Quincunx

  My attention was deflected from this, however, by the discovery that a large parcel had been delivered by the carrier. Although my mother tried to insist that I should not open it until I had finished tea, I made such a fuss that she at last agreed to let me unwrap it immediately. To my delight, it contained a box of about twenty horn-books which were illustrated by beautiful wood-cuts, many of them coloured.

  “Oh do let’s start straight away,” I cried as I opened one after another in delight.

  “Very well, but first I must answer Uncle Marty’s letter and thank him for advising Mr Sancious so well,” my mother said, and went out of the room.

  A moment later I heard a cry of alarm, and she came hurrying back into the sitting-room.

  “My father’s letter-case is gone!” she cried.

  We started to search every conceivable place, summoning Bissett, Mrs Belflower and Sukey to help us. Eventually we had to concede that it was not to be found.

  “He must have took it, ma’am,” said Bissett, not needing to be more specific.

  “I suppose so,” said my mother. And then, as if to herself, she murmured: “I would rather he had taken almost anything but that.”

  I looked at her in surprise and said: “Was it worth so much?”

  “Why, Master Johnnie,” Bissett exclaimed, “it was silver!”

  My mother, however, merely shook her head sorrowfully.

  “And Mr Emeris,” Bissett confided when the other two had left the room, “come round while you was out to say as how Mr Limbrick swore on his solemn oath as that tool ain’t nothin’ to do with Job nor with slatin’ neither.” She shook her head: “The sinfulness o’ folks sometimes beggars believing.”

  “I never believed Job did it,” my mother said. “Nor that Mrs Belflower recognised him.”

  Bissett, however, remained convinced that Job had been involved, and would not be satisfied until she had carried her point.

  CHAPTER 4

  The arrival of the parcel of books from London initiated a new era of my life. Every morning, after breakfast, my mother and I would sit on opposite sides of the table in the sitting-room, she with some work on her lap and a primer propped open before her from which she would read me my lessons, and I listening to her or else crouched over my slate or cyphering-book with my tongue between my teeth as I frowned in concentration over the letters I was forming or the sum I was trying to work out.

  Although my mathematical studies made slow progress under my mother’s tuition, I greatly enjoyed being read to and persevered in learning to read for myself.

  Even before I could make out the meaning of the letters, I was fascinated by the appearance of books — their illustrations and design. Above all, I was intrigued by heraldry and maps, especially the latter of which there were many examples in the house — and in particular one huge vellum example portraying the land around Hougham and dated to nearly a hundred years ago which I used to study for hours. (Mysteriously, it bore in one corner in an ancient hand Uncle Martin’s name — “Fortisquince”.) Because of this interest of mine, my mother arranged for Uncle Martin to send me a map of London and so one day a huge parcel arrived: a vast and fascinatingly detailed map which had been published in twenty-two enormous sheets just the year after I was born. I pored over it for hours, marvelling at the vastness of London. It became a city of the imagination to me rather than a real place, and my desire to read the hundreds of street-names spurred me on to learn my letters. Soon I devoured DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Strype’s edition of Stow’s Survey of London and followed them on the map, fascinated by the changes I could discern taking place between the different periods. By this means I came to “know” the metropolis and believed I could find my way around at least its central districts.

  I suppose I became what is called a queer child. I remember looking out of window at night and thinking how strange it all was, that the trees were just there and the houses, and the stars and the moon above them, and strangest of all that I was there and studying them. I knew God was looking down at me for Bissett and my mother had told me so. My nurse had told me how if I was good I would go to Heaven for ever and ever and if I was bad I would go to Hell. Once as I lay in bed I tried to imagine “for ever and ever”. I perceived a vast gulph into which I was falling and falling and falling for it had no bottom to it, and the imagination of it made my hair prickle and my heart began to pound for everything I knew — my mother, my nurse, the village — became tiny and meaningless and far-away as I plunged on and on into this endless crevice — until at last I was able to force myself to think of something else.

  I was terrified — as I suppose all children are — of things being random and arbitrary. I wanted everything to have a purpose, to be part of a pattern. It seemed to me that if I behaved unjustly I denied the pattern and by creating something ugly and meaningless, forfeited the right to judge that something unjust had been perpetrated against myself and, even more important, the right to expect that there was any justice or design in the world. I wanted my life to involve the gradual unfolding of a design, and whether I have been successful in this remains to be discovered.

  Once I had learned to read, books became a great source of pleasure to me. In the histories and romances that I devoured — lying for hour after hour on the floor of the sitting-room with the light of the window falling over my shoulder — I found a kind of freedom and a richness of experience that I missed in the confined circumstances of my life. And if at times I grew tired of this, then for a diversion I would look out of the great window and watch the villagers pass the house. There went James Fettiplace, the surgeon’s assistant, and then Mr Passant, the post-master, with his little girl. And there in the rain balancing on her pattens was Miss Meadowcroft. And now that it was a sunny day here came the Yallop boys — the sons of the village’s general chandler — with the young curate who tutored them. The adults rarely looked at the house, but the children occasionally did so and it seemed to me that they often smiled and laughed as they glanced towards us. I had spoken to none of these people but their lives intrigued me and I made up stories about them — that Mr Yallop had run away to sea when he was a boy and made a fortune and married Mrs Yallop by elopement. And the curate was a wealthy duke in disguise who had come to the village in order to woo Miss Laetitia Meadowcroft, the Rector’s daughter. I asked Mrs Belflower and Sukey about them and what they told me seemed duller and yet in a way stranger than my inventions.

