The Map of Time

  No one, not even he, would have imagined that the necessary components could come together in that revolting hovel to produce a writer, and yet they had—although the delivery had been a long-drawn-out, fraught one. It had taken him precisely twenty-one years and three months to turn his dreams into reality. According to his calculations, that is. As though he were addressing future biographers, Wells usually identified June 5, 1874, as the day his vocation was revealed to him in what was perhaps an unnecessarily brutal fashion. That day he suffered a spectacular accident, and this experience, the enormous significance of which would be revealed over time, also convinced him that it was the whims of fate and not our own wills which shaped our futures. Like someone unfolding an origami bird in order to find out how it is made, Wells was able to dissect his present life and discover the elements that had gone into making it up. In fact, tracing back the origins of each moment was a frequent pastime of his. This exercise in metaphysical classification was as comforting to him as reciting the twelve times table in order to steady the world with the mainstay of mathematics each time it seemed to him like a swirling mass. Thus, he had determined that the starting point, the fateful spark setting off the events that would turn him into a writer was something that might initially appear puzzling: his father’s talent for spin bowling on the cricket pitch. But pulling on that thread quickly unraveled the whole carpet: without his talent for spin bowling his father would not have been invited to join the county cricket team, had he not joined the county cricket team, he would not have spent the afternoons drinking with his teammates in the Bell, the pub near their house, had he not frittered away his afternoons in the Bell, neglecting the tiny china shop he ran with his wife on the ground floor of their dwelling, he would not have become acquainted with the pub landlord’s son, had he not forged those friendly ties with the strapping youth, when he and his sons bumped into him at the cricket match they were attending one afternoon, the lad would not have taken the liberty of picking young Bertie up by the arms and tossing him into the air, had he not tossed Bertie into the air he would not have slipped out of his hands, had he not slipped out of the lad’s hands the eight year-old Wells would not have fractured his tibia when he fell against one of the pegs holding down the beer tent, had he not fractured his tibia and been forced to spend the whole of the summer in bed, he would not have had the perfect excuse to devote himself to the only form of entertainment available to him in that situation— reading, a harmful activity, which under any other circumstances would have aroused the his parents” suspicions, which would have prevented him from discovering Dickens, Swift, or Washington Irving, writers who planted the seed inside him which, regardless of the scant nourishment and care he was able to provide it with, would eventually come into bloom.

  Sometimes, in order to appreciate the value of what he had even more, not to let it lose any of its sparkle, Wells wondered what might have become of him if the miraculous sequence of events that had thrust him into the arms of literature had never occurred. And the answer was always the same. If the curious accident had never taken place, Wells was certain he would now be working in some pharmacy or other, bored witless and unable to believe that his contribution to life’s great melting pot was to be of such little import. What would life be like without any purpose, without any definite goal? He could imagine no greater misery than to drift through life aimlessly, frustrated, knowing nothing could ever satisfy him, building a dull, meaningless existence on the basis of luck and a series of muddled decisions, an existence interchangeable with that of his neighbor, aspiring only to the brief, fragile, and elusive happiness of simple folk. Happily, his father’s talent for cricket had saved him from mediocrity, exposing him less to the vagaries of life, turning him into someone with a purpose, turning him into a writer.

  The journey had by no means been an easy one. It was as if just when he glimpsed his vocation, just when he knew which path to take, the wind destined to hamper his progress had also risen, like an unavoidable accompaniment, a fierce persistent wind in the form of his mother. For it seemed that besides being one of the most wretched creatures on the planet, Sarah Wells’s sole mission in life was to bring up her sons Bertie, Fred, and Frank to be hardworking members of society, which for her meant a shop assistant, baker, or some other kind of selfless soul who, like Atlas proudly but discreetly carried the world on their shoulders. Wells’s determination to amount to something more was a disappointment to her, although one should not attach too much importance to that, because it had been merely adding insult to injury. Little Bertie had been a disappointment to his mother from the very moment he was born for having had the gall to emerge from her womb a fully equipped male. Nine months earlier she had only consented to cross the threshold of her despicable husband’s bedroom on condition he gave her a little girl to replace the one she had lost.

