The Syme Papers (73 page)

He came in slowly now, with a brown jug held between his hands
from which flowers bloomed. Two roses and a sprig of white buds
scattered like stars around their heavier planets. ‘I filled it too high‚’
he said. ‘It is a task for the girls, d’you see, but they must have their
drink.’ I saw the source of Sam’s impracticality, whose deficiencies
Tom had worked so hard to supply. The water trembled at the jug’s
rim and he set it down on the polished top of the piano. He quickly
saw his error and took a sheaf of songs from the stand and now set
the jug upon it. The water lipped over and darkened a patch of
music. I laughed and rose to help him, stooped and drank quickly
from the jug, to both our surprise, then lifted it slowly and left. ‘He
is a child‚’ Mary said when she saw me. I poured half out of the
kitchen window, then returned and set it on a newspaper. I joined
Edward on the settee.

‘I bought the vase over lunch‚’ he said. ‘Gypsies came round the
school with bits and bobs for the children and I took this for myself.
Anne liked flowers, you see. I set young Timothy to pick some for 
me after school. He sleeps, poor dim child, and does not attend, but
it is cruel to punish him sorely. The other boys don’t take to it
either, though you would not credit it. He is their pet, poor lamb,
but he won’t learn; nor can he, I fear. Still, we can make his school
days gentle. They are lovely, no?’

Anne had died just over two months earlier. He mourned her
still, but with a light heart. His was a pretty grief. ‘Anne liked
pretty things, and flowers, roses especially, and the piano. So there
we have them all together for her sake.’

‘Sam cannot take it so lightly, sir. I fear for him. He does not attend
to me, which I don’t take amiss at such a time. But he neglects himself
and that grieves me. He needs some occupation, or purpose at least,
something beyond mourning.’ We are never proud of the tone we take
with our elders, but my worries were real enough.

‘Has he not these theories he attends to? Don’t that occupy him?
I recall he made much of certain calculations concerning masses and
orbits and so on, though they don’t signify to me. Sam is
cleverer than his father, Phidy, I’m afraid. But won’t they serve?
’

‘Has he not said? He broke off his last engagement to return
home, as much for you, I think, as Anne. Besides, he was in no state
to continue. I could not say what he plans now. All that seems to be
over, though he gave so much of himself to the cause, that’s so.’

‘What do you consider he should do, Phidy? What do you make of
these theories?’

Before I could reply, Edward broke in, and on hearing him my
answer swiftly changed. ‘It has always seemed to me’, he said, ‘a mad
cap business. Hollows and spheres and gases, conjured out of … He’s
a bright boy, Phidy, but a strange one. Scarce another man thinks as
he does. There is something else, too.’ He paused to consider.

‘Were I to tell a story, I should put more faces in it. Were I to
explain what goes on below, like a myth, I should have people in it
for a start and maybe caves. All these implosions and numbers and
rotations seem dry to me. They smell of the abacus and the lecture
hall and great big dusty geometrical tomes with cracked spines. One
needs one’s spectacles to see them.’ He was joking partly, but he
meant it, too. ‘I should have a bit of colour down there. Goblins and 
spooks and little dancing creatures. Fires and smells, you under
stand. Great stony monsters beating away with great hammers, and
sparks all ahoo, and a dreadful noise. And sinners repenting their
sins, or being boiled to pieces. And lots of shadows. Creatures with
huge hands and tiny faces, girls with deep voices. Men and women
confused and monsters with two heads. And dainty things, like tea
and tables, stretched and pinched as if you saw them in a spoon. A
horror of a place, to be sure. But with some life in it, a few faces.
I could not give myself to all those numbers without a few shapes I
knew what to make of. Though I dare say I’m talking hocus-pocus
and my son all the time a perfect Newton. Still, I shouldn’t have
spent so much time on it without faces.’