  As the months passed and a year went by and then another, and I became bored with spinning my top and trundling my hoop around the terraced grass-plats, I chafed increasingly at my confinement to the house and garden. I might remark, incidentally, that I never saw the mole-spade in Mr Pimlott’s possession again. (And this confirmed my suspicion that he had lent it to the tramper to effect his entry.) Neither did I ever venture back into the Wilderness, at first through fear but then it was something else that restrained me — a superstitious desire, I think, to leave something unexplored, to have something that I feared as dangerous and yet knew I could face up to and find to be safe after all.

  I particularly resented my afternoon walks because the village-children used to jeer at me when they saw me walking with my mother or Sukey as if I were under guard, and so I used to run on as far ahead of my escort as I could in order to look as if I were alone. I envied the children for running barefoot in the summer when I used to see them on the Green playing their elaborate games of chuck-farthing and kiss-in-the-ring and drop-the-handkerchief. And on the long summer evenings I watched them playing at shuttlecock in the wide street from the front windows of the house.

  Above all, and later, as I grew bigger and my walks extended further, I envied the boys of my age whom I sometimes heard shouting above our heads where they were bird-nesting in the high branches or whom I glimpsed in the distance swimming in the river — the white flash of their bodies visible as they dived from the bank. Once or twice while I was walking with Sukey
we met one of her brothers, especially Harry who was only a few years my senior, and he always seemed to be doing exciting things: helping to drive cattle, or tenting crows, or harvesting. And quite often it came about that we fell in with Job and that he happened to be walking our way.

  I liked Job, particularly because, when he and Sukey were not giggling and whispering to each other, he told me about the things he had done as a boy. He had been very keen on swimming and I conceived the idea that he might be permitted to teach me. I asked my mother about this and at last she agreed.

  And so one fine Sunday afternoon that summer, Job and I went to the mill-pond on the river at Twycott. He was a good teacher and on that first day I learned a great deal. I was impressed by the way he dived from the bank and swam underwater and I envied this ability and yet was terrified of the thought of emulating him, especially when he would swim beneath the water-gate of the abandoned mill. He tried to teach me but seeing how frightened I was, he desisted and contented himself with improving my skill in merely swimming.

  Our lessons became a regular occurrence on Sundays, and afterwards Job would walk home with me to have tea in the kitchen with Sukey and Mrs Belflower. One day only a few weeks later, however, Sukey told me with tears in her eyes that I would not be seeing him again for a very long time. He had gone to “ ’list” as a soldier. (She told me that this was because of the way Mr Emeris — prompted by Bissett — was pursuing him with his suspicions of involvement in the burgling of our house.) I was so disappointed at this interruption of my swimming-lessons that my mother had the idea of asking Sukey if the eldest of her young brothers, Harry, could continue the lessons. She looked a little doubtful at this but said she thought it could be arranged.

  So next Sunday it was Harry who accompanied me to the river, largely in silence for he spoke rarely and seemed uninterested in my conversation. He was a well-built, straw-haired lad with a big jaw and pale blue eyes. His approach was much more pragmatic than Job’s for he insisted that I should first of all learn to stay under the water in order to overcome my natural fear of it, and his conviction that this was desirable seemed to increase when he found how frightened I was at the prospect. To this end he seized me with relish and held me under the surface while I struggled and fought. I really believed I was drowning and I recollect that when he at last released me and I pulled myself onto the bank and lay there gasping and spluttering, I was sure that I was going to die. I looked at a nearby gate — just an ordinary gate into a field — and I recall to this day how it looked exactly like a picture in a frame. And for several days I found that everything I looked at seemed to be framed in this way, as if I were seeing it for the first time.

  Strangely enough, Harry’s method seemed to work, for my fear of being underwater vanished and I became so skilful that he and I would compete to see who could swim fastest beneath the sluice of the water-gate. But the following summer he was too busy with his work to continue to teach me and my mother refused to let me swim alone — though I was privately convinced that I was safer without than with my professor.

  I turned more and more towards books. Parcels of them arrived regularly from Uncle Marty and there were, besides, many in the house. I read whatever was in the library (by which I should be understood to mean, scattered throughout the house for there was no room set aside for that purpose) and soon discerned that there were several distinct categories. There were new books sent to my mother and myself from London and these were romances, novels, tales for children, and so on. Then there were much older volumes — none of them less than fifty or sixty years old — most of which were on dry and dreary subjects connected with estate management and farming, but there were also books of history and travel among these as well as a Latin primer. I knew they formed a distinct group for, apart from their age, they had very plain book-plates with only a heraldic design of an eagle, above which were the initials “D. F.” These were to be distinguished from another group of books that were for the most part twenty or thirty years old and from which the book-plates seemed to have been removed. These volumes were entirely devoted to the subject of law and I put them aside in disgust. And finally there were a number which I supposed to have belonged to my mother when she was my age, though I was not sure of this because there was no name inscribed inside them. To speak more accurately, in all but a few instances the edge of the fly-leaf had been cut off.

