A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (23 page)

Miss Logan also reflected upon Miss Fergusson’s fall. They had been crossing a scree; there had been many loose stones, and footing was difficult, but surely at that point they had been traversing a gentler slope, and her employer had actually been standing on a flattish stretch of granite when she had fallen. It was a magnetic mountain where a compass did not work, and it was easy to lose your bearing. No, that was not it. The question she was avoiding was whether Miss Fergusson might not have
been the instrument of her own precipitation, in order to achieve or confirm whatever it was she wanted to achieve or confirm. Miss Fergusson had maintained, when they first stood before the haloed mountain, that there were two explanations of everything, that each required the exercise of faith, and that we had been given free will in order that we might choose between them. This dilemma was to preoccupy Miss Logan for years to come.

7
THREE SIMPLE STORIES

I

I
WAS A NORMAL
eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting. At least, all the other eighteen-year-olds I knew were like this, so I presumed it was normal. I was waiting to go up to university and had just got a job as a prep-school master. The fiction I had read predicted gaudy roles for me – as private tutor at the old stone mansion where peacocks roost in the yew hedges and chalky bones are discovered in the sealed-up priest’s hole; as gullible ingénu at an eccentric private establishment on the Welsh borders stuffed with robust drunkards and covert lechers. There would be careless girls and unimpressable butlers. You know the social moral of the story: the meritocrat becomes infected with snobbery.

Reality proved more local. I taught for a term at a crammer half a mile from my home, and instead of passing lazy days with charming children whose actively hatted mothers would smile, condescend and yet flirt during some endless pollen-spattered sports day, I spent my time with the son of the local bookmaker (he lent me his bike: I crashed it) and the daughter of the suburb’s solicitor. Yet half a mile is a fine distance to the untravelled; and at eighteen the smallest gradations of middle-class society thrill and daunt. The school came with a family attached; the family lived in a house. Everything here was different and therefore better: the stiff-backed brass taps, the cut of the banister, the genuine oil paintings (we had a genuine oil painting too, but not as genuine as that), the library which somehow was more than just a roomful of books, the furniture old enough to have woodworm in it, and the casual acceptance
of inherited things. In the hall hung the amputated blade of an oar: inscribed in gold lettering on its black scoop were the names of a college eight, each of whom had been awarded such a trophy in sun-ridden pre-war days; the item seemed impossibly exotic. There was an air-raid shelter in the front garden which at home would have provoked embarrassment and been subjected to vigorous camouflage with hardy perennials; here it evoked no more than amused pride. The family matched the house. The father was a spy; the mother had been an actress; the son wore tab collars and double-breasted waistcoats. Need I say more? Had I read enough French novels at the time, I would have known what to expect; and of course it was here that I fell in love for the first time. But that is another story, or at least another chapter.

It was the grandfather who had founded the school, and he still lived on the premises. Although in his mid-eighties, he had only recently been written out of the curriculum by some crafty predecessor of mine. He was occasionally to be seen wandering through the house in his cream linen jacket, college tie – Gonville and Caius, you were meant to know – and flat cap (in our house a flat cap would have been common; here it was posh and probably indicated that you used to go beagling). He was searching for ‘his class’, which he never found, and talked about ‘the laboratory’, which was no more than a back kitchen with a bunsen burner and running water. On warm afternoons he would sit outside the front door with a Roberts portable radio (the all-wood construction, I learned, gave better sound quality than the plastic or metal bodies of the transistors I admired), listening to the cricket commentary. His name was Lawrence Beesley.

