11

Friday 30 August 1985 et seq

Colley and family arrived home on Friday after five days in the Lakes.

They found cat Hervey decidedly off colour.

‘Daddy, Hervey’s not well’

‘No, he’s got a lump on his face – come and see’

‘There’s a note from Mrs Drewitt; he’s got some sort of abscess – I’ll ring the vet; we can have him neutered at the same time’

‘Oh, that’s really cruel’

‘What’s neutered?’

She went through to telephone; could be heard setting up Hervey’s fate. She returned to apprise Colley of the arrangements:

‘You can take him in tomorrow between nine and ten and I’ll pick him up on Monday. There should be a cat box in the shed – if Carole brought it back’

‘What, they work on Saturdays?’

‘Why not? It’s animals’

Colley went to look in the shed; Carole had brought the basket back. Thank goodness.

The next morning, Colley was up early, mowing the lawn, feeling virtuous. After breakfast, he gathered the library books; then put Hervey in the box and set off for the vet. All the way, Hervey kept up a constant barrage of miaowling which Colley turned into a dialogue – or was it a catalogue? – by interspersing the word ‘Yes’ in as many different inflections as he could.

As he walked through busy Saturday Foxworth, he amused himself by imagining the scene in the vet’s waiting room: ‘There’ll be an assortment of high-backed dining chairs round the walls; in the centre of the floor, an oak drawleaf table of the thirties laden with genteelly-tattered copies of Country Life, The Field and The Lady. There’ll be people sitting all round, some with boxes; some with loose animals, talking with a camaraderie you’d never find in a doctor’s waiting room’

He arrived at the premises and pushed open the door; laughed out loud, since the scene was just as he’d imagined it – apart from the people.

He was the only one there – rapid transit. The door of the inner sanctum opened, and a girl in a white coat ushered out a large, stooping countryman with mottled skin, brown suit, and flat cap, leading a fat old dog indeterminate on a plaited leather lead, acknowledging canine instructions with flapping false teeth: ‘Right you are ... thank you, Miss’

‘GOOD BYE, MR HATTON’

She forgot to stop shouting: ‘WHO’S NEXT?’

The girl laughed: ‘It’s one of those days. You should’ve seen it last Saturday. Come through, will you?’

Colley followed her through the door, which huffed shut in a seedy, veterinary sort of way. The girl examined Hervey.

‘Right, I’ll give him a shot of penicillin now – there shouldn’t be any problem with that abscess’

It was dawning on Colley that this girl was the vet; though he had no need to feel embarrassment (for she could not have known that he’d mistaken her for a junior helper); he nevertheless felt himself reddening. First policemen, then doctors, now vets. Whatever next? He must be ageing rapidly. He tried to think of something to say: ‘I believe my wife arranged for him to be neutered?’

‘Yes; we’ll do that this afternoon – your wife’s picking him up on Monday’

‘Right – what time?’

‘There’ll be someone here between five and seven o’clock’

She pulled out a card from a filing drawer: ‘What’s his name?’

‘Harvey – with an E’

‘Where?’

‘Second – H–E–R–V–E–Y – pronounced Harvey. It’s Johnsonian. We love him – only he’s a cat. And a very fine cat indeed’

‘Oh’

She took down Hervey’s – and Colley’s – particulars. While she did so, Colley reflected how much more difficult it must be to be a vet than a doctor, having to deal with dozens of different sorts of animals, none of which can tell you what’s wrong anyway ... not that the majority of humans is much more articulate. How much larger than life vets seem, putting on old clothes and wellies, and administering pills the size of footballs, and wielding syringes as big as Saturn rockets, and climbing inside ungulates to help them give birth. Why do vets seem to make doctors seem so over-cautious – like mothers who keep their children on reins beyond school-leaving age?

Reflecting thus, he emerged into the sunlit High Street – and bumped into Chaite.

‘Well, well ... [Colley felt incredibly original] ... we meet again. Hey ... you seem to have two arms ... [Should he have said that?] ... not like last time’

Chaite was not usually so open with comparative strangers. And yet, though she had met Colley but once, she felt that she knew him intimately ... which, in a sense, was true.

