The Syme Papers (78 page)

Meanwhile, I began to fall in with Mrs Simmons. Every
Thursday evening I took her light-boned arm – the arm, where
Youth and Beauty linger last and sweetest! – and walked her home,
after a party of whist with Mr Fawlkes (a bookseller) and his mother.
Sometimes we peered up and down the street, and I snuck in for a
glass of sherry by her fire.

‘Will Sam mind us, do you think?’ I said to her one evening.

‘Leaving him to his work? No, that’s the best of him.’

‘No, that is not what I meant, I think.’

‘He is not a passionate man. Does that surprise you, Phidy?’ she
answered, considering. ‘And a woman of … forty or so needs company. A young man is always pleasant. Sam and I are like in that as
well, taking young men to us. There was an Alcibiades before you,
but he was a mouthful so we called him Alley.’

‘Tom has always been Tom.’

‘And now there is Easy
‚’
she said. ‘Though he is a sad young
man, and I should not have chosen him. Easy is a sweet name for
him, though cruel. Tom has a sharp tongue for all his courtesy and a
name for everything. Such a lovely boy, but he never liked me,
more’s the pity.’

‘Why not?’

‘He thinks I draw Sam from his purpose. He is jealous, too.’

‘Would it upset you if he stopped
all this nonsense
for you?’

‘Why should it?’

‘As a matter of principle.’

‘You are a great one for asking questions, Phidy. You imagine
yourself so shy and silent, but all the while no one can hush you for
love or money. If it comes to that, I have my own principles.’

‘What are they, if you will pardon another question?’

‘That everyone can find a reason to be unhappy and that most can
find a reason to be happy. That should answer you as far as Sam 
goes. It has got me across an ocean and through the death of poor
Mr Simmons –
and pushes me out of bed in the morning, when I
would much rather sleep.’

‘Would you like to sleep now?’ I asked, hopeful and afraid.

‘Not quite
‚
’ she said, laughing at me in her eyes, with such
shyness as looks like daring.

Then I stood up and heard my knees creak; they hurt me as I knelt
with my elbow against the armrest of her chair. I stooped to her dry,
soft lips and my blood raced, with two thoughts. With the intimate
thick thought of her before me, and the second tiny whisper in my
head that I was following Sam. We kissed, gently and then longer.
Then she sat back, content and not at all surprised. She was too
comfortable in her soul to deny me a resting-place there, though I
knew Sam was her great and only love. ‘A young man is always
pleasant’ echoed in my thoughts, but in fact she said, ‘You make a
lady wait.’

Here I dwell, I thought, even in the house of your love. Mrs
Simmons held the key to his back door, and I might come with her to
his very heart of hearts, when he would turn me from the parlour on
my own. ‘Enough‚’ he said to me that night, and left me with a
breast overcharged with his love. Is it any wonder I should give it to
the heart closest his own?

But if Sam stood behind my thoughts, Mrs Simmons lay before
my eyes. She had nursed me in the spring, and time passed easily
with us. Even the slight wrinkles of her neck gathered sweetness in
them, as the veins of a leaf drink dew. Her hair was thin and old,
but the tenderer for it; and her eyes were cut from a wonderful blue
stone time could not touch. She had her own charms: long, thin
arms and a curving side.

It was well past midnight before I turned to my own bed.

The doldrums gave way to a hurricane. I returned one night late
from Mrs Simmons to find Easy in our parlour and a great fuss in
the air. Easy shook a letter in his hand with furious indignation. He
turned to me as I entered. ‘Bull Harcourt, as you call him, Phidy‚’
he said, ‘is a bull, a bull-headed, thick-skulled tyrant with all the 
fineness and sensitivity of a butcher. He is a bully, a bull.’

Sam laughed, ‘Don’t take on so, Easy. He is plum right.’

I had never seen Easy in such a state. His blood boiled and his
hair stood on end and he paced up and down in a storm, Sam was
calm as cream beside him, but had he known what was to come, he
should have burned that letter and never spoken of it again.

