Curiosity (48 page)

On Bedford Street in Covent Garden, he presents himself at the offices of the Geological Society. William Babington, the Society’s president, happens to be on the premises dealing with correspondence, and receives him warmly. A small, neat man with an expressive, mobile face, a medical man with a passion for mineralogy.

“I won’t take up your time,” says Henry. “I just want to inquire whether there’s room on today’s agenda for a further item.”

“There is indeed.” Babington opens a drawer in the desk and pulls a page out. An iron pen such as Henry has never seen before lies among the samples scattered on the desk, and he takes it up.

“I wish to report on certain ideas I encountered in Paris recently, and canvass the members for their reaction. Begin a debate, I suppose.”

“On what subject?” Babington asks, nudging the hinged lid of his inkwell up and dipping the pen.

“On the subject of transmutation, as proposed by Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and others.” He manages to keep his voice even.

Babington’s expression changes. He puts the pen down. “Have you a written submission?” When Henry replies in the negative, Babington outlines the policy for agenda items: a written paper, with the signatures of two peers. “I’m sorry. It’s a recent policy. I should have mentioned at the outset.”

Conybeare is not in attendance and Henry keeps his distance from Buckland. He spies an empty seat by Gideon Mantell, another physician and a most passionate collector. Mantell is
somewhat shunned in this company – his over-brushed suit and cadaverous eyes and his general air of reproach and defeat always call up the confinement bed and beakers of leeches, an association Babington somehow manages to escape. In the last year especially, Mantell has become something of a joke for his obsession with certain huge bones and teeth he’s been finding at a quarry in Cuckfield. Having subjected them to Cuvier’s principles of proportion, he insists they are the remains of an unknown land creature sixty feet long. He nods gravely as Henry sits down. Together they watch Professor Buckland glad-hand his way around the room, his prominent eyes red-rimmed, his gestures comedic. Henry feels the tug of an old affection. Buckland will be occupied in turning his new notion about time into a theory. Apparently, the laws of nature pertain when convenient to our theories, but not otherwise. He will certainly be attacked for it, from both sides, poor fellow – when all he wants is to be admired. But he never bragged about eating the heart of Louis XIV. Maybe he’s starting to be frightened by his own compulsions.

Henry leans towards Mantell. “Have you thought of announcing your recent finds? Have you ever discussed this with Buckland?”

“Indeed I have. But Buckland advised me to wait.” He makes a little moue. “How can one ignore a caution from such a quarter?”

“Perhaps he’s collecting his own evidence to publish in advance of you?” Henry says. He can see Mantell turning this over in his mind as the meeting is called to order.

The meeting is brief and concerned mainly with the orientation of new shafts for a tin mine in Cornwall. In the election of officers, Buckland is duly named president. Afterwards, there’s a general movement to a club. Henry slips out and walks back through the West End and into Green Park, where the noise of the city fades. A nurse with a little boy hanging on to each hand
walks a path towards him and he looks eagerly at her face. He’s in one of those moods where everyone he encounters looks uncannily familiar. He finds a bench to sit on and is overtaken by the anxiety he’s been avoiding since he drove away from Lyme. Letitia’s keenness when he first mentioned this trip: it was not a desire to go to London herself, but a desire for her husband’s absence. And he is so often absent. A suspicion he thought he had mastered flared up at the sight of her face in that moment, and has since grown. He has no material proof. But it is a fact, daily he is faced with it, that she is fed by an emotional current that has nothing to do with him. He gets up and begins to walk quickly towards Pall Mall, trying to shake off his panic. When she told him she was pregnant, back in Paris, he fixed in his mind the occasion of conception. Just after they left Lyme – he could recall the inn, the disagreeable, distracting smell of the bed linens. But during the whole Mediterranean leg of their tour, he was consumed with anxiety. It began in the southeast corner of France and deepened as they passed into Italy. It became an insane preoccupation. He was not well, he was never well after that night in the Muséum, and his suspicion seemed of a one with the filth and the garlic-reeking food, the gabbling, rude press in the streets, the black-clad quarrelling widows (so resembling his arachnoid mother-in-law), the winking, leering gigolos, the yellow sun, and the smell of sex hanging in everything. Letitia was miserably pregnant by then, and one day, helping her step heavily down from the carriage, it struck him that her pregnancy was the material proof he lacked. She had come straight to him from London because she needed to be married. His mother (it was suddenly clear to him) was complicit in the deception. He can compute a gestation period, and their baby’s appears to have been seven months. It’s a law of nature, the human gestation period, but somehow his first glimpse of Bessie’s puckered red
face in the folded opening of a white shawl swept suspicion from his mind. And now it’s back.