‘You? Harmless? Don’t tell me ... how about coffee?’

‘Ye-e-s. All right. Where?’

‘The Olde Peacock Inn – over there’ He gestured.

They picked their way through the shoppers, and found themselves at The Olde Peacock Inn where time was standing still even before Good King Edward popularised appendectomy.

They went in, made their way to the grandly-named Ballroom, and sat down. Chaite looked round, appreciating the architecture:

‘I suppose this is the covered-in yard of an old coaching inn’

‘Yes – it dates back to the fifteenth century ... [Colley taking a proprietorial pride in his knowledge of local history, sparse as it was] ... those brackets ...’

‘The ones like cornucopias?’

‘Yes ... they were cast in the last century by the Butterley Ironworks’

‘Why do they use silken ropes to tie the walls together?’

Colley looked, then laughed uproariously: ‘Oh-ho-ho – they’re steel tie-rods – ha-ha – invested with fluff and cobwebs’

Chaite laughed: ‘An investment truss?’

This was fun. An incredibly seedy waiter shattered the scene: ‘Morning coffee for two? Sir? Madam?’

‘Yes. Please’

The waiter withdrew. As if this were a signal, a trio – piano, violin and ’cello – struck up behind Colley. Startled, he turned; then subsided: ‘I expected to see them on that musicians’ gallery’

Chaite considered the cracks in the ceiling; the tastefully peeling paint: ‘I don’t think that would do – it’d all come crashing down’

‘A heap of wood, plaster and strings – and imagine the noise’

‘Prince Charles would visit it, and say "something must be done"’

‘The musicians would be ordered to strike up something jolly, rather than Abide with me’

They fell silent, absorbed in the set; in spite of appearances, the musicians were euphonious and versatile. At last they finished; amid enthusiastic applause, the ageing trio shuffled out as only an ageing trio can.

‘Perhaps they’re suffering from enuresis diurna’

Coffee arrived, accompanied by a plate of genteel egg sandwiches, crust off, cress garnished; iced cakes which would have been more fattening had they been larger. Colley and Chaite looked at one another.

‘Well, here goes’

The offering was surprisingly welcome; the coffee surprisingly good.

‘I must remember this place’ said Chaite.

‘How could you forget it?’ asked Colley.

They munched.

The trio shuffled back, licking their lips. The violinist exhaled cigarette smoke.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Yes – perhaps he’s just come in from the cold’

‘Perhaps he’s in league with the devil’

‘Paganini reincarnate?’

‘Whatever it is, he won’t last long’

‘He seems to have lasted quite a long time already’

The ’cellist now took up his position behind a drum kit; on the bass drum was a circular placard announcing : ‘Algy Hyde and the Key-tones’.

‘What a name – hello, here’s another’

Enter a tall, silver-haired man carrying an armful of saxophones to polite applause.

‘One of your local folk heroes?’

‘Yes. He’s good ...’

The trio, now become a quartet, began to produce a sound reminiscent of Victor Sylvester – which appealed to that audience.

‘Would you like to dance? ’

‘No thanks – it’s a bit old fashioned ... anyway ...’

‘Yes’

They sat back and enjoyed watching the dancing; some of those on the floor, they speculated, must have been shuffling round every Saturday for over fifty years.

Chaite asked Colley about his holiday. He told her at length. She didn’t mind – and she didn’t mind that he didn’t ask her how her week had been.

At last the audience started to thin; Colley wanted to get to the library, and Chaite hadn’t managed to do any of her shopping. They emerged into the High Street. Colley saw Chaite in a new light – a verbal sparring partner: ‘We must do this again’

He kissed her, furtively and lightly. She enjoyed that too ... and wondered how he would react when he found she was his people person.

Colley’s weekend passed in agony. He would have to meet Chaite again – soon. But where – how – to find her? He could have saved himself the worry; when he arrived at WEL on Monday, he found a note from Chaite on his desk. When he’d got over the shock, he called her in: ‘What on earth are you doing here? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

‘That’s a difficult one ... I didn’t know how you’d take it. Anyway ... I had an interview with Ted Crowe while you were away the first time, and it seemed to go all right, and I was able to start quickly ... so here I am’

‘Well, I must say it’s good to have you in the company ... [In spite of himself, Colley had switched into general welcoming mode] ... and I hope you’ll enjoy it here. We have our little ways of doing things; I’m sure you’ll soon get used to us’

‘Yes – I hope you’ll soon get used to me too’

Chaite’s eyes twinkled. Then she clanged her social compartment shut, and went over the things she had to discuss with her research director.

