The Syme Papers (8 page)

I pursued my researches now at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, a noble Victorian red-brick building in the middle of suburban nowhere – in a loose field protected by a sagging fence, a set of football posts kneeling in the high grass beside a
pile of cement rubble littered with Coke cans. I sat at the top, looking over the green wasteland, while a single fan, perched in the crack of a tall window, blew the hot air around and around the high room.

A tall young man with a pinched nose and a racking sneeze pushed the squeaking trolley towards me and lifted out the book of old Baltimore papers, bound together but surprisingly light, as if the news had thinned with age. ‘That’s what we’ve got,’ he said, pinching his pinched nose and twisting it to the side to sniff, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s what’s left. Try not to smudge it, will you?’ And then, like an ailing Charon, he steered the trolley back to the comfort of the other shore, among the air conditioning and the forgotten papers.

The pages of the
Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser
(1818–20) were less
yellowed
with age than cast into the burnished hue of a dusty summer cloud, the paper thick and softening at the edges, and blotched occasionally with a deeper yellow, like the smear of fat or oil. It was slow work, trawling through the advertisements for ‘Cohen’s lottery’ and the offer of a reward for an ‘eloped Negroe – of fine upright carriage, rather thin in figure than otherwise’. There were accounts of the spread of hydrophobia and the death of a young schoolboy; there was the shipping news, arrivals and departures; stories of sea-monsters discovered; records of the sessions in the Senate. More advertisements, for ointments, liniments, potions, pipsissiway (a root that cured cancer). An account of a man reputed to be a hundred and thirty years old, who had seen with his own eyes the coronation of Queen Anne. And then, with a growing palpitation of the heart, and an extra stickiness of the stubborn thumbs, I discovered the following:

After the initial excitement of my discovery, I confess I was troubled by a certain
lightness
suggested by the tone of Syme’s demonstration. Tippy Adams remarked on a ‘kind of vengeful humour’ in Sam, and though the volcanic experiment seemed rather teasing than angry, nevertheless it displayed a sense of trickery, the delight of the charlatan, a word broached by the humble apothecary himself. Naturally, the chemistry involved was
old
 
hat
to a man of Sam’s education (Silliman impressed his first-year students with such demonstrations); and no doubt Sam revelled in the ignorance of his parochial neighbours. Still, this very desire to
impress
what must have been a collection of farmers with the rudiments of his art embarrassed me. It did not indicate a ‘mute, inglorious’ Newton buried in small-town life, but a somewhat shabby gentleman playing upon the superstitions of his boorish friends. At best, he appeared a tease; at worst, a sham, desperate for the meanest of admiration. In all likelihood, he was something of both. This did not augur well, I thought, for the role I had in mind for Syme.

I stared out at the waste-green field, falling away from the stretches of suburban neighbourhoods towards London, and wondered if after all I had been barking up the wrong tree, or, worse still, barking where there was no tree. There is a peculiar loneliness to historical research. One acquires a taste, a distinct taste, for
footprints,
the intimate evidence of past lives, marks left in newspaper and letter, even in the items of a will. I had almost forgotten the touch of ordinary days, almost forgotten the courtesies of ignorance – accustomed as I was, by a lonely year away from wife and boys, to rummaging rudely through old lives, stepping on this and that and taking what I could. I missed my home; my wife had scarcely practised the trick of love – for it
is
a trick, a sleight of hand, a gift of eloquence – over the phone in two weeks, that particular intimacy of mouth and ear across oceans of air, conveyed by the warm oily plastic of the telephone. We talked but the heart was gone in us – she harboured some obscure resentment, which expressed itself in politeness and concern. Much has been made in the literature of the past
century of the animal within us, unabated by ages of civility. In my experience, even our basest appetites need constant replenishment, they die for want of nourishment, flaring up only now and again in a kind of weak fever. I have known more harm done out of simple human
dryness
than out of any passion or taint in the blood. And there I sat, in the Colindale Newspaper Library, unearthing the life of a dead man who suddenly seemed to me better left buried. I was homesick, and the thick air dampened the splint between my thumb and forefinger till it stank; and I stared out of the window, hoping the rain would come soon.

Once more into the breach, I thought, when the fellow with the pinched nose delivered, sniffing greatly, a little box of microfilm to my table.
‘Norfolk
Weekly Intelligencer,’
he said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve got there; 1821, I
shouldn’t
imagine. The dates are all in a muddle. That’s what we have, I’m afraid; the rest is buggered.’ And he sniffed his way back to his desk.