What could I answer, when he said what I knew in my own heart
to be true? Had I not stayed for the faces, for Sam’s principally, and
Tom’s, Edward’s, Mrs Simmons’? Had that not become my own
creed? Yet I felt Sam was right. ‘Without considerations’, he had
argued. My gorge rose as much at my own doubts as Edward’s
naming of them. Then I recalled Sam’s speech in Perkins. A bit of
his father’s chicanery, Sam said, that story of elephants and eagles.
Sam was right, but his father’s vision was less kind. Did not Anne
have big hands and a face upon a face? Her large bones appalled
him, and, in her need, he shrank from her blood and inarticulate
clamour. These were not idle pictures. Edward had raised the flag of
his imagination. Though he won my sympathy and my belief, as a
man of such niceties, I could not let him win my heart. So I
answered him.

‘I once thought as you. As a story, I said to myself, to say nothing of the science, I should have chosen another scene, a different subject for my brush. Speaking as an artist, I mean, and I believe Sam wishes to be judged, at least in part, according to their fashion. The stars, their extent and nature, should have drawn me first. Barring that, perhaps creation itself, the processes of human life. As a doctor, I have seen such mysteries first hand. There is much to be delved into. I often find that narrow corners offer wider prospects of discovery than open spaces.

‘But there is a
something
in Sam I cannot quite shake from me. 
You, sir, seem blessed with a bedevilled imagination. My own
thoughts are often tempted by freaks and frolics. To us, Sam’s improb
able images seem cold, his conceptions smooth and lifeless. And yet …
there is great consolation in numbers. Do you know, sir, I have often
consoled myself with the
drudgery
of Sam’s theories, their attention
to calculation and detail. Perhaps because the charlatan binds half-truths lightly and would not cement them with such hard mortar and
impractical falsehoods (as they once seemed to me). As I came to love
him, sir, I wished him an honest man and misguided, rather than a
cheat. Even though the latter is a happier trade. And yet …

‘The more I think on these hollowed spheres beneath us, revolving
endlessly in measured patterns; the brief coincidence of their faults,
the eclipse of vacuii. Coincidences, I say, though Sam believes he
will learn their seasons in time. These eclipses in their course breed
storms, stir volcanoes, toss seas, ruin crops, burn cities, swallow
ships, that in turn desolate nations and leave widowed wives and
orphaned children, that in turn … you follow me, sir? Sam once
said to me that precision is only one kind of abundance. He loves it
for that reason. And his is an abundant world, more intricate than
our fevered imaginations of gargoyles and ghasts; richer, too. Those
shining revolutions
…
bright overlapping metals
…
bursting and
colluding suns. The tale of disasters to be spun from such thread, of
Pompeii and Sodom. You and I are drawn to deviations, freaks,
things that suffer no explanation. But your son has made a muse of
inevitability. It calls to him as beautifully as chance to us. It is a
being full of light and colour in his eyes. Is not his the nobler faith?’

There was a clatter at the door and the thud of a dropped pack.
Sam walked in.
‘
I
have come a day early, as you see. I missed my
Phidy,’ he said, ‘and knew we should return for Tom’s wedding
soon. And now your news?’ He greeted us both easily, enquired
after our healths. He was too much at ease for anything but happi
ness to sit smiling at his heart. He had overheard me, of that I am
sure. I was moved to see how calm and content even my poor fervent
admiration could make him. He was, though I had not suspected it
before, a creature of loves. That night, Sam and I resumed all our
old habits of intimacy.

In a week, we left for Pactaw and Tom’s wedding. I said farewell
to Edward at the door. He was ever gracious, especially in farewell.
We two were closer kinned in nature than Sam and I. But I walked
with his son down the garden path, linked arm in arm.

I slept through most of the journey to Pactaw and awoke with my
thick head in the crook of Sam’s elbow. Eyes shut, I breathed the odour
of his side, rich and warm as baking bread in the sunshine trapped by
the carriage window. His eyes were open, but he did not mark me
until I sat up and said, ‘A summer is not so long, after all.’

‘No‚’ he answered absent-mindedly, ‘but coming home always
steals time.’

I began to note the first signs of Pactaw. The road dipped into the
valley and ran beside the river for a space. The Apple Cart flew by
us on the left, and I thought of that colder day when all our
prospects lay clean as snow before us. Now the land was brown and
green and cut across by raws of fallen trees (tipped over by the great
storm, I suppose), whose roots reached from the dry earth like
buried hands. Then we passed along the Dewdrop in a slower can
ter (old Barnaby sunned himself upon the stoop), and the town
surrounded me, with a homecoming whose joy caught me by sur
prise. I had come a year before, a stranger to the place. Now I rode to
Pactaw for a wedding and farewells.