Colley was shaken, but not stirred. When they seemed to have finished, he ventured: ‘I ... wonder if we could ... continue our conversation?’

‘Probably not ... [his heart sank] ... but we could start another. I’d like to go to the Peacock again’

‘We’ve got a few things to discuss ... in more relaxed surroundings. How about Friday?’

‘My diary’s yours – so to speak’

So it was that they met for lunch that Friday. The intervening hours were hell on earth for Colley. Everything he did seemed to be done by someone else. At home, he felt jumpy and snappy; he therefore said little for fear of revealing himself, so that Genista sensed there was something wrong anyway. He slept fitfully, thinking of Chaite. She was there as he dropped off, and she was there when he woke. It was a long time since he’d felt that way, and he comforted and excused himself by thanking God that he could still feel that way.

Chaite felt neutral about it. Colley, on the other hand, felt as though everyone was looking at him. The Ballroom was closed on weekdays; lunches were served in the Lounge Bar. Chaite was already there, seated at a discreet table with a half of shandy. Colley veered past: ‘Anything else you’d like?’

‘To drink? No thanks – but can you find a menu?’

Colley got himself a St Clements, and asked for a menu. The barmaid pointed: ‘It’s up on the wall’

‘Yes, but we’re sitting over there – we can’t see it properly’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to come closer then. We don’t have portable menus’

Colley reported back: ‘You should’ve brought your opera glasses’

‘You should’ve brought your Polaroid’

They moved across to a place of visibility, chose and ordered.

Leaning forward at the end of the counter, Colley could see that the Public Bar was jammed with people, whereas the Lounge Bar was just comfortably crowded to the point of anonymity. Someone recognised him across the great divide: ‘Hello, Colley – coming round this side?’

‘Er – business meeting ... see you later’

The acquaintance returned to his loud cronies, Colley forgotten.

He sat down; knives and forks arrived, wrapped in paper serviettes; surprisingly well-groomed bottles and jars of sauces and mustards.

Chilli con carnes on rice, in ubiquitous earthenware dishes, with chunks of brown bread and too much butter.

‘It’s the same the ’ole world over ... Where do they get all this British Standard food from? Is there a secret factory churning it out and distributing it to pubs everywhere?’

‘I don’t know ... but the menus seem remarkably the same these days – and not just in pubs. Take the sweet trolley for instance ... [Chaite simulated a waitressy voice] ... "There’s sherry trifle, and figs in syrup, and oranges in grand marnier, and profiteroles, and Black Forest gâteau, and strawberry cheesecake ..."’

‘Perhaps it’s something to do with training courses?’

‘No, I think there’s a definite sweet trolley conspiracy – a foreign power setting out to sabotage British business by overfeeding the British businessman’

‘And that’s why the countermeasures bureau has come up with the keep-fit-and-healthy-diet movement...’

further afield. Sometimes they would talk seriously, sometimes frivolously. Wherever and whatever, Colley found it immensely stimulating; found (he explained to himself) some new joy in life; in living. He told himself that he had never met anyone like Chaite. Just to catch a fleeting glimpse of her in the corridor, or crossing the car park, gave him a frisson – as did seeing anyone who bore some vague resemblance to her in the distance. He really wasn’t sleeping at all well; he would wake in the small hours and lie thinking of Chaite, recalling what he thought of as her words of wisdom – how she made him think again; live again.

He recalled every new facet of exploration.

‘What do you think of Millais?’

