The Underground Man (5 page)

What a treat! This morning, as I stared out of the dining room window and wondered what to do with the day, Clement came in with a large tube-like package, bound together with string.

I immediately took control of the situation, saying, ‘We are going to need scissors, Clement. Scissors, as quick as you can.'

In a minute we had cut the twine away, removed several square yards of brown paper and were unrolling onto the table the most exquisitely coloured map. Tears welled up in my blinking eyes – such a baby! – so that I worried they might spill onto the map and spoil it. I took out a handkerchief, gave my nose a good blow and tried to pull myself together.

Clement handed me an accompanying note, which read,

‘Mr Bird says it is meant to be hung,' I announced, between gulps. ‘We shall need help to hold it up.'

So while Clement went off to drum up some support I took the opportunity of examining the map alone.

Mr Bird and I discovered very early on we shared a passion for cartography. I showed him my modest collection of maps of the North of England and I remember well him mentioning to me a large-scale local map, executed in the shape of a disk. In my usual vague way I promised to make enquiries after it, but never got around to the task. But here I was, years later, standing before the very thing and I was quite overcome with joy. Like most of life's more potent pleasures, it came strangely tinged with melancholy.

I had barely begun taking in all the pinks and greens and blues when Clement returned with a couple of maids who, under his careful instruction, held the thing up so that it could be properly viewed.

Well, the effect was quite staggering. The map is so big that the girls had to stand on chairs. It is easily six foot in diameter. Maybe more.

It is the shape of the map which makes the biggest impression – an apparently perfect circle – so that one is inclined to imagine one stands before a map of the entire world. Here are oranges and purples and yellows, all come together in a beautifully bruised fruit. Yet it is only when one looks a good deal closer and reads the names of the principalities these colours so delicately adorn that one realizes what a very small world this is, with Mansfield as its capital, as if the rest of England has been trimmed away with a palette knife like so much overhanging pastry on an uncooked pie.

Roadways and rivers are clearly visible: the prominent veins of an exerted man. They creep up and down and all about the place, tying the whole peculiar ball together. Every township, village and ox pasture is given its rightful name,
every church represented in miniature form, each wood by a caricature plane or oak perching in its own neat pool of shade. The names of each district and county sweep across the map in sizeable script, so that one's heart goes out to those unfortunate enough to live in the shadows of the huge A or O of WARSOP PARISH.

Every gradation is delineated by the bunched scratches of Mr Sanderson's pen. Indeed, the cross-hatching of a sudden incline looks like the grubby thumbprint of the artist himself. It is as if Mr Sanderson has had the pleasure to sit up at God's right hand. To take in the view from our Creator's perspective and sketch it for us mortal men.

But all is not well! On closer inspection, one notes that where many roads come together and many buildings stand the effect is most unwelcoming – like a tumour or a spill of ink. A city of Sheffield's proportions, for example, appears very dark and people-congested; an ugly blockage in the circulation of this little world.

Looking closer still, one sees that, in order to squeeze some peripheral town on to the edge of his map, Mr Sanderson has occasionally lost the circumference's lovely line. Rotherham protrudes from the planet like a boil fit to burst. Bakewell hangs off it like a scab.

So I drew my eyes away from the cankerous towns and cities, to go in search of my own bucolic abode. Whitwell is found easily enough, therefore I must be just a little to the
East
. There is Clumber, so I must have gone too far. I go back – slowly, slowly now. Then, of a sudden – hurrah! – there we are! My house, my lake, my own front drive! Even the ice house is named, and
Greendale
and
The Seven Sisters
– my grand old oaks. This gives me no end of the most profound pleasure. I am located. Verified.

I put my nose right up to my own house, as if I might see me waving from a window. And, no doubt to the great
amusement of my young housemaids, I gently plant my forefinger on the map at that very spot.

‘I am here,' I say.

Yet another disturbed night's sleep. Woke not knowing where on earth I was. It was as if I had been plucked from sleep's great ocean and flung on some unfamiliar shore.

There is no shortage of fanciful notions which seek to explain the mysteries of sleep. Personally I have always favoured that which proposes that the souls of the sleeping ascend to another plane, so that while our bodies sleep under worldly sheets our spirits play among the stars.

It is my opinion that the finest of threads connects the spirit with the vacated body, the latter acting as an anchor, and that down this line come the vibrations of the spirit's starry gallivanting, which the dormant body perceives as dreams. Thus when we sleep we go kite-flying, yet we are both flyer and the kite.

But if all the world flies kites at night it follows that the sky must be filled with threads. Very dangerous. Question—What happens when two lines become tangled? – for it must be easily done. Might a soul not return down the wrong string by accident and wake to find itself inhabiting a stranger's body? This has concerned me, on and off, for quite a while and was more or less how I felt this morning. It was getting on for lunchtime before I had properly straightened myself out.

This afternoon we took the West tunnel out to Creswell to inspect the damage done by a fire to the cottage of a Mr Kendal, who wandered aimlessly up and down the place in
floods of tears, despite my many assurances that everything would be taken care of. I am told he has something to do with the infant school, or the kennels – either way he is lucky to be alive. A dreadful acrid stench still filled the house; every wall and ceiling was blackened by smoke. After five minutes I decided I had seen enough and told Clement to return in the carriage so I might walk back through Tile Kiln and Cow-close Wood.

When a man falls asleep in his armchair with his pipe still lit, the transformation by fire to his surroundings is truly something to behold. Every surface changes texture. Familiar objects – a kettle, a stool, a mirror – are made unrecognizable. But all this is nothing when put alongside the carnage wrought upon woodland by the seasons' change and as I strolled through the estate today I was confronted with destruction of the most comprehensive kind.

