Читать книгу Serendipity - Marcus Attwater - Страница 4

It is late July and the weather is hot. The heat is not of the muggy English variety with thunder at the end, but the Mediterranean kind: clear blue skies and unrelenting sunshine. There haven’t been more than a few drops of rain for weeks, and the air outside smells of hay, not because there are any farmer’s fields nearby, but because the grass is drying where it grows. This is deckchair-in-the-garden weather, it is not the time for old books and deep thoughts. But here I am, in the library, writing. I chose the library not through some authorly conviction that it is the best place to work – it is not very well stocked in any case – but because, bar standing at the bottom of the garden with your phone in the air, it is the only room in this place with a decent internet connection, and I want to fill the gaps in my account as quickly as possible.

What I had intended to write during the holidays – if the weather had been more conducive to rational thought, and I had not become hopelessly tangled in my subject – was an article on the lost boys of Greek myth. Very briefly, my thesis was this: after centuries of church-led heteronormativity and decades of feminist enlightenment we expect stories to be about men and women. In any given story, we assume male-female relationships – sexual and familial – to be the most important ones. But Greek myth, of which we still have so much, originates in a society in which women were simply less important than men, and consequently relationships between men would receive the most attention. This means that our view of their stories is skewed (or even more skewed than we already realise). Sometimes we just may not get the point. Sometimes we elevate a less important aspect of the tale at the expense of what earlier tellers found significant. And that is just the stories we still tell. We have also had centuries of selection, of deciding what to include in the introduction, the dictionary, the notes to Homer and Virgil. And it is the stories about love and friendship between men which have suffered disproportionally from this selection. We remember Ariadne, whom Theseus knew only briefly, and we forget Pirithous, with whom he shared his life. There must be stories we do not know at all.

The problem is that ‘lost’ is the operative word here. When one’s argument depends on what is not there anymore, or at best overlooked, it is hard to build a decent case. I couldn’t decide what form the article should take, where the emphasis should be. I wanted to write about the stories themselves, but also about how they are shaped by our expectations and engagement. I didn’t want to import a lot of social history, since it was the myths I really needed to talk about, but I found myself writing about politics and patriarchy. The piece was growing longer and longer and I was liking it less and less. In the end I pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind and decided to do something else entirely. I went to Attwater House.

I had already decided to come here for a short stay, and it would be a good opportunity to find out something more about my not-quite-ancestor, the last Lord Attwater. This house used to be his, before it became a friendly everything-cared-for hotel for people who want to get away from it all, including television and social media. It is a little staid, truth be told: I am by some margin the youngest person here, and I am nearer forty than thirty now. But it is a wonderful place to work, uninterrupted by anything except meals and walks in the park.

I knew the first time I came here that I was distantly related to the Attwaters who had lived in the house in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the last lord’s biographer contacted me that I became interested. In fact, Tilda Norman never actually became his biographer, because she decided the life of this obscure English lord mostly taken up by various intellectual pursuits wasn’t going to be of interest to the modern public (‘not enough enemies and not enough sex’ was how she put it when we met). Attwater knew some other mildly interesting people (one of whom, the man he shared lodgings with in London early in the century, was described by Tilda as ‘ridiculously elusive’), wrote some articles which are known to the select few who study, say, dithematic Germanic names or the genealogy of the house of Navarre, and all in all appears to have been the kind of dedicated scholarly amateur occasionally thrown up by well-to-do English families. The only really startling thing about his life is that he was not English at all. He was born the only son of Grand Duchess Adelejda of Zugd, heir to a tiny eastern European principality which was annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1900, when the Grand Duchess and her son escaped to England to continue their lives in exile. The title of Lord Attwater he inherited through his paternal grandmother, who was English (it was her grandfather who was also my ancestor).

