The Syme Papers (10 page)

Something about this teasing account froze my attention, quite aside from the evidence of Syme’s spreading influence that it suggested. I read it repeatedly for a clue, until at last I realized that the faint chime of recognition ringing at my temples originated in the bell of a name, Thomas Jenkyns, the correspondent from the
Southern Courier.
Trawling through my previous researches, I discovered that
his
had been the name to which Sam’s mother had addressed her recollections of the ‘presages of geologic genius’;
his
had been the eye that witnessed the ‘ingenious’ compression of water attempted by Lt Syme. The question remained, who was he? And what part did he play in the rise and fall of the Divine, the Poet, the Rhetorician, the Scholar, and the high-bred Gentleman who occupied my researches?

So I returned to the supermarket grandeur of the British Library, butting through the dusty traffic of King’s Cross from my lonely studio flat, and entering the cool, distilled air of a space where books are kept, hoping against hope that Thomas Jenkyns had left some trace of a spent life behind him.

In this, at first, I was disappointed. I discovered a variety of Jenkynses – authors, sailors, clergymen, historians, divines – but, by some honest quirk of fate, not a single Thomas among them – as if, though she would deny me my prize, Fate would not tease me with a twin of history, an insignificant Thomas Jenkyns, a Thomas Jenkyns untroubled by the matter at hand. After all, there
was no particular reason my
special
Thomas Jenkyns should have left his name to posterity, seeing that the man he trumpeted so grandly to the skies had been dispersed till nothing but scraps remained.

It was the word ‘clergyman’ that stuck in my throat, and suggested another avenue to my researches. ‘Thomas Jenkyns, esq., the son of Reverend Jenkyns, of Richmond, Virginia,’ the clipping read, and of
Reverends
Jenkyns I had found a windfall. Jenkynses, it seemed, by some disposition of their last name, some suggestion of benignity perhaps, or a hint of the absurd, had been drawn to the Church like bees to a jam-pot, and I wondered if the good
father
of my obscure Thomas (my predecessor in the art of
puffing
Syme) had left his mark on the world. (More and more this seemed to me, and the deeper I went, a tale
of fathers.)

Of
Reverends
Jenkyns there was one curious instance, a certain William Jenkyns, whose funeral sermon upon the death of a Mr Seaborn caused a great stir, it seemed, among the American clergy in 1850, occasioning a flurry of correspondence and a distinctly chilly ecclesiastical
air.
The charge levied at this divine Jenkyns was one of heresy, prompted by his eulogy of the said Seaborn, and seemed to have little to do with my own, increasingly dear, Samuel Syme, except for a strange coincidence of dates; for 1850, I recalled, was the year of Sam’s death. But this coincidence seemed too remote to require a deeper investigation, and I returned to Mackintosh Place and the Hampstead & Highgate Preservation Trust, the birthplace of Sam’s father Edward and the scene of his death, and the storehouse of his effects.

Here a long and excessively dull afternoon of rummaging at length yielded its prize. Again and again, I had to combat the strange faith of the historical researcher (at least, of
this
researcher) in some
fate
involved in his discoveries, whose hand will reveal what has been lost, whose inexorability (I know no better word) will suffer no relevant stone to remain unturned. It is a strange conviction, I confess it, yet perhaps a necessary one, for scholars who, like Newton, stand only on the sea-side of what may be known, and must persuade themselves that no
buried, undiscovered fact will disprove the scanty world they have constructed from the few remains. Yet a world of facts stretches wide and deep beyond the corners of our gaze. No assiduity could discover the whole; and so we work by faith, that the
part
explains the
sum,
that the
pattern
holds true – and that the necessary facts
will
reveal themselves to us, by some agency, and that when nothing is revealed, no revelation is at hand. And so on long, dry, fruitless days we battle the conviction, as much as anything else, that there is
nothing
to find; because an important truth
would, by now,
have declared itself.

At last, as the sun set against the side of the house and a few stray beams shimmered on the mottled glass, the long-sought clue did reveal itself to me. (You see how
insidious
this strange faith is, how persuasive, that the clue revealed is the
one that matters,
and not that
other
clue, the undiscovered one, the shadow at the end of the light, endlessly retreating and mysterious.) Stuck, by some dampness acting upon the ink, to the back of a coloured sketch (an accomplished piece of work, depicting Sam himself, ‘the delicate temples and too big eyes, the face sad, inward, except for the butting, jutting chin, stubborn and strong above the white cravat; the hair thinning over the large forehead’), a letter peeled off, somewhat blotted by its previous adhesion.

