I had often betaken myself to this quiet retreat and wandered amongst its welcoming benches and solemn gravestones. Many of those whose names were etched there were familiar to me. Others I knew from the stories that were told of them or which still to that day were occasionally extracted from memory to elicit a smile or a sigh of commiseration over a glass of warm mulled wine.
Near my mother and father’s shared stone was a specific bench that had fascinated me since childhood — one emplaced to remember a gentleman by the name of Roger Rugg. Mr. Rugg had left the Dell long before I was born, but he had scarcely been forgotten (at least not by me). For upon the stone one found not merely the name of this early member of the Departed, but, in relief, the uncanny likenesses of a number of winding, coiling snakes.
What a curiosity!
Both for the very fact of the snakes and for their inarguably innocuous depiction. I had wondered in my ever-pondering youth what there was about the man that could have motivated his grieving family to put the images of friendly, happily twining snakes upon his memorial bench. One day I decided to find out once and all the genesis of the ophidian imagery. I went to that man whom I understood in my earliest years to hold the key to every mystery in the universe: my father. I asked him what he knew of Mr. Rugg and what could possibily be the reason for the singular etchings upon his bench.
“Is it not obvious?” returned the parental sage, raising his eyes to peer at me from above the wall of his newspaper, which, though tissue-thin, customarily kept all young intrusive boys at bay.
“That he was like a snake himself?”
“No, my boy. Have another go at it.”
“That he liked snakes?”
“Ah yes — now there you have it. Rugg was, in fact, quite fervid in his affinity for the slithering creatures. One assumes that his departure from the Dell had less to do with a desire to see the Outland in general than to study the divers species of snakes that lived there in particular. Now does that quench your curiosity, my boy?”
I nodded.
“Then go along and leave your papa to his newspaper. You may tell your mother that the Crier says there is to be a lecture at the Burghers’ Hall on Tuesday night on the subject of metempsychosis.” My father tilted his glasses to give a better look at the printed text before him. He chuckled. “Oh, this is good. This chap says that he cares little what sort of creature receives his soul when his death puts it upon the path of transmigration. He wishes only that it should not find purchase in another human. For ‘man is the only creature that prospers by injustice.’ How rich. And oh, how very true.” And then the wall rose, and my father disappeared behind it, our interview decisively concluded.
I was, at the moment of my chance meeting with Muntle, headed with purposeful steps in the opposite direction from that which would gain Muntle the cemetery. It was obligation that called me; I had been invited, just as I had been entreated every June since my mother’s untimely passing, to attend the annual gathering of the “Euphemia Trimmers Memorial Society.” An invitation had always remained open for attendance by my older brother Augustus and his wife Charlotte, as well, but Gus could hardly ever bring himself to go. And Charlotte, too, had decided after last year’s sleep-inducing assembly to foreswear the visit for every year thereafter as an imposition upon her purportedly crowded social calendar.
“They are dear old souls, every last one of them,” my brother would say,“but I cannot abide their tongues. There is such cackling abrasion there, Freddie, and I dare say that I get enough friction in my very own home— what with a mischief-making son and an unruly, disrespectful daughter and a wife who constantly stirs the pot without even thinking of it — to put myself in the way of additional distress by my own volition. This year I’m going fishing. Be so kind, brother, as to extend my apologies — just as you have extended them for all those other years of my non-attendance — and I’ll continue to remain in your fraternal debt.”
Augustus had made this pronouncement the day before, and I had no doubt that he was at this very moment happily ensconced within his favourite fishing spot on the Thames, whiling and whistling away this beautiful sunny Saturday (which was exactly where he was, in fact, until summoned back to his house by Chowser’s troubling visit). The bank of the Thames was just where I should have been had I chosen not to maintain that relatively undefined, self-punishing sort of allegiance to my mother’s memory. It was an allegiance that put me without variance into the company of that group of women who had long been my mother’s friends — women who wished each year to commemorate Mama’s passing by sitting stiffly within a stifling parlour, lifting teacups to cherry lips and nibbling bits of cake without relish.
“So what is it that you do in that cemetery, Muntle?” I casually enquired of my longtime friend (for we had never spoken of our mutual interest in the place). “Sit upon the memorial bench and revisit warm memories of your long-lost brother?”
“Aye. And I cannot help wondering (for I do it each and every year) what he should be doing of a particular moment were he still alive, which I rather strongly suspect that he is not. Of course, I will own to other more peripatetic thoughts, which on occasion divert me from the primary purpose of the visit. For example: something from the natural world inevitably catches my eye — a robin tugging at a worm, for example, or the intriguing shapings of the clouds as they collect themselves overhead. Last year, who should stroll by but the cook at the Chowser School, and we had ourselves a delightful chat.”
“Of what did you speak?”
“That was a full year ago, Trimmers. How am I possibly to remember details of a conversation that took place so many months removed?”
Muntle thought for a moment.
And then Muntle said, “Cheese. I believe that we talked of skim milk cheese. Whether there should be much nutritional value to it.”
I grinned. “It all sounds quite riveting.”
“And you are a turd, Trimmers — a warm, fragrant turd.”
“Just what did you expect me to say? Skim milk cheese. Upon my life and arse, sir!”
“There was much more that was discussed besides cheese, I’ll be bound. And here is another thing that has just come to me, and I cannot think why it was not the first thing to be recollected: she — the Chowser cook — her name is Maggy Finching, by the bye — she knew the lines from John Clare as well as did I:
‘I am! Yet what I am who cares or knows?
Sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn.
So let me lie, the grass below,
Above the vaulted sky.’”
“Yes, I’m familiar with those lines as well. They’re from the Companion, are they not?”
Muntle nodded, and blotted a nascent tear from the corner of his eye with his forefinger. “I think of my brother in that last line, the two of us as boys lying on our backs upon the dewy grass. He is below the sod now, I suppose, perchance in some Outland cemetery.”