Arthur and George (33 page)

“I see that look in your eye, Connie, and I know what you are thinking—that you would not have needed a psychic to tell you that. But wait. Two days later, another seance was held with the same sensitive, and the two lads, who had been trained in spiritual knowledge, came through at once. They apologized to their mother, who had not wanted them to set off, and gave an account of the capsizing and of their death by water. They reported that they were now in exactly the conditions of brightness and happiness that their father’s preaching had promised. And they even brought the seaman who had perished with them to say a few words.

“Towards the end of the contact, one of the lads told how the other brother’s arm had been torn off by a fish. The medium asked if it had been a shark, and the boy replied that it was not like any shark he had ever seen. Now, all this was written down at the time and some of it published in the newspapers. Mark the sequel. Some weeks later a large shark of a rare deep-sea species, one unfamiliar to the fishermen who caught it, and quite unknown in the waters off Melbourne, was taken some thirty miles away. Inside it was the bone of a human arm. Also, a watch, some coins, and other articles which belonged to the boy.” He paused. “Now, Connie, what do you make of that?”

Connie reflects for a while. What she makes of it is that her brother is confusing religion with his love of fixing things. He sees a problem—death—and he looks for a way of solving it: such is his nature. She also thinks Arthur’s spiritualism is connected, though quite how she cannot work out, with his love of chivalry and romance and the belief in a golden age. But she confines her objections to a narrower basis.

“What I make of it, my dear brother, is that it is a wonderful story, and you are a wonderful storyteller, as we all know. I also think that I was not in Melbourne twenty years ago, and neither were you.”

Arthur does not mind being rebuffed. “Connie, you are a great rationalist, and that is the first step towards becoming a spiritist.”

“I doubt you will convert me, Arthur.” It seems to Connie that he has just told her a revised version of Jonah and the Whale—though one in which the victims were less fortunate—but that to base any beliefs upon such a story would be as much an act of faith as it was for those who first heard the story of Jonah. At least the Bible is proposing a metaphor. Arthur, because he dislikes metaphor, sees a parable and chooses to take it literally. As if the parable of the Wheat and the Tares were mere horticultural advice.

“Connie, what if someone you knew and loved were to die. And afterwards that person made contact with you, spoke to you, told you something only you knew, some chance intimate detail which could not have been discovered through anyone’s trickery?”

“Arthur, I think that is another bridge I shall cross if ever I come to it.”

“Connie, you English Connie. Wait and see, wait and see what turns up. Not for me. I’m all for action now.”

“You always have been, Arthur.”

“We shall be laughed at. It is a great cause, but it will not be a fair fight. You must expect to see your brother laughed at. Still, always remember: one case is all we need. One case and the whole thing is proven. Proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Proven beyond all scientific refutation. Think of that, Connie.”

“Arthur, your tea is now quite cold.”

And so, gradually, the years accrue. It is ten years since Touie fell ill, six since he met Jean. It is eleven years since Touie fell ill, seven since he met Jean. It is twelve years since Touie fell ill, eight since he met Jean. Touie remains cheerful, free of pain, and ignorant, he is sure, of the gentle conspiracy surrounding her. Jean remains in her flat, practises her voice, rides to hounds, makes chaperoned visits to Undershaw and unchaperoned ones to Masongill; she never swerves from insisting that what she has is enough because it is all her heart desires, and she leaves one safe child-bearing year behind her after another. The Mam remains his rock, his confessor, his reassurance. Nothing moves. Perhaps nothing ever will move, until one day the strain attacks his heart and he simply explodes and expires. There is no way out, that is the beastliness of his position; or rather, each beckoning exit is marked Misery. In
Lasker’s Chess Magazine
he reads of a position called
Zugzwang,
in which the player is unable to move any piece in any direction to any square without making his already imperilled state worse. This is what Arthur’s life feels like.

