Silence Read online

  Charles, her father occasionally introduced the subject of his own accord, though always with the same complaint, young Charles Darwin is a dreamer. Her father said, getting richer. In other ways a steady enough chap, Charles. But a dreamer, her father said.

  These animals interest me very much. Cuvier has arranged them with intestinal worms, though never found within the bodies of other animals. Numerous species inhabit both salt and fresh water; but those to which I allude were found, even in the drier parts of the forest, beneath logs of rotten wood, on which I believe they feed.

  There was nothing interesting in her nature that she knew. But here was her cousin writing to her and when he said he will and must and shall she found this tremendously interesting. In a way it was not the most important thing about Charles. The most important thing was that she did not love him. This was the truth. This was the secret and at any rate another matter. And one that was less important than everybody thinks. Everybody thought she did. But to her own astonishment this time it was the other way around. Somebody had to be loved but not her. She said, that is, people said, the people known to her father said, a truth of such kind no young man must ever discover. A truth of such a kind must not be spoken.

  Yet she wrote again. Anyhow this is her story.

  She wrote again, filling the page with worthy instances. She was a year older. She wrote about the seasickness afflicting him. She had advice. Though she had never been at sea. Do you think not having been at sea would make her say less. Especially for the things he found fascinating. Do any of you know what it is to face the last chance and know it for what it is. Emma had that. So she enthused over his beetles, his worms, his floating islands. Nobody refuses grief.

  When someone is away they cannot be spoken to. Even when there are things not to be said. And of course letters are like the very slow and tactical precautions of chess. His next reply started out from the beginning. Think of it. He wrote to her as if he still had all his pieces on the board. Do you begin to see how tactics come into this story. And the letter came bearing still more Chilean postage stamps that proved he was no closer. An entirely different matter is that this meant she could devour everything he had to say with the same scruples as before.

  This is such an out of the way place. The goldmine, once reached, is an amazing sight. They say the shaft is a hundred and fifty yards deep. Instead of ladders they prop tree trunks hazardously zig-zagging up the sides with notches cut for footholds.

  But to return to the action in the house where Emma’s father grew rich and she grew desperate. This is how it was. She had a queer way of thinking. Like thinking down a microscope because she only thought of one thing at a time and it was mostly little things she must put a name to. She turned this queer kind of thought of hers on Charles.

  Intuition suggested to her that whereas it was wonderful for him to know such a great deal about the world and nature as he did know, it was more wonderful that he knew so little about women. She accepted this. And then. She described him to herself as an instrument to be played on. He was a harp of nerves. At risk because maybe falling into the hands of some woman, some heartless schemer. The heartless schemer might stand between him and his scientific necessities. There are many women who are not married, though some of them are. Some not. And others would say anything to please.

  Labourers carry the rough stone on their backs. Each, loaded with more than his own weight, delivers it to the surface for crushing. I was struck by the pale appearance of the men, many being no more than eighteen or twenty years of age with almost no muscular development. Sweating, they ascend from that great depth up the perilous improvised steps to emerge into the light of the working day. However, I am assured by Mr Nixon, the American who works the mine, that they are not slaves. Their pay, so I am told, is from twenty-six to twenty-eight shillings a month. And they are not allowed to leave the mine more than once in three weeks to spend two days with their families. I know this place must sound harsh to you, but it answers pretty well for the master. And I am not here to judge. I am teaching myself to observe.

  Emma would write back. Most certainly she would. And she would write to absolutely say she was shocked. The conditions at the mine shocked her. And his failure to assure her he had felt outrage might only prove Charles was Charles and not that she was herself. But how could he bear to be shown. So she began her letter.

  At very least, of this oversight you are guilty, she wrote. My father accuses you of being a dreamer. But I think he is wrong. You are a scientist and one of the best, because you have no fear of looking into things.

  However I must protest that I would deplore this neutral passion if it ever came to entail a suspension of the moral imperative.