The letter was addressed to Sam himself and signed by none other than Thomas Jenkyns, in a curiously feminine hand, clear and distinct, with a hint of flourish here and there. It followed a peculiar tradition of the nineteenth century, of the fan-letter, peculiar less for the letter itself than the warmth that often greeted its reception. This was a century in which an act of admiring homage produced a condescension that often led to friendship, and I guessed at once that some friendship
had
followed this particular display of admiration, remarkable for its
practicality
(despite a kind of blushing effusion), and the faint air, almost of irony, running throughout it:

What was Tom’s cause? – a question that puzzled more than Sam in his day and leads to no satisfactory conclusions. Tom, like Jacob, seems a
smooth
man; his brother-in-science, Sam, a
hairy
one. I confess an inclination to the latter; despite my own shiny pate, I support a harvest of black and golden hairs upon back and breast and leg and forearm, casting a muffled glow over the swell of the muscle and suggesting, by luxuriance of growth, the vitality
of the man within, the earthly fertility, the richness in life and love and
projects,
that particular outcrop of the academic soul. A smooth skin offers no purchase to the eye, no rough grip; we glance off them like sunshine off a window and cannot fix them in our sight. They flicker – Tom
flickers,
shaven, odourless, clean, the paradigm of men, the quintessence of dust, scrubbed till the stench of man, the goodness and badness of him, the lust and love, give off only the faintest and sweetest of scents. Tom had that ease of character, happy enough in its own goodness and its harmony with the world, that he need never
lie
or
cheat
to promote his own interests – the truth, by its nature he seemed to believe, would be agreeable to an agreeable man. He saw no need to battle it. Sam, on the other hand, battled and battled and battled – a bulldog, a pit bull, a man after my own heart, like Esau robbed of his inheritance. It took a far different man from Tom to rescue Syme from obscurity in the end (though Tom, to be fair, played his part); a man both more faithful than Tom – at least, hungrier for faith, and in consequence more full of doubt; but I overstep myself, and
Phidy’s
time will come.

Yet Tom was a ‘liked guy’, as the fellow said to Holly Golightly; more than that, a much-loved gentleman, famous among his friends for his kindness and the grace of his affections. In short, a cipher of a man, whose interest in Syme’s projects seems the most puzzling thing of all. Yet that he
was
interested is clear; that he promoted Sam’s interests is also clear, and worked extremely hard to do so; and that he had some moderate, even great, triumphs in Sam’s cause cannot be doubted; nor that he remained faithful to him and kind long after Sam could serve his own or anyone’s purpose. The testament to this fact takes me to my next discovery, the death of my object, the funeral scene – the moment from which Syme’s
history
began, at which all speculation takes wing, for its perch in
living fact
had snapped, and no resting-place remained.

Another bell had rung and I returned to the strange Reverend Jenkyns and the uproar over his ‘heretical eulogy on the death of Mr Seaborn’, the same name to which Thomas Jenkyns attributed
the account of the ‘Remarkable Journeys’ that first drew him to Syme. This was perhaps my second piece of great good fortune, after the cache of Sam’s memorabilia discovered in the house in Highgate. As the latter had been preserved owing to the
smooth
ness
of the stream of time – an attic unrummaged, a house allowed gently to decay – the former caught my attention owing to a
ruffle of turbulence
as the flow of history adjusted itself to a slight awkwardness in its path.

The great prize, of course, in Tom Jenkyns’s letter was the fact that Sam had written a book,
The Remarkable Journey of Mr Seaborn,
which seemed to bear, at least obliquely, on his scientific work. I could not guess then the casual mistake that had kept this book secret from me for so long, a clerical error, the careless duplication of a letter and a slight slipping into the plural, but I had no doubt of my ability to
rustle up
the precious tome. Indeed, this certainty, or rather the prospect of it, occasioned my delay, as a boy will keep the fattest sausage for the final forkful; and I scraped around the edges of my prize to draw out the delight of its eventual discovery.

Consequently, I turned to explore the strange coincidence of names between the object of Reverend Jenkyns’s controversial grief and the protagonist of Syme’s literary explorations, with only half my heart – the shore lay ahead, I was certain; I had stopped only to explore a piece of driftwood caught up in the outbound tide. (I could not guess then the disappointment of my actual landing.) But I soon recognized the error of my inattention, or rather the
second
clerical error, that had blinded the library’s computer to the connection between the great scientific failure and the ecclesiastical storm surrounding the elegy of a dead man in Virginia in 1850. (If I could begin my academic career from scratch, I should focus my interest in error on the minutiae of mistakes,
the history of the misprint,
rather than the grander miscalculations that occupy me here and elsewhere.) For the dead man lying quietly in the middle of all the fuss was none other than Sam Syme himself – mistaken, by some ecclesiastical printman, for the narrator of his novel,
The Remarkable Journey of Mr Seaborn,
which
had caused all the uproar in the first place. I had stumbled by accident upon his funeral.