charm, what spring in my step (I suffered in my younger days from flat feet), I owe to Ruth. I was not slow to detect, amidst all the actualor implicit interrogation, another, unspoken question (I was used to it): Could I really have been the husband of Ruth Vaughan? What—him?
But here the pathos factor came into play. I was not only the former husband of a well-known actress. I was the former husband of a well-known actress who had died in circumstances publicly reported and lamented and officially labelled (is there no other word?) “tragic.” I was no ordinary widower. A school of thought which held that I should be treated gently—and therefore girded around with a sort of halo of knowing looks and evasions—was largely overruled by the school of thought which held that now was the very time (five months after the event) when I should be encouraged to “talk”—an excuse for fêting me liberally (if you can fête the bereaved) and milking me for the “inside story” I was supposedly bursting to tell.
And in all this, all this being the centre of dubious attention, all I wanted was to be the opposite thing, to be the dowdy, forgotten moth again. Yes, Sam was right—devious revenge or not—I accept that he was right. Perhaps I could never have coped. How much longer could I have gone on, holed up in that Kensington flat, in those roomfuls of memories, a redundant theatrical manager (my sole client had died on me), besieged by the commiserations of stage and screen, by agents, lawyers, morbid hangers-on and prurient journalists. I needed shelter, I needed sanctuary.
The contemplative life.
My period of spurious celebrity here lasted some three months. It carried me through to my mother’s death, which did not have the effect of extending the prerogatives of grief. Rather, it was about that time—summer turning to autumn and a new academic year looming—that my special privileges fell away from me like some ineffective disguise,and I began to be scrutinized for my real credentials. It was then that the general view took hold that my academic qualifications, though not entirely absent, were way below the college standard, and that, Ellison Fellowship or no Ellison Fellowship, I was an impostor.
And it was then that the Pearce manuscripts, which my mother’s death released into my hands, came—in more than one sense—to my rescue. I should explain that the terms of the Ellison Fellowship are generously vague. The incumbent, with all the resources of the College and the University at his disposal, is at liberty to pursue whatever line of scholarly research he wishes. The question of the duties he owes in return is left largely a matter of unwritten agreement. I had already undertaken—primarily to give myself something to do, but also to show willing and spare the College embarrassment—some supervision of students. After a gap of fifteen years, I found myself once more speaking to these strange, young—even younger now—people. (They too blurted out their little condolences.) I flattered myself that my teaching was not ineffective, though how much this depended on my students’, like others’, suspending their usual rigorousness of appraisal, I don’t know. But now I was to understand that because of certain “feelings” in the Faculty (I will come to this) the continuation of my tutorial services was under review.
What was really under review was not my teaching but my whole contribution to scholarship. What exactly was the line of research for which College and Faculty were providing me with such superlative amenities? It looked very much to them—it looks the same to me too (Sam, you bastard!)—that my line of research, apart from a little desultory and random browsing, was doing nothing at all.
But then, with my mother’s death, there was MatthewPearce. There were Matthew Pearce’s notebooks and his last letter to his wife, Elizabeth, which had survived miraculously Uncle Ratty’s
But here the pathos factor came into play. I was not only the former husband of a well-known actress. I was the former husband of a well-known actress who had died in circumstances publicly reported and lamented and officially labelled (is there no other word?) “tragic.” I was no ordinary widower. A school of thought which held that I should be treated gently—and therefore girded around with a sort of halo of knowing looks and evasions—was largely overruled by the school of thought which held that now was the very time (five months after the event) when I should be encouraged to “talk”—an excuse for fêting me liberally (if you can fête the bereaved) and milking me for the “inside story” I was supposedly bursting to tell.
And in all this, all this being the centre of dubious attention, all I wanted was to be the opposite thing, to be the dowdy, forgotten moth again. Yes, Sam was right—devious revenge or not—I accept that he was right. Perhaps I could never have coped. How much longer could I have gone on, holed up in that Kensington flat, in those roomfuls of memories, a redundant theatrical manager (my sole client had died on me), besieged by the commiserations of stage and screen, by agents, lawyers, morbid hangers-on and prurient journalists. I needed shelter, I needed sanctuary.
The contemplative life.
My period of spurious celebrity here lasted some three months. It carried me through to my mother’s death, which did not have the effect of extending the prerogatives of grief. Rather, it was about that time—summer turning to autumn and a new academic year looming—that my special privileges fell away from me like some ineffective disguise,and I began to be scrutinized for my real credentials. It was then that the general view took hold that my academic qualifications, though not entirely absent, were way below the college standard, and that, Ellison Fellowship or no Ellison Fellowship, I was an impostor.
And it was then that the Pearce manuscripts, which my mother’s death released into my hands, came—in more than one sense—to my rescue. I should explain that the terms of the Ellison Fellowship are generously vague. The incumbent, with all the resources of the College and the University at his disposal, is at liberty to pursue whatever line of scholarly research he wishes. The question of the duties he owes in return is left largely a matter of unwritten agreement. I had already undertaken—primarily to give myself something to do, but also to show willing and spare the College embarrassment—some supervision of students. After a gap of fifteen years, I found myself once more speaking to these strange, young—even younger now—people. (They too blurted out their little condolences.) I flattered myself that my teaching was not ineffective, though how much this depended on my students’, like others’, suspending their usual rigorousness of appraisal, I don’t know. But now I was to understand that because of certain “feelings” in the Faculty (I will come to this) the continuation of my tutorial services was under review.
What was really under review was not my teaching but my whole contribution to scholarship. What exactly was the line of research for which College and Faculty were providing me with such superlative amenities? It looked very much to them—it looks the same to me too (Sam, you bastard!)—that my line of research, apart from a little desultory and random browsing, was doing nothing at all.
But then, with my mother’s death, there was MatthewPearce. There were Matthew Pearce’s notebooks and his last letter to his wife, Elizabeth, which had survived miraculously Uncle Ratty’s
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