  It is hardly surprising that after such inauspicious beginnings, Wells’s relationship with his mother should continue in the same vein. Once the pleasant respite afforded by his broken leg had ended—after the village doctor, who, without being asked, had kindly prolonged it by setting the bone badly and being obliged to break it again to correct his mistake—little Bertie was sent to a commercial academy in Bromley, where his two brothers had gone before him although their teacher, Mr. Morley, had been unable to make anything out of them. The boy, however, quickly proved that all the peas in a pod are not necessarily the same. Mr. Morley was so astonished by Wells’s dazzling intelligence that he even turned a blind eye to the non-payment of the boy’s registration fees. However, this preferential treatment did not stop his mother from uprooting her son from the milieu of blackboards and school desks where he felt so at home, and sending him to train as an apprentice at the Rodgers and Denyer bakery in Windsor. After three months of toiling from seven thirty in the morning until eight at night, with a short break for lunch taken in a cramped, windowless cellar, Wells feared his youthful optimism would slowly and inevitably begin to fade, just as it had with his elder brothers, whom he barely recognized as the cheerful, determined fellows they had once been. And so he did everything in his power to prove to all and sundry that he did not have the makings of a baker’s assistant, abandoning himself more than ever to his frequent bouts of daydreaming. It came to the point where the owners had no choice but to dismiss the young man who mixed up the orders and spent most of his time dreaming in a corner. Thanks to the intervention of one of his mother’s second cousins, he was then sent to assist a relative in running a school in Wookey where he would also be able to complete his teacher training. Unfortunately, this employment, far more in keeping with his aspirations, ended almost as soon as it began when it was discovered that the headmaster was an impostor who had obtained his post by falsifying his academic qualifications. The by now not so little Bertie once again fell prey to his mother’s obsessions, which deflected him from his true destiny, sending him off on another mistaken path. And so it was that aged just fourteen, Wells began working in the pharmacy run by Mr. Cowap, who was instructed to train him as a chemist. However, the pharmacist soon realized the boy was far too gifted to be wasted on such an occupation and placed him in the hands of Horace Byatt, headmaster at Midhurst Grammar School, who was on the lookout for exceptional students who could imbue his establishment with the academic respectability it needed. Wells easily excelled over the other boys. They were on the whole mediocre students, and he was instantly noticed by Byatt, who contrived with the pharmacist to provide the talented boy with the best education they could. But his mother soon frustrated the plot hatched by the pair of idle philanthropists by sending her son to another bakery, this time in Southsea. Wells spent two years there in a state of intense confusion, trying to understand why that fierce wind insisted on blowing him off course each time he found himself back on the right path. Life at Edwin Hyde’s Bread Emporium was suspiciously similar to a sojourn in hell. It consisted of thirteen hours” hard work, followed by a night spent shut away in
the airless hut that passed for a dormitory, where the apprentices slept so close together that even their dreams got muddled up. A few years earlier, convinced her husband’s fecklessness would end by bankrupting their china shop business, his mother had accepted the post of housekeeper at Uppark Manor, a run-down estate on Harting Down where as a girl she had worked as a maid. It was to here that Wells wrote her a series of despairing, accusatory letters, which out of respect I will not reproduce here, alternating the most childish demands with the most sophisticated arguments in a vain attempt to persuade her to set him free from his captivity. As he watched with anguish the future he so longed for slip through his fingers, Wells did his utmost to try to weaken his mother’s resolve. He asked her how she expected him to be able to help her in her old age on a shop assistant’s meager wage, pointing out that with the studies he intended to pursue he would obtain a wonderful position; he accused her of being intolerant, stupid, even threatening to commit suicide or other more dreadful acts that would stain the family name forever. But none of this weakened his mother’s resolve to turn him into a respectable baker’s boy. It took his former champion Horace Byatt, overwhelmed by growing numbers of pupils, to come to the rescue, offering him a post at a salary of twenty pounds for the first year, and forty thereafter. Wells was quick to wave these figures desperately in front of the nose of his mother, who reluctantly allowed him to leave the bakery, tired of all her vain efforts to keep her son on the right track. Relieved, the grateful Wells placed himself at the orders of his savior, whose expectations he was anxious to live up to. During the day he taught the younger boys, and at night he studied to finish his teacher training, eagerly devouring everything he could find about biology, physics, astronomy, and other science subjects. The reward for his titanic efforts was a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he would study under none other than Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous biologist who had been Darwin’s lieutenant during his famous debates with Bishop Wilberforce.

  Despite all this, it could not be said that Wells left for London in high spirits. He did so more with a feeling of deep unhappiness at not receiving his parents” support in this huge adventure. He was convinced his mother hoped he would fail in his studies, confirming her belief that the Wells boys were only fit to be bakers, that no genius could possibly be produced from a substance as dubious as her husband’s seed. For his part, his father was the living proof that failure could be enjoyed just as much as prosperity.

  During the summer they had spent together, Wells had looked on with dismay as his father, whom age had deprived of his sole refuge, cricket, clung to the one thing that had given his life meaning. He wandered around the cricket pitches like a restless ghost carrying a bag stuffed with batting gloves, pads, and cricket balls, while his china shop foundered like a captainless ship, holed in the middle of the ocean. Things being as they were, Wells did not mind too much having to stay in a rooming house where the guests appeared to be competing for who could produce the most original noises.

  He was so accustomed to life revealing its most unpleasant side to him, that when his aunt Mary Wells proposed he lodge at her house on the Euston Road, his natural response was to be suspicious, for the house was to all appearances normal, warm, cozy, suffused with a peaceful, harmonious atmosphere, and bore no resemblance to the squalid dwellings he had lived in up until then.

