The oxford fellow, p.30
The Oxford Fellow, page 30
‘Well—ah, well—well, if you really want …’
Denton wound up buying him a pint, found him a rather bitter man for such a young one, already walled in on all sides by the desire to rise ‘in the town’, meaning the town government, and already aged by it. Denton suggested he give it up and go somewhere else. David Fletcher looked at him as if he were mad. ‘Easy to say, the devil to do,’ he muttered, and he finished his pint and thanked Denton and disappeared into the quiet warmth of a Taunton street. Denton thought of Jonas’s saying ‘Come home, Father,’ thought it sprang from the same strangling parochialism as Fletcher’s.
Could there be more than one Ifan Gurra? Denton laughed so loud that somebody on the street looked at him. No, there could be only one, but how in the world had he got from a farm in Cheddar’s ‘rich lower lands’ to the senior common room of an Oxford college?
In the morning, he started back towards London. He was waiting on the platform for the first train that would take him to Bristol. The air in the train shed was not very summery, yet there was a smell of the farms and the fields laid over the smell of coal smoke and oil. Another man waiting there must have noticed his inhaling that air, for he said—rare for an Englishman, but they were friendlier in Somerset than in London—‘You should be here in strawberry season. You can smell them, even up here.’
‘I thought it was all cows and hay.’
The man laughed. ‘When we get up towards Cheddar, look down to the left side of the train where the land slopes down to the gorge. That’s all strawberry fields in season—the blossoms look like snow sometimes. It’s a great time for the young people to be out picking the berries. Hundreds of people. Lots of babies nine months later.’ He laughed. ‘The cows and hay are on the other side.’
Denton watched as they rushed north. He got up and sat on the left side after Cheddar, then went back to the right side to watch the haying. It made him not nostalgic but sombre, thinking of what he’d left behind. All lives left things behind, his more than most. It was like Alice Lees and her children, boys left with their half-brothers, the girls somewhere that was not their home. Alice and her daughters, and Denton and his sons. He and Alice Lees were not so different in that. He had left his homeland and lived alone in London. She had tried living with one of her daughters in Canterbury but had gone back to that unhappy house to live alone.
He felt guilty about the missed lunch with Jonas; the guilt expanded to include his abandonment of both his sons. They had been raised by his sister, as Alice Lee’s daughters had been raised by her parents or by strangers. They had had good reason, he and Alice, probably imperative reasons, survival uppermost. But they had given up a lot, not known how much when they did it, and when their children said, ‘Come home,’ it was too late.
Mrs Lees of course must know that Ifan Gurra was her son. And Fortny’s. She seemed to be willing that Gurra marry Esmay Fortny—his half-sister, Denton now realised. The marriage would violate English law, he thought, but he saw that Alice Lees could have reasons stronger than law: revenge on Fortny, perhaps; and a tie that made Mariana live again in Esmay and might, at least in Alice’s fantasies, lead to Alice’s raising another child as she seemed to have raised Mariana Bulstrode Fortny. She had devoted her life to raising somebody else’s children; what, he wondered, had been the powerful attraction of the child with the club foot? Had that been it—profound pity? Or was it something he was incapable of understanding?
And how had Fortny managed to meet and marry Mariana Bulstrode? Denton didn’t trust coincidence. In some distorted or corrupted way, Alice Lees must have been the means. Not intending for Fortny to grab the girl, the heiress, but that had been the result.
He got off in Bristol and had a second, smaller breakfast and caught the London train, still thinking about it. Frank Harris had told him that Mariana’s father had been in something ‘infra dig’—beer. If he wandered the public houses of Bristol, would he find taps with ‘Bulstrode’s’ on them?
Had Alice seen early on the possibility of putting the beer heiress and Ifan together? If so, that hope had been smashed by Fortny. As for Alice’s other children, it was likely enough that she and Lees had ended by hating each other; her not getting the farm, her having to go off wet-nursing, suggested something like that. Maybe Lees had married her but never forgiven her for the bastard child.
