The Brothers Boswell (15 page)

Given that primacy, and given that it was James who nearly always dictated our games, it was inevitable that we would come
to play with the
Dictionary
, to compete with the
Dictionary
, and ultimately to beat out one another’s brains—if at all possible—with the
Dictionary.
More than swordsmanship, with which we were infatuated, more even than lawn bowls, proficiency in Johnsonian English became the competition
sine qua non
between us.

Between these word matches we watched for quiet moments, when the two volumes were sitting alone in the library, and then we would each shut ourselves up with them, squirreling away strange or impressive or incomprehensibly Latinate words, stocking up on Johnson’s own quibbles and qualifications, so that our challenges to one another’s choices might bear his stamp. The words marched in two long columns down each page, and our small fingers traced these columns reverently, up and down, stroking the book like a familiar.

Over the years, the word competition evolved and complicated, but the name was always simplicity itself: the Dictionary Game. Sets of unwritten rules crystallized, the first and most important of which was that the game only ever properly began with an insult. An English insult, of course.

We played the Dictionary Game hundreds of times, not including hundreds of fragments of games, but one afternoon I remember more sharply than any other. James was seventeen, I fourteen. I was in our shared bedroom, meandering through a volume of
Sir Charles Grandison
, not the first novel I’d read but the first I had read with my father’s active consent. It was near dusk, a trace of late autumn light still floating through the window, my mother and youngest brother off on a visit somewhere, my father still hearing pleas at the Court of Session.

And James ambled in. I suspected, even at the time, that he had just been in my father’s study, swotting up on the
Dictionary
, so eager was he to get up a game. Certainly he lost no time.

He came and stood over me, and then abruptly he seized the book from my hand. He read the title, nodded, and then placed it in my grip again. “Ah, Sir Charles. A nice, upstanding moral
treatise. Nothing like Mr. Richardson’s
Clarissa.
A horrid book, that. Full of dueling and unspeakable acts. Certainly nothing for the fainthearted.”

And here he chucked me under the chin, a glint in his eye. “Certainly nothing for a weak-stomached little
nidget
like yourself.”

Fighting words—or word, rather.
Nidget
: a coward, a dastard. In fact, my father had refused to allow me to read Richardson’s earlier, more interesting novel, and I was still miffed about it. And of course James knew that I was still miffed about it. I tossed the thin volume onto my bed, and we were off.

“Well, it takes a coward to know a coward, James. Proof positive that you are—in point of fact—the true
nithing
here.”

“Noodle, then, young puppy.”

“Nincompoop.”

He pursed his lips, choosing his ammunition carefully. “
Neezer—
that is, one who discharges flatulencies by the nose. And I hasten to add, that in all my circle of acquaintance, I know of none more nasally flatulent than yourself.”

I hesitated, for an instant only.

“Come, come, simply declare ignorance if you must, but no delays.”

“You give me no chance to speak—
nizy
, then,” I shot back.

James wagged a finger. “Tut, tut, little brother. Johnson marks that as a low word, beneath you as a gentleman. Which you might know, if you weren’t such a ninnyhammer.”

“Far better than to be an errant
nias
, such as yourself.”

His plumpish face lighted up, and he actually clapped his hands in delight. “A misuse! Indeed, a true misuse. You introduce an adjective for a noun! Tally one for James! But let us be generous. Let us set you straight if we possibly can. One cannot be
a nias
, John, though a silly fellow—such as yourself—can and will be referred to as
a nias man.
Do you see the distinction? I realize that it is a subtle one, but can you make it out at all?”

Not only was James’s memory superior to my own, all our lives long, but he was a far more skillful needler. When he hit just the right tone in his teasing, my rehearsed word lists would fly utterly out of my mind. And though I believed positively that I knew more insulting words beginning with
N
, they temporarily escaped me, and I shifted letters—itself an implicit point for James.

“I apologize, sir, for the error. But surely it does not excuse such
protervity
on your own part.”

“You shift letters, Johnnie. Don’t think I’ve not marked it. A proditorious bit of strategy on your part, indeed.”

“Pshaw, there was nothing proditorious about it. You grasp at straws.”

His countenance was again spread over with glee. “Another clear error! You’ve simply reintroduced my own P-word, rather than one of your own.”

I have one particular smug face, for my own part, that James cannot tolerate under any circumstances. And I presented him with it: “
Pshaw
, brother.”

He saw his error, and to counter the smugness he heaped up his polysyllables, and posed a question rather than an insult. Tougher to finesse, if one were uncertain.

“
Pshaw
, indeed. I suppose it is in Johnson—barely. Bravo, my clever little princox, you have been studying your lexicons. You play an anfractuous game today, but not a poor one. With such resources, what say you to setting up as an
oneirocritick
? What say you to that, young Johnnie? To the work of an oneirocritick? Ah, I see you hesitate. You do know the
meaning
of the word, sir? It is the King’s English, after all.”

I couldn’t bring the word to mind, if ever I knew it. And so I went round it. “Truly, you
outknave
yourself with your play today, James.”

“You clearly cannot answer my term, but at least you stay within the letter at hand. A half-decent response, I suppose. When you
have grown, sirrah, you may yet master this game. When you are not, as now, such a spinny little dandiprat.”

I perked up my ears. I had already lost enough points to preclude winning outright, but here were some choice opportunities for needling. And I seized upon them. “Permit me to correct at least a few of your errors, brother.” I cleared my throat, grandly. “
Primo
, you switched letters without realizing.
Secundo
, had you given Johnson more than a cursory inspection, you would know that
spinny
, like the majority of the words cluttering your minuscule vocabulary, Johnson cites as a barbarous term. Beneath a gentleman, as you yourself said earlier.”