‘Settle yourself, Easy, and tell me what’s the matter,’ I said.

‘“Dear Dr Syme‚’” he read in a squeak and squall. ‘“I have lately
had the pleasure of looking over your first instalment, the outcome
of our association.” Pompous fool, it is the outcome of his genius
and your bullion, you bull, butcher.’

‘Carry on,’ I said, and Sam and I looked at each other, smiling.

‘There is more of such stuff, but I pass over it. Here, no, here, he
says, yes, here it is. “I am a practical-minded man. As you no doubt
recall from our discussion, among the conditions to our arrange
ment, was the agreement that you justify your discoveries, either
with the acknowledgement of a community of scientists, or with the
dramatic proof of a demonstration of some kind. Though Mesmer
was turned out of Paris, he had a crowd of witnesses behind him.
You have two, an outcast German physician” – I am sorry Phidy –
“and my son.”’

‘He knows nothing of Tom‚’ I said.

‘A down-at-heels newspaperman
‚’
said Sam, laughing.

‘Is there more?’ I asked.

‘Is that not enough?’ said Easy.

‘No, there is more‚’ said Sam. ‘Read it.’

‘“In case I appear an insensitive critic, my dear Doctor, let me
observe that, towards the end of your essay ‘What it Means to
Pactaw’, you furnish ample material for such a demonstration.
Unless I am mistaken, the calculations on page thirty-seven reveal
that no less than a triple eclipse is predicted within the next month
not thirty miles from Pactaw itself.”’

‘Is this true?’ I asked, of a sudden fearful. That word ‘calcula
tions’ had rung a bell in my memory. Tom had dreaded the proof
of certain ‘calculations’ before me. Now I had inherited Tom’s … hesitations.

‘I have looked at it and it is.’

‘Had you known it?’

‘Perhaps I had.’

‘What does Mr Harcourt say to it?’

‘There is not much left. Finish reading, Easy.’

‘“Surely such an event would proclaim itself in some dramatic, or
at the least observable, fashion. Could not a crowd surround the spot,
as at some entertainment? Or, if that is impractical, a few fellow
geonomists could be alerted and brought to witness. As I have said, I
am a practical man, and you may rely on me for any assistance you
require to bring it off. Your servant, Bull Harcourt.’”

Easy had grown quiet and dull and the joke fell flat. Again his
father had trod upon his toy, and he feared it would not mend. Sam
said nothing, though he cocked a cheerful and enquiring eye at me.

I could still hear him in my head, loud as on that happy night,
‘You faithless fool.’

My last month in America was upon me. We stared at Sam’s calcula
tions night after night to be sure of them, until the numbers grew like
leaves in our eyes, scattered at hazard in a storm, and we could as lit
tle understand their order. Seventy-seven degrees nine minutes thir
ty-three seconds west of Greenwich, thirty-eight degrees twenty-two
minutes fifty-seven seconds north of the Meridian.

Sam had a friend in Richmond from army days, Tippy Adams.
He was a surveyor still in the 53rd Infantry. So we set off for
Richmond one day, over a landscape the sharp snow had scraped
dark and bare as it retreated. The army offices were bright red brick
with a high, bright flag stuck from a pole above the entrance in a
happy flutter of nerves. The sky was thinnest blue at lunchtime, but
all else was brown and slop, the grass outside deep in mud and the
hallways streaked with it and smelling of the stables.

Tippy was a mild, tall man with iron-coloured hair and a plain
face that had been handsomer and happier in his youth. He wore
spectacles that glinted over the pupils of his eyes, and he had grown
fat round the middle for the first time in his life. He looked as if he
knew his dry business; and he loved Sam.

