A Parcel of Fortunes Page 2

  Matthew rose from his chair and said he would make some coffee for them both. In the kitchen, he looked at the familiar painting that his daughter, Daisy, had done of Farewell when she was a child. The colours were approximate, especially the woodwork, and the white Lloyd loom chairs appeared a little wonky. But she had captured perfectly the slim elegance of the craft, and the tapering curve of the stern towards the water.

  Matthew returned to the balcony with the coffees. ‘So, Dad, as I was saying, I quite like the idea of part-retirement. It seems like a good halfway house. But I’m not sure being an archivist is the right thing. What does the historian say?’

  ‘Well, the one-time historian says that anything that keeps the bonce ticking over’ – he tapped his head lightly – ‘has got to be good! What are your reservations?’

  ‘My reservation, I suppose, is that I am not a historian and I feel that an archivist perhaps should be.’

  ‘Well, yes, may be. But arguably an archivist is essentially a collector. The historian is the writer of narrative, where the archivist is not.’ Michael paused a moment. ‘But I don’t think you should feel inhibited from taking the job. In any case, I am sure, Matty, that your literary training would be useful – your study of a text is exploratory, analytical, interpretative…tentative. Ideal qualities.’

  Matthew nodded. ‘True. But what are the distinctive disciplines of the historian, Dad?’

  ‘The analysis of sources, I guess. And the shaping of these into some kind of narrative…which is the antithesis of literary narrative. Novelists and dramatists can invent people and places and events, whereas we historians are bound by what the evidence will support.’

  ‘Sure, but the historian can slant his interpretation of his sources, and presumably has to invent – or at least speculate – where there are gaps in his evidence. When joining two dots, where there are some missing dots in between, he can draw completely the wrong shape.’

  Michael chuckled, and allowed Matthew to continue.

  ‘But picking up on your distinction between literature and history. Plutarch obviously gives us a fuller account of the life of Mark Antony than Shakespeare does, and no doubt, you would say that Plutarch’s is a truer account. But arguably Shakespeare gives us more insight into Antony than Plutarch.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d agree with that. But you are right that the historian’s interpretation of a series of events relies to a certain extent on an act of imagination…I tell you what, Matty, let’s go for a walk. I need to stretch my legs. We’ll continue this.’

  As they walked by the river, Michael spoke animatedly about the grand sweep of historiography, from the works of Herodotus to the more recent musings of E.H. Carr, who had briefly taught him at Cambridge. He explained that Carr had divided facts into two categories: ‘facts of the past’, which he defined as the historical information that historians decided was unimportant, and ‘historical facts’, information that historians deemed important. He contended that historians arbitrarily determined into which category facts fell, according to their biases and agendas. He claimed, in his famous example, that millions of people had crossed the Rubicon, but only Julius Caesar’s crossing in 49 BC had been judged noteworthy by historians.

  Listening to his father as they walked along the towpath, Matthew imagined that this was the way that he spoke to his students. But he did not feel patronised, rather was grateful for the clarity of his father’s ‘tutorial’. In the months ahead, he would often refer back to this afternoon’s discussion, extracting and distilling comments his father had made into protocols of guidance for his role as archivist.

  By the time they approached Marlow lock on their return, the sun was low in the sky, shadows seeping from the ground, the river a ribbon of light. The trees on the far bank and the steeple of All Saints Church were silhouettes now, their reflected inversions smudged by the slight rippling of the water. Further west, the tops of the blackened trees were separated from the gun-metal clouds by a peachy streak of dying light.

  He left his father by his front door, squeezing him tightly as he embraced and kissed him goodbye. ‘Thanks, Dad. You have been brilliant, as ever.’ His father squeezed his arm in reassurance.

  ‘Just a word of caution, Matty. History is never complete…and your archive is bound to have gaps. I know you love completeness, Matty, need it perhaps, and always have since you were a child. I think that is perhaps why you went for literature rather than my discipline – because you are allowed to fill in the gaps left by the author. Because you as reader are in control of your interactions.’

