Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

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. ]

16

Labor vincit *

Later that morning, I heard Tom’s knock on the front door. When I opened it to him, I did not have to feign exhaustion.

‘My dear fellow,’ he said stepping in and helping me back to my chair by the fireplace, where I had fallen asleep, fully clothed, only an hour before. ‘What is the matter? Shall I call for Dr Penny?’

‘No, Tom,’ I replied, ‘no need for that. I shall be right as rain soon, I’m sure. A temporary indisposition only.’

He sat with me for a while as I took a little breakfast. Then, noticing the copy of Buckingham’s book lying on the window-seat, he asked whether I had thought more about the expedition to Mesopotamia. He could see from the evasiveness of my reply that my interest in the project had lessened, but was friend enough to say that he expected I would see things differently when the indisposition had passed. But I could not let him think so, and told him straight out that I had definitely fixed against joining Professor S—in Nimrud.

‘I’m sorry to hear it, Ned,’ he said, ‘for I think it was a promising opening, with much to gain in all respects. Perhaps you have other possibilities in view for earning a living?’

I had not often seen Tom angry with me, but I could not blame him for feeling somewhat put out. The prospect of adventure and advancement in the field of archaeology had only been a temporary passion, and I should have squashed it firmly underfoot at the start, in fairness to Tom. I tried to mend the mood by saying that I was also considering an opening at the British Museum, but then spoiled it by adding that this, too, might not be quite suitable for me at the present time.

‘Well, then,’ said Tom, standing up to go, ‘I shall write to the Professor. Good morning, Ned. I hope to see you improved soon.’

I took the unspoken reprimand in his parting words without reply, and stood at the window gloomily watching him make his way back down the path to the village.

I should never now see Mesopotamia, and Great Russell-street would have to get on without me. For I was being drawn irresistibly back to the little black books that now lay scattered across my mother’s work-table. The urge to discover the meaning of what my mother had written was to grow ever stronger, and soon became all-consuming, leading inexorably to ends of which I could not then have conceived.

The decipherment of my mother’s journals and papers – for that, in effect, is what it became – began in earnest the next day, and continued in its first phase almost unabated for two or three months. Tom had departed to spend some time with a cousin in Norwich, feeling no doubt that it was best, for both of us, to leave any further discussions concerning my future to some later date. And so I remained indoors, alone and undisturbed, except for brief daily visits from Beth, and devoted myself night and day to my task, only occasionally leaving the house for a day or so to hunt out information that I needed to explain, or to confirm some reference or other.

Besides assiduously committing her private thoughts to her journals, it had been my mother’s habit, in all her practical dealings, never to throw anything away; accordingly, there were innumerable items – bills, receipts, tickets, odd scribbled notes, lists, correspondence, drafts, memoranda – all bound together in bundles on that battlefield of paper. Through these I now also began to pick, piece by piece, day by day, night by night. I sifted, collated, sorted, categorized, deploying all the skills of scholarship, and all the gifts of intellectual application and assimilation at my disposal, to reduce the mass to order, to bring the light of understanding and fixity to bear on the fleeting, fluid shadows in which the full truth still lay hidden.