And the bastard? Where had he been all that time? Denton looked at the notes he had made in the British Museum. Wells. Gurra hadn’t gone to a good school, but he had gone to school, Wells Grammar; he had got himself an education and he had got into an Oxford college, perhaps with the help of a crammer. Who had paid for all that? The Bulstrodes, touched by the wet-nurse’s story? Or Fortny? Maybe it had been through Fortny’s support of his by-blow that he and Alice had kept in contact, and so Mariana had come inevitably to Fortny’s attention.
What a tortuous way they had made for themselves! Alice Lees had attached herself to Mariana and wouldn’t (still wouldn’t) let go; Fortny had married Mariana and got Alice into the bargain. With Alice, Denton believed, had come Gurra. And Fortny seemed not to have minded, might actually have welcomed him, been, perhaps, some sort of collector of people. He had even made himself Gurra’s Schliemann—was there self-replication there? Had that always been his goal with both of them, to hold on to them, make them his acolytes, servants, priests, replicas?
He had thought that he would get off at Oxford and ask these questions of Mrs Lees, but as the train got closer, he shrank from the idea. There was really only one question that mattered now, and that question wasn’t one he was ready to ask her: Did Gurra know he was Fortny’s son? But he pretty well knew the answer: it would have been a rare man who would knowingly marry his half-sister. Even for her money.
He was at his own door by dinner time; with his key in his hand, his door opened and Maude stood there. ‘Welcome back, sir.’ And, as if he had guessed Denton’s question, ‘I heard the carriage, sir.’
Denton surrendered his valise to Maude. He addressed himself to the mail, was able to throw most of it out, but kept back an envelope with ’Half Moon Street’ on the back.
Mr Denton, I learned from my sister that you had called and do apologise for not being here. I do think it would be best in future if you would send a message first. The telegraph would be quite acceptable. My sister tells me that you had a long conversation. I would remind you that she is only a girl and should not be examined in the family matters that you and I discussed. Will you come to tea on Thursday at five?
Dutifully,
Esmay Fortny
He admired ‘dutifully.’ He had an image of her on her knees, polishing a pair of male boots. Not quite accurate as a picture of Esmay Fortny.
He went up to his bedroom and drafted a telegram to her and put it where he hoped he would remember to take it next morning. It said only that he regretted that he couldn’t come to tea. He had nothing to tell her except that her fiancé was already a close relative, and that didn’t seem like teatime chatter. Anyway, he wasn’t ready to tip his hand—not until Fessenden’s expert had studied the Fool. He could tell her about Mrs Lees’s being in the house, but that seemed to him to have become insignificant.
CHAPTER
14
On the Thursday, Maude called him to the telephone, and a deep, amused-sounding voice said, ‘Mr Denton, this is Bertrand Rogerson.’ He sounded as if he were making a joke; he also failed to call himself Sir Bertrand, thus showing either great humility or even greater vanity. ‘Sir Basil Fessenden asked me to be in touch when I had finished my examination of … mmm … a phenomenon of common interest.’
Denton was slow in remembering who he was, but not so slow that Rogerson had to explain. ‘Oh, yes. Sir Basil told me he’d, mmm, called you in.’
‘So he did, and made me promise to inform you when I had the result. I now have that result, and I am meeting with Sir Basil at four tomorrow to give it to him. I wonder if you would care to come along.’
‘To Oxford?’
‘No, no! Do you know the Thatched House on St James’s Street? It’s discreet, if little else. I didn’t suggest lunch or dinner, as I dislike serious business over food, especially bad food. I believe they could be made to provide sherry and even whisky, however.’
‘That would be fine. With or without the spirits. You’ve been very quick.’
‘I need the whisky. Four o’clock, then? Just tell the porter you’re meeting me. As for being quick, this is the sort of pease porridge that’s best eaten hot. Right, then.’ He was gone, seeming to leave laughter hovering in the telephone lines.
Denton had expected to be energised by the moment, something happening, but he mostly felt as if it were simply one more damned thing he had to do. And there was anticlimax to having to wait until the next day, with nothing happening until then.
‘Maude, I have to go out to a gentlemen’s club at three-thirty.’
‘Clothes, sir?’
‘I suppose. Nothing too fancy, please.’
