'Fair's fair. If anything should ever happen to me, you've got to promise that you'll practise what you've just been preaching, that you won't confuse grief with despair, that you'll mourn but not forever, that you will never forget me, but you'll never forget this promise that you made to me either. That you understand I won't be at rest till you are happy again. Can you promise that? If you can't, I won't.'
He put his hand up to take hers.
'I promise,' he said.
'OK, then so do I.'
He drew her to him. Her softness, her scent, her warmth enveloped him like the air of lost Eden, but he frowned into the dark as he tried to analyse a strange feeling that something had happened which he didn't understand.
Rye lay with her head pressed against his chest and her lips were smiling.
Letter 9. Received Fri Jan 18thP. P
The UNIVERSITY of SANTA APOLLONIA Ca.
Guest Suite No 1
Faculty of Arts
Wed Jan 16th
Dear Mr Pascoe,
What a week this has been! What a rare mood I'm in! You cannot believe how much I'm enjoying America. It's been like stepping into a movie and finding I was a star! Have you been here? I'm sure you have – a cultured, well-rounded man like yourself will not have been content to take the rest of the world on report. You will have travelled everywhere, observed, sampled, judged. My exuberance probably strikes you as ingenuous, perhaps naive, even jejune. But remember, this brave new world is indeed new to me. All my acquaintance with it hitherto has been through the cinema, so no wonder I saw and felt it as a movie set!
Of course my good impression of this bright sunlit world was helped by the contrast with what I had left behind. Frankfurt was wet and windy, Gottingen locked in ice and snow. Anyone wanting to understand the Gothic glooms of the German character should spend a winter there! Not that I suffered any particular discomfort, being able to afford, at Linda's insistence, decent lodgings. But I made no noticeable advance in my researches in either place. I did track down some people called Degen in Frankfurt who may or may not be of the same family as young Konrad, the baker whom Beddoes lived and travelled with and attempted to turn into a Shakespearean actor. But they had no papers or artefacts that could be linked to their distant relative and I got the impression that their few alleged family memories of the man were in fact gleanings from various predecessors (including Sam himself) who had come here on Beddoes' trail. (Though there was a young blond Degen who fluttered his silky eyelashes at me
… ah, the things we biographers do in search of empathy with our subjects!)
As for Gottingen, it's a pretty, enough little town, much of which has survived intact since Beddoes' day. My hopes soared, but, apart from viewing his name in the university records, I could find nothing to add to what his own letters tell us of his life there. Sam wrote one of his 'Imagined Scenes' in which Beddoes and Heine, both students at the university and sharing an interest in poetry and radical politics, met and quarrelled, but the dates don't really fit and eventually Sam scored through it on the grounds that even imagination's wings need at least one feather of fact to achieve lift-off.
So all in all, what with the foul weather, the lack of progress, the weighty echt Deutchheit of everything, I grew daily duller and more stupefied, and time seemed to crawl by as if I'd been put into an uncomfortable seat between two fat men with BO at the start of one of Wagner's longer operas sung by an amateur music society and accompanied by a school band, and told there weren't going to be any intervals.
At this juncture I thought how wise you had been, dear Mr Pascoe, to eschew the life academic in favour of the life detective. The mean streets your work takes you down seemed as nothing compared to the gloomy avenues I found myself lost in. No wonder that poor Beddoes with his death fixation opted to spend most of his adult life here. Even now in this age of universal light when it's possible in England or America for a child to grow up in a big city without ever having noticed a star, shades and miasmas and Gothic glooms are available on tap out here. What it must have been like in the early eighteen hundreds pains the imagination! Beddoes sought enlightenment through medicine, that most socially beneficial of sciences, and through support of radical egalitarian movements, but each of these avenues led him back to the same conclusion, that man was a botched creation whose proper domain was darkness and whose only salvation was death.
The longer I stayed there, the closer I could feel myself coming to agreeing with him!
Happily at this juncture the US Embassy in London, with whom I had been in close correspondence since talking to Dwight, now summoned me for interview, so I took my conge with considerable relief!
Not that things improved in England. The weather was foul and the Embassy officials treated me like their Public Enemy No. l, bent on bringing down the Republic. The only good thing was I once again found Frere Jacques in residence at Linda's Westminster pad, and this time, having become such chums, neither of us objected to me bedding down on the couch for a couple of nights. It turned out he was heading north on his promotional tour and, as I wanted to touch base back in Mid-Yorkshire before heading off into the west, he offered me a lift in his hired car as far as Sheffield.
It was an interesting trip. I got the feeling that something has changed for him. Perhaps Frere Dierick's death has something to do with it. I'm sure the man and the monk in Jacques must always have been in delicate balance, and with the removal of that death's head reminder of his commitment to the life celibate, the man is very much in the ascendancy. He talked of Emerald, and I have a strong suspicion that in the very near future he might be contemplating the huge step of changing his vows monastic for vows marital! (I must confess, shame- faced, that I also for a moment entertained a very faint suspicion that perhaps Jacques knew more about the circumstances of Dierick's death than he should do… But I soon thrust this aside. Ungrounded suspicions are a mental cancer. We should trust our friends absolutely, don't you agree, Mr Pascoe?)
What Linda will make of it, I don't know. We shall see.
My stay in M-Y was brief, all too brief, alas, for me to make contact with you. How good it would have been to see you face to face and get direct assurance of the rapport I am psychically convinced my letters are building between us. But I had news of you from one or two common acquaintance, and it was generally good, though dear old Charley Penn, who'd glimpsed you in town, thought you were looking just a little bit peaky. Do take care of yourself, my friend. I know your job necessarily involves irregular hours and takes you out in all weathers, but you're not getting any younger and you mustn't let the indestructible Dalziel overstretch you.
Back to my Great Adventure. At last I left these clouded hills behind and, after an interminable passage through fog and filthy air followed by an even longer passage through the morass of US Immigration, I was greeted by a young god and goddess wearing baseball caps and beaming smiles (literally beaming; dear old Apollonia clearly knows how to honour her devotees!) and waving a banner bearing my name. They turned out to be Dwight's teenage twins, whom he'd sent to meet me, and all my troubles seemed to drop away as they led me, blinking, out into the bright sunshine, and drove me to their lovely home which stands on stilts rising out of a beach of golden sand running down to the deep deep blue of the Pacific ocean. Stout Cortez, I get the message, man!
I spent the first couple of days relaxing and acclimatizing in the bosom of Dwight's family -not literally; this was strictly hands-off territory, though the kids' fondness for skinny-dipping with their friends kept temptation before my eyes. Happily, despite a pleasant air temperature when the sun shines, the ocean is still pretty cold at this time of year and that kept my interest from becoming embarrassing, though maybe Dwight's sharp eye detected something, for once I'd got over my jet lag and was ready to strut my stuff before his publishing friends, he suggested that, now that term was beginning (bit of an earlier start out here than you were probably used to at Oxford – or was it Cambridge? I can't recall), it might be more convenient if I had a room on campus. Nice to think even a modern West Coast liberal academic dad keeps an eye on his kids' virtue.
Being on campus is great, especially as I'm occupying one of the faculty guest suites – not quite as impressive historically as the Quaestor's Lodging at God's, but a lot more user-friendly -and I've been introduced around as a distinguished academic visitor. Dwight got me to sit in on a couple of his classes, then persuaded me to do a seminar on Beddoes' poetry with a specially selected group of students and a few faculty members. It went really well and the students seemed to take to Beddoes in a big way and soon I was getting invitations to talk to all