  He was so grateful to his aunt for providing him with this long-awaited reprieve in the interminable battle that was his life that he considered it almost his duty to ask for the hand of her daughter Isabel, that gentle, kind young girl who wafted silently around the house. But Wells soon realized the rashness of his decision.

  After the wedding, which was settled with the prompt matter-of-factness of a tedious formality, not only did he confirm that his cousin had nothing in common with him, but he also discovered that Isabel had been brought up to be a perfect wife. That is to say, to satisfy her husband’s every need except, of course, in the marriage bed, where she behaved with a coldness ideal for a procreating machine but entirely unsuited to pleasure. In spite of all this, his wife’s sexual frigidity proved a minor problem easily resolved by visiting other beds. Wells soon discovered there was an abundance of delightful ones to which his hypnotic grandiloquence gained him entry, and so he finally dedicated himself to enjoying life now that it seemed to be going his way. Immersed in the modest pursuit of pleasure that his guinea a week scholarship allowed, Wells not only gave himself over to the joys of the flesh, to making forays into hitherto unexplored subjects such as literature and art, and to enjoying every second of his hard-earned stay at South Kensington, but he also decided the time had come to reveal his innermost dreams to the world by publishing a short story in The Science Schools Journal.

  He called it The Chronic Argonauts, and its main character was a mad scientist, Dr. Nebogipfel, who had invented a machine which he used to travel back in time to commit a murder. Time travel was not an original concept; Dickens had already written about it in A Christmas Carol and Edgar Allan Poe in A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, only in both of those stories the journeys always took place during a dream or state of trance. By contrast, Wells’s scientist traveled of his own free will and by means of a mechanical device. In brief, his idea was brimming with originality. However, this first tentative trial at being a writer did not change his life, which to his disappointment carried on exactly as before. All the same, this first story brought him the most remarkable reader he had ever had, and probably would ever have. A few days after its publication, Wells received a card from an admirer who had read his story and asked if he would take tea with him. The name on the card sent a shiver down his spine: Joseph Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man.

  12

  Wells began hearing about Merrick the moment he set foot in the biology classrooms at South Kensington. For those studying the workings of the human body, Merrick was something akin to Nature’s most amazing achievement, its finest-cut diamond, living proof of the scope of its inventiveness. The so-called Elephant Man suffered from a disease that had horribly deformed his body, turning him into a shapeless, almost monstrous creature. This strange affliction, which had the medical profession scratching its heads, had caused the limbs, bones, and organs on his right side to grow uncontrollably, leaving his left side practically unaffected. An enormous swelling on the right side of his skull, for example, distorted the shape of his head, squashing his face into a mass of folds and bony protuberances, and even dislodging his ear. Because of this, Merrick was unable to express anything more than the frozen ferocity of a totem. Owing to this lopsidedness, his spinal column curved to the right, where his organs were markedly heavier, lending all his movements a grotesque air. As if this were not enough, the disease had also turned his skin into a coarse, leathery crust, like dried cardboard, covered in hollows and swellings and wartlike growths. To begin with, Wells could scarcely believe such a creature existed, but the photographs secretly circulating in the classroom soon revealed the truth of the rumors. The photographs had been stolen or purchased from staff at the London Hospital, where Merrick now resided, having spent half his life being displayed in sideshows at third-rate fairs and traveling circuses. As they passed from hand to hand, the blurred, shadowy images in which Merrick was scarcely more than a blotch caused a similar thrill to the photographs of scantily clad women they became mixed up with, although for different reasons.

  The idea of having been invited to tea with this creature filled Wells with a strange mixture of awe and apprehension.

  Even so, he arrived on time at the London Hospital, a solid, forbidding structure located in Whitechapel. In the entrance, a steady stream of doctors and nurses went about their mysterious business. Wells looked for a place where he would not be in the way, his head spinning from the synchronized activity everyone seemed to be engaged in, like dancers in a ballet. Perhaps one of the nurses he saw carrying bandages had just left an operati
ng theater where some patient was hovering between life and death.

  If so, she did not quicken her step beyond the brisk but measured pace evolved over years of dealing with emergency situations. Amazed, Wells had been watching the nonstop bustle from his vantage point for some time when Dr. Treves, the surgeon responsible for Merrick, finally arrived. Treves was a small, excitable man of about thirty-five who masked his childlike features behind a bushy beard, clipped neatly like a hedge.

  “Mr. Wells?” he inquired, trying unsuccessfully to hide the evident dismay he felt at his offensive youthfulness.

  Wells nodded and gave an involuntary shrug as if apologizing for not demonstrating the venerable old age Treves apparently required of those visiting his patient. He instantly regretted his gesture, for he had not requested an audience with the hospital’s famous guest.

  “Thank you for accepting Mr. Merrick’s invitation,” said Treves, holding out his hand.

  The surgeon had quickly recovered from his initial shock and reverted to the role of intermediary. With extreme respect, Wells shook the capable, agile hand that was accustomed to venturing into places out of bounds to most other mortals.

  “How could I refuse to meet the only person who has read my story?” he retorted.