I was well pleased with myself, and I went breezily on to my conclusion. “I must say, sir, I find it truly risible that a young
fub
such as yourself can envision himself moving among the drawing rooms of England, when his speech so clearly marks him for the oyster cellars of Edinburgh.”

Brothers show their love by combat, of course, as well as their anger and their jealousies. No fight between brothers is ever undertaken within any one clarified emotion, which is what makes the combat itself so involving, and so painful when it strays invisibly from one expression to the next. And for reasons I might have understood had I stopped to examine them, my few needles sank far deeper into James than I had intended. A rosy flush came to his neck, as it did when he was peeved, and he deliberately—maliciously, it seemed to me at the time—aimed for my own sorest spot.

“Perhaps you have it right, John, and I will remain trapped in Edinburgh my entire life—a fub, as you say. But whatever I am here, I am the
protoplast—
and that is a word you should mark well, little brother—the thing first formed by our parents as a copy to be followed afterwards. I am your original, John, and if I am a chubby Edinburgh fub, then you are destined to be nothing but an inferior copy of something nearly worthless from the start. And never forget it.”

With that, he stalked out of the room.

And, as I remember, it was weeks before we played the Dictionary Game again.

C
ENTURIES BEFORE PENSIONERS
limped the grounds of the Seamen’s Hospital, Plantagenets and Tudors lived very well here in the old Royal Palace, Placentia, nestled within their armories and tilting yards and banqueting halls, and a warren of residences for their staffs and hangers-on. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth were born and pampered here. But Charles II wanted something both a little newer and a little grander when he returned from exile in France, as monarchs whose fathers have been decapitated tend to do when they eventually reassume the Throne.

And so he did to the old Royal Palace complex what perhaps only a brand-new king could do: he had it demolished, in its entirety, and tipped into the Thames. Not a banqueting hall remains above ground from the days before the Stuarts. Not one timbered ceiling. Not a wall. When he began work on the Royal Hospital, Christopher Wren had the luxury of a well-scrubbed canvas.

But beneath Wren’s Queen Anne block, on the eastern side of the Hospital, something survives well below ground, and that is the second spot I must run my eye over while James is feasting and nodding. Just within the entrance arches to the Queen Anne courtyard lies an ancient horse-mounting block. Without this marker, the door to the undercroft might pass unnoticed; the
workmen who built the new Hospital structure above ground managed to work the existing stone entrance cleverly into the ripple and flow of their masonry. And in that tiny stone archway they fitted a newish door, of stout oak, with a newish lock.

Fortunately for me, my old man found a way to come at a newish key.

Filching this key was the only part of today’s itinerary that shook his courage. He is already under a heavy sentence, as the Hospital’s rules go, and he genuinely fears losing his pension altogether. I had to press him hard, and promise to pay him very well, to manage it. I have promised to return the thing to him when I have done with it, and I will do so.

When the outer door is opened, daylight falls upon three lanterns racked on the thick stone retaining wall at the top of the staircase. My canary has made sure that one of these lanterns is lit, and I lift it down. Few visitors know of the undercroft, and traffic to it is very light, but still there are enough curiosity seekers each year to warrant more than a single lantern. Johnson happens to know of this under-cellar from the days he spent living and writing in Greenwich, the years he composed in the Park and drank coffee and nosed out all the riddles of the little city. But Johnson is not the only lover of secret history, and neither is he the only one with the intention of scaring the stuffings out of a companion.

The lamplight moves with me as I drop down the first of two narrow staircases, filling the small space and illuminating the damp brick. With the Thames only a stone’s throw away, James I found upon taking the Throne that the timbers of his Great Banqueting Hall were slowly moldering, and so early in his reign he caused a huge vaulted cellar to be built beneath it, stretching from his garden ponds to the Thames itself. The floor was meticulously tiled in clay. In this way the upper structures were kept dry; the ever-present smell of damp in the Banqueting Hall vanished.

And when all other evidence of James and his ancestors had
been scraped into the river like so much rubbish, this undercroft remained. That is all: an under-cellar to keep the wet at bay. One last ignoble remnant of the seat that gave Eliza birth, and, for that reason among others, Johnson has a sentimental attachment to it.

At the base of the stairs, I move out into a vestibule the size of a small wine cellar. But this is clearly meant as entrée to the undercroft-proper, which opens out through an archway to my right. I move through the arch, listening, but there is no sound.

Outside the halo of lamplight, I can sense the vastness of the larger chamber, the space broken only by thin ribs of brick vaulting that flow down into shaped stone pillars at intervals across the tile. The temperature has fallen considerably, so that the sweat at my temples and the back of my neck quickly cools. A perceptible draft moves aimlessly over the tile, as though searching for the water that gave it birth.

A trick of the lamplight renders the march of arches into the gloom infinite, but it can be no more than a few hundred feet long and a hundred feet across.

Still, it is as lightless and silent and cool as the grave, and I know that James will only barely be able to force himself to descend the steps and move out into the center of this space, even beside his imposing hero. His fear of ghosts and death and the dark is profound, and has been since he was a child.

Although Johnson has known my brother for only two months now, he knows this about him well enough, and the insistence that they visit the undercroft together this afternoon carries with it just a hint of exploratory cruelty. But this is all part of what they offer one another. For all his trepidation, James will come here, and he will indeed be afraid; he will marvel openly at Johnson’s lack of fear; Johnson will comfort James; James will add that show of compassion to his accumulating mental notes of the day; and in this way they will test and strengthen their odd new complementarity. They will confirm one another in being what they each cannot help but be.