  She found she could be bold in what she told and what remained untold. She had not come from timid people. Or poor people. Though she was shy. And other things passed by. She accepted that. And why. Every day passing by farther and farther out of reach in reality. Nothing changed. Oh dear no. How should a woman’s loneliness bother anyone at all. She would write everything. She would write to stop herself thinking.

  So think of me at least a little, she wrote, sequestered here in the cool climate of home, obedient to civilised customs, with little to do but watch (right now!) hail dance unheard on the windowsill. My mother has come in and she stands close behind me to read what I am writing. She tut-tuts and asks me to pass on her commiserations. I add to these my prayers for your safe return.

  She covered what she next wrote on the silent page. Nothing could be more vulnerable than this. With her free hand she covered it so he would be the only one to read. Think of this naked covering. Nothing could be more exposed. In particular because this was perhaps the only thing he truly hoped to hear.

  Ah, but the simple truth, she spelled it out in secret, writing under her hand, is that I envy you the liberty to make your own mistakes.

  Knots, ties, etc.

  Silence may be a word or, equally, a word missing (missed, most infamously, when it constitutes consent to cruelty). Cymbeline only agrees to speak so that he cannot be said to have yielded by saying nothing. On the other hand a catastrophe might be too far beyond the reach of words. Likewise joy. Plus, come to think of it, there is a kind of active headache, as many among us know, adept at braiding sounds together in the mute chamber of the brain and twisting them into a knot tight enough to hobble the capacity for thinking straight at all.

  Commander J.Irving’s 1884 revision of Knots, Ties and Splices by J. Tom Burgess (published London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd) steps aside from informing mariners of the day and—through later reprints—truck drivers and others, who might need to secure haulage loads or fellow mountaineers, to offer just one item of advice which implies social, perhaps even political, application.

  ‘In its double shape the running loop, under the name the Tomfool Knot (Fig. 20) has achieved greater renown than almost any other knot of modern times. It is made in the beginning like the running knot (Fig. 21), after which the firm end is passed through the open simple knot so as to form a double loop or bow.’ He proceeds to explain that if a person’s hands or wrists are placed through the open loops C and D, and the latter are then drawn tight and the loose ends tied firmly round the centre, a pair of improvised handcuffs may be made, from which it will need more than ordinary skill or strength to escape. ‘The firmness and security of such a knot depends, however, upon the rope used being well stretched; otherwise a person with small hands would not have much difficulty in releasing himself from this or any other knot made in a rope.’

  Typical, that a book entirely concerned with the practicalities of knot-tying does not once address the symbolic implications of such knots: neither the knot as a hindrance to a woman’s pregnancy (as the Cotton Vitall MS, Cockayne Leechdom I [c.1050] has it: the evil has been done to a man [by a knot] so that he may not enjoy his lusts)—nor the knot as a Christian protection against evil (patently unsuccessful for much of the Middle A
ges)—nor the knot as a cure for warts (as still practised in some dogged corners of Britain)—nor even the Buddhist knot (one of the Eight Auspicious Signs)—let alone that symbol of eternity and much else besides, the Mystic Knot of Vishnu.

  The heart of the matter is that when we undo a knot we are metaphorically reaching the centre, the cabalistic unravelling of thought. Neither Commander Irving nor Mr Burgess, as the case may be, is concerned to tell us anything more than how to tie knots. On the subject of how to untie them they have nothing to say.1

  Come to think of it, there is a kind of active headache adept at braiding sounds together in the mute chamber of the brain, as many among us know, and twisting them into a knot tight enough to hobble the least capacity for thinking straight at all. On the other hand joy might be too far beyond the reach of words. Likewise catastrophe. Cymbeline only agrees to speak so that he cannot be said to have yielded by saying nothing. Silence may be a word missing (missed, most infamously, when it constitutes consent to cruelty) or, equally, just a word.

  1May have ironic application to the book you hold in your hand right now.

