Death's Jest-Book (38 page)

Have
you had a good Christmas? I have, in fact so good that only now does
it seem I've had time or energy to sit down and write to you. Perhaps
you'd have preferred it if I hadn't bothered? I hope not, but in any
case it's no longer a matter of choice. They say in China that if you
save someone's life then it becomes your responsibility. In a way you
may have saved mine by putting me in the Syke, so now you're having
to pay the price.

Last time I wrote I was on my way
to Zurich.

God, what a wonderful city! You
can almost smell the money! But that I know will be of little
interest to one so unmaterialistic as yourself, so let me hasten to
matters more to your taste, such as art, history, and the pursuit of
knowledge.

From the point
of view of new material, my short stay was as unproductive as I
anticipated. To dig up anything new from ground already carefully
riddled by Sam and Albacore, I would have needed a
vast supply
of serendipity, and I'd already used mine in making a possible
connection between Beddoes and Fichtenburg. But good biography is as
much concerned with getting inside the mind of its subject as
establishing external facts about him, and I think I got a great deal
out of simply strolling around the city, imagining I was that other
lonely, disaffected and unattached exile, Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

You, of course, by instinct and
training, are expert at tracking motives. How much easier would it be
with you at my side for me to understand what made Beddoes, shortly
before his twenty-second birthday and shortly after having taken his
degree at Oxford where he had begun to establish a reputation as a
poet, decide to leave England and spend nearly all the remainder of
his life in Germany and Switzerland? In particular, how could someone
who so clearly loved the English tongue as much as he did have pretty
well relegated it to his second language by the time he died?

Sam's theory is that everything
can be traced to the boy's early exposure to the brutal realities of
death, and to the devastatingly early loss of his powerful father. If
we look at the three main energy centres of Beddoes' life, we can see
how they all relate to his father, and how they're all preoccupied
with man's struggle against the ultimate enemy.

Through medicine he seeks for
ways to understand and conquer it while at the same time looking for
any evidence in flesh, blood and bone of the existence of the soul.
While he does not seem inclined to follow his father in channelling
his medical skills into improving the health of the underprivileged
(Beddoes Sr founded the quaintly named Institute for the Sick and
Drooping Poor!), Thomas Lovell actively supports - sometimes at
personal risk - what today we would call human rights movements
throughout Germany. And, of course, through the creative power of his
imagination he attempts to grapple hand to hand with the Arch-Fear.

So why come to Germany? The
answer lies in what I've just written. Here he could be at the
cutting edge (ho ho) of medical research; here there were strong
undercurrents of social revolution such as only rarely made
themselves felt in dull, complacent little England; and here with its
dark forests and dramatic castles and sweeping rivers and turbulent
mythology lay the true Gothic heart of Europe which, since the
Jacobeans, the British had only dabbled their toes in.

But in the end he sees that his
attack has failed on all three fronts.

I visited the site of the old
town theatre which Beddoes hired for a night in a last sad attempt to
pluck some morsel of comfort out of his disintegrating life by
dressing young Konrad Degen up in hose and doublet and putting the
poor lad on the stage as Hotspur.

Sam muses that perhaps Beddoes
saw Hotspur, an uncomplicated, impulsive, brave, honourable,
poetry-mocking, life-loving man of action, as the kind of son who
wouldn't have let his father die. Or perhaps the only way a man can
really bring a father back to life is to become him by having a son
yourself.

Poor Beddoes. For a moment I
slipped out of my skin and time into his and felt his pain, and felt
too, what is worse, his faith that the future must be better than the
past and that by the time we reached, say, the twenty-first century,
the world would have taken large steps towards Utopia.

But enough of these dolorous
imaginings! The festive season was waiting for me back at
Fichtenburg. Let me tell you how I have celebrated it.