He’s previously set up a two-day meeting regarding a geological survey of Devon. A lucrative contract – he can’t afford to jeopardize it. He reads through most of the night to keep Letitia from his thoughts, but by morning, his anxiety is so consuming that he writes to say that a family emergency recalls him to Dorsetshire. Tom had set his heart on two days at Barnaby Fair and he snaps the reins sulkily all the way out the Clapham Road. Indeed, the whole trip was an utter waste of time and energy, typical, Henry thinks, of how he’s managing his affairs.

Outside the city Henry falls asleep, and sleeps until they stop at Chertsey. He wakes in an easier frame of mind. Grateful to the cautious Babington, relieved not to have opened that most fraught subject of debate. There was a day when he saw science as the most manifest expression of reason. But really, it’s a cauldron of bubbling lava; without warning, it will spill over and destroy them all. He, certainly, doesn’t have the stomach for it. He’s a thinker no longer, but a meticulous clerk, his intellect reduced to
sorting
, compulsively sorting everything he sees. He’ll make a detailed set of charts of the Lyme Regis coast, that’s what he’ll give himself to, using colour to indicate the type and age of rocks. The thought of it is deeply comforting, a return to an old passion. In the front cover of his notebook is a list of the strata. He takes a pencil out of his bag. As they drive, he begins to make a list of corresponding pigments. He’ll hire a boat and do a small-scale schema first. Ink in the general outlines and the major strata, and then begin with the pigments. It will be an immaculate, detailed chart, devoid of explanation. Asking nature to explain itself is pointless. Ask nature a question and it replies with a bank of navy clouds or the red dots in a frond of seaweed,
it explains mystery with mystery. He will not ask; he will observe and chart. Others can theorize, those equipped by temperament or circumstances to afford that luxury.

They stop at an inn at Overton for their dinner and rest the horses until mid-afternoon. Back in the barouche, he falls into a reverie of Lyme. He’s walking slowly up to the jetty, carrying a mackerel wrapped in a paper. The tide is high; Mary won’t be collecting until almost noon. She’ll be working at home, rinsing and sectioning and polishing fossils. As he reaches the outlet of the Lyme, she crosses the shore from the back of her house and bends to fill a bucket at the water’s edge. He knows her: his knowledge of her life is the deepest comfort of his.

He drives all morning of the second day through rain. After Salisbury he gives the reins to Thomas and dozes with his chin in his chest. All through Wiltshire, he has the sensation that the coach is fixed and the rising landscape of the Southwest is being pulled towards him. In and out of sleep, he develops the happy conviction that his mother-in-law is in Lyme: she will be supervising. But of course, Mrs. Auriol is in Bristol, he realizes when he pulls himself awake. Letitia is alone with the servants. They stop at Sherborne and he takes the reins again.

It’s early afternoon of the third day when they roll into town, a Lyme scrubbed clean and heartbreakingly beautiful in the sun. He pulls up at the stable and Tom gets down to open the doors. A tall black gelding with severely docked tail and military caparison stands in the first stall of the stable. A single, material horse. “Coldstream Guards, sir,” says Tom.

A plumed hat rests on the stand just inside the door. Daisy hurries down the hall to meet him, to take his hat, her smile frightened. In the slice of drawing room framed by the door, Letitia is reclined on the settee, caught just in the moment of sitting up and
swinging her feet to the floor. “Mrs. De la Beche be in the drawing room, zir,” Daisy says, “with Colonel Wyndham.”

Henry Wyndham! He has his back to the door – he’s sitting on a chair drawn up to the settee. He and Letitia both jump to their feet as Henry enters. Letitia is bright-eyed and smiling, intensely present, visibly arranging her thoughts. Wyndham is still taller than Henry. Stouter now, his bland, handsome face a little haggard, sandy hair beginning to retreat from his forehead, but Henry would have known him immediately. His eyes glaze with what can only be fear. Or shame. He begins to talk in an excessively amiable manner. He was staying with friends in Exeter and heard that his old comrade lived in Lyme Regis. He thought to renew an old acquaintance, and to meet De la Beche’s wife.