At three he went up and found that Maude had laid out a lightweight wool suit in a restrained check that was as unobjectionable as a boiled potato. He added black, elastic-sided boots, a stick and the soft grey hat.
The Thatched House was one of a row of clubs on St James’s Street that marked a high-water mark of male respectability, as if they’d all been washed up there by the same tide of masculine triumphalism. Men were going in their doors as he walked up the street, as if the work day—whatever ‘work’ meant here—were over.
‘Sir Bertrand Rogerson is expecting me.’
‘Yes, yes—Mr Denton, is it? Yes, right this way.’ He was put at a table set up in a small room lined with books, perhaps a writing room, a sign on the door, ‘Reserved’. The sherry and whisky were already laid out, ditto the biscuits and something that looked like ground-up snails. Rogerson joined him almost at once, laughing and saying as they shook hands, ‘I was here but elsewhere.’ He offered the whisky, poured himself a generous peg, pointed at the silver bowl and said, ‘The club chutney. Not so bad as it might be. Fessenden’s washing his hands and will be with us momentarily.’
The small talk went by like a downhill trickle. Rogerson, for all that he laughed a lot, was businesslike and moved things forward almost the moment that Fessenden joined them. ‘I hope you’d like to hear what I have to say so we can all get about our other business.’ Taking Denton’s nod and Fessenden’s silence for agreement, he said, ‘This is all quite hush-hush, Mr Denton, and is not to be repeated—house rules as laid down by Sir Basil. You agree? Well, then.’ He added a minuscule amount of water to his whisky, drank, sighed, and began, giving each a look and a smile and then leaping in.
‘The Staffa Fool is, so far as I can surmise, an exercise in theatricality, perhaps a joke. I leave it to somebody else to make a judgement upon it and its creator; there have been, after all, scientific and scholarly jokes before. Whether they should be allowed to hoodwink the credulous public in a museum is not for me to say, but they should certainly never be allowed to seduce the educated. I will say that it is remarkable that the so-called Fool for so long has passed muster with men who should have known better. I name no names.’ He bellowed out a laugh, as if ignorance and fraud in high places, the ruination of a career and the threat of scandal that would involve a great university were wonderfully entertaining.
He took out a single sheet of paper and laid it in front of him. ‘I shall begin at the top of the Fool’s head and work my way down.’ He laughed again.
‘To begin: the hat or covering that has caused people to talk of fools is made from a piece of modern, chemically tanned hide, probably Canadian caribou.’ He looked up to add a parenthesis. ‘A chemical colleague had the analysis done by a student over the last two days, but I found the leather quite dubious even to my naked eye.’ He looked down at the paper again. ‘The so-called “horns” were stuffed with mostly wheat straw, hardly likely in a Bronze Age artefact. The sewing was done with animal tendon, certainly likely enough, but apparently with a curved needle, whereas the most we might have hoped for from the Bronze Age is an awl—no needles that we know of.
‘The cranium has suffered damage twice. One injury is to the top rear of the occiput, where two triangular piece of bone have detached themselves, apparently as the result of a blow. However, a blow would have pushed the pieces inward so that they should have been found inside the cranium, rather than outside, where they are now. This is an oddity, suggesting that possibly the bone was removed at the time of the blow, although the skin would have had to be removed, as well. Certain tribes of North American natives did such work, I believe, for the purpose of removing the brain, which they then ate. No Red Indians running about Scotland in the Bronze Age that we know of, however.
‘The other injury to the head is on the left side, where some sort of pointed tool or weapon actually made a hole behind and above the left temple. There are hairline cracks there as well, as if something descended with great force. I speculate that this was the blow that killed, not the one to the back of the head, which, as I suggested, seems to have been done expressly to break the bone so it could be removed. That the man died by violence seems fairly certain.