The entire scene was drained of colour; every tree and bush quivered leaflessly. The slimmest fraction of the spectrum had been left to them – from an ash-grey to the faintest brown. The rest had been sucked back into the hardening ground or washed away by the rain. The smaller trees stretched out their branches like young beggars, but I could not do a thing for them.

The only life on show was a single rabbit which, sensing my approach, made a mad dash for its burrow. My footsteps produced a painful racket as they came down on the dried leaves and twigs and this crashing was cast back at me by the dumb timber all around. Every tree seemed …
humiliated
. Hushed and resentful, like a struck child. The only other sound I heard all afternoon was a gun's report (one of my own men, I trust) which twice came up from the Wilderness with the grim finality of a slammed door.

I reckon I am very much like the leafless trees. Autumn scares the life right out of me. Every year I worry I will not
survive it, that this may be my last. Sometimes I fear a malevolent hand has cut spring and summer from the calendar and, for a cruel joke, stitched winter straight onto the following autumn. There is never much rest from autumn. Always autumn, it seems.

I must have stopped to catch my breath. I cannot walk as far as I might like these days without the occasional breather which, in company, I attempt to conceal by making a show of taking in the view. Certainly it did not seem to me that I fell asleep but I must have somehow slipped from consciousness for when I came to, slumped on a boulder, the sky had grown quite dark. At first, I felt only a modicum of concern, but when I looked about and found myself deep in the woods with no recollection of how I had got there I suffered the most profound shock. It was as if I had become utterly dislocated from time.

Like my father before me I have suffered from occasional ‘absences' – seconds, even minutes when my mind seems to completely switch itself off. In my youth, without the slightest warning, I would become entirely detached from everything going on around me. Friends who witnessed these episodes said only that I seemed to go into a brown study of the deepest introspection. (My father, incidentally, claimed they were the result of a diet lacking iron, which is why he ate so much liver.) So whilst finding myself in such confusion is not entirely new to me I cannot honestly recall being so thoroughly absent and for so long a time. When I came to my throat was dreadfully dry and my whole body was icy-cold.

Getting to my feet cost me a tremendous amount of pain. The blood which had slowed to a near standstill now took to raging round my limbs. A thoroughly unpleasant sensation, which only served to exhaust me more. My feet felt as if they had been filled with twice their proper capacity of blood and might burst at any moment and fill my boots.

The wood was no longer silent. Nearby, an owl hooted in a plaintive tone – perhaps he had stirred me? – and a stiff breeze was intent on rattling the branches of the trees. I had the idea they now crawled with all manner of tiny insects. Night had brought the whole wood to life.

I set off without being at all sure of my bearings. After a few strides a whey-faced moon popped out from behind a tree and followed me along. For a minute or two I was glad of the company – his brightness lit my way. But after turning and watching him keeping up with me a time or two I soon thought I would very much like to be rid of him. The moon is very knowing and he looked down at me as if he understood exactly what I was about. I picked up some speed, but the faster I went the faster he swept through the branches and when I slowed my pace a little he followed suit. ‘Damn him!' I thought, ‘he will not let me go.' Then, ‘If he is going to follow me all the way home I may as well get it over with,' and I broke into a ferocious trot. At some point I think a cloud must have blocked him out and I was able to return at a more civilized pace.

Clement met me on the drive, a lamp illuminating his anxious face. He said nothing, simply wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and escorted me back to the house.

Fanny Adelaide had a voice like an angel. When she left the stage after the final curtain she could barely walk for all the bouquets. But when I think of her – and I still think of her all too frequently – it is not her voice that leaps into my mind uninvited, but the neck which gave it life.

She had come up from London on one of her visits and the journey had evidently worn her out for when I returned to the Swan Drawing Room after calling down for tea I found her fast asleep on the chaise. Her gloved hand was tucked
under her tilted head, a shoe had slipped from a foot. Her dress swam out around her. Beautifully capsized, she was. Her hair, I recall, was a great labyrinth of stacked curls held together in a manner which was a mystery to me. I watched as she lay there, dozing, breathing through a minutely-opened mouth.

I interpreted her falling asleep as somehow flattering, thinking it showed how safe she felt in my company. So I perched myself on a leather footstool and quietly drank her in. Would have continued to do so had not the jangle of tea things in the hall sent me hurrying out to head off the maid.

But as I gently set the tray down she came to, and in an instant had decided she had no stomach for tea after all, but wished to take a turn around the gardens and breathe in some country air. So I led her out through the French windows and we did a tour of the flower beds and the lawns. And though she contributed very little to the conversation I was pleased just to have her at my side with her hand resting on my arm.

I wanted to show off every corner of the gardens. I started talking spiritedly about a dozen different things – a gabbling fool, I was. But under a cherry blossom she stopped, turned and raised a finger to my lips. Cocked her head as if she had picked out some exotic birdsong, when all I heard were my own foolish words still rushing round my head. Then she looked me in the eyes and said she had given proper consideration to my proposal and that now it was her turn to speak.

O, I would have given anything. Anything. I would have died for her.

When she had finished, she slipped a hand inside her purse, removed a fancy box and held it out to me. I was not to open it until she had gone, she said. She caught the next train back to London. Left me standing there in the gardens, all tangled up and undone.

The following year she married her agent, Peter Nicolson,
and retired from the stage for good. They had two children, George and Charles, who, by all accounts, were as beautiful and intelligent as one could wish for and very well behaved. Every morning the whole family climbed up Parliament Hill. Then, a week after her thirtieth birthday, she ate a piece of fish which she thought did not agree with her and by the following day she was dead. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery. It was in the newspapers, but I did not attend.