On my return
to the castle early in the evening of December 23rd, I found Linda
and her party had arrived that morning. She greeted me warmly with
her version of the Continental kiss. One of the most popular videos
on offer in the Syke was called
Great British Sporting Moments
(Dr
Johnson was right; if you want a patriot, look in the jails!) and one
of the Moments which got a particularly loud cheer was the old
black-and-white footage of Henry Cooper flooring Cassius Clay, as he
still was then, with a left hook.

Linda's bruising buss to the
point of my cheekbone had much the same effect. I was still reeling
from it as she followed it up with close enquiry into the progress of
my researches. I got the impression she knew all about the pattern of
my first couple of days there - Frau Buff, probably - and regarded my
rather abrupt departure to Zurich as a pleasing demonstration of my
capacity to put duty before pleasure. No hint she knew the form that
pleasure took, thank God!

She took the coincidence of the
Stimmer connection with Beddoes in her stride, very much a Third
Thought reaction. God's hand is in everything; we should marvel all
the time, not just on the odd occasion when our spiritual
caliginosity clears enough for us to glimpse Him at work. She has no
real interest in Beddoes. She is backing me because by doing so she
disobliges a lot of poncy academics, and also because (I make the
point objectively not vaingloriously) in some as yet undefined way
she likes the look of me.

She foresaw no problem in getting
the Stimmers to permit examination of the Keller painting. That's her
real strength. She simply doesn't admit the possibility of failure!

But I could tell she was
genuinely pleased by my progress, for suddenly she apologized - with
that brusqueness you encounter in people who are not used to
apologizing - for a regrettable but necessary interference with my
scholastic privacy. It seems that her party has swollen some way
beyond its opening numbers (politicos love a freebie!) and pressure
on room space has necessitated putting someone in the chalet's second
bedroom.

The good news was that it was
Frere Jacques.

I said, 'That would just be
Jacques by himself, would it?'

She took my point immediately and
said, 'Yes. Doleful Dierick's back at the Abbey, making sure the
Brothers don't enjoy Christmas too much. But I should warn you, he's
threatening to join us for New Year.'

Well, sufficient is the evil,
etc, and I said I'd be delighted to have Jacques' company, and I
meant it. A chaperon was just what I needed. Timid and naive Mouse
might be, but she's her mother's child, and Linda is a woman who
hates to leave a job undone.

I met Mouse on my way down to the
chalet. She greeted me with what looked like unfeigned delight,
reproached me for my abrupt disappearance, and said that Zazie and
Hildi had told her to wish me a very merry Christmas on their behalf.

' Carefully I looked for hidden
meaning. With relief, I found none.

In the chalet I discovered Frere
Jacques sitting at the kitchen table writing.

He too expressed great pleasure
at seeing me and also tried to apologize for breaking in on my
scholarly privacy.

I told him I was delighted to
have the company, and hoped he didn't mind being separated from
Linda's main party.

'Good heavens, no!' he laughed.
'They seem as boring a bunch of politicos as you could hope to find
outside of your House of Commons tea-room.'

'No plans to seduce them to Third
Thought?' I said slyly.

That might be a problem, as a
Third Thought clearly requires two other thoughts to go before it,'
he replied gravely. Then he grinned and said, 'But you can't be a
Christian without believing six impossible things before breakfast,
so I'm calmly optimistic.'

Now this was unbuttoning with a
vengeance! Again that hesitant, doubtful part of my mind, always
looking at the shadows in the sunniest scenes, made me recall that
old stratagem of Machiavelli's, that the best way to get a man to let
you into his confidence is to offer him the illusion of free
admission into your own first.

What a trouble to me is this
inability to give my trust without stint, but I did feel easy enough
with him to ask outright what he was doing spending Christmas at
Fichtenburg when I should have thought a man in his line of work
might have found the season making other calls on his time.

He said, 'Do not imagine because
I mock these politicos that I despise them. For Third Thought to
prosper, it can't be seen as a refuge for oddballs. We must appeal to
ordinary people, and if they see people they trust trusting me, then
they have taken a large step towards us.'

'You think people trust
politicians?' I said. 'You know that Linda is known as Loopy Linda in
the British Press?'

'You think
that people trust the British Press?' he countered. 'Of course with
her surname she was bound to be called Loopy. Most of your papers,
like Shakespeare, would sell their souls for a bit of word-play!
Whenever I get mentioned in your press, few of the journalists can
resist the temptation to make a
dormez-vous
or
sonnez les
matines
joke. If Linda reverted to her maiden name of Duckett, I
dread to think what might ensue.'

This set the tone of the
relationship between us and by the time the festivities were over, we
were very good chums. He was sharp enough to notice how I avoided the
company of Mouse and I countered by comparing her unfavourably with
Emerald.

'Yes,' he said. I thought you
were somewhat struck with Miss Emerald.'

‘Funny,' I said. 'I thought
much the same about you.'

Which made him laugh, but I felt
those keen blue eyes checking me out for hidden meanings as he
laughed.

I'm really getting to like this
guy. But I still made sure I kept the innermost casket of my soul
firmly locked. It's only with you, Mr Pascoe, that I feel able to
reveal everything. Frere Jacques might wear the religious robe but it
is you who are my sole confessor.

So we had a
great time. Even the religious bits were fun. Jacques presided at a
decidedly ecumenical service in the music room on Christmas morning.
His sermon was short, eloquent and entertaining, one of the politicos
(a German) proved to be a dab hand on the piano, and both Linda and
Mouse turned out to have very nice voices, the latter soprano, the
former mezzo, which combined most pleasingly in a Bach anthem. They
sang again, making a fair shot at the "Flower Song" in
Lakme
after the superb Christmas dinner which Frau Buff and
her team of Coppelias provided, and each of us was then invited in
turn to contribute to the entertainment.

I felt a bit like poor old
Caedmon as the foreigners did their various things very competently,
and might have snuck off back to my cowshed if Linda hadn't fixed me
with her dominatrix gaze and said, 'Franny, let's have one for
England, eh?'

Reluctantly I stood up. The only
thing that came into my panicking mind was a comic poem of Beddoes,
The New Cecilia'. His sense of humour is a mix of the dark surreal
and the medical robust, and in this poem he tells of the alcoholic
widow of St Gingo, who denies her dead husband's capacity to work
miracles with the words -

He can no more work wonder

Than a clyster-pipe thunder

Or I sing a psalm with my
nether-end.

And
she immediately pays the price.

As she said it, her breakfast
beginning on

A tankard of home-brewed
inviting ale,

Lo! the part she was sitting
and sinning on

Struck the Old Hundredth up
like a nightingale.

And
so it continues for the rest of her life, leading to the moral-

Therefore, Ladies, repent and
be sedulous

In praising your lords, lest,
ah well-a-day!

Such judgment befall the
incredulous

And your latter ends melt into
melody.

As I launched into this, suddenly
the huge inappropriateness of what I was doing struck me like a pink
blancmange at a funeral feast. Here was I on Our Lord's birthday in
front of my devout patroness, her spiritual guru, and an audience of
her distinguished friends reciting a poem about a saint's widow
farting psalm tunes!

But, like the Widow Gingo, I
could find no way to interrupt my flow.

I dared not look at Linda. As I
finished, I heard a choking sound come from her direction which at
first I took for the beginning of an explosion of inarticulate rage.
And then it matured into a long macaw-like screech of laughter. She
laughed until the tears ran down her face. Most of her guests roared
their approval too, and those who had to have Beddoes'
nineteenth-century idiom and sometimes convoluted syntax explained to
them demanded a repeat performance which I embellished with a bit of
body language which also went down very well. But when they urged me
to give some further examples of Beddoes in merry mood, I modestly
demurred. Leave 'em laughing when you go was always a good maxim in
the music halls.

It occurred to me that it might
also make a good motto for Third Thought, but I'd taken enough risks
for one day so I kept it to myself!

But life is real, life is
earnest, and I'm beginning to feel the need to get down to some work
on the book, so tomorrow I'm borrowing Linda's car and heading off to
Basel.