He laughed to see him and then stood blinking at us. ‘Come to lunch with the boys‚’ he said at last. So we followed him into the mess hall where the tinkle and roar of a hundred voices and the sour smell of boiled water reminded me of my own days at Werner’s academy. ‘Fellas!’ he shouted, as we came in. ‘Look what I’ve brought!’ And a hundred faces turned to Sam who smiled like a pumpkin and I heard cries of ‘Moonie!’ and ‘Old Moon-Eyes!’ and the slap of a dozen hands on his strong back. He was at home as I had never seen him, and when we sat down with stiff straight backs at the end of the law bench, Tippy said, ‘So, Doctor, are you still poking for holes?’

‘I’ve got a rag out,’ said Sam.

‘Hell,’ said Tippy, smiling.

‘The
New Platonist.
I’m here on business, really.’

‘Let’s eat and then talk‚’ said Tippy, and that’s what we did. For
dinner came and Tippy ate and said not a dozen words between
mouthfuls. He had a thick jaw and looked at us and smiled each time
he brought a napkin across his thin mouth. He was like a schoolboy
gone grey and still gobbled.

After dinner Tippy took us to the officers’ room, with a brown
carpet underfoot, and brawn chairs and odd brown tables, and
brown paintings of men from the 53rd with white faces at their
brown oars on the brown Potomac against the brawn walls. The
brass grate was slick as honey and the fire glowed orange on it and
the sky outside the cold window was blue and thin as blown glass
and empty for the wind to play in. We could hear it down the
chimney deep in our broom chairs.

‘What’s this business then?’ said Tippy.

‘I’m at my old loons
‚’
said Sam, in a voice I scarcely recognized –
rough, quick, utterly at ease. ‘Fella I know put up some money for a
magazine. But he is a thick-sighted old mole – would doubt a rock
till it had struck him in the nose. As it happens, I know where the
rock is, but I need a map.’ Sam had fallen into his old gait.

‘Where away?’

‘Pactaw County. Can you help us?’

Tippy laughed, quiet and at the back of his throat, nothing so like 
the sound of someone chewing nuts. ‘Did you know Perry?’ he said.
Sam shook his head. ‘Literary fella. Wrote jokes about us, rhyming
things, you know, like “gun” and “fun”. He had a girl – “yellow-haired nymph” was her name, I think – in Pactaw. He says to me,
“Ain’t there something to do in Pactaw? Shoot Injuns or some
thing?” No Indians in Pactaw, but I let him chart the place. So I do
have a map, if that’s what you want.’

‘It is.’

‘Stay put. I’ll rummage later.’

He said nothing and I was quiet as a mouse. Sam’s thoughts
were all on the map, but then he did turn and ask Tippy how he
was keeping.

‘Well stuck in, you know me’ was all the answer, but he had wait
ed for this question and grew content; and soon after he rose on stiff
knees with his right hand on his new belly and took us to the chart
room. We spread the map flat on a table in a rustle of paper like the
slap of sails, and in an instant we had tacked down the Potomac to
Pactaw County with its low hills pricked with thin ink. Bull
Harcourt was right. The spot lay in ‘Tyler’s Farm’, not fifteen miles
from the Races.

Tippy gave us the map and said, ‘Bring it back when you come
and see me.’

‘I will, Tippy.’

‘You would have been captain by now, do you think of that?’ He
looked at me then, as if I had the same sad thought at my heart,
which I did.

‘I was an old hothead
‚’
Sam said.‘Should’ve got killed somehow
or other – long before now.’ Perhaps it was true.

‘What happened to the nymph?’ I shouted as we left.

‘They were married,’ Tippy called across the windy day.

‘Mr Tyler’s Farm’ proved to be a brown, bedraggled hump of a
hill with a bright cloud behind it and sparks of rain above it. It ran
over to the valley under that cloud, and there our business lay,
before the copse at the foot of the hill. There was a small building
marked ‘Shed’ on the map near the magic spot, though we later
found it to be a tiny chapel. It had a single pew in front of our crum
bling Saviour, with an odd iron tree of candles before it, with
cracked black paint. We also found a game of draughts under the
pew and a child’s collection of rocks, with one dead mouse among
them. The Tylers were Catholics.