‘Ooh ... the painter. "From today, painting is dead"’

‘Ha, d’you think so? From what I know of the way they carried on, it took them longer to compose a photograph than to paint a picture’

‘Surely not? Think of Lizzie Siddall lying in the bath in Gower Street in December, and Millais reporting at the beginning of March that he’d finished the head. Think of the detail of the flowers – Ranunculus penicillatus var calcarius (R W Butcher) C D K Cook. You can’t get much more esoteric than that’

‘Yes, and what about Holman Hunt painting The Light of the World, having "an imitation door with adjuncts" built in his studio, and painting by real moonlight until four in the morning "until it no longer suited"’

‘It’s not just the PRB, is it? What about Marcel Duchamp and all his elaborate preparations of randomness – for the Large Glass, for instance’

‘The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. And the ninety-four documents of the Green Box’

‘Turn to box ninety-four. It’s very odd that what started out as a sort of joke has turned itself into as much a revered work as the Mona Lisa’

‘Has it?’

‘Well ... one sort of feels that there’s art there, even if the original intention was ... Take the Three Standard Stoppages for example’

‘Yes?’

‘And?’

‘And then he cut the pieces of canvas and glued them on to strips of board, and the three were reverently housed in a wooden box – later to be used to derive some of the shapes for the Large Glass’

‘This certainly seems to be a more painstaking way of creating a work of art – if it is a work of art – than dubbing a comb or a urinal a "Ready-made"’

‘Are you suggesting that the longer it takes, the more artistic it is?’

‘No ... but I suppose you could say that what is constructed without effort is examined without enjoyment’

‘Or you don’t get out more than someone else has put in ... no, that doesn’t make sense, either’

‘It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Marcel Duchamp scribbled a moustache on the Mona Lisa ...’

‘... L H O O Q ...’

‘... yes ... because he thought that revering artists and placing enormous values on their works was ludicrous ... and now that defaced reproduction is itself priceless ... well, fairly priceless’

‘I think that in the end he just sighed and lay back and enjoyed the joke ... if people wanted to revere his tomfoolery ...’

‘"The picture’s value is the painter’s name" ...’

‘Exactly. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’

Colley revelled in it. He just wanted to talk. The doxy rationale – bore another man, lose another friend. But he’d never met anyone else who could match Chaite’s knowledge – by which he meant, could he have but seen it, anyone else who had a field of knowledge sufficiently similar to his to provide the frisson. Why doxy? Heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.  – a shaft;  – a receptacle. Strange, that.

How one’s point of view can change from second to second – shimmering like a squid. Modified from without; continual monitoring. Do I think that I think in my head because I know my brain is in there, or because I can feel the thoughts there? My brain sits like a spider in a web – a super-arachnid – stretching out to the rest of the world; the whole of space. And the rest of space is stretching out to me, the web of life – everyone has a line on the surface of the globe starting where he was born and finishing where he is disposed of. The world’s littered with thought-trails from those who’ve gone before.

tried, but it didn’t gel. It was a big disappointment; why couldn’t she see what he was driving at? What was he driving at? Had he got a message there that she couldn’t see, or was there really no message? That one kept him awake for some nights, while he tried desperately to try to think what it was he was trying to think about. Eventually, he came to believe that there was nothing there to discuss, and forgot it. After all, there were plenty of other topics to explore.

They were talking about urban myths, a genre which had existed from time immemorial, but which suddenly seemed to have been recognised and categorised. Colley had told Chaite of a filler paragraph in the paper, which stated that some workmen, having been instructed to build a protective wall round an old ruin, had used material from the ruin itself to build the wall.

‘"Thereby producing a wall built round a vacant space?"’

‘How did you know? That’s what it says here – have you seen it already?’

‘No, but the story isn’t new – I’ve read it in Harry Furniss’s Confessions of a Caricaturist’

And so they had pursued the scale of Chaite’s interest in and knowledge of the popular (and generally forgotten) writers and artists of the previous century, and Colley had marvelled at (the breadth rather than the content of) her knowledge. He could always see what other people ought to do; he remembered particularly an evening which had developed in Chaite’s flat: ‘You know so much about these people; you ought to write it down. Before it’s too late’

‘Sooner or later I will – I must. But at the moment, it’s all jumbled up. It’s ... pieces of fibre, before they’re spun to make the yarn to be dyed and woven into the tapestry – and it’s only the finished tapestry which is the useful outcome of the work – as far as anyone else is concerned’

‘But not quite like that – you’re not only the collector of the fibres; you’re the spinner, dyer and weaver as well. "The umpire, the pavilion cat, the roller, pitch, and stumps, and all." You’re not only the block of stone inside which the finished sculpture resides; you’re also the sculptor herself’

‘And the mallet, and the chisel, and the scaffolding ...’