Sir Arthur’s life, on the other hand, which is all most people see, is in royal shape. Knight of the realm, friend of the King, champion of the Empire, and Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey. A man constantly in public demand. One year he is asked to judge a Strong Man competition organized by Mr. Sandow the bodybuilder at the Albert Hall. He and Lawes the sculptor are the two assessors, with Sandow himself as referee. Eighty competitors display their muscles to a packed hall in batches of ten. Eighty bursting leopardskins are whittled down to twenty-four, to twelve, to six, and then a final three. Those remaining are wonderful specimens, but one is a little short, and another a little clumsy, so they award the title, and with it a valuable gold statue, to a man from Lancashire called Murray. The judges and some chosen company are then rewarded with a late champagne supper. Emerging into the midnight streets, Sir Arthur notices Murray walking ahead of him, the statuette tucked casually beneath one powerful arm. Sir Arthur joins him, congratulates him anew, and, perceiving that he is a very simple country fellow, asks where he is intending to stay the night. Murray confides that he has no money at all, merely his return ticket to Blackburn, and is planning to walk the deserted streets until his train leaves in the morning. So Arthur takes him to Morley’s Hotel, and instructs the staff to look after him. The next morning he finds Murray cheerfully holding court from his bed to awed maids and waiters, his award glinting on the pillow beside him. It looks the very picture of a happy outcome, but this is not the image that stays in Sir Arthur’s mind. It is that of a man walking ahead of him alone; a man who has won a great prize and been acclaimed, a man with a statuette of gold under his arm and yet no money in his pocket, a man planning to walk the gas-lit streets in solitude until daybreak.

Then there is Conan Doyle’s life, which is also in fine fettle. He is too professional and too energetic ever to suffer from writer’s block for more than a day or two. He identifies a story, researches and plans it, then writes it out. He is quite clear about the writer’s responsibilities: they are firstly, to be intelligible, secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever. He knows his own abilities, and he also knows that in the end the reader is king. That is why Mr. Sherlock Holmes was brought back to life, allowed to have escaped the Reichenbach Falls thanks to a knowledge of esoteric Japanese wrestling holds and an ability to scramble up sheer rock faces. If the Americans insist on offering five thousand dollars for a mere half-dozen new stories—and in return only for American rights—then what can Dr. Conan Doyle do except raise his hands in surrender and allow himself to be manacled to the consulting detective for the foreseeable future? And the fellow has brought other rewards: the University of Edinburgh has made him an Honorary Doctor of Letters. He may never be a big man like Kipling, but as he walked in parade through the city of his birth, he felt at ease in those academic robes; more so, he has to admit, than in the quaint garb of a Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey.

And then there is his fourth life, the one where he is neither Arthur, nor Sir Arthur, nor Dr. Conan Doyle; the life in which name is irrelevant, as is wealth and rank and outward display and bodily carapace; the world of the spirit. The sense that he has been born for something else grows with each year. It is not easy; it will never be easy. It is not like signing up for one of the established religions. It is new, and dangerous, and utterly important. If you were to became a Hindoo, it would be regarded by society as an eccentricity rather than a derangement. But if you are prepared to open yourself to the world of Spiritism, then you must also be prepared to endure the jocosities and shallow paradoxes with which the Press misleads the public. Yet what are the scoffers and cynics and penny-a-liners when set beside Crookes and Myers and Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace?

Science is leading the way, and will bring the scoffers low as it always does. For who would have believed in radio waves? Who would have believed in X-rays? Who would have believed in argon and helium and neon and xenon, all of which have been discovered in the last years? The invisible and the impalpable, which lie just below the surface of the real, just beneath the skin of things, are increasingly being made visible and palpable. The world and its purblind inhabitants are at last learning to see.

Take Crookes. What does Crookes say? “It is incredible but it is true.” The man whose work in physics and chemistry is everywhere admired for its precision and truth. The man who discovered thallium, who spent years investigating the properties of rarefied gases and rare earths. Who better to pronounce on this equally rarefied world, this new territory inaccessible to duller minds and cabined spirits? It is incredible, but it is true.

And then Touie dies. It is thirteen years since she fell ill, nine since he met Jean. Now, in the springtime of the year 1906, she begins to lapse into mild delirium. Sir Douglas Powell is immediately in attendance; paler, balder, but still the courtliest messenger of death. This time, there is no chance of reprieve, and Arthur must prepare himself for what has been so long foretold. The vigil begins. Undershaw’s clattering monorail is stilled, the rifle range placed out of bounds, the tennis net taken down for the season. Touie remains without pain, and easy in her mind, as the spring flowers in her room change to those of early summer. Gradually, she slips into longer periods of delirium. The tubercle has gone to her brain; there is partial paralysis of her left side and half her face.
The Imitation of Christ
lies unopened; Arthur is in constant attendance.