  Matthew wanted to argue, to dispute this most strongly. But it was late. His father was probably tired. So he kissed him once more, thanked him again and took his leave.

  As he drove away, he saw the dim, frail figure of his waving father, diminished by the rear-view mirror and receding rapidly. He wondered how many more such farewells there would be.

  *

  For some days Matthew reflected on his discussions with his father. He was particularly struck by Michael’s comments on E.H. Carr’s History of Russia. In the 1950s it had been admired by Marxist historians as a monumental work of historical scholarship. But more recent verdicts, said Michael, had been negative, damning even, suggesting the work to have been little more than an apologia for Stalin – a piece that highlighted the facts that placed Stalin in a favourable light and ignored the more uncomfortable ones.

  If the writing of history was indeed such a subjective business, open to the vagaries of interpretation and the provisionalities of judgement, then it was not so unlike literary scholarship, thought Matthew.

  And so the following September he took up his role as School Archivist. In the early days he had spent most of his time cataloguing and preparing existing archive items for proper storage: removing ancient paperclips and staples that had stamped their rusty imprint on documents, disposing of the corroded elastic bands that had left their rubbery worm casts behind.

  He was surprised how much he enjoyed the job; bringing order to the haphazard collection proved unexpectedly satisfying. He liked the quiet of the Archive Room, the lack of disturbance; and working his way through the mountain of poorly preserved documents, magazines and photographs had given him a slowly expanding knowledge of the school that he had never had as a teacher. There were always new materials to catalogue, enquiries of various kinds to be answered, the odd tour of the older buildings to conduct. As his first year turned into a second and the second into a third, he continued to make discoveries, working out new connections between what had hitherto been unconnected, seeing the history of the school emerge with increasing clarity and sharpness, like a slowly developing photograph. Most of the discoveries he made were mundane.

  Until one day he uncovered the beginnings of the trail, an enigmatic fragment of letter, which would lead to the visit of Tommy Cooper that morning.

  The discovery had reminded him of his father’s account, four years earlier, of Carr’s classification of ‘facts’. The unimportant facts of the past. Or historical facts, elevated to such status by the whim of professional historians. In following up the stray page of letter that had fallen from a long-buried file, amateur archivist Matthew Agnew was attributing some significance to these cryptic snippets of information. On a whim? A hunch? Idle curiosity? Difficult to tell. In the months to come he would puzzle over the motivations that spurred his quest for a fuller knowledge of the incomplete letter.

  *

  The Agnews left the Headmaster’s drinks party early. Matthew had not yet had the chance to tell Rachel about the visit of Tommy Cooper and wanted to talk it through when they got home, wanted her advice. He relied on her good sense and her equable temperament. She had a natural reticence, the contained nature of a subtle mind that would assess the intricacies of a situation so that it could move to a balanced understanding. She tended to be calmer in her reactions to dr
ama or crisis than Matthew. Sometimes this would infuriate him, when he thought she needed to step up and meet the true scale of the drama. Other times he found her unruffled, measured responses enormously reassuring.

  Her slow and steady apprehension of things was often sharper than his. He liked quick assessment, whereas she favoured considered judgement. On the other hand, she could be quickly and deeply intuitive, seeing in an instant a truth that he might be slowly and reluctantly creeping towards. They counterbalanced each other. ‘We’re two sides of the same coin,’ he sometimes said. ‘And what is the coin?’ she would ask in well-rehearsed routine. ‘A farthing or a golden guinea?’ They would both admit that whatever the coinage, it was somewhat tarnished and chipped with age these days. And although she had never discussed this with Matthew, she had observed in him in recent months a certain uncharacteristic hesitancy, a loss of the old self-confidence.

  As they entered the front door they were greeted by Foxy, their young sheltie. She gave a few joyous bounds around the hall and then an affectionate muzzling against their legs.

