The Meaning of Night (21 page)

light itself. The light of the world; the Sun that had once shone on ancient Babylon, and

now struggled to light up the dreary November streets of Oxford in the nineteenth

century, had been captured and held, like the slave beneath the king’s feet, and made

permanent.

I tell you all this because the moment was a significant one in my life, as shall

appear. Up until then I had followed the familiar paths of knowledge that wound out from

the safe harbour of the Liberal Arts. Now I saw that science, somewhat neglected in my

education, held open possibilities of which I had not dreamed.

The Professor smelled a little overripe in the close confinement of his attic rooms,

and seemed to think that standing very close to someone and talking loudly into their

faces was the most convenient way of conducting an interview. He questioned me closely

on my knowledge of Mesopotamia and the Babylonian kings, and on a variety of

congeneric questions, whilst Tom hovered some distance off with a hopeful smile on his

face.

It may well be that I passed muster. Indeed I know it to be the case, for a few days

after our return to Sandchurch, the Professor wrote to communicate his desire that I

should return to Oxford as soon as it could be so arranged, in order to make the

acquaintance of the other members of the proposed expedition.

But by then my heart had found a new desire. That glorious imprisonment of light

and shadow, which I had observed in the photogenic image of the great stone king, began

to consume me, and all thought of digging with my fingernails in the heat and dust of the

Mesopotamian desert was driven out.

To Tom I said nothing, but I skilfully contrived excuses for not returning to New

College, as requested by the Professor, and, by feigning a slight but temporarily

debilitating sickness, managed to keep myself close in the house for several days.

On the first day of my pretended illness, the rain came down hard from the south,

and remained beating in from the Channel until darkness edged across the cliff-top and

enveloped the house. In the morning, I’d settled down with Buckingham’s Travels in

Assyria,? lying back in the parlour window-seat that looked out to sea, in a vain attempt

to assuage my conscience at deceiving Tom; but by the time Beth came in to place lunch

on my mother’s old work-table I had grown weary of Buckingham, and turned instead to

my much-thumbed copy of Donne’s sermons, in which I lost myself for the rest of the

afternoon.

After supper, I began to think about practicalities. There was much I needed to do

in order to establish myself in a firm and permanent way of success, lacking, as I did, a

University degree. Until Tom’s intervention on my behalf, I had determined to sell the

house and move to London, to see what I could try there in the way of some work that

would draw on my capacity for intellectual application. I had planned, first of all, to take

up the invitation of Mr Bryce Furnivall to put myself forward for the vacancy in the

Department of Printed Books at the British Museum. It remained a congenial prospect:

the bibliographical fire burned strong within me, and I knew that a whole life of useful

work could be found in this – for me – absorbing study.

Whichever way I went – to Mesopotamia or Great Russell-street – I should need

ready money to support myself in the beginning. A start would also have to be made on

reviewing and arranging my mother’s papers, for I had been lax in this regard, and they

had lain for the past ten years, undisturbed and reproachful, in bound heaps on her

work-table. That task, at least, could now be commenced. I therefore proposed to myself

that I would begin looking over them first thing in the morning, lit up a cigar (a bad habit

I had acquired in Germany), pulled my chair close to the fire, and prepared to take my

evening’s ease with a neat little edition of Lord Rochester’s poems.

But as the flames flickered, and the rain continued to hammer against the window,

I put the book down and began to stare at the piles of paper on the work-table.

On the wall flanking the table was the set of shelves, made by Billick, housing my

mother’s published works, in two and three volumes, dark-green or blue cloth, their

spines and blocked titles gleaming in the firelight, assembled in strict order of

publication, from Edith to Petrus; or, The Noble Slave, her somewhat half-hearted

attempt at the historical mode published in the year of her death. Below this library was

the arena of her labours itself – the great square work-table, fully eight feet across, that

later stood in my rooms in Temple-street.

It was a landscape of paper, with little peaks and shadowed troughs, tottering

sheer-sided gorges, and here and there the aftermaths of little earthquakes, where a crust

of curling sheets had slid across the face of its fellows beneath, and now leaned crazily

against them. The mass of paper that lay before me contained, I knew, working drafts and

fragments of novels, as well as accounts and other items relating to the running of the

household. My mother’s curious system had been to parcel up little battalions of sheets

and other pieces relating to a particular category, and then to bind them up with string or

ribbon or thin strips of taffeta and stack them up, unlabelled, roughly in the order in

which they had been created, one on top of the other. The effect, where it remained intact,

was rather like a model of the battlefield of Pharsalus? I had once seen, with massed and

opposing squares and echelons. Nestling in the midst, surrounded on three sides by the

encroaching walls of paper, was the space, no wider than a piece of foolscap, in which

she had worked.

There were, too, a number of small, perfectly square notebooks with hard, shiny

black covers, each closed up by delicate silk ribbons of the same hue, which used to draw

my fascinated eye as a child because of their resemblance to slabs of the darkest

chocolate. In these my mother would commit her thoughts by bending even closer to the

page than she was wont to do when engaged on her literary work, for the leaves were

small – no more than three or four inches square – requiring her to adopt a miniscule

hand for the purpose. Why she had chosen willingly to put herself to so much trouble –

the notebooks were made especially for her by a stationer in Weymouth – I never knew.

A dozen or more of these little volumes now stood, line astern, on one side of the

working space, held in formation at the edge of the table by the rosewood box that had

once contained my two hundred sovereigns.