  TV reporter

  We are walking among the dried eaten-out turds of a village not in our own country of course—saying at least our television viewers (good evening) are safe from the stench but still agreeing that if you were to be shut up and suffocating for air you’d breathe this gratefully and with relief

  We are photographing the children with distorting cameras that bloat them into abstract works of art—I feel my eyeballs (fingers swollen with regrets) it takes the power of will to look

  Would these be pigs’ turds?—and something incredible there are holes in the ground where things have lived or live—we (walking the baked dust these foreign people venerate) are the very objects we’ve been trying to recognize

  Children watch us silently—there is no word for us

  Noise

  The Duke of Wellington,

  Sydney.

  Friday 22nd.

  My dear cousin,

  I see no way out, I must withhold nothing of the whole tale so far as it is known to me. Even now I am still on my mission to clear up the last details to be yielded by the colony. Having brought to the task my knowledge of our Uncle John, as we have known him since we were boys, your father’s kindness to him and, in turn, your own kindness, the protected life that your family still provides and mine supports. I cannot think you have any idea of the case I am unearthing—other than that, when we used to frighten each other with guesses at the dark secret in his life, we did not imagine a fraction of it. Such hopes as I brought with me that despite his ruined state he might emerge as a pattern of truth, sincerity and decency were deeply, deeply misguided.

  I do not quite know how to write what I need to say next, but I trust you will acknowledge the cost of saying it: I cannot ignore what I have learned, I cannot lay up yet more horrors of the conscience in remaining silent, yet neither do I dare speak of it to any but you. We were very young to hope for something good. Do not be angry with me for saying so. In spirit, in moral decency, as in the conduct of his business, is every man not obliged to be solvent? The decision of what you do is essentially yours, he lives with you. I have reason to know, by this time, that there is no good in him and no prospect for him. Too much evil is in this. Even now I have not a clear idea how deep it goes. I have not the power of counting such things.

  Setting out, I began with what we already knew—his life with us in Gloucestershire—safe and settled, dedicated to surround himself with that constant din which is so maddening to all, driven as he is (no one knew whence or how) by what we have humoured as his eccentricity. His eternal kettle sizzling on the hob, his birds twittering in uncovered cages, his clocks set to different times so they chime continually, erratically and infuriatingly throughout every hour in that corner of your idyllic home I now recognize as hell, the windmill’s offset vanes clattering at the least breeze, wires strung among the trees to whine the whole while, even the creek roaring through his mill race … each piece a part of the puzzle. Imagine the sheer energy needed to equip your garden with all those contraptions we used to think incompetently made because they screeched and knocked. They are as he meant them to be: strident enough to drown out the terrible silence in his mind.

  This is my conclusion. I have begun to understand that he fears the slightest hiccup in the fabric of sound. A mere blip of nothing might be enough to drop him back into the abyss of what he has done.

  It troubled me even as a child, and it troubles me now, more nearly, to witness his loneliness (having what I have to tell) and think what he did to bring it about. You say you are happy to pursue your chosen way of indulgence, even at the cost of the anxiety he occasions in you. But I must warn you of the reason behind these eccentricities, his madness as I now prefer to call it, which you have a right to know. The cold and irrevocable Nemesis, the blight ruining everything it rests on, is Guilt. He did not return home from the colonies of his own free will. He escaped. Stage by stage, imagine: using a false name he bribes his way aboard ship and then works his passage. At the first foreign port he finds work as an overseer on a rubber plantation where natives milk the trees for a Malacca-based company, but it seems that even the lowliest labourers soon sense a secret crime and speak of him as The Man with a Hole for a Head. I have it firsthand. He vanishes for a year until he arrives on your father’s doorstep and is welcomed in.

  That’s when he knew he had got away with it.

