She watched him go. She had no special feeling for Hat, but there was a quality of brightness and bounce about him which it was hard to resist, and she wasn't happy to have a part in snuffing it out. She hoped she'd been telling the' truth about the likely tabloid reaction, but she doubted it. If, as Dalziel suspected, one of the papers had already committed an undercover investigative reporter to the case, they weren't going to step away from it without at the very least a mud-stirring article. There was enough material here already for that and she'd barely got going on her devil's advocate assignment. But of course, it wasn't just that which would be bothering Bowler. He too was a detective and she doubted if she'd asked any questions he hadn't already asked himself. She just hoped to God that he'd have the nous not to ask Rye. She herself hardly knew the woman, thought her interesting, and was certain there was a lot more to her than met the eye. If that lot more had included opening her pages to her librarian boss, that was her business and Hat would be well advised not to make it his.
But if it made a tabloid headline, it would take a stronger will than she guessed he possessed to keep his lips glued.
Letter 7 Received Mon Dec 31 ^ st P. P
Wed Dec 26th
My dear Mr Pascoe,
Have you had a good Christmas? I have, in fact so good that only now does it seem I've had time or energy to sit down and write to you. Perhaps you'd have preferred it if I hadn't bothered? I hope not, but in any case it's no longer a matter of choice. They say in China that if you save someone's life then it becomes your responsibility. In a way you may have saved mine by putting me in the Syke, so now you're having to pay the price.
Last time I wrote I was on my way to Zurich.
God, what a wonderful city! You can almost smell the money! But that I know will be of little interest to one so unmaterialistic as yourself, so let me hasten to matters more to your taste, such as art, history, and the pursuit of knowledge.
From the point of view of new material, my short stay was as unproductive as I anticipated. To dig up anything new from ground already carefully riddled by Sam and Albacore, I would have needed a vast supply of serendipity, and I'd already used mine in making a possible connection between Beddoes and Fichtenburg. But good biography is as much concerned with getting inside the mind of its subject as establishing external facts about him, and I think I got a great deal out of simply strolling around the city, imagining I was that other lonely, disaffected and unattached exile, Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
You, of course, by instinct and training, are expert at tracking motives. How much easier would it be with you at my side for me to understand what made Beddoes, shortly before his twenty-second birthday and shortly after having taken his degree at Oxford where he had begun to establish a reputation as a poet, decide to leave England and spend nearly all the remainder of his life in Germany and Switzerland? In particular, how could someone who so clearly loved the English tongue as much as he did have pretty well relegated it to his second language by the time he died?
Sam's theory is that everything can be traced to the boy's early exposure to the brutal realities of death, and to the devastatingly early loss of his powerful father. If we look at the three main energy centres of Beddoes' life, we can see how they all relate to his father, and how they're all preoccupied with man's struggle against the ultimate enemy.
Through medicine he seeks for ways to understand and conquer it while at the same time looking for any evidence in flesh, blood and bone of the existence of the soul. While he does not seem inclined to follow his father in channelling his medical skills into improving the health of the underprivileged (Beddoes Sr founded the quaintly named Institute for the Sick and Drooping Poor!), Thomas Lovell actively supports – sometimes at personal risk – what today we would call human rights movements throughout Germany. And, of course, through the creative power of his imagination he attempts to grapple hand to hand with the Arch-Fear.
So why come to Germany? The answer lies in what I've just written. Here he could be at the cutting edge (ho ho) of medical research; here there were strong undercurrents of social revolution such as only rarely made themselves felt in dull, complacent little England; and here with its dark forests and dramatic castles and sweeping rivers and turbulent mythology lay the true Gothic heart of Europe which, since the Jacobeans, the British had only dabbled their toes in.
But in the end he sees that his attack has failed on all three fronts.
I visited the site of the old town theatre which Beddoes hired for a night in a last sad attempt to pluck some morsel of comfort out of his disintegrating life by dressing young Konrad Degen up in hose and doublet and putting the poor lad on the stage as Hotspur.
Sam muses that perhaps Beddoes saw Hotspur, an uncomplicated, impulsive, brave, honourable, poetry- mocking, life-loving man of action, as the kind of son who wouldn't have let his father die. Or perhaps the only way a man can really bring a father back to life is to become him by having a son yourself.
Poor Beddoes. For a moment I slipped out of my skin and time into his and felt his pain, and felt too, what is worse, his faith that the future must be better than the past and that by the time we reached, say, the twenty-first century, the world would have taken large steps towards Utopia.
But enough of these dolorous imaginings! The festive season was waiting for me back at Fichtenburg. Let me tell you how I have celebrated it.
On my return to the castle early in the evening of December 23rd, I found Linda and her party had arrived that morning. She greeted me warmly with her version of the Continental kiss. One of the most popular videos on offer in the Syke was called Great British Sporting Moments (Dr Johnson was right; if you want a patriot, look in the jails!) and one of the Moments which got a particularly loud cheer was the old black-and-white footage of Henry Cooper flooring Cassius Clay, as he still was then, with a left hook.
Linda's bruising buss to the point of my cheekbone had much the same effect. I was still reeling from it as she followed it up with close enquiry into the progress of my researches. I got the impression she knew all about the pattern of my first couple of days there – Frau Buff, probably – and regarded my rather abrupt departure to Zurich as a pleasing demonstration of my capacity to put duty before pleasure. No hint she knew the form that pleasure took, thank God!
She took the coincidence of the Stimmer connection with Beddoes in her stride, very much a Third Thought reaction. God's hand is in everything; we should marvel all the time, not just on the odd occasion when our spiritual caliginosity clears enough for us to glimpse Him at work. She has no real interest in Beddoes. She is backing me because by doing so she disobliges a lot of poncy academics, and also because (I make the point objectively not vaingloriously) in some as yet undefined way she likes the look of me.
She foresaw no problem in getting the Stimmers to permit examination of the Keller painting. That's her real strength. She simply doesn't admit the possibility of failure!
But I could tell she was genuinely pleased by my progress, for suddenly she apologized – with that brusqueness you encounter in people who are not used to apologizing – for a regrettable but necessary interference with my scholastic privacy. It seems that her party has swollen some way beyond its opening numbers (politicos love a freebie!) and pressure on room space has necessitated putting someone in the chalet's second bedroom.
The good news was that it was Frere Jacques.
I said, 'That would just be Jacques by himself, would it?'
She took my point immediately and said, 'Yes. Doleful Dierick's back at the Abbey, making sure the Brothers don't enjoy Christmas too much. But I should warn you, he's threatening to join us for New Year.'
Well, sufficient is the evil, etc, and I said I'd be delighted to have Jacques' company, and I meant it. A chaperon was just what I needed. Timid and naive Mouse might be, but she's her mother's child, and Linda is a woman who hates to leave a job undone.
I met Mouse on my way down to the chalet. She greeted me with what looked like unfeigned delight, reproached me for my abrupt disappearance, and said that Zazie and Hildi had told her to wish me a very merry Christmas on their behalf.
' Carefully I looked for hidden meaning. With relief, I found none.
In the chalet I discovered Frere Jacques sitting at the kitchen table writing.
He too expressed great pleasure at seeing me and also tried to apologize for breaking in on my scholarly privacy.
I told him I was delighted to have the company, and hoped he didn't mind being separated from Linda's