‘Oh, it’s a big sculpture, is it?’

‘Enormous. A veritable Ozymandias’

‘Hold it. You’ve moved into a different ballpark. Something that big would be made out of separate blocks’

‘That’s another difference: each volume will just be a book until it’s opened; People will have to read it to find out what’s inside. As far as the statue is concerned, it’s only the external appearance of the assemblage of blocks which means anything’

‘But each block contains an infinity of sculptures ... oh, all right. Anyway, I haven’t got as far as the trunkless legs yet, let alone the trunk ... and the visage. All I’ve done up to now is a bit of blasting in a particular quarry of knowledge, and picked over a few loosened chippings’

‘A Newton, "playing on the sea-shore and now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lies all undiscovered" before you’

‘Mmmm ... Newton’s truth was different from mine. He was surely concerned with mathematics and mysticism, masonry and mastery of the mint. Anyway, how could he equate the pebbles – my chippings – with the ocean? His analogy is pretty, but won’t stand scrutiny’

‘Very few analogies will if you try to carry them too far. Ours doesn’t. But it’s a framework on which to hang the development of thought. On one level, we use the analogy to explain something by equating elements of each. On another level, it’s not the strengths but the weaknesses of the chosen analogy which help us to see the detail of the original’

‘We always return to the Procrustean bed. The mistake people make is to think that there’s something wrong with the original something if it doesn’t have elements each of which exactly equates with those of the analogy’

‘Well, in this particular case, we might ask if the loose chippings in your quarry could be ground up and cast into tablets of stone in cuneiform moulds – it’s like printing books. How many books are concealed in a tree?’

‘If you think there’s a sculpture inside every block of stone ...’

‘Not just one; an infinity. But once the sculptor has decided which one she’s going to chip out, the stone takes on a different complexion’

‘She probably never Frinks of the other possibilities; just the one she’s homing in on. What I want to ask you now is whether you think that all piano music resides in a piano’

‘Ouch. It would be a great deal more interesting to set up computer-controlled machine to play all the piano pieces which could ever be composed than to set up a typing engine to replace the monkeys who write Shakespeare’

across a lot of other writers on the way – past and future. And just think: the monkeys get through the whole of Hamlet, almost to the end, and then you find "thy rent its solace", or "braxinofalch" ... it spoils the whole thing. The problem is, you – someone – would have to read it all to evaluate it. And it might be in any language expressible in the set of characters your print-out machine will produce. Language is so flexible, and there are so many languages’

‘My goodness ... if you used a dot-matrix printer ... I can’t stand it’

‘Well, this is worse: a television screen which will run through every picture you could ever have on a television screen. It would thus be able to show you anything – and everything – that had ever happened, or ever could happen. Not that there would be enough time ...’

‘With music, it’s universal – well, it transcends the boundaries imposed by language. You could listen to it rather than have to read it. And you could allow yourself a little programming artifice to limit the potential cacophony, and work up to the more esoteric possibilities slowly’

And it was here that they had picked up God’s omniscience and explored the possibility of time running at different rates, if only to give the people in heaven a chance to keep up.

Colley returned home to Genista. He told himself that it was early – only 10 o’clock – and that he was making a great sacrifice by leaving such an interesting discussion early. It was a wonderful gesture, he thought, tearing himself away from the knife-edge intellectual excitement of Chaite and returning to the cozy calm of Genista.

As he approached his house, he could see that all the lights were out. So Genista was either watching television or in bed. Damn, damn, damn – if Genista had gone to bed, why had he bothered to come home early?

He thought of going back to Chaite; then realised that there was no way of recapturing the conversation; that it was futile to expect that it could just be picked up again from the point at which it had left off, as if nothing had happened. To avoid making a noise, he switched off the engine so that he could coast into the drive silently. Hervey the cat (usually lovable; now clubbable) appeared from nowhere, and Colley had to brake, losing his impulsion and getting the car stuck across the pavement. Damn some more.

