“Doctor Marsden said not to leave supper this evening. What are your plans, sir?”
“Nothing for me, thank you, Mrs. Glenwearie. I do hope my visitors aren’t proving too much of a bother.”
“Oh no, Mr. Goodrich, don’t you worry over a thing. I manage very well. Mr. Knife is quite kind, you know. Sometimes he insists on washing up the dishes. And he’s a one for stories. He told me Doctor Marsden’s play may be in the Festival this year. I said I would go if it was.”
“Did he indeed?” said Goodrich. “I hope it may be.” He mimicked Marsden: “Plays cost a pretty penny.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Glenwearie. “Och, I remember as a young girl I did a bit of acting myself.” She looked both pleased and embarrassed.
“You’ve never told me that, Mrs. Glenwearie,” Goodrich said.
“Ah well, it wasn’t all that much. I was once Grace Darling and then again I was Haile Selassie in a church play.”
“Haile Selassie?” Goodrich was astounded. He stared at Mrs. Glenwearie, trying vainly to imagine the transformation.
“It was a long while back,” she told him. “And then I remember my mother being very proud when I was chosen to read Tam O’Shanter at a Burns Supper.”
Goodrich was fascinated. “Can you remember any of it now, Mrs. Glenwearie?” he asked.
“The whole lot,” said Mrs. Glenwearie astonishingly. “My favourite bit was:
‘She ventur’d forward on the light;
And vow! Tam saw an unco sight!
Warlocks and witches in a dance;
Nae cotillion, brent new frae France,
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys and reels,
Put life and mettle in their heels.
A winnock-bunker in the east,
There sat auld Nick, in shape o’ beast;
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge:
He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl. — ’”
She stopped, ash-tray in hand, her cheeks slightly reddened, and exclaimed apologetically, “I was quite swept away there, Mr. Goodrich. You’ll have to forgive me.”
“Not a bit of it,” said Goodrich. “I enjoyed it.”
“It’s kind of you to say so, sir,” she told him. “But I’m afraid my style is not what it was.” She paused. “It’s all this talk of plays from Doctor Marsden and the others brought it back to my mind.”
Goodrich was secretly moved. It seemed to him that Marsden’s presence had fired in some degree everyone with whom he had come in contact. He was suddenly curious to know his housekeeper’s real feeling about Marsden.
“What do you make of Doctor Marsden?” he asked softly. “Do you like him, Mrs. Glenwearie?”
Mrs. Glenwearie looked away from him and out through one of the windows. “It’s not for me to say, sir,” she said. “But since you’ve asked me I would say he’s a very unusual gentleman. My dear mother would have called him a kind of hutherer.”
Goodrich was baffled. “What is a hutherer?” he asked.
“It’s just,” said Mrs. Glenwearie, “och I don’t rightly know how to explain it. Just a hutherer, that’s all.” She was silent for a moment then became very brisk. “Mr. Goodrich, dear, I’m forgetting your tea. I’ll go and get it.” The subject was obviously closed.
Goodrich felt somewhat lost. He felt he should say something in a different vein. “How is your niece?” he asked. “I trust she’s better now.”
“Poor lass,” she said. “She’s a bit better this summer but it’s been a great worry for my sister and her husband. In fact my sister’s ailing herself.”
“If there’s anything I can do, Mrs. Glenwearie, any financial help or anything of that sort, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Thank you, Mr. Goodrich. It’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Glenwearie and bustled from the room, taking with her Grace Darling, Haile Selassie and Tam O’Shanter.
7
The incongruous triggers of the day — comic and serious — evoked an involuted spectre in Goodrich’s mind and he dreamt that night he stood at a wall overlooking a wide and deep terrain. The light was uncertain. It may have been close to nightfall or it may have been the approaches of dawn. He had come there to meet someone he had known in some buried or vague connection a long time ago. Someone who had been blind, a blind woman he surmised. He himself at this moment could not see her because of the peculiar light in which he was steeped. But he felt all of a sudden that their positions were reversed and the blind woman could see him; something had happened to her across the years since they had last met in an underground of lives. As the feeling entered his mind she arrived and spoke to him. He could not make out entirely what she was saying but her voice rang in his ears with a new and remarkable tenderness which warned him he must keep a secret. That was all he could make out from her words. What secret? he asked but she had already vanished. It was a deeply puzzling dream, and yet it left him with an extraordinary revitalized sensation, a validation of identity.
As though a mysterious cycle of contrasting spaces peculiar to time had come full circle at last. He was now seen for whom and what he was in space. Seen by some intimate blind spectre or caveat of history whose judgement was no longer blind. Seen through — or in spite of — himself.
Goodrich made a note in his diary about his dream:
“I had a strong sense of space in my dream. How should I put it? Let me put it perhaps in this way. Space is a symbol or apparition of self-conscious properties and of human and cosmic desert. At certain times in one’s life the human or cosmic desert personalizes itself! The question is — what does this personalization mean? I would hazard a guess that it is a way of bringing to one’s attention the hubris of self-consciousness, the hubris embodied in a ‘technology’ of space. In a sense, therefore, the personalization of the human or cosmic desert in one’s dreams is a kind of ironic acquittal from the charge of hubris. I say acquittal in that a motif appears and asserts itself in the dream to define and redefine the nature of community beyond conformity to a status of hubris. Acquittal, therefore, from hubris is nothing more than the revitalized life of the imagination to re-assess blocked perspectives and to begin to digest as well as liberate contrasting figures….”
That morning he joined Marsden in the sitting-room filled with a most curious and uncanny tide of energy. Something had validated him. It seemed an irrational conviction and yet it persisted: a sensation of grotesque yet deeply significant transfigured relationships, forgotten relationships which possessed ironic powers to return and acquit him not only of hubris but of forgetfulness: despised or forgotten vocations within the muse of history.
It was stimulating and sobering. Indeed the very stimulation was a caution. In describing or gloating upon his dream, had he not partially betrayed it and succumbed to an order of self-congratulation or inflation?
As he confronted Marsden the question assailed him: Marsden’s phenomenal expression of world-weary conductor, an indefinable shroud or pallor (so it seemed to Goodrich in the wake of his own stimulation or tide of energies). For in the shroud Marsden appeared to wear this morning Goodrich sensed a paradoxical feud as well as debt to nameless and intimate resources planted in his dream. Over the past months he had given clothing, food, money to Marsden but it was Marsden who symbolized the Bank from which he had drawn rather than the beneficiary to whom he had given. He was indebted to Marsden as the most signal contradiction in his life — a shared community of goods and dreams. An enigmatic historical bank and beneficiary within whom the very act of giving became a receiving, a dangerous hypnotic legacy at times as well as a revitalized caveat of originality and community.