Victoria looked across the table and regarded her aunt, who appeared rested, serene, and flushed with the heat of a long day. Because of the fine weather she’d left her suit jacket upstairs in the room the two of them were sharing, and she was musing now about whether she should perhaps have a look in the local shops the following day, see if she could find a lightweight dress in her size.
She’d slept soundly last night, solidly, which was just as well.
Victoria, gazing at her aunt, felt a lurch of love, and claimed for herself a share of her aunt’s present contentment, her ease. She almost wished there were hardships she might save her from, gifts she might give her. Right now, right this minute, the little tongues of amity between Lewis and her aunt seemed beautiful to her, the beginning of something.
Lewis was telling her about the bicycles and backpacks he had rented so that he and Victoria could ride out to Yesanby the following morning and start their investigation. “We’ll start digging for our little wonders,” Lewis told her, “and leave you to find Magnus Flett.”
“Did I hear you say Magnus Flett?” the proprietor of their hotel said, pausing by their table and pouring out their coffee.
The proprietor’s name was Mr. Sinclair. He was a large, nobly built man, a lifelong bachelor with a clever face and a headful of fine gray hair which he was forever palming back from his forehead. How on earth had this person got into the hotel business, Victoria wondered — he should have been a movie actor with his graceful, his almost silvery way of setting down plates on a table and his sweet droll country voice. His hotel, which had only six bedrooms, was advertised as having “All Mod Cons,” meaning some of the rooms were equipped with electric heaters. Mr. Sinclair in his neat gray overall, gliding up and down the carpeted stairs, was desk clerk, chambermaid, cook, server.
“Did I hear you say you were looking for Magnus Flett?” he said politely, leaning in his silvery way over the table. “Now, you will excuse me for interrupting, but I couldn’t help overhearing you saying something or other about old Magnus Flett. Magnus Flett, why he’s just next door, you know.”
“Next door?”
“The Sycamore Manor. You must have walked right by it. It’s where the old folk are, the ones as have no family that can keep them. When I was a lad there were sycamore trees in the back garden but they’re gone now, of course. It was a private house before the Council took it over. That’s where old Flett is. The famous Mr. Flett, I should say.”
Victoria shook her head; she looked more comely tonight than she would have guessed. “Our Magnus Flett’s dead,” she said with a measure of solemnity. “He was born in 1862. We don’t know when he died, but we’re sure of when he was born because the date is on some legal documents my aunt has.”
“That would be his nibs all right,” Mr. Sinclair nodded, smiling. “That is if you believe he’s the age he says he is, and I happen to be of one of them who takes the man’s word on it. His picture’s in the Orcadian every year on his birthday. This year they had the London papers up as well. The poor old lad was a hundred and fifteen years old, just think of that. Oh, not more than a month or so ago it was, a birthday party like you never saw. They had a cake big as this table here. Candles alight, a regular bonfire, course he slept right through it all. Why, Mr. Flett, he’s the oldest man in the British Isles.”
It was not his age alone that made old Magnus Flett famous. It was his prodigious memory.
In the summer of 1977, the year Victoria and her colleague, Lewis Roy, and her elderly Great-aunt Daisy visited the legendary Orkney Islands on their separate expeditions of discovery, Magnus Flett’s reputation did indeed rest on those 115 years of his. This is a very great age. There is a woman in the Ukraine who is said to be 121, and a pair of brothers in Armenia whose ages are given, respectively, as 118 and 116 (with documents to support their claim).
An Inuit woman living in the Anglican Church hostel at Rankin Inlet has sworn on a Bible that she is 112 years of age (she took up a cigarette habit at eighty-five, whisky at ninety). And then there is the undisputed champion of human antiques: Mr. Gee of Singapore, still ambulatory at 123, though only his wife (aged ninetysix) has actually clapped eyes on him in recent years. Proven or unproven, great old age is heartening to observe, and Magnus Flett with his remarkable span of years is a celebrity. He has been profiled in the British weeklies (“A Life in the Day of Magnus Flett,” The Sunday Times, 16 March 1962, p. 54). And once, ten years ago, he appeared before the BBC television cameras, staring straight out at the audience and doing “his thing.”
“His thing,” much more so than his age, is what has made the man famous: his ability, that is, to recite the whole of Jane Eyre by heart, chapter by chapter, every sentence, every word. Mr. Sinclair describes this achievement to his visitors, his soft voice softened even further by awe.
An impossible feat, some people might say, people who are unfamiliar with the retentive qualities of the human brain. Probably these same people have never heard how certain devout individuals in long ago days memorized the complete New Testament. That even at the beginning of our own century it was not unusual to find quite ordinary mortals who had the Gospels by heart, though, later, Sunday School prizes were given out for such trifling accomplishments as the Beatitudes or the One Hundredth Psalm. Scholars have for years insisted that the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf was recited at banquets by a single performer who had no text to refer to.
Daisy Goodwill Flett was told of his extraordinary achievement while a student at Long College for Women back in the twenties; during that same period of her life she herself committed the whole of Tintern Abbey to memory — not because her professor required her to, but because she felt a longing to take the oracular, rhythmic lines of William Wordsworth into her body.
Naturally, at the age of 115, Magnus Flett’s memory has begun to fade, Mr. Sinclair acknowledges that. At the time of the television interview ten years ago he was able to recite only the first chapter of Jane Eyre, but this he did without once stumbling or hesitating.
A year ago he could manage only the first page. And now, as Mr. Sinclair warns his North American visitors, the poor old fellow can handle only the opening lines of the opening paragraph.
The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. Why does young Victoria work so hard to keep old Magnus Flett out of her thoughts? And why does her Greataunt Daisy, day after day, put off her visit to Sycamore Manor?
Every evening she offers her niece excuses, saying she has been seeing the local sights, or occupied with shopping for a summer dress. The warm temperatures continue, a new Orkney record for the last week of June, and she claims she wants to make the most of this unprecedented weather. In her new cotton skirt and blouse (a solid burgundy shade) and her newly acquired walking shoes, she’s braved the fields above Stromness, finding along the way heather, crowberry, various sedges and the beautiful, tiny Scottish primrose (Primula scotica) in all its pink profusion. “Love! tenderness! courage!” she murmurs to the tilted landscape, for no reason that she can think of. Mr. Sinclair, a connoisseur of the pastoral, accompanies her on some of her outings. After the hotel’s midday meal has been served, after the washing-up is done, these two set out together in his smart little Ford Fiesta, visiting the churches and graveyards of neighboring villages, and one day they come across a tombstone whose family name has worn away, but whose date—1675—and brief inscription remain clearly visible: