In 1931, as if he anticipated the sack, Mr Delph gave Masters several As for English composition. His habit was to inscribe a list on the blackboard and to request his students to incorporate it into a story. One such prophetic list, straight from the oracle’s blackboard mouth in the cave, ran as follows: marble woman, burning schooner, crocodile, milk, Magna Carta, Bartleby’s widow.
Mr Delph sometimes struck a match in the cave to light his pipe and comment with some elaboration on each relic. He rhapsodized over “Magna Carta” and “Bartleby’s widow”.
Mr Quabbas was by no means Australian, nor was he Grenadian. He was New Forestian, of mixed blood; his natural caution (he was a born spy) — and his graphic definition of Antipodes — made him kith and kin to Grenadian/English Becks and to Australian/Italian Delph.
“Feet to feet — click,” he said. “That is Anti-po-des.” He would chant to the cosmic Boys and trace the egg of the globe with gesturing hands at the heart of the cave. He indicated there were souls dressed in boots standing diametrically opposite each other. Then as the egg contracted until it disappeared, the Antipodean boot souls of foetal humanity drew together and clicked like a time bomb. Was it, I asked the dead king, a shadow variation of tap-dancing Magna Carta ladies and barons in Aunt Alice’s wonderland?
Mr Quabbas was a teacher who seemed to defy all categories. (He sometimes lectured on mathematics.) His bulky frame dipped and crouched like the incarnation of many a shy and stern creature. He was hard. He marked his students hard. He was gentle. He taught Masters the geography of Europe, particularly of Great Britain; nothing at all of the Americas, but his silence here was sometimes deafening. He never spoke of the deepening 1920s–1930s depression in New Forest. It was rumoured, however, that he contemplated writing a book for initiated students into the complexities of New Forest sugar and its abortive status in the eighteenth century when it gestated and failed to emerge in radical fictional alignment and twin ship with Boston tea and the birth of the American Revolution.
The book was never finished — perhaps it was never begun — and Mr Quabbas had long vanished from the scene by the late 1940s when the World Bank invested a loan in propping up the archaic economy of New Forest. He knew, though he was no longer there to read the script of economic fiction, that an epitaph has many dimensions, and that the writing on the wall is sometimes the unwritten word, the unwritten book, the unlived revolution.
The Boy imbibed his global education into self-made epitaphs in the 1932 collegiate Inferno. It was a hard lesson. He was privy nevertheless to the genius of love that Quabbas curiously, in Carnival judgements, imparted. Young Masters became hard as the uncut tree or wood on Quabbas’s coming grave but turned that hardness by evolving degrees over long years into complex insight, complex self-knowledge.
“Hardness cracks, when one least suspects it, into the seed of the fruit of god that sets one’s teeth on edge. Hardness becomes King Midas’s, if not El Doradan, gold. It resists consumption. It leaves an unforgettable flavour on royal palates. It evokes an emotion that transcends self-pity in order to foreshadow the arts of self-judgement and rebirth. I am indebted to Quabbas for hardness yet gentleness of heart in the profoundest epitaphs of my age, a hardness and a gentleness I need to perceive before it is too late and the self-made dimension, the unrecorded, unwritten dimension in the wood or marble or stone or naked soil over my grave, is lost.” Thus said the dead king to me in 1982. I was intrigued to learn more of the Quabbas of 1932. And he led me back.
Quabbas lived in Queen Street, a stone’s throw from Brickdam, and the Boy Masters was invited there to a meeting of the Young Men’s Cave Guild theatre. Mr Quabbas was president of the group. The average age of the members of the guild was twenty-four and Masters, barely fifteen, considered it something of an honour to be enrolled as princeling-overseer amongst a body of young lawyers and clerks. In fact he was the youngest ever to attend.
They sat in a large, slightly Victorian drawing room with elegant basket chairs, cushions, other straight-backed chairs, a Persian carpet, wallpaper that did not match the carpet, and a great mahogany piano at which Mr Quabbas’s niece practised her lessons in the middle of the morning. Her name was Alice, young Alice, and rumour had it that she was a distant “great-niece” of Aunt Alice of the daylight supper dancing school. Masters remembered passing one Saturday morning and hearing what seemed to him a passage that young Alice picked from Vivaldi’s La Primavera. She seemed to be echoing a strain of the violin upon the keys of a great cave piano. Mr Quabbas was unmarried, but rumour — a prevailing theme in New Forest society — had it that he adored his young niece and that he paid for her music-masks and music lessons.
She was not around when Masters took his seat in the drawing room within the great dream-cave. The others sat a little stiffly, as if slightly on their guard, under Mr Quabbas’s peculiar, almost saturnine, eye. He spoke to them with that slightly chanting quality of a spy of god who is familiar with every skeleton, every cupboard, of grace. Everything he said carried the resonance of something unsaid. There was a quaint but nonetheless stinging backlash in his jokes and every young man in the cave theatre — whether that cave assumed the proportions of glass or marble or wood or flesh-and-blood or aeroplane — knew he would sooner or later be pierced by Mr Quabbas’s innocent damnations.
This was a very important occasion for the cave theatre and — may I say it — for me. I was — under Masters’ guidance in the realms of the Inferno and Purgatory — to become acquainted with my biological parents for the first time.
It was around four o’clock, the afternoon of 30 August 1932. Mr Quabbas faced the group. His chair was larger than any other in the room in order to accommodate his bulky frame. He was the judge. The drawing room was half-bright. The Venetian blinds were half-drawn. How could the sun so successfully dangle its face from its hand? Was it because it arched across New Forest from Cannon Row Estate where the czar had been killed, through Crocodile Bridge, through the Alms House, through the College buildings and grounds, through the Market-place, and seemed to move upon a wheel or cycle before depositing Thomas’s mask? Thomas was to be put on trial for the assassination of the czar.
Despite the heat of the afternoon, the faintest shudder ran through the masked actors in the room. Each mask was felt both inwardly and outwardly as if one dangled it into oneself with a ghostly dazzling hand. The epidermis of the soul also dazzled in crying to be stroked as primary mask. Stroked by ecstasies, rages, humiliations. The ghostly fingers had skilfully woven a shell to be placed on every person who ran into the cave. It was Quabbas’s design, as he drew us in (the dead, the living, the newborn), to awaken us so peculiarly that the mask of time slipped a little, remained but loosened a little into a sensation of curved face or curved facelessness. And as such face and facelessness became sudden dimensions of soul.
It was the task of Judge Quabbas not only to try Sir Thomas but to choose someone to wear the mask. He glanced rapidly, appeared to be spying through his telescope of soul, from face into face, facelessness into facelessness, loosened shell into loosening mask, and pointed quickly at a young lawyer, Martin Weyl, who sat hidden at the back of the room.
Weyl was around twenty-five and it was clear that the summons to don the mask of Thomas distressed him. There was a murmur of sympathy from the others. The facts were that just over or under six months ago (a month or a day may easily be misread when one converses with one’s guides in Purgatory), Weyl had married “a young lady whom he had gotten into trouble”. She was three months pregnant. It had been a scandal in the small society of New Forest and they were driven to marry by an outraged middle-class establishment. Those were the bald facts — they seemed of little importance in a world in depression, a world of common law wives in the Market-place labouring folk — but they had accumulated into a complex epidermis of the soul upon Weyl’s body, and the birth of the child, compact, male, had accentuated the inner bruise, the inner wound, that the establishment had inflicted. His wife’s labour became his and it left him with a sense of unreality. He had given birth …