying that I was not a regular subscriber – through my letter box. Rolled up so that it resembled the sort of weapon with which peasants revolt and delivered with enormous violence, it got three-quarters of the way into our hall and might have even made it up the stairs had it not collided with the telephone table and knocked the receiver off its cradle.
The racket caused Sharon to sit bolt upright in our bed and me to be forcibly propelled from those moist, dark places underneath her arms into which it was my custom, immediately upon waking, to bury myself. I mention this small domestic detail not to be indelicate but because it proves that although I had little time for immaterialism or popular metaphysics, and did not welcome periodicals of the tele- or the para-anything, I was not some rigid earth-bound rationalist, confined merely to the here, the palpable and the now. In my private life especially, in the matters of those mysterious intimacies between men and women which seemed to spawn, in these days, so many Acts of Parliament – this was 1967, that annus mirabilis for consenting adults – I considered myself to be unusually open to experience: an adventurer, a seeker, a wayfarer who knew that the way forward might also be the route back and that in order to come up it was sometimes necessary to go down. Sharon was not a woman who needed any encouragement to allow the hairs on her body to grow when and where they wanted, but I encouraged her anyway; a fanatic horticulturalist, I urged on wild profusions of growth, so that when I plunged nose first into them I could be back in the primaeval forest, listening again to the blatherings of the macaws, the faraway insistent beat of native drums, and the closer, the much closer screech of the baboons.
Ours was not, is what I’m trying to convey, a spiritually diffident household, but that didn’t mean that I was pleased to find the current issue of The Finchley Zoist and Astral Traveller waiting for us amongst the wreckage of our hall furniture; still less that I was keen to read the article it contained concerning me.
Sharon was, though. She caught me on the point of feeding it down our mechanical sink tidy, took it from me and bore it back upstairs with her to the lavatory. It was also part of our relational intrepidity not to close doors, and I was able to hear her exclaiming ‘But that’s amazing!’ at regular intervals. When she came down again she was still wearing her reading spectacles which I took to mean that she wanted to read to me aloud. But first she offered to soften me up with one of her famous calculations. ‘Do you know’, she said, ‘that if you add together all the numerals in today’s date’ – it was the 12th day of the 8th month in the year 1967 – ‘and take away the number of pages in this paper’ – there were 8 – ‘plus the time it was delivered’ – on the stroke of 8.00 – ‘you will arrive at your age?’ I was 27. I think you will find that the mathematics work. I never checked myself. I had a sort of stunned and absolute faith in Sharon’s ability in the field of numerology.
Thinking about her now I feel a great nostalgia for her innocent almaniacal obsession with dates and numbers and coincidences, and I can see that it was nothing but the efflorescence of a good and hopeful nature. What she yearned for above all was a universal and perhaps even an inter-galactic certainty, and those little wonders of synchronicity she discerned were important to her because they were confirmations of coherence, and therefore causes for celebration. She was ready to crack a bottle of champagne every time something added up. After five years of marriage I suppose I must have been less responsive to this statistical optimism than I ought to have been, but I must confess that in the early days of our courtship I capitalized on it unscrupulously. I could get her to do anything for me provided that I justified it with a small sum. She would stay with me until whatever hour in the morning was equal to the addition of both her parents’ birthdays divided by how many veins I could count on her forearm. She would kiss me in as many places as I could multiply the seconds we’d known each other by the minutes we hadn’t. I always regretted that more of the means whereby men and women please one another were not referred to by numbers instead of names because I believed I could have totted her up into all of them. As it was I gave myself a sounder mathematical grounding in her company than most modern boys, with their reliance on pocket calculators, can ever hope to equal.
But on this occasion, with everything totalling 27 and Sharon looking full of amazement, I didn’t manage to be very graceful. ‘Read it to me then, if you really have to,’ is what I must have said, because read it to me she did; but I reckon I must have added some imprecations to my consent. I know I was most irritated with her.
This is what she read to me and if you wonder how I come to remember it so vividly I can at least tell you that it is not for want of trying to forget it.
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY, COSMIC MEMORY, OR REINCARNATION?