Henry crosses the carpet and shakes his hand. “But you and Letitia
are
acquainted. It was at Ascot that you met, wasn’t it?”

“Indeed, as I discovered this afternoon,” says Wyndham. Henry is surprised at how inept he is, how ill-equipped for the perfidious enterprise he’s launched himself into. He was always inept, but one might have expected ten years as a military officer to have sharpened him. Henry feels his own energy concentrate, as it always did in Wyndham’s presence at Marlow, feels himself grow darker, quicker, more audacious and sardonic. He sits down beside Letitia. Clumsily, Wyndham pulls his chair a few feet away from the settee before sitting.

“You discovered?” Henry says, preternaturally calm. “I understood you to have unearthed Letitia’s connection to myself on the occasion of your meeting two or three years ago. But never mind. It’s remarkable that our paths have not crossed in some drawing room or other in all this decade since I was removed from Marlow. However, my travels have been prescribed by my profession and have taken me in directions very different from yours, I dare say.”
For the first time in many months, he is exuberantly alive. He has all of his faculties after all; it is tremendously reassuring. He stretches one arm along the back of the settee, looking at the two with gratitude. Now it’s Wyndham’s turn to speak, but apparently he can’t manage it. “This is really a very pleasant room,” says Henry, providing the requisite line. “I’m always glad to return to it after a day in the field.”

“You work as an engineer?” Wyndham says finally, shifting in his chair.

“As a geologist. It’s a profession that suits me better than I could have imagined. I would have made a poor soldier indeed. And you command a battalion of the Coldstream Guards. Butler told me. I encountered him some time ago in London. Tell me what action you’ve seen. I believe Letitia mentioned Waterloo?” It’s a delightful scene and he wishes it to go on forever.

“We were part of the brave assault on the fortress of Bergen op Zoom in ’13. Then we garrisoned in Belgium, and were still there when Napoleon escaped Elba. And so we fought in Waterloo. We held the fortification at Hougoumont, the right flank. I was grievously injured, but my valiant men were able to hold.” He has an imprecise articulation that Henry recalls from boyhood – almost a lisp.

“As Napoleon said, long wars make good soldiers. What was the fortification like at Hougoumont? I have heard much of that battle, but I’ve never been able to envision the site.”

Letitia is silent. Her face is pink and her lips pinched together in an uncharacteristic expression. Doubtless she is trying not to cry.

“They call it a
château
,” says Wyndham heavily. “But it was just a farmhouse and outbuildings, with a wall around.”

“And the French broke through the wall with axes?”

“They had axes, but no call to use them. I regret to say the gate was left open. We were setting up, bringing supplies in. We thought the French miles away. Of a sudden, they burst from the wood nearby and were inside, and we must struggle to close the gate and get the bar across before the fortification was entirely lost.”

“Didn’t Wellington himself acknowledge that Waterloo turned on the closing of that gate?”

“I believe he did.”

“I remember your father from Marlow days. He must be tremendously proud of your military honours. Or – is he still alive?”

“He is.” Wyndham inclines his head politely.

There is a dreadful silence.

“You will dine with us?” Henry asks. “Letitia, have a word with the cook.”

“No, no. Thank you,” says Wyndham. “Very kind, I’m sure, but I’m expected in Exeter.”

“What a pity. It would have been amusing to reminisce about our youthful follies. Well, in that case, let me have your mount brought round.” He rings for Daisy. They fall back into silence. The Swiss clock ticks in the adamant manner it assumes when you are alone in a room. This must indeed be a wrenching separation for Letitia, for both of them – if regret and pain can make themselves felt through all the other sensations of the moment. Henry watches her, wondering if she will risk a glance at Wyndham, but she does not. She sits with hands clasped, her eyes on the lozenge border of the rug. She’s wearing a rose-coloured gown that particularly suits her (as he has often told her, his favourite among her dresses), and it seems the worst of it, that she donned this gown that morning. He suddenly loses his stomach for the scene. The
walls of this room are intolerable: it is the blue of insanity. Then Daisy is at the door and he refuses to look up, and so Letitia is obliged to ask to have Colonel Wyndham’s horse brought round.