Having learned that I could not help her, and having decided there was not going to be a book in it after all, Tilda kindly let me have the material she had collected: a few photographs, a bundle of things Attwater himself had written, and some letters he received from others. There are two or three autobiographical pieces from his early years in London, neatly typed, the articles he published in various journals, and several small notebooks with jottings in his distinctive handwriting (very small and round, nothing like the sloping cursive hand taught in English schools). They are the rough drafts of articles and letters, with the odd poem and other not obviously connected material, such as sketches of family trees. His way of working and putting down his thoughts appears very familiar to me, and for that reason I don’t really like to look in the notebooks. I certainly wouldn’t enjoy having anyone look in mine, and it feels intrusive reading the thoughts Lord Attwater meant only for himself. But I brought the notebooks with me when I came here, with the idea of at least roughing out a chronology of his life, and it was a list of names in one of them which first caught my eye. It consisted of the titles of some tragedies by Euripides, not all of them extant: Hippolytus, Chrysippus, Phaethon, Hippasus. Seeing them there together I laughed out loud, startling the only other person using the library. Who would have thought? Returning to the references for Attwater’s published articles Tilda had given me, it turned out there was one from 1921 titled In search of ‘Hippasus’: new light on a forgotten story. Attwater had, nearly a century ago, collected all the evidence for one of my lost boys. But although I found the article fascinating, I was still determined to let the modern interpretation of Greek myth rest for the time being, and I put it aside to see if I could find out more about Attwater’s family and his life in England.

Despite the period furnishings of the house (if one does not inquire too closely which period), I wasn’t really expecting to find evidence of Attwater’s life still lying around here. But since this is obviously a house with a history, and those staying here are generally of the type who are interested in that kind of thing, there is a lot of documentation available downstairs in the guests’ lounge. In particular there is a scrapbook, meticulously assembled in the time before glossy brochures, let alone websites, with newspaper cuttings and photographs featuring the house and its inhabitants. Looking through this, and already disappointed it had no pictures of Lord Attwater himself, I lingered on the pages documenting the 1910s and 20s, the time I knew he had actually lived in the house. The most striking picture on any of these pages was a small snapshot of a very young man, standing in front of what must be the same copper beech which still graces the garden (the corner of the house is just visible in the background). He is dressed in a fairly close-fitting white jumper and trousers, and is loosely holding a cricket bat. His hair (hard to judge the colour in faded black and white) is sticking up slightly at the back, and he looks a bit startled, as if he has only just noticed the photographer and hasn’t made up his mind yet. There is no hint of a smile on his lips, but although the overall impression is of someone a little lost, he does not look unhappy about it.

The person who compiled the scrapbook has titled it ‘cricket in the garden, 1920s’, but there is no indication who the boy might be and who else was at the cricket (I don’t think Attwater played). The other photos on the same page are no help. One shows a whippet-like dog lying alert on the steps to the front door, the other a woman getting out of a car in front of the same steps. This one is out of place, since judging by the car and style of dress, it was taken some years before the war. Under it the same hand has written ‘Lady Attwater visiting her son’. Clearly whoever was kind enough to create this book for their guests wasn’t going to be put off by a lack of knowledge. The family resemblance confirms that the woman in the photograph is indeed Attwater’s mother, but the Grand Duchess was never Lady Attwater. Remarkably, to judge from the rest of the available documentation, the new owners of the house appear not to have known about their predecessor’s origins. So where finding more about Attwater was concerned, all this wasn’t much use. But the photo of the boy was intriguing. It was also coming unstuck at one corner, and it was the easiest thing in the world to tease loose another and see if there was anything written on the back. There was, in a small neat script I had already come to recognise:

Pip, May 1920

Detaching it completely, I brought the photograph into the manageress’s office, begged the use of the scanner they do not admit to having, and made a copy of both sides. I then cut out the copy, pasted it into the scrapbook, and tucked the original print in one of Attwater’s notebooks. Well, I thought that was where it belonged.