The study of human immortality through hypnotic age regression moved one step closer to public recognition and acceptance three evenings ago when a number of local business people and literary luminaries crowded into Sharon Fugleman’s bookshop in order to meet and listen to the distinguished London-based hypnotherapist, Harry Vilbert. After a characteristically lucid and modest introductory lecture, in the course of which he vigorously disassociated himself from those ‘cocktail party illusionists’ who bring the work of serious students of the paranormal into disrepute, Mr Vilbert proceeded to a demonstration of his remarkable gifts. As is often the case with first-time regression groups, where apprehension does not yet recognise itself as joyful expectancy, it took a little time for a volunteer to be found, but finally Mr Barney Fugleman, the husband of the bookshop’s proprietress, stepped forward. He did not at first appear to be an ideal subject. His initial movements and responses suggested unwillingness and even suspicion, and when asked to relax he sat bolt upright in his chair, his fists clenched tightly on his knees, his eyes forced open to an unnatural degree. But Harry Vilbert proved to us once again that there is no recalcitrance which cannot be turned into quiescence. Only idiots cannot be hypnotized. Within a few minutes Mr Fugleman’s head fell forward and he was taken with consummate ease through all the preliminary stages of hypnosis. Released from the constraints of his present personality and sent back to ransack the boundless immensities of time that preceded his birth for some vital memory or recollection, he dropped almost at once into a voice and style of diction not normally his own. What follows is given verbatim, and it can be seen that Harry Vilbert asked the most straightforward of questions and in no way coaxed or prompted the subject.
‘Where are you?’
(Silence, but a rapid movement of the eyes and some moistening of the lips.)
‘Where are you? Do you hear me?’
‘Yes. Be quiet. I’m trying to see.’
‘What is it that you are trying to see? What do you see?’
‘I didn’t come on purpose to look. I’m on an errand.’
‘You didn’t come on purpose to look at what?’
‘The woman.’
‘What is the woman doing?’
‘I don’t know … nothing … she is just swinging.’
‘Do you know this woman?’
‘I’ve read about her. Everyone has read about her.’
‘Do you know her name?’
‘How else could I have read about her? It’s Martha … Martha Brown.’
‘What kind of swing is she on?’
‘She isn’t on a swing. She is on a rope.’
‘She’s swinging on a rope?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is the rope attached to then? Is it tied to a tree?’
‘No. (Laughter) It is tied to her.’
‘Around her waist?’
‘Around her neck.’
‘Isn’t that rather dangerous?’
‘(More laughter) Not now it isn’t.’
‘Is she already dead then, this woman?’
‘Just about.’
‘Did you hang her?’
‘I? No, I have too tender a heart. I am just here on an errand. Calcraft the hangman hanged her.’
‘And you watched him?’
‘I and thousands of others. It’s a big crowd here … but I have a very good view.’
‘Why do you want to watch?’
‘She is a handsome woman. She makes a fine figure.’
‘But isn’t she covered?’
‘They put a white cap over her face but it has become transparent in the rain. I can see her features quite clearly – even the parting of her lips.’
‘What else is she wearing?’
‘Only a black silk gown. It rustled when she was led past me, and you could hear it rustling when she first twisted half around and back again. But it is quiet now. The rain has made it cling to her body.’
‘Is that why you are watching?’
‘I can see all her shape.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I am sixteen.’
‘Have you been to many hangings?’
‘No. There hasn’t been one for years.’
‘What year is this, then?’
‘1856.’
‘I haven’t yet asked you your name.’
‘Tom … Tommy.’
‘And your other name?’
‘Ah … Thomas.’
‘No, I meant your second name. Your family name.’
‘Aaah … (A sudden switching of voices here) AAH.’
‘What’s the matter? Why don’t you want to tell me your second name?’
‘AAAH … AAAAAH.’
‘What is it? Why are you frightened?’
‘AAAAAH … AAAAAAAAAH.’
‘It’s all right Tommy. I just wanted to know how to address you if I needed to write to you. Tommy who? Thomas what?’
‘AAAAAAH … AAAAAAAAAAAAH.’
At this point Harry Vilbert hurriedly brought his subject, who was shaking violently, back to the present. He later explained to our reporter that he did not believe he could safely proceed any further with the regression as the reluctance to disclose the second name was not Tommy’s but Barney’s. The hostility felt by the present to the previous incumbent of Barney Fugleman’s host body must have been very great, he went on, for there to have been an intervention, across time and consciousness, on this scale. It is not unusual, he said, for subjects to be dismayed and even disgusted by the unfamiliar personalities who have inexplicably usurped their accustomed functions; but he had never before witnessed such determined resistance: Tommy was so unwelcome to Barney Fugleman that he was not even allowed the most basic individualising human right to name himself.