My familiar eye tallied every street and house and tree. The
market square, half-empty in declining day, a clutter of trampled
greens underfoot. I looked long at the Boathouse across the water,
gleaming under a lick of fresh paint; the fresh-built jetty below
thronged by pleasure-boats, a thick fire smoking from the chimney.
Even the crickets scraped a native air on their dry legs. The eucalyp
tus trees, with flowers in their hair, filled my breath. I know the
song the sirens sing, and it is this: rest a while, you have been here
before. A while, I thought, but I cannot stay.

My feet led me of their own sweet will back down Main Street
towards the Dewdrop Inn. ‘Shall we sup here?’ I cried to Sam,
lagging behind.

‘If you please. Tom will take a glass of wine with us later, but
he dines with his father-to-be. I would never believe it
‚’
he said, 
coming up,
‘
I am out of breath. Grief has made me fat.’

A small boy, barefoot and sprouted from his leggings, stood at the
post by the door on whose step old Barnaby sat. ‘Your kind never do
have horses‚’ the lad remarked sarcastically, spinning a coin in the
air.

‘What kind is that?’ I asked him.

‘Layabouts‚’ he answered, which pleased us somehow, and I gave
him a penny for luck. ‘It won’t buy you that‚’ he said. ‘But it might
buy me something.’

‘Hush now‚’ Barnaby cried, in his slaw rasp. ‘My niece’s boy, a
vicious creature. Ah, ‘tis the Boxer himself‚’ he said, squinting
against the last of the sun and addressing Sam. ‘You should have
gone far, sir, in that noble science, I believe.’

‘Too late‚’ came the answer. ‘For I have got fat and scant of
breath. And wish to grow fatter.’

Sam and I ate our two great chops in hunger and silence. He was
as common as a brother to me now, and time lay so light in our
hands we could bear it between us without a word said. Sam was
unhappy and quiet. I was only quiet. Then Tom came and spurred
our spirits to a quicker gait. We sat for hours over glasses of ale at
the Dewdrop, talking comfortably. Though afflicted by such separate
and lonely considerations, we had each hoarded sufficient mirth to
pay for one happy evening together.

‘O Tom, what shall I do without you?’ Sam said at last. ‘At least I have my widow to turn to.’ I had never heard him call Mrs Simmons by that name, as if she were a badge of middle age. Then the church-bell rang its ten slow steps into the night. Sam rose and said, ‘They call me to her, gentlemen. Bless you, Tom. Kitty is a sweet lass. But there is much to be said – for widows with heavy purses. Remember the proverb – “For blood grows old and cold, and so (thank God) does gold.” The round is yours Phidy. Good night.’

‘He jests only from a heavy heart‚’ Tom said, after Sam had gone.

‘It is something else, Tom. He grows gentle slowly. Another glass
with you?’

‘No, thank you, Phidy.’ He rose to leave. Even now I wished to
linger beside them, when they turned to their own purposes. ‘You 
sleep with me tonight, I believe?’ Tom said. ‘I have taken a room on
Seymour Lane.’ Then he added, as if someone had just brought the
news, ‘I am to be wed tomorrow.’

We lingered at the lamp-post outside his gate. Tom, whose body had grown more eloquent than his tongue, twined himself about it and about, supple with sadness. ‘I suppose, Phidy‚’ he began, then paused. I had known him for a year, and still I sought some peephole to his thoughts – a sweet creature, easy in joy and easily upset, occasionally peevish, tireless and faithful in love. He would be married on the morrow, and I hoped perhaps to gossip my way into his affections. ‘I suppose’, he resumed at last, ‘you won him after all. In the end – you Understand me.’ Even then he could not turn the talk to his own life, or would not, though I desired with all my heart for some speech touching the matter nearest Tom’s own. ‘You won him after all.’ He had a guilty air, too, as if he confessed a secret. ‘Too late, however, I suppose. It is all the same now‚’ he said.