Curious about this boy’s identity, I looked again in Tilda’s notes. The years just after the war appear to have been lonely ones for Attwater. His friend Baumann was in London trying to convince shell-shocked soldiers that civilian life was worth living. Balthasar Horner was in Egypt excavating a tomb that would have been famous if Howard Carter hadn’t come along. And although he was in regular touch with his cousin Ragnvald in Denmark, otherwise Attwater’s acquaintances were few. It should be easy enough to find anyone nicknamed Pip (presumably Philip), and it was, once I had remembered the habit of men of that time and class to refer to each other by their last names. (Lord Attwater, rather splendidly christened Athalaric Miroslav Emmanuel, seems to have left his given names behind in Zugd, although he would admit to Emmanuel if pressed, presumably because it sounded the least barbaric to English ears.) Once I had taken last names into account, there really was only one option: J. Whitburne-Phillips, who was, according to Tilda, a student Attwater was coaching through the first part of his tripos at Cambridge in 1919-20.

Armed with a name, I determined to pursue my quest. Here the local history collection in the lounge came in useful. There were two sets of Whitburne-Phillipses living in Oxfordshire between the wars: the elder branch, land-owners in the southern part of the county, close to Attwater House, and the younger branch, importers of quality coffee and tea with offices in London, Calcutta and Colombo. Both had a J. Whitburne-Phillips in the right generation: Julian, born in 1902 to the elder branch, and Jonathan, born in 1899 to the younger. I thought the boy in the photograph must certainly be Julian. If it was taken in 1920 the age seemed to fit, and at eighteen he could have been in his first year at Cambridge.

(As an aside, one of the odd consequences of Attwater’s life in two parts is that I don’t know his year of birth. Tilda thought he must have been around 40 in 1920, although in the only picture she found which was taken around that time – leaning on the parapet of a bridge, jauntily hatted – he looks younger.)

I was enjoying my detective work now, and I returned to Attwater’s notebooks with a new purpose. There was little of a personal nature in the notes for the post-war years, but I did find the draft of a letter to his cousin Ragnvald which seemed relevant, and which from the context I dated to late 1919. It wasn’t a continuous piece, but a collection of unconnected passages, some written hurriedly, others neat and clearly thought out. That is how Attwater usually wrote: fluent but contextless paragraphs which only became joined into a whole when he typed the final version. I had noticed that similarity with my own working methods already when I looked at the ideas for his articles.

It appears he intended to open the letter to his cousin with a quotation from Plato’s Symposium, but unfortunately, he did not indicate which bit, just started in medias res with a confident ‘I finally know what Plato meant’. The next sketchy paragraph appears to indicate that he is talking about the relationship between a grown man and a younger one, and that he means by this a non-erotic passion (‘platonic’ in the true sense), and is not just being reticent out of consideration for his reader (Ragnvald, in any case, would not have been offended by the notion). With this in mind, the next passage (if they are in the right order at all) is worth quoting in full:

That my mood should change after the years of mourning, that there would in the end be some sort of contentment, that I had expected. But to find a different kind of joy, one I am almost reluctant to accept, so fearful and fragile does it appear, that I could never have foreseen. In sadness – that of myself and others’ – and endurance I had forgotten that happiness comes unlooked for (although I had remembered that it leaves unasked), and now I find myself startled into it by something intended to be no more than a useful way to pass the time. To be, in a small way, responsible for someone else’s well-being, to have someone learn from one, to be of consequence to another, more than anything accounts for my present optimism.

At the bottom of the page there is a sentence in brackets, perhaps not intended to be included in the eventual letter:

(It is my gratefulness that he escaped the horrors of that war which makes me realise how deeply I care for him.)

It is his distancing mention of ‘that war’ which makes me suspect that the years of conflict and Attwater’s ‘years of mourning’ did not quite coincide. He is talking about personal grief here as much as of the hardships and losses shared by the country. And it was not a death in battle he mourned, but the loss of friendship, as the companion of his London years, Felix Baumann, slipped away into another life at the start of the war. There is in Attwater’s notebook for 1915 a little poem called Absent without leave which marks the end of his auto-biographical writings. As Tilda had found, there is nothing more known about his personal life after that but what can be gleaned from the surviving letters to his cousin, including this one about his feelings for someone who ‘could learn from him’.

So that was it. A fairly innocent passion of a tutor for his pupil, of which the pupil was probably not even aware. Another biographical fact unearthed, and Tilda was surely right to think that the sales potential of Attwater’s life was small, if this was what counted for excitement. Back to reconstructing medieval family trees.

