Not that this meant much to me. I now recall an earlier and more ambitious lecture of my mother’s, which aimed at nothing less than a brief history of the world, or at least the New World, a concept quite beyond me, since I was still at that stage of infancy (Paris would end it) when I vaguely suspected that the existence of foreign countries was a clever adult fiction. Washington, apparently, was called Washington because of George Washington, who had made America American. But, before that, America had belonged to us — it was really British. There was also something, to add to the confusion, about a cherry tree. These great men and their trees.
August 1945. August 5. It was my mother’s birthday. That was the point of this tea-time excursion. I was “taking her to tea.” My father was in Washington, and it was my mother’s birthday; and, as it was her birthday, there was a chance he might telephone at any moment. Think of that — a phone call all the way from America. (But would that prove — I was sceptical — that America really existed?)
By lunchtime no phone call had come (my scepticism increased). But apparently there was still plenty of time. You had to remember that over there they were only just having breakfast. A likely story. Perhaps she saw my disbelief, and perhaps rose to the challenge of another lecture — but thought twice about it. Waving the whole matter aside, she said, “But what a gorgeous day! Where are you going to take your mother for her birthday treat?”
The past, they say, is a foreign country, and I fictionalize (perhaps) these memories of that afternoon. But then my mother is dead. With all the others. She doesn’t exist. And fiction is what doesn’t exist. Did she really, right there and then in the tea-shop, hold up before her by its stalk her William’s pear, as if inviting me to snatch it, or as if she might suddenly let it fall? A small age seemed to pass in which it dangled between us, like a hypnotist’s watch, and in which my mother, her eyes swimming in and out of focus, seemed like a woman I was just beginning to know.
Then she bit, voraciously, into the plumpest part.
A lesson in gravity? Or in levity? Eternal levity. She couldn’t have known, any more than I, that in a far-away foreign country, where it was several hours later than us, where night had already fallen, they were about to drop a bomb. That for ever afterwards she would share her birthday with the anniversary of the last pre-atomic day.
She took a bite, a good, lip-splaying bite, out of the pear. Juice ran — a drop, a splash or two of pearly pear juice in that baffling opening of her blouse. Her tongue made slurpy noises, her eyes wallowed.
“Mmmm, darling — divine.”
20
The sun is beginning to sink. The shadow of the bean tree creeps over the lawn. Across the river, the towers and turrets, the little twinkling arched and latticed windows, take on their evening aura. These ancient walls. These hallowed groves. So ripe with the steady defiance of time, with the presumption of mind over matter. So evocative of the King of Navarre’s other-worldly schemes, of Berowne and Longaville and Dumaine: “a little academe, still and contemplative in living art …”
“Worthies, away!..”
It was my mother who first warned me, invoking the examples of vainglorious grandfathers and great-uncles, against the ruinous desire to outwit mortality. And, having heeded her advice so far as to rush, spontaneously, into death’s arms and having returned from its apparently escapable embrace, what can I say about this old and terrifying bugbear, mors, mortis? That it turns you (surprise, surprise) into a nobody. That my little bout with it has left me with a ghostly disconnection from myself — I am wiped clean, a tabula rasa (I could be anybody) — and a strange, concomitant yen, never felt before, to set pen to paper.
O death-defiers of this world! O luminaries, O immortalists! To leave one’s mark! To build a bridge, christen a theory, name a pear, write a book. The struggle for existence? Ha! The struggle for remembrance.
So I am in it too, this race for posterity? I succumb, just like Matthew, to the jotting urge. But who are they for, these ramblings? And who am I, to seek to go on record? I don’t even have Matthew’s agony of conscience (and why should I envy him that?), which is as obsolete now as that ichthyosaur he met up with on his summer hols.
“Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, live regist’red …”
But it was she who wanted fame, not me. I was content to be the happy stagehand; I could attend rehearsals. Yet who doesn’t want to leave behind some token, some trace, some reminder, some plea? Usually, it’s children. But we had no children. Too busy finding fame — or just happy without them? But, in any case, it’s not so simple — so it seems — this begetting of children.
Who am I? Who am I? A nobody. An heirless nonentity. What’s more — a bastard.
Consider, for contrast, my fabled ancestor, brave Sir Walter, born long before Providence was declared invalid, setting sail from Plymouth (him too) with never a qualm. By my time of life (is that the phrase?) what had the little lad of the sea-shore not achieved? Discovered new lands, founded a colony, won queenly favour, tackled the Spanish Armada. Been soldier, sailor, discoverer, explorer … “Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare …”
Ah, what a thing is man.
Actually, what was he doing, aged fifty-two-and-a-half? He was cooped up in the Tower of London. I make no comparisons. These ancient walls: the storied stones of the Tower. But what does he do with this forced confinement? Makes a virtue even out of incarceration. Puts pen to paper. Writes a History of the World. No less. From Adam and Eve until— And schemes and dreams. Of Eldorado. No less. Of a land of gold, an earthly paradise in the far, far west. O brave new world!
And ever mindful of his image, of how caged lions draw the public, takes care to show himself now and then, like Napoleon on the Bellerophon, to the awed citizenry of London. There he walks on the battlements, the old, proud sea-dog, in the years that Shakespeare’s tragedies were first staged: the “last Elizabethan,” the one-and-only Renaissance man, living proof that anybody can be anybody, since this fellow was everybody: discoverer, explorer, colonist, courtier, scientist, historian, philosopher, wit, dandy, ladies’ man, physician, chemist, botanist, tobacconist, potato merchant …
And poet.
Our mothers’ wombes the tiring houses be
Where we are drest for this short Comedy …
Life after Darwin: As You Like It, or What You Will. But even those long-vanished Elizabethans, who’d never heard, poor ignoramuses, of Newton, Darwin or the splitting of the atom, and whose history books began with the Creation, were not so sure of the Life Eternal that they did not invest heavily — and profitably — in that other eternity: fame. A bumper crop of fine old worthies. The age was thick with them. And the poets! Never so rich a hoard. An Eldorado in verse. Poetry. That still other, verbal eternity. The so-called divine spark. That thing for which Darwin lost all taste.
It is true (we know now) that we are descended from the apes. And it is true that an ape, set before a typewriter and given a time-scale of infinity and an eternal factor of randomness, might eventually bash out the sonnets of Shakespeare. But, by and large, it is just as well and a good deal neater that Shakespeare appeared when he did to do the job. Which leaves a host of questions still wide open. How Shakespeare came about in the first place (why he didn’t go into sheep farming or die, aged two, of scarlet fever), and why, though Shakespeare is all things to all people, we cannot all be Shakespeares. Why some are poets and some are not. And why not all poets are also explorers, adventurers, courtiers, etc. — all things in one. And why there should be this stuff called poetry, to begin with, which strikes our hearts at such a magic angle. And why there should be certain things in this random universe which cry out to us with their loveliness. And why it should be poetry that captures them.