The Microfilm Chamber adjoined the reading room through an old arched set of double doors that at first appeared to be locked, until I read the proud notice across it: THESE DOORS ARE NOW AUTOMATIC. I waited, counting the slow beat of blood in my ears from the hot day; peered along the crack down the middle of the doors. Nothing happened. Perhaps their stiffness, their silence, their immobility were automatic, unconscious, requiring no particular effort of the will. They stayed put automatically, unblinkingly, unflinchingly. I lowered a shoulder against them; a bruise upon the nub of bone persuaded in me a grudging admiration for them. These doors knew what they did well; in true English fashion, they
remained unmoved.
As I remained, unmoved, before them, staring them out. The timeless silence of a hot day in an old library passed over me. I let it pass, in utter absence of mind, the blankness that follows the first leg swung over the edge of a bed in the morning, and precedes the second sudden brisk step towards the bathroom. I was almost spent, barred from a cave of treasures I suspected in that weak hour of containing fool’s gold.

I stood on the casual verge of turning back (by such threads do
the secrets even of our own dispositions hang) when I perceived that, far from being locked, the doors had begun to open of themselves and at their own pace –
automatically
and incrementally slowly. They wheezed slightly as they shuddered outwards, as if they had yet to enjoy the first cigarette of the day to clear their lungs. So I waited, until the ancient portals like old men on canes inched away from the middle, and I could squeeze my thick frame between them into the coldest room I have ever encountered in a lifetime of air-conditioned academic chambers.

Once more into the breach, I muttered, braver than before. I seemed to have travelled from the Plutonist fires to the frozen waters of Neptunian theory. Hunched and huddled men stared at the flicker of the microfilms in a darkened room, like cavemen around a fire, rubbing their bare arms, roughened with goose pimples, to thaw the red blood in them and ease the flow. Nobody spoke, only the occasional clatter and whirl of a reel rewinding broke the white hum of the monitors. I had entered the ice-box of history, where the most delicate ephemera are frozen in photographic amber, revealed for an instant by a whizzing electric light, then cast into darkness again. Our memories are at the mercy of chance both ways, I reflected; the luck of what’s left behind and the luck of the eye that falls upon them. For as brief as the window of time that preserves us can be the passage of the single gaze that may light upon us later, and remember us to the world. As I flicked through the pages of the
Norfolk Weekly Intelligencer,
racing across the glow of the white screen, I thought not only of the footprints I hoped to find, but the tracks I was sure to miss.

The
Intelligencer
was a collection of clippings from around the country, selected and printed by Bishop Perkins of Norfolk, for the ‘curious and pious Mind, which delights in all the works of the Lord’. Each issue opened with a half-dozen pages of ecclesiastical notes, interpretations of scripture, records of sermons; there followed a brief section titled ‘Arts & Science & Culture’, and finally a page of ‘Remarkable Occurrences’, such as the interrupted interment of a woman presumed dead, until a tumble occasioned by a clumsy undertaker opened a cut in her forearm,
which ‘bled freshly to general astonishment’. After a consultation of doctors, and the several applications of a scalpel to her skin, each resulting in a renewed flow, she was pronounced dead again ‘on account of the absence of breath’ and buried at last. It was not among these phenomena, thank God, but in the previous section that I discovered at last the following news of my ‘undiscovered genius’, recorded by a Mr Thomas Jenkyns, and picked up from the
Southern Courier,
October 1819:

My hands shivered as I read, both from the extreme refrigeration of the Microfilm Chamber, and from a kind of
relief,
inseparable from excitement. Syme was no simple charlatan, no village trickster, I was sure. Here at last was proof of the weight of his convictions – the laborious machinery of his theories, each wheel meticulously constructed, patiently articulated into the grand design.

Slowly, I felt, I had begun to grasp the
fabric
of the man. The quality I had mistaken for lightness was in fact a profound
rest
lessness,
an excess, of energy and intellect, a fresh itch continuously scratched. He turned for relief of this innate discomfort – a kind of tightness of his own skin, from which he sought to burst free – to the easy applause of a parochial ignorance, to flatterers and flattery, to the warmth of simple admiration. But only for relief. I felt I knew my man. The time had come when, with a delicate finger, I could feel
his
pulse as my own. How often had I myself wasted an idle hour bullying and persuading ignorant company, simply to preen my own feathers? But beneath his bright vanities lay a far weightier ambition, a heavy sense of purpose, that drove him on, regardless of obscurity, a deep patience. At times, I flattered myself that his patience had found its reward, at last, in my attentions, my rescue, from the sea of time, in which he had almost drowned.