I stopped Sharon here. Apart from the suggestion that I had been behaving like a fascist towards my own unconscious or whatever part of me I had dredged that monstrous creation, Tommy, out of, all that Sharon read was familiar to me. It was only a few days since, to please Sharon, I had subjected myself to these indignities, and I still retained a sort of dull, anaesthetized recollection of the experience, much as if I had woken sooner and less oblivious than I would have liked on the morning after a drunken party. Only I knew I hadn’t been to any party. ‘I know all that,’ I said, ‘can I put it down the sink now?’
But Sharon wasn’t dismayed by my lack of enthusiasm. ‘You haven’t heard the last paragraph yet,’ she told me, launching straight into it.
Our researches have since established that on Saturday, August 9, 1856, a woman named Martha Brown was publicly hanged from a scaffold outside Dorchester prison. Her crime was the murder of her husband.
She wore for her execution a simple and light black silk gown. A crowd of several thousand people turned up, as the case had enjoyed much notoriety and there had not been a hanging here for many years. It was, as Tommy clearly remembered, a rainy day.
[2]
‘Don’t you think that that’s amazing?’
I wasn’t prepared to make even the pretence of considering it. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Then how do you explain it?’
‘Do I have to explain it? I can’t explain how water comes up and waits for me in my pipes but that doesn’t mean I have to be amazed every time I turn on the tap.’
Sharon might have been the one without the university degree but I could see she was not going to let me get away with that. ‘Plumbing can be explained scientifically.’
‘Not by me it can’t, Sharon. By me nothing can be explained scientifically.’ This wasn’t rhetoric; for all that I consider myself to be a realist I have always possessed a very dim sense of how things operate. Perhaps it’s Jewish. In the household I was brought up in you rang an electrical contractor when you wanted a plug fixing. So I wasn’t exaggerating when I said to Sharon, ‘I don’t even understand how a mirror works.’
She helped me out. ‘Refraction.’
For a numerologist she could be very literal. And I really did have a point that I wanted to make. ‘Listen, Sharon,’ I said to her, putting more than usual authority into my voice, ‘my own body is a vast machinery of mysteries and minor miracles to me. Its every function astounds me. See, I can crook my little finger within an infinitesimal fraction of a second from the moment I decided I would like to crook it. If I want to stamp my foot, look, I can stamp my foot. How can this be? Sharon, if I were to put my mind to it – and putting one’s mind to something is also a miraculous little activity – I would be filled with reverence for myself every time I moved a muscle.’
‘Which isn’t very often.’
‘It might not be often, Sharon, but if we are going in for astonishment it is astonishing I can do it at all. Right now, even as I speak, thousands of tiny valves are opening and closing in obscure corners of me, without my even asking them to. So what am I supposed to do – consider myself to be a prodigy just because I work?’
‘All right, stop shouting.’
‘I’m not shouting.’ I’m sure I wasn’t shouting. ‘Sharon, we’re both approaching thirty; between us we’re almost sixty. That’s old enough to know that nothing is amazing because everything is.’
That was meant to be the end of it. Had we been a television programme the credits would have started to roll. But Sharon was dogged this morning. ‘You don’t want to know how you came to get Martha Brown’s name right?’
I shook my head.
‘You don’t want to know how you were able to describe accurately the dress she was wearing?’
I shook my head.
‘You’re not curious about the date even?’
I poured myself some coffee.
‘Do you realise that August 9th was the day on which Martha Brown was hung and you were hypnotized by Harry Vilbert?’
‘A black day for both of us,’ I replied. I couldn’t stay silent all morning. ‘But you can’t make much of the coincidence, Sharon. Her August 9th was 1856, mine was 1967. If you could have managed an exact hundred years anniversary I might have been impressed, as it is –’
‘As it is the difference is 111 years, and you don’t need me to tell you that 111 is the devil’s number.’
With which she rose from the breakfast table and left me, whereupon the credits, this time, really did begin to roll.
But in twenty minutes she was down again, dressed all in black and looking dangerous. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘we’re not sixty between us, we’re fifty-five and a half. Make what you like of that.’
God knows, I tried to.