Arthur
A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like
this then. A child wanted to see.
He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. He did
this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the
instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he
walked in, stopped, looked. There was nobody to observe him; he
turned and walked away, carefully shutting the door behind him.
What he saw there became his first memory. A small boy, a room, a
bed, closed curtains leaking afternoon light. By the time he came to
describe it publicly, sixty years had passed. How many internal
retellings had smoothed and adjusted the plain words he finally
used? Doubtless it still seemed as clear as on the day itself. The
door, the room, the light, the bed, and what was on the bed: a
“white, waxen thing.”
A small boy and a corpse: such encounters would not have been so
rare in the Edinburgh of his time. High mortality rates and cramped
circumstances made for early learning. The household was Catholic,
and the body that of Arthur’s grandmother, one Katherine Pack.
Perhaps the door had been deliberately left ajar. There might have
been a desire to impress upon the child the horror of death; or,
more optimistically, to show him that death was nothing to be
feared. Grandmother’s soul had clearly flown up to Heaven, leaving
behind only the sloughed husk of her body. The boy wants to see?
Then let the boy see.
An encounter in a curtained room. A small boy and a corpse. A
grandchild who, by the acquisition of memory, had just stopped being
a thing, and a grandmother who, by losing those attributes the child
was developing, had returned to that state. The small boy stared;
and over half a century later the adult man was still staring. Quite
what a “thing” amounted to-or, to put it more exactly, quite what
happened when the tremendous change took place, leaving only a
“thing” behind-was to become of central importance to Arthur.
George
George does not have a first memory, and by the time anyone suggests
that it might be normal to have one, it is too late. He has no
recollection obviously preceding all others-not of being picked up,
cuddled, laughed at or chastised. He has an awareness of once having
been an only child, and a knowledge that there is now Horace as
well, but no primal sense of being disturbingly presented with a
brother, no expulsion from paradise. Neither a first sight, nor a
first smell: whether of a scented mother or a carbolicy
maid-of-all-work.
He is a shy, earnest boy, acute at sensing the expectations of
others. At times he feels he is letting his parents down: a dutiful
child should remember being cared for from the first. Yet his
parents never rebuke him for this inadequacy. And while other
children might make good the lack-might forcibly install a mother’s
doting face or a father’s supporting arm in their memories-George
does not do so. For a start, he lacks imagination. Whether he has
never had one, or whether its growth has been stunted by some
parental act, is a question for a branch of psychological science
which has not yet been devised. George is fully capable of following
the inventions of others-the stories of Noah’s Ark, David and
Goliath, the Journey of the Magi-but has little such capacity
himself.
He does not feel guilty about this, since his parents do not regard
it as a fault in him. When they say that a child in the village has
“too much imagination,” it is clearly a term of dispraise. Further
up the scale are “tellers of tall stories” and “fibbers”; by far the
worst is the child who is “a liar through and through”-such are to
be avoided at all costs. George himself is never urged to speak the
truth: this would imply that he needs encouragement. It is simpler
than this: he is expected to tell the truth because at the Vicarage
no alternative exists.
“I am the way, the truth and the life”: he is to hear this many
times on his father’s lips. The way, the truth and the life. You go
on your way through life telling the truth. George knows that this
is not exactly what the Bible means, but as he grows up this is how
the words sound to him.
Arthur
For Arthur there was a normal distance between home and church; but
each place was filled with presences, with stories and instructions.
In the cold stone church where he went once a week to kneel and
pray, there was God and Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles and the
Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. Everything was very
orderly, always listed and numbered, like the hymns and the prayers
and the verses of the Bible.
He understood that what he learned there was the truth; but his
imagination preferred the different, parallel version he was taught
at home. His mother’s stories were also about far distant times, and
also designed to teach him the distinction between right and wrong.
She would stand at the kitchen range, stirring the porridge, tucking
her hair back behind her ears as she did so; and he would wait for
the moment when she would tap the stick against the pan, pause, and
turn her round, smiling face towards him. Then her grey eyes would
hold him, while her voice made a moving curve in the air, swooping
up and down, then slowing almost to a halt as she reached the part
of the tale he could scarcely endure, the part where exquisite
torment or joy awaited not just hero and heroine, but the listener
as well.
“And then the knight was held over the pit of writhing snakes, which
hissed and spat as their twining lengths ensnared the whitening
bones of their previous victims …”
“And then the black-hearted villain, with a hideous oath, drew a
secret dagger from his boot and advanced towards the defenceless …”
“And then the maiden took a pin from her hair and the golden tresses
fell from the window, down, down, caressing the castle walls until
they almost reached the verdant grass on which he stood …”
Arthur was an energetic, headstrong boy who did not easily sit
still; but once the Mam raised her porridge stick he was held in a
state of silent enchantment-as if a villain from one of her stories
had slipped a secret herb into his food. Knights and their ladies
then moved about the tiny kitchen; challenges were issued, quests
miraculously fulfilled; armour clanked, chain mail rustled, and
honour was always upheld.
