“Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill.”
It’s not the end of the world. It is the end of the world. None of the arguments, none of the catechisms work. There was a time — don’t you remember? — when you never knew her; you lived without her then. No amount of grief ever brought anyone back. You wring your heart out over the death of one woman; but thousands die every hour, every minute. Well, I’m sorry. I’m selfish, I’m feeble, I only have heart enough for one.
Life goes on. It doesn’t go on. Yes, yes, I know, all we want in the end, we living, breathing creatures (am I still one of them?) is life. All we want to believe in is the persistence and vitality of life. Faced with the choice between death and the merest hint of life, what scrap, what token wouldn’t we cling to in order to keep that belief? A leaf? A single moist, green leaf? That will do, that will be enough. What do the dying cling to in their final moments? Sunlight through a curtain, the sound of a tennis game, the noise from a Paris street?
Good God, I am surrounded by leaves! But only Ruth will do. She represented life to me. I know that, now she is dead. She was life to me. And that isn’t just vain hyperbole, is it? She was an actress, wasn’t she? It was her job: to represent life to people.
I picked up the note. It was meant only for me, but it had to be submitted as evidence to the coroner. “I never could stand drawn-out farewells.…” I stooped over her body. It is almost inspiring, almost uplifting, at first, to be in the presence of such a momentous event. Later the madness, the helplessness, but first the gravity of the situation. I stooped over her body, as if I had rehearsed it all before and knew exactly what to do.
Romantic love. Romantic love. The first, flustered kiss on a wet night in a taxi to Girl Number Three. The last kiss, at the break of dawn, to the Queen of Egypt. “Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies a lass unparallel’d.”
And in between? Happiness. Yes, I commemorate it. Happiness ever after.
11
So Matthew married Elizabeth, in Burlford church on 4th April 1845. And on that April day John Pearce would have presented the couple with the clock he had lovingly and expressly made for the purpose.
Quite possibly Matthew was in league with his father over the clock, since the Latin inscription on the brass backplate, though a perfectly apt motto for the young couple, also conveyed, being a quotation from Virgil, a sly tribute to the Rector, whose chief recreations were the Roman poet (he laboured on his own translation of the Aeneid) and bee-keeping — complementary passions, as anyone will know who has read the Georgics. And perhaps the Rector, touched by the gesture, even more touched by the union of this sweet couple, which he himself had consecrated, refrained from ever pointing out (he was no pedant after all) that the Latin was the popular misquotation, the word order being inverted in the original — as was only characteristic of the Virgilian style and, in any case, required by the scansion.
And the marriage must have been blessed and happy and Matthew’s animal nature must have been nothing lacking, because between 1847 and 1853 Matthew and Elizabeth produced four children: John, Christopher, Felix and Lucy. And when in 1854 he began his Notebooks, after the death of Felix, Matthew would refer to this whole period as “the ten happiest and most fragile years of my life.”
I see Matthew tiptoe from the side of a cot. Of two cots … I see him blow out candles; open the little brass plate and wind the clock. He watches Elizabeth at her dressing-table as she loosens her hair. She smiles at his watching smile in the mirror. And he resolves once again — though by now, perhaps, the resolve has become a reflexive, unconscious, continuous thing — not to tell her, to lock up his thoughts. It sometimes seems to him that that very smile of hers is like a warning finger raised to her lips (the way she does it with little John and Christopher), bidding him not speak, not spoil things. She brushes her hair. He feels a tug, like an anchor-chain, at his heart. And beyond the window, in the middle distance, hidden now in the dark, is Burlford church. If Elizabeth is the anchor, there is the harbour wall. And every night now (for they are living at Leigh House, on the edge of Burlford village) the chimes from the solid old tower steal across to them over Rectory Meadow.
No, I don’t believe he ever told her about that afternoon in Lyme. He kept quiet, as the Rector kept quiet about the misquoted Virgil. Perhaps he meant to tell her. Many times, perhaps, especially in those months before they were married — to get it over with, to exorcise the ghost! — he would have looked for the right moment. But his mouth would have been stopped by her innocent unsuspectingness, then by the innocent unsuspectingness of John and Christopher, and by the simple safety of silence. So that the not telling became in the end a duty for her sake, for her protection, a measure of his devotion. And, anyway, how did you begin? An ichthyosaur … And with each non-disclosure the eventual utterance became less probable, less plausible. The more it hung back from his lips, the more it receded from the front of his mind. And perhaps that was all that was necessary: Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, it will go away.
4th September 1855:
What a good-hearted, muddle-headed old soul is my father-in-law. He understands — why should he be disposed to understand? — so little of the matters I have now begun to raise with him. How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling. I could thank for ever my darling Liz and my darling little ones for opening my heart, even to the emaciation of my thoughts. But hungry thoughts sooner or later must feed.…
And the good-hearted Rector, in those days before Matthew’s “thoughts” began to fatten, may even have suffered some small disappointment that his son-in-law was not quite the vigorous whetstone to his own blunted faculties that he had hoped. To put it plainly, happiness seemed to take away some of the man’s bite. Well, well, he could hardly complain of that. His trivial loss was a measure of his daughter’s gain. He could scarcely grumble if preoccupations domestic and professional (old Makepeace duly retired in 1848, and Matthew was his own master) left his son-in-law with little time for stimulating debates in the Rector’s study on the relative merits of the Classics and the Sciences in fitting a man for life.
And, as the Rector baptised grandchild after grandchild, there was plentiful comfort and even relief to be drawn from watching Matthew mellow before the age-old influences of matrimony and procreation. Well, well, a man settles down and finds out how his heart truly lies, just as he, Rector Hunt, had done some thirty years ago. Once — he was to confide this much to Matthew, and then, as it happened, during an exchange of some heat in his study — he had wanted to be a missionary. A more daring and pioneering undertaking, surely, even than laying a railway line from London to Land’s End. But instead of finding himself among the savages of Africa, he had settled for a rectory in Devon, and the role had fitted so like a natural skin that even his aspirations to further preferment had somehow evaporated. It would have been agreeable, of course, if a little chafing from his son-in-law had shown that some sharper, keener, more venturesome man still lurked within this skin. But it would have been disagreeable if, under the test of the young man’s provocation, nothing more had emerged than that he was what he was: an amiable, amenable husk of a man.
Yes, when you got him alone, there was something strangely muted and docile about his son-in-law, for all his fine, vigorous qualities, something almost — the Rector would not have seen it at first, then berated himself perhaps for overlooking the obvious, while simultaneously adjusting to a not unflattering irony — something almost suppliant. Of course! It was Matthew who looked to him. It was the younger man who in these changing times, in a profession which exposed him to so much modern upheaval and innovation, looked to the older man for guidance and certitude. As why should he not to one approved as a spiritual father?