But these pages should not be a furtive laboratory in which I analyse my wife. God forbid that she should think that that is the object of these “studies” of mine. Truly I believe that — still — she would never dare touch a single page of these notebooks without my permission. Yet, while I closet myself repeatedly in their fellowship, has she not a right to be jealous?
What would I do without her? What would I have become without her? What price should I not pay not to lose her? I do believe she would forgive and forget all my strange humour of late, if I would only, as she once, so warily, entreated me, call upon my better nature and “be myself again.”
“Better nature”? What, in any of us, is our “better nature”? And what does it mean — is this what we love and respect in each other? — to “be oneself”?
So what are we supposed to believe here? Forget what Matthew, by now an almost confirmed non-believer, believed or didn’t believe. Consider the facts. Matthew left Burlford (and Elizabeth) in July 1860. Under new laws — imagine the Rector’s mortification — Elizabeth obtained a divorce, on grounds of desertion. I am working now from data outside the Notebooks (I have done my background research), which stopped with Matthew’s departure. Elizabeth married James Neale in November 1862. Neale, with his lucrative stake in a copper mine, and something of a charmer, had been on the scene at least since 1856. So what are we supposed to believe? That from 1854 until 1860 Elizabeth held out, the mystified, forbearing, loyal, loving wife, until it was all up? And then, and only then—?
Let’s read between the lines. Let’s be brutal and modern and take apart these precious Notebooks — this precious marriage of Matthew and his Lizzie. Forget his numerous avowals. Forget that last letter from Plymouth. Hogwash! Eyewash! When it comes down to it, Matthew was just another disillusioned idealist, an over-reactive Hamlet type — couldn’t take it that the world was real. See how he lapses into whingeing sentimentality. What price would he not pay not to lose her? But he did lose her. He left her on a July day in 1860. Though she had left him, perhaps, long before that.
And while we’re about it, we may as well ask the big question: which came first — the failed marriage or the ideological anguish? Which would Potter go for in his TV production? The fully licensed historical protagonist? The tortured man of his time? But think of rooms and beds and breakfast tables. (Think of the private life of Michael Potter.) Let’s face it — for at least six years they were in a state of marital shut-down. The good husband confides in his wife. Matthew kept it all to himself. Reason: some day he might just come out of it all, and there would have been no point in telling. But that way he dug a deeper and deeper pit for himself, and when he finally crawled out of it to tell her, can you blame her for feeling cheated — for having already made her contingency plans?
What was she supposed to have done? An Ophelia routine? Talked to the flowers?
So, have I got it all wrong? I invent. I imagine. I want them to have been happy. How do I know they were ever happy? I make them fall in love at the very first meeting, on a day full of radiant summer sunshine. How do I know it was ever like that? How do I know that the Notebooks, while they offer ample evidence for the collapse of Matthew’s marriage, were not also a desperate attempt to keep alive its myth, and that even when he seems most honest Matthew, with much display of fine feeling, tender conscience and wishful thinking, only beats about the bush of an old, old story?
An old story. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Happens all the time. The way of the world. Even a clergyman’s daughter. Even a Victorian clergyman’s daughter. Così fan tutte (and tutti too). God damn it, it was how you were born.
And Ruth. And Ruth? No, I don’t believe that she ever— But suppose, suppose. In the days before I became her manager. Her minder … The freedoms of these theatrical folk, the way they touch and kiss and hug, and slip in and out of roles … No, I don’t believe she ever really— But what if she had? What if she had? Would she have been someone other than Ruth? People aren’t defined by other people. We have to be ourselves.
Talk to the flowers. My prerogative, here in this garden. There is a buddleia bush, a clump of buddleia bushes, over there at the far end of the herbaceous border, assigned the rather lowly function of screening a compost heap. And buddleia bushes must still have the same properties they had more than a century ago, because even now, even from here, I can see, against the floppy purple flowers, the intermittent wink of tiny wings.
10th July 1857:
The enigmas of our buddleia bush! To which, while this fair and butterfly-breeding weather lasts, my little Lucy — as the butterflies are attracted to the florets — seems irresistibly drawn …
He wrote the Notebooks for me?
Perhaps it was Lucy who persuaded her to keep them. If persuasion were needed. Perhaps it was Lucy who, long before that, persuaded her to keep the clock.
The third (surviving) child, the only daughter, and the youngest. She would have been only seven when the news rocked Burlford. The children, of course, made it worse. How could he do it? His own flesh and blood! The downright perversity of it! He laments the death of one, then abandons the others. He heeds the exhortation of Scripture—“Be fruitful and multiply”—then denies Creation. The man must have been mad. Neale’s verdict, no doubt, and others’—disguised under the easy rant of outraged piety and, in Neale’s case, the rectitude of sexual triumph.
But Neale must have considered what he was taking on. The guardianship, the stepfatherhood of three children, all, presumably, in a distraught state of mind. It says something for the attractions of the former Mrs Pearce that, an unencumbered bachelor up to this point, he should have accepted these charges along with her. And it says something, perhaps, for Neale’s own position on the fruitfulness and multiplication question, or for the scruples of the second-time wife (Elizabeth was thirty-six), that no little Neales issued from his marriage.
I make no glib comparisons. Even though there is an entrepreneurial similarity between James Neale and the late Sam Ellison, and both acquired the waifs of scandal. But, of course, Neale chose. As far as the scandal went, perhaps it redounded to his credit — to be the saviour of this damsel in distress, to step in where that godless wretch had left off. Rich businessmen have a penchant for being judged virtuous; abandoned mothers of three need charity.
Of the Pearce children, both the sons were to throw in their lot with their stepfather and go into copper. No, I make no comparisons. We are talking about real ore hewn from the depths of the earth, not factory-made synthetics (though, as it turned out, John and Christopher might have been better off with the latter). Lucy seems to have made a break from the family, over which, by then, new shadows had fallen, when she married in 1872 and moved to London. Yet she took the clock with her. I know this. It is the fact that Elizabeth decided to give it to her (thus inaugurating a tradition) which makes me think that it was Lucy who perhaps persuaded her to keep it in the first place. And, of course, by that time, by 1872, that gift of the clock would have meant so much more.…