  Now that I could read for myself I perused all of The Arabian Nights — those exotic but often brutal and even indecent stories from whose full force my mother had tried to shield me. I particularly enjoyed the long tale in which the resourceful — but, as it seemed to me, surely often unscrupulous! — youth Alla ad Deen plunged into a series of extraordinary adventures as a result of which he was able to enrich his impoverished mother. And now I read to the very end the tale of Syed Naomaun who followed his wife to the graveyard one night and found her with a female goul.

  I contracted the habit — or acquired the ability, for I do not know which to call it — of losing myself (or perhaps finding myself?) in a book and cutting myself off from the world. (And, to anticipate for a moment, this was often to prove very useful.) I read works of philosophy, travel, history and literature before I even knew what these words meant or how to distinguish between them. The strange bye-ways I wandered down, the vistas I glimpsed, the dark windings I passed through — all these I cannot hope to enumerate. Though often confused and befogged I was constantly excited by a glimpse of something vast and profound and mysterious. I lost myself amid the spacious “orotund lucubrations” of the last century (the great Cham), or the helter-skelter rushing of the drama and prose of the century before. I read — and above all in Shakespeare — of passions whose nature I often could not understand but whose expression thrilled me. I read about the lepers who roamed England hundreds of years ago ringing a bell and crying out “Unclean! Unclean!” with hoods over their faces to hide their ravaged features until they became too infirm, when the Burial service was read over them and they were locked away in leper-houses. Curious to know how the truth about the East matched the Arabian Tales I had loved so much, I devoured travellers’ tales and read of hereditary and secret castes of worshippers of many-headed goddesses who strangled their arbitrarily-chosen victims by night as sacrifices to their deities, or of other votaries who hurled themselves to their death beneath the wheels of the great waggons carrying an image of their god. And I read of the hated and reviled Indian caste that only crept out at night to remove the night-soil.

  My mother had long read Sir Walter Scott’s works to me and now that I grew older I began to read his romances for myself — those works in which narrative and history are so adroitly blended and made to change places. Perhaps because of my reading of history-books, I became fascinated by the past, and always wanted to know how things had come into being. My elders could not satisfy my curiosity except that Mrs Belflower told me stories of the great families of the locality, but her tales seemed to me not to be historical for they were never precisely placed in time.

  I became more and more curious to know about the past. Where had I come from? Where had my mother lived? She hated to be asked and would tell me nothing beyond the bare fact that she had grown up in London. Now that it was borne in upon me that we were not of the village, I was filled with a desire to belong, to have roots, to know of a past before I was born.

  The only clew I had to follow lay in the books. I looked more closely at those which I assumed had belonged to my mother. And now in a few cases I found the letters “M. H.” written in a corner of the fly-leaf and since I knew that my mother’s name was Mary, I assumed that the initials were hers. Now I examined the law-books which I had earlier cast aside and noticed that although they had once had a book-plate pasted in, all of these had been torn out. However, since this had not always been done very well, by comparing a number of them I was able to reconstruct the original. This took the form of a shield with the familiar design of the five
quatre-foil roses. Above it were the words “Ex libris J. H.” and beneath it another line of writing which, as I gradually re-assembled it, I found to be the mysterious words: Tuta rosa coram spinis. This was very puzzling, but by now the time was approaching when my mother had promised to satisfy my curiosity on this subject and others, and so I was prepared to wait as patiently as I could until Christmas.

  I suspected that the words were in Latin. This language was not one of the subjects my mother had undertaken to instruct me in, but I recognised it from church on Sundays when we attended divine service. And it was on one of these occasions that something happened that I must now describe.

  It was autumn and as we walked to church that morning — my mother in her yellow silk gown with her merino cloak and best bonnet and I in my top boots, blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, and creamy breeches — the season’s combination of fullness and foreboding was in the air. The chestnuts were bursting from their sheaths and we passed several young men carrying baskets of hazel-nuts, filberts and beech-nuts that they had been into the woods early to gather, following the tradition of the village, in order to give to the girl they admired. And the martins were clustered on the chimneys and thatch of the cottages ready for their departure.

  As usual we slipped into our little boxed pew (we had our sitting far away at the back and behind a pillar) before almost anyone else had arrived. And so while the church orchestra of clarionets, trumpets, trombones, bassoons, French horns, fiddles, and bass-viols buzzed and twittered as they tuned their instruments, I watched Mr Emeris — holding his mace before him with stately dignity — usher the great ones of the parish through the throng of villagers who were already standing in the body of the church and now parted respectfully, and into their boxed pews at the front. These were entailed upon the freehold of their houses and it had been a source of irritation to me ever since the beginning of my heraldic interests that we did not have one of those pews that commanded such a fine view of the chancel.