To the end, she recognizes him. She says, “Bless you,” and “Thank you, dear,” and when he raises her in the bed, she mumurs, “That’s the ticket.” As June turns to July, she is clearly dying. On the day itself, Arthur is at her side; Mary and Kingsley watch in awkward fear, half-embarrassed by their mother’s paralysed face. In silence they wait. At three in the morning, Touie dies holding Arthur’s hand. She is forty-nine, Arthur forty-seven. He is much in her room after her death; standing by her body, he tells himself that he has done his best. He also knows that this abandoned husk, laid out on the bed, is not all there remains of Touie. This white and waxen thing is just something she has left behind.

In the days that follow, Arthur feels, beneath the febrile exaltation of the bereaved, a solid sense of duty performed. Touie is buried as Lady Doyle beneath a marble cross at Grayshott. Messages of sympathy come from the great and the humble; from King and parlourmaid, from his fellow writers and his far-flung readers, from London clubs and imperial outposts. Arthur is at first touched and honoured by the condolences, and then, as they continue, increasingly disturbed. What exactly has he done to deserve such heartfelt sentiments, let alone the assumptions behind them?

These expressions of true feeling make him feel a hypocrite. Touie has been the gentlest companion a man could possibly have. He remembers showing her the military trophies on Clarence Esplanade; he sees her with a ship’s biscuit between her lips at the Victualling Yard; he waltzes her round the kitchen table when heavily pregnant with Mary; he whisks her off to frozen Vienna; he tucks a blanket round her in Davos, and waves towards a recumbent figure on an Egyptian hotel verandah before launching a golf ball across the sands towards the nearest Pyramid. He remembers her smile, and her goodness; but he also remembers that it is years since he could put his hand upon his heart and swear that he loved her. Not just since Jean came along, but before that too. He has loved her as best a man can, given that he did not love her.

He knows that he should spend the next days and weeks with his children, because that is what a grieving parent does. Kingsley is thirteen and Mary seventeen: ages which now surprise him. Part of him has frozen time at the day and the year when he met Jean—the day his heart was utterly brought to life, and also placed in a state of suspended animation. He must accustom himself to the notion that his children will soon be adults.

If he needs any confirmation of this, Mary soon provides it. Over tea one afternoon a few days after the funeral, she says to him, in an alarmingly grown-up voice, “Father, when Mother was dying, she said that you would remarry.”

Arthur almost chokes on his cake. He feels his colour rising, his chest tightening; perhaps this is the seizure he has been half-expecting. “Did she, by God?” Touie certainly never mentioned the subject to him.

“Yes. No, not exactly. What she said was . . .” and Mary pauses while her father feels cacophony in his head, turmoil in his guts “. . . what she said was that I was not to be shocked if you were to remarry, because that is what she would want for you.”

Arthur does not know what to think. Has some trap been laid for him, or does no trap exist? Did Touie after all suspect? Did she confide in their daughter? Was it a general remark, or a specific one? He has lived with so much damned uncertainty over the last nine years that he doubts he can bear any more.

“And did she . . .” Arthur tries to sound jocular, while realizing that this is not the right tone—but then there is no right tone—“And did she have any particular candidate in mind?”

“Father!” Mary is evidently shocked by the very notion, as well as by his tone.

The conversation passes to safer ground. But it stays with Arthur through the following days, as he takes flowers to Touie’s grave, as he stands, distracted, in her empty room, as he avoids his desk, and finds he cannot face the letters of condolence, the letters of true feeling, which continue to arrive. He has spent nine years protecting Touie from the knowledge of Jean’s existence; nine years trying never to give her a moment’s unhappiness. But perhaps these two desires are—always were—incompatible. He readily admits that women are not his area of expertise. Does a woman know when you are in love with her? He thinks so, he believes so, he knows so, because that is what Jean recognized, in that sunlit garden, even before he himself was aware of it. And if so, then does a woman know when you are no longer in love with her? And does a woman also know when you are in love with someone else? Nine years ago he devised an elaborate plot to protect Touie, involving all those around her; but perhaps in the end it was only a scheme to protect himself and Jean. Perhaps it was entirely selfish, and Touie saw through its fraudulence; perhaps she knew all along. Mary cannot suspect the full burden of Touie’s message about remarrying, but it gets through to Arthur now. Maybe she knew from the start, watched Arthur’s squalid rearrangements of the truth from her sickbed, understood and smiled at every mean little lie her husband told her, imagined him downstairs busy at the adulterer’s telephone. She would have felt helpless to protest, because she could no longer be a wife to him in the fullest sense. And what if—now his suspicions become darker still—what if she knew about Jean’s importance from the start, and went on guessing? What if she found herself obliged to welcome Jean to Undershaw while imagining her Arthur’s mistress?