These stories were connected, in a way that he did not at first
understand, with an old wooden chest beside his parents’ bed, which
held the papers of the family’s descent. Here were different kinds
of stories, which more resembled school homework, about the ducal
house of Brittany, and the Irish branch of the Percys of
Northumberland, and someone who had led Pack’s Brigade at Waterloo,
and was the uncle of the white, waxen thing he never forgot. And
connected to all this were the private lessons in heraldry his
mother gave him. From the kitchen cupboard the Mam would pull out
large sheets of cardboard, painted and coloured by one of his uncles
in London. She would explain the coats of arms, then instruct him in
his turn: “Blazon me this shield!” And he would have to reply, as
with multiplication tables: chevrons, estoiles, mullets,
cinquefoils, crescents argent, and their glittering like.
At home he learned extra commandments on top of the ten he knew from
church. “Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak,” was one, and
“Chivalry towards women, of high and low degree.” He felt them to be
more important, since they came directly from the Mam; they also
demanded practical implementation. Arthur did not look beyond his
immediate circumstances. The flat was small, money short, his mother
overworked, his father erratic. Early on he made a childhood vow and
vows, he knew, were never to be swerved from: “When you are old,
Mammie, you shall have a velvet dress and gold glasses and sit in
comfort by the fire.” Arthur could see the beginning of the
story-where he was now-and its happy end; only the middle was for
the moment lacking.
He searched for clues in his favourite author, Captain Mayne Reid.
He looked in The Rifle Rangers: or Adventures of an Officer in
Southern Mexico. He read The Young Voyageurs and The War Trail and
The Headless Horseman. Buffaloes and Red Indians were now mixing in
his head with chain-mailed knights and the infantrymen of Pack’s
Brigade. His favourite Mayne Reid of all was The Scalp-Hunters: or
Romantic Adventures in Southern Mexico. Arthur did not as yet know
how the gold glasses and velvet dress were to be obtained; but he
suspected it might involve a hazardous journey to Mexico.
George
His mother takes him once a week to visit Great-Uncle Compson. He
lives not far away, behind a low granite kerb which George is not
allowed to cross. Every week they renew his jug of flowers. Great
Wyrley was Uncle Compson’s parish for twenty-six years; now his soul
is in Heaven while his body remains in the churchyard. Mother
explains this as she takes out the shrivelled stems, throws away the
smelly water, and stands up the fresh, smooth flowers. Sometimes
George is allowed to help her pour in the clean water. She tells him
that excessive mourning is unChristian, but George does not
understand this.
After Great-Uncle’s departure for Heaven, Father took his place. One
year he married Mother, the next he obtained his parish, and the
next George was born. This is the story he has been told, and it is
clear and true and happy, as everything ought to be. There is
Mother, who is constantly present in his life, teaching him his
letters, kissing him goodnight; and Father, who is often absent
because he is visiting the old and the sick, or writing his sermons,
or preaching them. There is the Vicarage, the church, the building
where Mother teaches Sunday school, the garden, the cat, the hens,
the stretch of grass they cross between the Vicarage and the church,
and the churchyard. This is George’s world, and he knows it well.
Inside the Vicarage, everything is quiet. There are prayers, books,
needlework. You do not shout, you do not run, you do not soil
yourself. The fire is sometimes noisy, so are the knives and forks
if you do not hold them properly; so is his brother Horace when he
arrives. But these are the exceptions in a world which is both
peaceful and reliable. The world beyond the Vicarage seems to George
filled with unexpected noise and unexpected happenings. When he is
four, he is taken for a walk in the lanes and introduced to a cow.
It is not the size of the beast that alarms him, nor the swollen
udders wobbling in his eye-line, but the sudden hoarse bellow the
thing utters for no good reason. It can only be in a very bad
temper. George bursts into tears, while his father punishes the cow
by hitting it with a stick. Then the animal turns sideways, raises
its tail and soils itself. George is transfixed by this outpouring,
by the strange splatty noise as it lands on the grass, by the way
things have suddenly slipped out of control. But his mother’s hand
pulls him away before he can consider it further.
It is not just the cow-or the cow’s many friends like the horse, the
sheep and the pig-that renders George suspicious of the world beyond
the Vicarage wall. Most of what he hears about it makes him anxious.
It is full of people who are old, and sick, and poor, all of which
are bad things to be, judging from Father’s attitude and lowered
voice when he returns; and people called pit widows, which George
does not understand. There are boys beyond the wall who are fibbers
and, worse than that, liars through and through. There is also
something called a Colliery nearby, which is where the coal in the
grate comes from. He is not sure he likes coal. It is smelly and
dusty and noisy when poked, and you are told to keep away from its
flames; also, it is brought to the house by large fierce men in
leather helmets which carry on down their backs. When the outside
world brings the door-knocker down, George usually jumps. All things
considered, he would prefer to stay here, inside, with Mother, with
his brother Horace and new sister Maud, until it is time for him to
go to Heaven and meet Great-Uncle Compson. But he suspects that this
will not be allowed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
Copyright © 2006 by Julian Barnes.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
Julian Barnes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-307-26310-X