  He poured two whiskies, his a larger measure and less watered than hers, and sat beside her on the sofa. As he told her about his strange visitor, he apologised for not telling her about the letter he’d sent some days earlier which, in his view, had triggered the visit of Tommy Cooper.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Matty, what on earth did you do that for? Why? Why? You were told to leave well alone. By me. By your dad. We said that there was nothing to be gained. That it was not your business. You are a fool, Matthew.’

  Matthew was looking in her eyes as she spoke. They were a reliable weather glass of her mood. Her grey and blue and green eyes were the colours of a changing sea; sometimes they suggested the mystery of the sea, sometimes a tempest, but most often a calm clarity. Like a sailor he had learnt to read those colours and chart her moods. Mildly cross, he decided, at the moment.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling. It was silly…But you know me.’

  ‘I do! You never let go. You persist and persist. You’re stubborn. Your imagination…your imagination is over-fanciful. Ridiculously over-fanciful!’ The eyes are smiling now. The sea is calm tonight.

  ‘Do you think I should be worried?’

  ‘No. No, not at all. In any case, what is the point of worrying? Assuming the whole thing wasn’t some silly wind-up and was a real warning, then so long as you heed the warning that is the end of it.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Of course, darling.’

  Rachel’s words could not wholly extinguish Matthew’s anxieties. And in any case, his curiosity had been aroused. What had he stumbled upon?

  *

  As he lay in bed that night turning over the events of the day, the oversized image of his mysterious visitor came at him repeatedly. He thought back to the brief encounter. After Tommy Cooper had told him that Special Branch could ‘magic’ people away, he had made a plosive popping sound with his lips. Matthew had been tempted to thrust his arms towards the man, palms down in the famous Tommy Cooper gesture, and say in a gruff voice, ‘Just like that!’ But he felt that the implied levity might be inappropriate. His harbinger of doom did not seem to be the kind of man who would brook much teasing; he had probably been ribbed a thousand times about his similarity to Tommy Cooper and would long ago have got heartily and perhaps brutally sick of it. On the other hand, maybe in using the word ‘magic’ he was playing up to the similarity, expecting a resulting piss-take. Who could tell?

  Matthew would have preferred to think that his visitor had been the cleverly incompetent Cooper rather than, as he suspected, a Special Branch goon conjured up by a Minister of State at the Home Office, one David Chapman, an alumnus of the school.

  CHAPTER 2

  The spectral figure of Tommy Cooper had flitted through Matthew’s dreams throughout the night. So, setting off for work, he had decided for the time being to banish any thoughts of the man. Later in the day he might look at the file he had been compiling on David Chapman. To check whether anything he had said in his letter might explain or justify the rather extreme response of a Home Office thug being sent down to demand that Matthew ‘desist’. If it really was a Home Office thug. And if indeed the visitation of Tommy Cooper had anything at all to do with David Chapman. For now, more pressing was the need to send off some research notes he had been compiling earlier in the week.

  One of the things that he had quickly learnt was that an archivist, a school archivist at any rate, was more than a mere ‘collector’, which was how his father had described the role when differentiating it from that of the historian. The archivist, Matthew now realised, was also a researcher; and what he did with his researches needed sensitive judgement. The nature and needs of the enquirer sometimes demanded careful selection and tactful editing to spare unnecessary hurt or to forestall the misplacing of an emphasis about a person or an event. And it was in that very selection, that editing – ‘shaping’ his father might call it – that the blurring of truth began. The whole truth and nothing but the truth? Rarely.

  Compiling the research notes that he had been working on earlier in the week had posed a dilemma. Christopher Evans had left the school in 1955, having made very little impression in any sphere of his scholastic life. A career in investment banking had made him a very rich man. And now a brief biography was being written about him by a charitable trust to which he had left a considerable bequest when he had died.