‘The facial integument that covers one eye socket and part of the forehead appears to be human skin. However, I am suspicious of the edges, which appear to me to have been cut with shears—under twelve-times magnification, both the jaggedness of the edge and the pinching effect of the blades can be detected. This is not of itself damning; I suspect that we could reproduce the effect with a sharp bronze or even stone knife from before the age of scissors.’ He looked at Denton. ‘Sir Basil was opposed to my taking a sample of the skin; nonetheless, I found a fragment attached to some fibrous matter where the spinal column met the skull, and I persuaded him to allow me to take that. Chemical analysis was inconclusive, but a chemical acquaintance did find the presence of what are commonly called “pickling salts” by the simplest tests of inorganic chemistry. Quite basic chemistry, let me say.’ He looked up. ‘The sort of thing that’s used to preserve cucumbers, you know. Do try the chutney, by the way.
‘The mandible, or lower jaw … Aha, yes. I was allowed to raise the lower jaw slightly’—he glanced at Fessenden—‘and to pivot it enough to expose the temperomandibular condyle. As you know, the mandible of this specimen seems oversized, arguably “prognathous”; however, the condyle on the left side of the mandible is almost too tight a fit, despite the width of the mandible from angle to angle.’ He demonstrated by grasping his own jaw between thumb and third finger at the rear. ‘Examination of the left condyle with twelve-times magnification shows abrasion that I believe to be the marks of a tool, probably a file, with which the condyle was slightly reduced to make it fit into the glenoid fossa of the cranium. I confess to being a bit unclear, as well, about what seemed to me an unusually persistent survival of the articular disc—that’s a form of cushion of cartilaginous tissue, Mr Denton, between the condyle and the fossa—after millennia in the earth. In fact, the disc looked to me to be pretty much intact—probably as good as my own. But of course I talk all the time.’ He guffawed. ‘What the survival of the disc suggests is a good deal less putrefaction than one would have suspected.’
‘As you will remember, a kind of garment of reeds or rush was fastened at the throat of the, mmm, may I say creature? I was unable to remove it—Sir Basil, you wouldn’t allow it, you remember—nor to take a sample, but I’ll stake anyone a bottle of the club’s best twelve-year-old whisky that the garment is modern African and not pre-Pictish. And, as I know of no documentation of trade between Scotland and Africa in the period, I have me doots about the authenticity of the article.’ He looked up, perhaps hoping for smiles to reward his ersatz-Scottish ‘doots’ for ‘doubts’. ‘I can produce a publication that shows a drawing of an almost identical piece, if you’re sceptical. I didn’t bring it with me, as it’s a heavy tome, but if you … No? We’ll take it as read, then. I’m not an Africanist, by any means, but I thought that the woven fibre that makes the sort of collar at the top looked familiar, and I went searching through my books and there it was. However, we’d want confirmation of it by an African expert.’
He looked down at his notes again. ‘The thorax. Oh, yes, my goodness! All remarkably intact—I think this was something that bothered you, Basil, once you started casting a sceptical eye on the thing. Remarkably intact. I found traces of a white matter in the costal groove of several ribs; I was able to extract a tiny amount without overexciting Sir Basil, and it proved to be a rather common chemical, anhydrous calcium chloride—used for keeping cellars dry.’ He raised his bushy eyebrows, his eyes a little wide. ‘Perhaps in the Bronze Age, this fellow was a specialist in drying cellars, although I’m not aware that they had cellars.’ He chuckled, then shook his head. ‘A human thoracic cavity is not a cellar, and so I am dissatisfied at finding an anhydrous chemical there. I leave it to another theorist to explain it.
‘Below the thorax, I simply couldn’t persuade Sir Basil to let me either take samples or have a proper look at things. As you know, the leg bones and the feet are mostly buried—a leetle peculiar, when one considers that this was an archaeological find and so would, in the course of things, have been dug completely out of the earth, but of course this was a reconstruction—a reburial, if you like—for purposes of display. However, let me give the benefit of the doubt and accept for argument’s sake that the creator of the exhibit was trying to replicate, or perhaps dramatise, the moment when the most exciting aspects of this creature were first exposed. You may remember that a photograph of the thing in situ accompanies it and is quite similar.’
‘In fact identical,’ Denton said. ‘Another of the things that bothered me.’ He tried a biscuit. ‘The photograph is really a photo of the reconstruction, isn’t it—not the original find?’
