Why in the human species should reproduction so belie its name? Why—argumentum ad absurdum—should not all human beings be the same? And why should the resemblance between offspring and parents, which we like to think of as so strong, be, in fact, so imprecise and tenuous?
Answer. Because this is the palpable proof, registered in our innermost being, that we are elevated over the beasts, that we partake of the divine, that we possess a soul.
Objection. But why should the divine express itself in the imperfect? Since, if the essence of speciation is trueness to type, the species man is infested with randomness. Not a useless randomness, perhaps, since it equips us for a complex social existence in which, as we say, it “takes all sorts”; since it gives us our Brunels as well as our blacksmiths, and allows us all indeed (oh, misnomer!) to feel “special.” But would it not be the grossest piece of fabrication, to construct upon a condition so shifting and fickle — upon the chance mutations of progeniture and the lottery of identity — the notion of what is eternal, immutable and godlike in our nature?
Hamlet’s mother says to Hamlet, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” What is the difference between belief and make-belief? What makes us give to any one belief (since it is only a matter of shifting, tuning the mind) the peculiar weight of actuality? “For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Little Felix was barely two. Ruth was forty-nine. A child of two, one has hardly begun to know. And an ichthyosaur. An ichthyosaur.
Who lets a Big Question upset his small, safe world? When matters reached their head, Rector Hunt, who still clung, perhaps, to the belief that that “inner man” in him, that former would-be missionary, might save the day, must have cursed Charles Darwin, not for his assault on religion — that could have been dismissed, he could have consigned the man to the realms of irrelevance so far as his congregation was concerned — but for timing the publication of his outrageous work so as to clinch his son-in-law’s apostasy, bring scandal on his family and parish, and smash for ever that image of himself as a spiritual champion. What was Darwin to him? What is Matthew to me? “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”
“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ ”
And, for contrast and to go back to where it all seems to have begun (what was an ichthyosaur to anybody?), consider the life of Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis, who was only twelve years old when she stumbled on that first thirty-foot fossil skeleton.
Was she horrified? Was she shaken? No. Was her universe turned upside down? No. True, she was only a child. But she was a shrewd enough twelve-year-old. She sold that first skeleton for twenty pounds. She went on to discover not only more ichthyosaurs but the first specimens of plesiosaur and pterodactyl, and she made a living and a name for herself out of her flair for fossils. Lyme Regis enjoyed a tourist boom. Renowned and learned men came to call. These included, one day, no less a person than the King of Saxony, to whom Mary is supposed to have remarked, pertly but without falsehood: “I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.…”
Perhaps all her life Mary only saw herself as a successful purveyor of wonders, a dealer in Mesozoic freaks. Leave others to ponder the meaning of her treasure trove. Was she happy, this daughter of a humble carpenter (she buried him when she was eleven and dug up a monster when she was twelve), who lived her life and found fame among bones? It was not a long life. When Matthew came to Lyme and, quite possibly, met her, she was forty-five. She would die two years later, of breast cancer. Would she have wanted (silly question) some other kind of life? Did it please her to know that posterity would not forget her? Did she ever reflect that her fate was little different from that of that unsuspecting ichthyosaur, that particular ichthyosaur, that expired long ago in some embalming lagoon, little knowing that after millions of years it would be resurrected by the touch of a twelve-year-old girl into the amazed consciousness of another race of animals, and be placed on show in one of their great museums?
Alas, poor ichthyosaur …
And everyone has this saving counter-logic, this belief in make-belief. Yes, that may be so, but — it’s not the end of the world.
I see a graveyard scene. Not Hamlet juggling a jester’s skull. A family group. Two are no more than infants, and there is a third child, not present, who is too young even to know what has happened. There is Elizabeth and there is Matthew. And there is the Rector, performing manfully one of the more testing duties of his clerical career. Pale spring sunlight on the hummocked turf, the tiny coffin.
What do I know of Matthew? I conjure him up, I invent him. I make him the protagonist (a touch of Potter’s TV temerity) of this “dramatized version.” I drag him into the light. He might have been no more than the bland words on a mossy gravestone. Sleeping inscrutably beside his wife and little son. Instead of which.
If he hadn’t married a rector’s daughter. There might have been no terrible rupture, he might have spoken without destroying, without being condemned. The day might never have come, fifteen years later, when he stormed out of the Rectory, leaving the Rector, head in hands, in his study and still in that ridiculous bee-keeping garb, and walked back to confront Elizabeth — who might, on that June evening, have picked up the clock, the clock of their union, and smashed it against the walclass="underline" there! If all creation was at fault, who cared about a little clock? But she didn’t. Plainly she didn’t.
The rescue of his marriage becoming a trap. But what was the trap? He loved her and she loved him: the world was good again. And wasn’t that the case, wouldn’t that be just as true — a question even a rector’s daughter might have put to him — whether it was God’s world or not?
12
He didn’t have to tell me. He didn’t damn well have to say a thing. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. He’d kept it shut for forty years. And if he’d bided his time just a little bit more, prolonged the dilemma just a little bit further, the matter would have been settled in any case by that fatal rendezvous in a Frankfurt hotel.
And I might never have found myself, in this den of learned inquiry, compelled to pursue yet another line of research — one with nothing of the academic about it, and one, you may judge, rather more germane to me than the notebooks of Matthew Pearce.
You might have supposed that my mother’s death — the equity of mutual widowerhood — would have settled all scores between my late stepfather (and dearly remembered benefactor) and me. What stored-up venom of guilt and blame, what recriminations that remained from those far-off days in Paris, might have been annulled by the amnesty of bereavement. The fact is that, following my mother’s death, Sam became afflicted with an attack of conscience, an agony of duty, a positive seizure of moral responsibility. Hardly the Sam of yore. Hardly Mr Plastic. Hardly, either, the Sam of a Frankfurt hotel. But you never know, it seems, the people you thought you knew.