  The salient details of Evans’ dull and mediocre schooldays were readily extracted from his school record. However, it was the small sub-folder at the back of the record that was of real interest (perhaps), and which required an editorial judgement to be made. It concerned a dispute about a hockey stick – trivial enough, you might say – which either had or had not been purchased by the boy at the school shop, which had billed the parents for it. After a tortuous correspondence between the Headmaster and the father, who was becoming increasingly indignant and angry, the boy’s housemaster was brought in. His written submission to the Headmaster confirmed that the boy had not bought a stick at the school shop, instead bringing one back from home. But, said the housemaster, Mr Evans was a tiresome old fellow with form in writing rude letters to the school. And young Evans was a rather obstinate and conceited boy. And a bit of a loner, always in search of friends.

  Matthew was unsure whether to send details of the correspondence. Why send it? It was trivial. Yes, yes, but it did give some insight into both father and son. Important information for a biographer, surely? No? But, just supposing…just suppose that Evans did bring his own hockey stick back, which was the one he had used that term…but that he had also bought the one from the school shop – as adamantly claimed by the shop manager. Just suppose.

  …Matthew sees young Evans, short hair slicked back in 1950s style. He enters the house common room, where his peers are assembling before going to supper in the school refectory.

  ‘Hey, chaps!’ Few eyes turn towards him; they recognise the whiny voice. ‘Listen, chaps, would anyone like a brand new hockey stick?’

  ‘How much?’ A drawling, half-interested voice.

  ‘Nothing. For free.’

  Young Evans is now a focus of attention. The boy closest to him reaches out an arm. ‘I’ll have it.’

  Evans holds it out, with a delighted smile on his face, inviting, pleading friendship. The stick is snatched from him roughly.

  The face crumples. ‘You might say “Thank you”.’ There are groans from the other boys…

  When Matthew asked Rachel for advice, she thought he was being over-fanciful and was going beyond his remit as archivist; she thought that the whole matter was deeply trivial, that the correspondence about the hockey stick was irrelevant and that Matthew’s elaborations were ridiculous.

  ‘You’re not in a position to make your supposition, Matty,’ she’d said. ‘It’s pure speculation. You m
ay be right, you may wrong. It’s one thing editing, another thing entirely speculating in the way you are.’

  ‘But surely the correspondence about the hockey stick is something the biographer needs to see, so that he can decide on its importance. It’s a decision for the biographer, not the researcher, which in effect is what I am. He needs to see everything that is there. Then he can make his own judgements, his own speculations. An impartial historian needs all the evidence he can get. His task is limited if he is reliant on evidence that has already being pre-edited.’

  ‘Evidence? You have no evidence whatsoever for your imagined scenario!…And for goodness’ sake, Matty, you are talking very grandly about a biography which in reality will be little more than a pamphlet offering a mere snapshot of the man. No doubt upbeat and celebratory, without any ambiguities or shades of grey. Hagiography rather than biography!’

  As so often, Matthew took her advice: the correspondence would not be included in the material he sent to the trust.

  Choices. Decisions. Matthew had made those when writing his letter to David Chapman. Had he made the wrong choices, the wrong decisions? The visit of Tommy Cooper had suggested that possibly he had. Or hadn’t.

  *

  He occasionally went for break to the Senior Common Room to maintain some kind of visibility. In the scheme of things, contributing to the school archive was a very low or non-existent priority for most staff. Even when he went for coffee, he was hardly noticed by the majority of them, who were instead grabbing hasty conversations with fellow teachers about pupils and work that could not rely on email communication.

  In former times, when the school was turning out young men to administer the Empire and to spill their blood on the battlefields of Asia and Africa and Europe, the SCR would no doubt have borne some resemblance to a London Gentleman’s Club. Buffed and scuffed leather chairs, heavy well-made tables, portraits on the wall, elegant lamps. The modern age required something more functional. Rows of pigeon-holes, a cluster of computers, white-painted walls to lighten the room. And women teachers, whose civilising influence had helped to dispel the traditional public school ethos, with its silly customs, its barbaric prejudices, its inward-looking elitism. Not that the elitism itself had been banished; it was merely more outward-looking these days, pointing the school’s young leavers towards top universities and well-paid jobs in the City or the Law or medicine or the media. Or government.