On a whim, I thought I would just look into one of these little black books before

retiring. I had never before known what they contained, and a rather anxious curiosity – I

cannot account for the slight tingle of nervous anticipation I felt as I walked over to the

table – began to arouse me from the drowsiness that had begun to come over me as I’d sat

by the dying fire reading Lord Rochester’s eloquent bawdy.

I took one of the little volumes from its place and undid its silk ribbon. Placing it

beneath the candle’s light, I opened the hard black cover and began to read the tiny

characters that had been pressed onto the page from top to bottom with so much care and

deliberation. The first two pale yellow leaves contained little of particular interest,

consisting mainly of brief and inconsequential résumés of daily activities. I was on the

point of closing the volume and picking up another when, flicking forward, my eye

lighted on the following passage:

That this is folly, sheer fatal folly, I know only too well. All my feelings revolt

against it, everything that I hold sacred is appalled by the prospect. And yet – it is asked

of me, & I cannot dash the cup from my lips. My nature is not my own, it seems, but

must be press’d into shape by another’s hand – not God’s! We spoke at length yesterday.

L was tearful at times, at others angry and threatening of worse than even what is

proposed. Can there be worse? Yes! And she is capable of it. He wd not be home that

night & this wd give us more time. After dinner L came to my room again and we cried

together. But then her resolve return’d & she was all steel & fire once more, cursing him with a vehemence that was horrible to behold. She did not depart until first light, leaving

me exhausted by her rage so that I did not return from E— to here until pm today. EG not

in evidence and so made no mention of my lateness.

The passage bore a date: ‘25. vi. 19’.

To gaze upon my mother’s private journal seemed a gross intrusion; but I found I

could not bring myself to secure the little silk ribbon again and confine the contents to

obscurity. For, being a journal or personal chronicle of some kind, then it must contain

something of truth about her, something hidden but authentic about the little hunched and

distracted figure, constantly writing, of my childhood memory. I felt impelled to uncover

what lay behind the words I had just read, even if it lead to the postponement of my own

plans to begin making my way in the world.

But what truth informed this enigmatic passage eluded me completely. For this

was not simply a record of events, as earlier entries had been, but of some impending

crisis, speaking of deep inward searching, the roots of which, it seemed, were as yet

impossible to conjecture. A subsequent passage, dated a week later, whilst clearer in its

detail, appeared equally impenetrable to immediate interpretation:

Who was ‘L’? Who was the man so clearly referred to – the Captain, or someone

else? And what of ‘Mme de Q’? I was now wide awake, held in an iron grip by what I

had read. I tried to connect the memory of my mother’s quiet and industrious life to these

clear intimations of some looming climacteric, in which she had become involved; but I

quickly gave up, and began to read on, urgently scanning the little yellow pages, to see if

some light could be shed on this mystery.

And so it began. I opened another little black book, then another, in a kind of

dazed concentration, alive to the strangeness of what I was reading but transfixed, until

my eyes were wearied. At last, looking up as the second or third candle I had lit began to

gutter, I saw that a pink arc of light was creeping above the horizon beyond the parlour

window. A new day had broken, for the world beyond, and for me.

16:

Labor vincit?

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Later that morning, I heard Tom’s knock on the front door. When I opened it to

him, I did not have to feign exhaustion.

‘My dear fellow,’ he said stepping in and helping me back to my chair by the

fireplace, where I had fallen asleep, fully clothed, only an hour before. ‘You look terrible.

Shall I call for Dr Penny?’

‘No, Tom,’ I replied, ‘no need for that. I shall be right as rain soon, I’m sure. A

temporary indisposition only.’

He sat with me for a while as I took a little breakfast. Then, noticing the copy of

Buckingham’s book lying on the window-seat, he asked whether I had thought more

about the expedition to Mesopotamia. He could see from the evasiveness of my reply that

my interest in the project had lessened, but was friend enough to say that he expected I’d

see things differently when the indisposition had passed. But I could not let him think so,

and told him straight out that I had definitely fixed against joining Professor S–– in

Nimrud.

‘I’m sorry to hear it, Ed,’ he said, ‘for I think it was a promising opening, with

much to gain in all respects. Perhaps you have other possibilities in view for earning a

living?’

I had not often seen Tom angry with me, but I could not blame him for feeling a

little put out. The prospect of adventure and advancement in the field of archaeology had

only been a temporary passion, and I should have squashed it firmly underfoot at the

start, in fairness to Tom. I tried to mend the mood by saying that I was also considering

an opening at the British Museum, but then spoilt it by adding that this, too, might not be

quite suitable for me at the present time.

‘Well, then,’ said Tom, standing up to go, ‘I shall write to the Professor. Good

morning, Ed. I hope to see you improved soon.’

I took the unspoken reprimand in his parting words without reply, and stood at the

window gloomily watching him make his way back down the path to the village.

I should never now see Mesopotamia, and Great Russell-street would have to get

on without me. For I was being drawn irresistibly back to the little black books that now

lay scattered across my mother’s work-table. The urge to discover the meaning of what

my mother had written was to grow even stronger, and soon became all-consuming,

leading inexorably to ends of which I could not then have conceived.

The decipherment of my mother’s journals and papers – for that, in effect, is what

it became – began in earnest the next day, and continued in its first phase almost

unabated for two or three months. Tom had departed to spend some time with a cousin in

Norwich, feeling no doubt that it was best, for both of us, to leave any further discussions