But things didn’t quite add up, and that bothered me. Attwater’s relief at the boy’s safety is palpable, but since Julian was fifteen or sixteen when the last conscripts were called up he could hardly be said to have made a narrow escape. There was also the matter of his university career. There is a family history of the Whitburne-Phillipses on the shelves here – a vanity project I am quite possibly the first to consult – which records Julian as gaining a double first at Oxford – the wrong university, and apparently hardly in need of coaching. He married in 1926, and his grandson still lives in Whitburne Hall, quite near here. Although people change, and there is perhaps something familiar around the eyes, a photograph of him in his sixties doesn’t much resemble the one of Pip. Those were the awkward facts. Less tangibly, I found it hard to believe from what I knew of Julian Whitburne-Phillips that he could have moved Attwater deeply enough to tell Ragnvald about it. I didn’t want Pip to be this prosperous but unremarkable, rather boring elderly gentleman.

So what about the other one, Jonathan, the one I had thought too old to be the boy in the picture? According to the family history, Jonathan Whitburne-Phillips joined his uncle Francis in the office in Ceylon to ‘learn the ropes and see something of the world’ in the summer of 1920. There is no more information included after that, which may mean that no more is known, or that he or his descendants didn’t want any more included. There is no mention of his education at all. But the dates would fit if he had decided after a difficult year that the university was not a good choice, and he would join the family firm instead.

But could the boy in the picture really by twenty or twenty-one? I supposed his slightness and wide-eyed expression could be misleading. But that did not explain how, born in 1899, he had escaped conscription. That is where I simply ran out of information. The only real reason a boy of his age would not be called up was illness, and so I can only suppose that he was unwell for a long period in 1916 or 1917.

The only other odd fact, which I deduced from the family tree, was that his parents divorced in 1912, a rare and scandalous occurrence back then. His mother returned to her native Boston, while Jonathan and his two older sisters remained in England. Their father remarried in 1915, and although this marriage is mentioned, the divorce is not alluded to in the text, which even a hundred years later appears at pains to show the family with its attics empty of madwomen and its cupboards skeleton-free. Did that mean that anyone not discussed in the text was automatically a black sheep? Was there something odd about the way Jonathan and his sisters were conspicuously left out? Whatever the case, I found the notion of a young man slightly out of step with his contemporaries easier to square with the wide-eyed boy from the picture than his more successful cousin. He looks like a boy who would appeal to one’s protective instincts. But if Jonathan was ‘Pip’, and if Pip was the boy Attwater cared for so much, he sailed from Ipswich a month after the picture was taken.

I wondered what Attwater felt about his charge taking ship for the other side of the world. Understandably, given the fate of his own country, Attwater distrusted the empire’s expansive ambitions and its patronising attitude towards the natives (he detested Kipling). To have one of his friends become a cog, however small, in its vast colonial apparatus would not have been easy for him. I toyed with the idea that Attwater’s reading of Sanskrit epic around this time was connected to his friend’s leaving for the east, but really, the interest may well have predated any plans Pip could have had for leaving, and for someone interested in Greek myth and Indo-Germanic languages, Sanskrit epic would have appeared on the horizon sooner or later. There is even less indication of how Jonathan felt about leaving England and his friends behind. Attwater House may be quite imposing and the family which lived here was clearly prosperous, but it is still hard to think of it as anyone’s Brideshead.

The only and rather indirect evidence for how Attwater felt about the boy’s absence lies in his reconstruction, published the next year, of the story of a young man slightly out of step with his contemporaries, who may have left for the east. Rereading his article, I realised that what I was doing now, trying to reconstruct a life from a few disconnected scraps, was not really different from what Attwater himself had done for the myth of Hippasus. And I suddenly knew what I should be writing. Instead of giving a rational account of the lost boys, instead of trying to convince people they are worth remembering as part of our own history, I should just be trying to find them. Not because their stories are useful or interesting or relevant, but because my not-quite-ancestor cared, and so do I.