The Meaning of Night

resemblance to slabs of the darkest chocolate. In these my mother would commit her thoughts by bending even closer to the page than she was wont to do when engaged on her literary work, for the leaves were small – no more than three or four inches square, requiring her to adopt a minuscule hand for the purpose. Why she had chosen willingly to put herself to so much trouble – the note-books were made especially for her by a stationer in Weymouth, which seemed a most uncharacteristic luxury – I never knew. A dozen or more of these miniature volumes now stood, line astern, on one side of the working space, held in formation at the edge of the table by the rosewood box that had once contained my two hundred sovereigns.

On a whim, I thought I would just look into one of these diminutive black books before retiring. I had never before known what they contained, and a rather anxious curiosity – I cannot account for the slight tingle of nervous anticipation that I felt as I walked over to the table – began to rouse me from the drowsiness that had begun to come over me as I had sat by the dying fire, reading Lord Rochester’s eloquent bawdy.

I took the first of the note-books from its place and undid its silk ribbon. Placing it beneath the candle’s light, I opened the hard black cover, and began to read the tiny characters that had been pressed onto the page from top to bottom with so much care and deliberation. They told of my mother’s last weeks at Church Langton before she and the Captain moved to Sandchurch. Intrigued, I read on for a few more pages, then closed the volume and picked up another. I continued thus, looking into one of the tiny books, and then moving on to its fellows, for near an hour. It was approaching eleven o’clock when I thought that I would put my nose into just one more volume before I went to bed.

The first two pale-yellow leaves contained little of particular interest, consisting mainly of brief and inconsequential resumes of daily activities. I was on the point of closing the volume and picking up the next when, flicking forward, my eye lighted on the following passage:That this is folly, sheer fatal folly, I know only too well. All my feelings revolt against it, everything that I hold sacred is appalled by the prospect. And yet – it is asked of me, & I cannot dash the cup from my lips. My nature is not my own, it seems, but must be press’d into shape by another’s hand – not God’s! We spoke at length yesterday. L was tearful at times, at others angry and threatening of worse than even what is proposed. Can there be worse? Yes! And she is capable of it. He wd not be home that night & this wd give us more time. After dinner L came to my room again and we cried together. But then her resolve return’d & she was all steel & fire once more, cursing him with a vehemence that was horrible to behold. She did not depart until first light, leaving me exhausted by her rage so that I did not return from E— to here until pm today. The Captain not in evidence and so made no mention of my lateness.

The passage bore a date: ‘25.vi.19’.

To gaze so fixedly upon my mother’s private journal seemed a gross intrusion; but I found I could not bring myself to secure the silk ribbon again and confine the contents to obscurity. For, being a journal or personal chronicle of some kind, then it must contain something of truth about her, something hidden but authentic about the little hunched and distracted figure, constantly writing, of my childhood memory. I felt impelled to uncover what lay behind the words that I had just read, even if it led to the postponement of my own plans to begin making my way in the world.

But what truth informed this enigmatic passage eluded me completely. For this was not simply a record of events, as earlier entries had been, but of some impending crisis, speaking of deep inward searching, the roots of which, it seemed, were as yet impossible to conjecture. A subsequent passage, dated a few days later, whilst clearer in its detail, appeared equally impenetrable to immediate interpretation:L’s appearance today, so wild & unexpected, at the door, was a great disturbance, made worse by Beth coming down the stairs just as she arrived, to hear her knocking furiously like the Devil himself. Beth asked if the lady was ill but I sent her off to fetch a drink as soon as I got L into the parlour & when she return’d L was as composed & gracious as you like. He had come back but had refus’d her again —& this time something more and terrible had happened that she wd not say but which had open’d up a new chasm between them. I saw the rage begin again and urged her with much tender anxiety to quieten herself – which she did in a little while. She had come all this way to tell me – trusting nothing but her own whispered words as she always does – that Mme de Q was to be in town next Mon. & Tues. & that I shd expect to hear something more quite soon thereafter.

Who was ‘L’? Who was the man so clearly referred to: the Captain, or someone else? And what of ‘Mme de Q’? I was now wide awake, held in an iron grip by what I had read. I tried to connect the memory of my mother’s quiet and industrious life to these clear intimations of some looming climacteric, in which she had become involved; but I quickly gave up, and began to read on, urgently scanning the tiny yellow pages, to see whether some light could be shed on this mystery.

And so it began. I opened another little black book, then another, in a kind of dazed concentration, alive to the strangeness of what I was reading but transfixed, until my eyes were wearied. At last, looking up as the second or third candle I had lit began to gutter, I saw that a pink arc of light was creeping above the line of horizon beyond the parlour window. A new day had broken, for the world beyond, and for me.

^*[‘Revelation’. Ed.]

^†[In the Rue de Richelieu. Ed.]

^‡[In the Rue Vivienne: ‘a great resource to the Englishman in Paris’, according to Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in France (new edition, 1844). Ed.]

^*[A Hand-book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor and Constantinople (John Murray, 1840). Ed.]

^*[Vasily Stepanovich Sopikov, book dealer and author of a standard essay on Russian bibliography. Ed.]

^*[I have not been able to identify ‘Professor S—’ and am unable to say why the author chose to respect his anonymity. He seems to have been involved in some rival enterprise to the expeditions to Nimrud of Austin Henry Layard (1817–94) that did not materialize. Ed.]

^†[The accounts of tours undertaken in 1836 and 1838 and written for the Royal Geographical Society by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–95). Ed.]

^*[William Fox Talbot (1800–77), British pioneer of photography. He had been working on producing ‘photogenic drawings’ since 1835. A paper on his ‘photogenic’ techniques was read to the Royal Society on 31 January 1839. He patented his improved ‘calotype’ or ‘talbotype’ process for making negatives in 1841. Ed.]

^*[Travels in Assyria, Media and Persia (1830) by James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855). Ed.]

^*[In Thessaly, northern Greece, at which Julius Caesar defeated the Senatorial forces of Pompey in 48 BC. Ed.]