There was no end to Colley’s trouble – Hervey weaving in and out of his legs, the pirouetting milk bottles, the falling keys, the squeaking door, the Benares brass tray striking in the hall – resistentialism was rife. He stood for a moment; ‘Hellish dark, and smells of cheese’ he thought. There were flickering reflections on the ceiling of the sitting room. He pushed the door open quietly. There was the firm but genially abrasive question master, on his right the smoothie (he must be the MP) and the man in the dark shirt with hairy tie and corduroy jacket (he must be the educationalist); on his left the bishop (no mistaking his weeds) and a well-built floral black lady (she must be statutory – statuesque – a thin girl trying to get out – and what would you do with the residue?)

Genista lay on the sofa, snoring.

‘Oh come, that was not what I said’ ... ‘You can hardly accuse me of being militant’ ... ‘It’s essential to look at this from a moral standpoint’ ... ‘You only gorra looka the kids on the stree’corner near where I come from’ ...

No wonder Genista snored again. Colley turned the sound right down but retained the picture, anxious not to miss it if – when – they came to blows. He knelt by the sofa and kissed Genista gently. She looked at him, not crossly, he thought.

‘Oh Gosh ... [she held her head] ... How did it end?’

‘The Sardinians gatecrashed the wedding and ate all the sandwiches’

‘Cucumber?’

‘And tuna, and prawn, and smoked salmon’

‘Very fishy. What’s the time?’

Colley massaged it: ‘Just after ten’

‘It’s nearly eleven’

‘It was just after ten when I came home’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Oh ... I worked a bit late, and then fell to philosophising. Have you ever thought how many books are potentially concealed in a tree?’

Colley’s challenge.

‘No, why should I? It’s as stupid as angels dancing on the head of a pin Anyway, what’s that got to do with anything?’

‘It’s a direct analogy with the sculpture inside the block of stone’

Half of Colley wants Genista to understand; the other half doesn’t.

‘Or the thin man trying to get out of the fat man?’

‘Or the clown wanting to play Hamlet?’

Yes, the Genista frisson could be as strong as ever; undimmed by Chaite’s contribution. That was a good thing. And yet Colley still thought he needed Chaite to develop his ‘serious intellectual themes’. He thought Genista couldn’t see his need to; he couldn’t understand that Genista was somewhat wearied of his wonderful themes – she’d heard them time and time again. He’d invested her mind with an aura of black and white, believing that everything to her was either obvious or pointless.

Completely overlooking the fact that this was a figment of his fertile imagination working against him, Colley told himself that he wasn’t in the least worried about it; he took heart from Chaite’s dictum: ‘You couldn’t possibly expect to get everything you need from one person’

Chaite had thrown the remark away; Colley the self-centred had picked it up and polished it; had seen it as referring specifically to him; had used it to console himself; as an excuse to derive intellectual stimulus from Chaite. In this mode, he felt himself to be the centre of the universe. He got ‘things he needed’ from a number of people – not least Genista and Chaite – to each of them he exhibited (he thought) a specially-tuned facet of his personality. But he never thought that each of them might be saving a matching facet for him – he thought he owned them totally. Then he saw himself as a soap-bubble among soap-bubbles; as a cell in a plant, parenchymatous, touching his circle of cell friends ... until – as usual – the analogy burst asunder like the soap films themselves.

He didn’t have to look far to appreciate that, in Genista, he had something beyond price; Genista, whom he had singled out to marry – and who, equally, had singled him out – Genista, who transcended Chaite – Chaite who had appeared by some divine Providence to complement Genista and give him, and receive from him, her share of things needed.

Self-centred Colley saw himself reclining on couch, laurel wreath on head, bevies of stylised Genistas and Chaites stroking his brow, feeding him grapes pendulous, nectar and ambrosia ... blessed office of the epicene.

Self-centred Colley never thought of Chaite’s pronouncement as it might have referred to her. He somehow believed that it was he who supplied all her needs; that when he was not there, she went into some state of suspended animation – he could not bear to think of its being otherwise.