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Saturday 7 February 1987

Just where was Chaite now?

Colley remembered one of their conversations about the afterlife - if heaven was all sweetness and light, just niceness going on and on and on and on and on for ever, was it not going to be more like hell?

    What was heaven like? Were people in heaven freer to move about than they had been when earthbound? Could they move across the boundaries of time as well as space?

    Did Mozart spend all his time at the pool table ... playing Jelly Roll Morton? Did he sit at the piano and play Jelly Roll Morton too? Did they respect one another's music; learn from one another? On earth, Morton knew of Mozart, but did Mozart in heaven know of Morton?

    What did the Bach family make of Scott Joplin? What did Claude Debussy and Bix Beiderbecke have to say to one another?

    'Alors!! Dans une Brume - c'est formidable'

    'Merci, Claude'

    'Ma foie'

    'Quel fromage'

every direction; everyone clean and wholesome, each in his or her little cubicle, ever open for discourse, a perpetual perambulation of visits and converse ... and there, above it all, was a dimly-perceived structure something like the organ in the Royal Festival Hall with banked choirs of angels and God busy doing nothing - and everything.

    Free as the social intercourse in Colley's heaven was, it was clinical and admitted of no frailty. Chaite's heaven, on the other hand, was more like an infinite Bartholomew Fair; if the inmates of Colley's heaven were clad in innocuous robes, Chaite's were much more colourful and flamboyantly dressed, a continual surge of jostling humanity going nowhere in particular, yet moving all the time, laughing and joking, processions, street parties; there was no loneliness - in Chaite's heaven, you couldn't be lonely, even if you wanted to be.

    Was there a language barrier? Could they all understand one another? Did those in heaven know what was happening on earth? And because so much was happening all at once, how could they find out what was on, let alone tune into it? Or was time such that the idea of simultaneity was meaningless? Much the same as the concept of time starting - the creation of matter - of the world. How can we possibly comprehend it?

    And did they have access to anything they wanted in heaven? Suppose Oliver and Armstrong wanted to hear what they'd recorded in 1923, could they call up records and equipment? Could Dan Leno enjoy Charlie Chaplin movies? Or perhaps he'd seen them already - watched them being made, even.

'Interesting - we've had music and clowning - universal languages. What about mathematics? Another universal language'

'God yes; Euclid, Newton, Euler, Fermat ...'

'Will everything be "known" in heaven? No mystery to Fermat's last theorem?'

'Surely, the only mysterious thing about Fermat's last theorem is that it is his last, and that he himself hinted that he had a "marvellous" proof. I side with Gauss, who pooh-poohed it, saying that he could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions "which one could neither prove nor dispose of"'

'Well, now he can reveal his "marvellous proof"; he can challenge Gauss'

'Interesting. Given that they all had about the same orders of magnitude of thought-hours at their disposal in life, what can we conclude about the quantity that one person can learn or develop in a lifetime? After all, what took Euclid a lifetime to develop can actually be assimilated very rapidly once someone else (ie Euclid) has done it'

'Well ... if everyone knows everything - has access to everything - there can be no language barriers after all. So how will one know which language to use to communicate. Or is it done by telepathy?'

'Shurely the mishtake we're making is that we're not thinking of any of these as whole-life people - we're just looking at a few moments of their lives - a few achievements - that we happen to know about, recorded on paper, or film, or canvas, or tape, or whatever. Just how are we to know about - let alone recount - whole lives? It takes longer to explain what you're doing than to do it - an optical illusion, a flower arrangement, a haiku'

'Well, then ... do you think that all the hundreds of people we've heard of - and the millions we haven't - all know each other, have access to each other, get on with each other?'

'Will everyone be happy all the time? And healthy?'

'Will people who have lost bits be restored?'

'I'm sure they will. But will everything be restored? Missing limbs, perhaps ... but what about appendixes - to name but one bit that might have been removed? And if that, what about hair, nails, teeth ...? And how old will they be?'

'As old as they were when they died'

'But suppose they were infirm and senile?'

'Then they'll ... well, they'll be whole, and age doesn't matter anyway'

'There must be a plethora of babies in heaven. What about foetuses? Where do we draw the line?'

'What about people who were born imperfect?'

'Physical imperfections are only one sort. People aren't equally brainy, or dextrous, or good at maths, languages, sport ... or needlework, or paperhanging ... who's to decide what's imperfect?'

'You see? We're trying to fit heavenly bodies into an earthly Procrustean bed'

And there they had left it.