Apart from my great-grandfather, he was the oldest man I had ever met. His age and status induced in me the normal mixture of deference, fear and cheek. His decrepitude – the historically stained clothes, that dangle of egg-white slobber from the chin – set off in me a general adolescent anger against life and its inevitable valedictory condition; a feeling which smoothly translated itself into hatred of the person undergoing
that condition. His daughter fed him on tins of baby food, which again confirmed for me the sour joke of existence and the particular contemptibility of this old man. I used to tell him invented cricket scores. ‘84 for 2, Mr Beesley,’ I would shout as I passed him snoozing in the sun beneath the gangling wisteria. ‘West Indies 790 for 3 declared,’ I would insist as I delivered him his child’s dinner on a tray. I would tell him scores from matches that were not being played, scores from matches that could never have been played, fanciful scores, impossible scores. He would nod in reply, and I would creep away, sniggering at my tiny cruelty, pleased that I was not such a nice young man as he might have imagined.

Fifty-two years before I met him, Lawrence Beesley had been a second-class passenger on the maiden voyage of the
Titanic
. He was thirty-five, had recently given up his job as science master at Dulwich College and was crossing the Atlantic – according to subsequent family legend, at least – in half-hearted pursuit of an American heiress. When the
Titanic
struck its iceberg, Beesley escaped in the underpopulated Lifeboat 13, and was picked up by the
Carpathia
. Among the souvenirs this octogenarian survivor kept in his room was a blanket embroidered with the name of the rescuing ship. The more sceptical members of his family maintained that the blanket had acquired its lettering at a date considerably later than 1912. They also amused themselves with the speculation that their ancestor had escaped from the
Titanic
in women’s clothing. Was it not the case that Beesley’s name had been omitted from the initial list of those saved, and actually included among the drowned in the final casualty bulletin? Surely this was solid confirmation of the hypothesis that the false corpse turned mystery survivor had taken to petticoats and a high voice until safely landed in New York, where he surreptitiously discarded his drag in a subway toilet?

I supported this theory with pleasure, because it confirmed my view of the world. In the autumn of that year I was to wedge into the mirror of my college bedsitting-room a piece of paper bearing the following lines: ‘Life’s a cheat and all things shew
it/I thought so once and now I know it.’ Beesley’s case offered corroboration: the hero of the
Titanic
was a blanket-forger and transvestite imposter; how just and appropriate, therefore, that I fed him false cricket scores. And on a wider scale, theorists maintained that life amounted to the survival of the fittest: did not the Beesley hypothesis prove that the ‘fittest’ were merely the most cunning? The heroes, the solid men of yeoman virtue, the good breeding stock, even the captain (especially the captain!) – they all went down nobly with the ship; whereas the cowards, the panickers, the deceivers found reasons for skulking in a lifeboat. Was this not deft proof of how the human gene-pool was constantly deteriorating, how bad blood drove out good?

Lawrence Beesley made no mention of female dress in his book
The Loss of the Titanic
. Installed at a Boston residential club by the American publishers Houghton Mifflin, he wrote the account in six weeks; it came out less than three months after the sinking it describes, and has been reprinted at intervals ever since. It made Beesley one of the best-known survivors of the disaster, and for fifty years – right up to the time I met him – he was regularly consulted by maritime historians, film researchers, journalists, souvenir hunters, bores, conspiracy theorists and vexatious litigants. When other ships were sunk by icebergs he would be telephoned by newsmen eager for him to imagine the fate of the victims.

Forty or so years after his escape he was engaged as a consultant on the film
A Night to Remember
, made at Pinewood. Much of the movie was shot after dark, with a half-size replica of the vessel poised to sink into a sea of ruckled black velvet. Beesley watched the action with his daughter on several successive evenings, and what follows is based upon the account she gave to me. Beesley was – not surprisingly – intrigued by the reborn and once-again-teetering
Titanic
. In particular, he was keen to be among the extras who despairingly crowded the rail as the ship went down – keen, you could say, to undergo in fiction an alternative version of history. The film’s director was equally determined that this consultant who lacked the necessary
card from the actors’ union should not appear on celluloid. Beesley, adept in any emergency, counterfeited the pass required to let him board the facsimile
Titanic
, dressed himself in period costume (can echoes prove the truth of the thing being echoed?) and installed himself among the extras. The film lights were turned on and the crowd briefed about their imminent deaths in the ruckled black velvet. Right at the last minute, as the cameras were due to roll, the director spotted that Beesley had managed to insinuate himself to the ship’s rail; picking up his megaphone, he instructed the amateur imposter kindly to disembark. And so, for the second time in his life, Lawrence Beesley found himself leaving the
Titanic
just before it was due to go down.