  Society, which has taken upon itself the general arrangement of the whole system of filling its coffers at the cost of human freedom for others (whether convicts or slaves) did not deliver the expected returns for our Uncle John. It did not enrich him as promised. So he, with misdirected energy, came to seize what he thought of as his due. You may imagine how grieved I am to write these words. It went wrong. Hence he escaped, hence he must hide from his guilt at the bottom of your garden and build around him a shield (incidentally) of the comforts of clean linen, cups of tea and almshouse duties, having reassumed his family name and been welcomed with kindness by your family and mine, also (essentially) that shield of noise. Oh, how the threat of quiet must besiege him with deadly persistence. Our parents had the delicacy to accept that, for whatever reason, he was a man in hiding within himself. Many’s the time I’ve eavesdropped on whispered family conferences. Fearful lest the least probe into the what or when of his condition might trigger a fit of madness in him, the snarls and screeches of some horrid tale of colonial isolation and hardship, they behaved as if nothing was amiss, at least so far as to write each Christmas to his parents back in New South Wales assuring them he was safe and well. And what did those parents—their sister and brother-in-law—write back? Nothing. That is to say, a great deal of inconsequential prattle: but nothing of the truth, the whole of which they undoubtedly knew. I should like to have questioned them while here, such is my anger, though of course both are now dead. Meanwhile your father took him in and humoured him with superfluous duties till he grew middle aged, stately, fat and popular with children—especially us boisterous ones.

  But what must he have been going through ever since he sold himself to the Enemy? What must he still?

  Like as he is to be seen nightly, staring into the moon’s blind eye, what he hears is what no other mortal can hear: the startled cries of Aboriginal women, himself reining in his horse while he turns in the saddle to face the men he leads, men who have agreed ‘to teach these savages a lesson they will not forget’ and who still remember him as a spirited lad. One of them rallied to bring the sight alive for me, saying he ‘wore his triumph like I don’t know what, sir, a crown’. Well, cousin, those ‘savages’ had turned out to be a harmless few, twenty-eight people in all, taking refuge from the heat of the day, found seated in the shade around their little cooking fires. What he lives with is knowing that, even so, he spurred his horse and urged the fellows with cutlasses to follow. Nightmare upon nightmare he mu
st hear again the whisk of his service sword, blood as I was told ‘guttering’ from an old man’s throat, a heartbroken female tenderly murmuring to a bloodied child ‘for all the world like a mother’. That’s the account of it as witnessed by two who were there. His fellows, convict labourers assigned to neighbouring properties, hacked away at their work (among them a black African from Liverpool), their horses ‘stumbling among sticky stones’. Some must have leapt down because their ‘daggers flashed in the sunlight’. The victims shrieked until there was no more shrieking and the only sound was the sizzle as ‘chunks of the corpses, hands and heads chopped off, were thrown on the flames’. How those shrieks must burrow and go on burrowing into his brain!

  Be it what it may have seemed at the time, this chopping and burning of the bodies constituted proof, of course, and a form of confession, as you must see for yourself. Regardless of how ignorant he probably was when setting out at the head of his party, by then Uncle John knew he had committed a crime. A court case ensued, which proved anything but straightforward. Indeed the issue went to trial twice, thanks to the perseverence of the governor, Sir Geo. Gipps, and these details have been witnessed. He (Uncle John) trusted to fire to obliterate all trace of his victims, identity impossible to reconstruct from charred lumps and smashed bones of assorted sizes, the evidence reduced to a stench, airborne and swirling away as greasy smoke … all gone by the time the Sydney investigator arrived at the scene.

  His men, nonetheless, were charged and bound over and the governor saw to it that seven were hanged. It was so famous a case it brought the colony to the brink of revolution because the killing of natives would henceforth be punishable as murder. But our Uncle John was nowhere to be found nor apprehended, leaving his illiterate fellows to bear the blame. Thus began his unthinkable flight—a gentleman wanted by the law—riding off alone with his mother’s prayer that he might survive to seek refuge in a neighbour’s cupboard or under stairs, and each at a different house, in hay sheds and lofts and—who knows?—under beds, then to the best of my belief in a boat paddling down the Gwydir River and sleeping out, a gift of gold sovereigns hidden in his socks, till he reached the fringes of Sydney town. Such is the haunted picture he presents, desperate, grubby and unshaven, an iron barrier between him and decent society, which nothing now could remove. Scouring the quay for a skipper disreputable enough to sign him on (no pay, in return for no questions asked, so it seems), he found one. Even as his ship cleared the Heads, how can it be otherwise than that he knew it was futile to congratulate himself that his mother’s prayers had been answered: God could not now possibly exist.