And yet he shouldn't, as they had put it, 'try to fit heavenly bodies into an earthly Procrustean bed'. If time were so different where Chaite was, perhaps the idea of 'coming back' never occurred to her, even if she could. Suppose a year to him were but a nanosecond to her.

A thousand ages in thy sight are but an evening gone - Colley became fascinated with that: where had Isaac Watts got his insight from? He looked it up. Easy - Psalm 90, verse 4: for a thousand years in thy sight are but a yesterday … hold on - 2 Peter; chapter 3, verse 4: But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

    Once again Colley had a feeling that ancient man - certainly the witnesses of the Old Testament - knew something that we, with all our knowledge, were failing to recognise.

    There'd have to be some time compression in heaven if there were to be 'enough' time for everybody to do everything. Perhaps Chaite did come back in picosecond bursts; with 31.5 million seconds in an earth year, it would be quite long enough for her - who had to pack so much into her new life - but too fleeting for him.

    This way lay ... madness? Or could it be the secret of the universe? For a picosecond burst - and not for the first time - Colley fancied that he had actually grasped the secret of time: with blinding clarity he saw and understood; then the omniscience dissolved from his comprehension, leaving him utterly frustrated.

It was impossible to comprehend every thought and fact and memory that had been extinguished and obliterated in the moment of Chaite's death. Some of what was lost was trivial, the detritus of life - that the pepper was in the corner cupboard, that the seam of the tartan shirt was pulling away, that the hyacinth in the amber bulb glass was going to be blue.

    Anyone who looked in the corner cupboard would see at a glance that the pepper was pepper, and that a great deal more besides was there, to be used or disposed of as the decider decided.

Would anyone throw a hyacinth away? One would surely wait for it to burgeon, becoming blue, something seemingly springing from nothing, fed but by water and air, owing its life to Chaite who had chosen and nurtured it and now wasn't there to enjoy what was continuing as best it could in its plantly way as an extension of she who had set it up.

This sort of knowledge was little loss - what was so obvious was hardly knowledge. Some of Chaite's memories lost were scarcely less trivial and just as irretrievable; nobody knew of her recollection of an image of the moon through a stand of beeches as an owl hooted, to be answered by another, distant; the evocative smell of dry dust that had always reminded her of a cupboard in a childhood house where she had delightedly discovered a trunk full of granny's garments - and why had her mother seemed so put out at the discovery? - a tableau she had seen from a train of a girl in an apron about to feed a flock of eager geese, shades of white and brown and green, a grassy slope, a tumbledown of corrugated iron, memorable in its powerful inconsequentiality.

Much later, Chaite had read:

    Four ducks on a pond,

    White clouds on the wing;

    She knew exactly what William 'Up-the-airy-mountain' Allingham had felt; from such a stream of oubliobilia, uncommunicable to others yet so meaningful to ourselves, are our memories made - sometimes we want to tell people about them because they mean so much to us; the moments seem somehow to encapsulate universal truths, yet always frustrate us as we learn again that they are uncommunicable.

or Hall Caine, or Harry Furniss, or Dornford Yates or a host of others could ask Chaite.

    But even Colley was more interested in the fact that she had the knowledge than in what that knowledge was: 'A man will turn over half a library to make one book ... [he had quoted, and] ... Knowledge is of two kinds; we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. You know so much about these people; you ought to write it down … Before it's too late' he had added.

    Neither had seen anything prophetic in that; there was plenty of time ... wasn't there? If you thought about all the possible implications of what you were saying you'd never say anything lest it should touch some raw spot of the past or presage some psychic lesion of the future. The present, reasoned Colley, did not exist; rather was it an interface between the past and the future. The present, like the point of Euclidean geometry, had position, but no dimension. And yet, like the point, it had not only no dimension, but every dimension. For the future, you could not always be worrying about 'before it's too late'; everyone had to go sometime.

    As for the past ... he remembered going into Sibson's office breezily one morning, to find him grimly tidying his desk: 'What a beautiful morning - full of the joys of spring, eh Sib? What's making you tidy up at last?'

'Er ... my mother's just died, so I'm going over to Oswestry for a couple of weeks to sort things out'

A cement-mixer effect in Colley's head thought it had instructed his voice to say: 'I'm so sorry ... I didn't mean ... Is there anything ...?'

It had come out as 'Aarrgh-gurgle-grunt-psshh-huhummmm' as Colley had backed out of Sibson's office. Never having cared much for Colley, Sibson carefully concealed that both for him and for his mother, prematurely senile and painfully ill, it was the proverbial merciful release.