Being a violently educated eighteen-year-old, I was familiar with Marx’s elaboration of Hegel: history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But I had yet to come across an illustration of this process. Years later I have still to discover a better one.

II

W
HAT WAS
J
ONAH
doing inside the whale in the first place?

It’s a fishy story, as you might expect.

It all began when God instructed Jonah to go and preach against Nineveh, a place which, despite God’s substantial record of annihilating wicked cities, was still – obstinately, unaccountably – a wicked city. Jonah, disliking the task for unexplained reasons which might have had something to do with a fear of being stoned to death by the partying Ninevites, ran away. At Joppa he embarked on a boat to the farthest end of the known world: Tarshish, in Spain. He failed to understand, of course, that the Lord knew exactly where he was, and what’s more had operative control over the winds and waters of the
Eastern Mediterranean. When a storm of rare violence blew up, the mariners, being superstitious folk, cast lots to determine which of those on board was the cause of the evil, and the short straw, broken domino or queen of spades was drawn by Jonah. He was promptly pitched overboard and just as promptly swallowed by a great fish or whale which the Lord had directed through the waters for this especial purpose.

Inside the whale, for three days and three nights, Jonah prayed to the Lord and swore his future obedience so convincingly that God ordered the fish to vomit up the penitent. Not surprisingly, the next time the Almighty posted him to Nineveh, Jonah did as he was told. He went and denounced the wicked city, saying that like all other wicked cities of the Eastern Mediterranean it was about to be annihilated. Whereupon the partying Ninevites, just like Jonah inside the whale, repented; whereupon God decided after all to spare the city; whereupon Jonah became incredibly irritated, which was only normal in one who’d been put to a lot of trouble to bring the message of destruction, only for the Lord, despite a well-known, indeed historic, taste for wrecking cities, to turn round and change his mind. As if this wasn’t enough, God, tireless to prove himself top dog, now pulled a fancy parable on his minion. First he made a gourd spring up to protect Jonah from the sun (by gourd’ we are to understand something like the castor-oil plant or
Palma Christi
, with its rapid growth and all-sheltering leaves); then, with no more than a wave of the silk handkerchief, he sent a maggot to destroy the said gourd, leaving Jonah painfully exposed to the heat. God’s explanation of this little piece of street theatre ran as follows: you didn’t punish the gourd when it failed you, did you; and in the same way I’m not going to punish Nineveh.

It’s not much of a story, is it? As in most of the Old Testament, there’s a crippling lack of free will around – or even the illusion of free will. God holds all the cards and wins all the tricks. The only uncertainty is how the Lord is going to play it this time: start with the two of trumps and lead up to the ace, start with the ace and run down to the two, or mix them around.
And since you never can tell with paranoid schizophrenics, this element does give the narrative some drive. But what do we make of that gourd business? It’s not very convincing as a logical argument: anyone can see there’s a world of difference between a castor-oil plant and a city of 120,000 people. Unless, of course, this is the whole point, and the God of the Eastern Mediterranean values his creation no higher than vegetable matter.

If we examine God not as protagonist and moral bully but as author of this story, we have to mark him down for plot, motivation, suspense and characterization. Yet in his routine and fairly repellent morality there is one sensational stroke of melodrama – the business with the whale. Technically, the cetacean side of things isn’t at all well handled: the beast is evidently as much of a pawn as Jonah; its providential appearance just as the sailors are tossing Jonah overboard smacks far too heavily of a
deus ex machina
; and the great fish is casually dismissed from the story the moment its narrative function has been fulfilled. Even the gourd comes off better than the poor whale, who is no more than a floating prison where Jonah spends three days purging his contempt of court. God finger-flips the blubbery jail hither and thither like a war-game admiral nudging his fleet across maps of the sea.