Jackson's Dilemma Read online

  Benet’s father, now long deceased, had been Uncle Tim’s younger brother. Benet’s paternal grandfather, a lover of the classics, had named his elder son Timaeus and his younger son Patroclus; appellations which were promptly altered by their owners to Tim and Pat. Benet (who narrowly escaped being called Achilles) called his father Pat and of course his mother Mat. Benet’s full name was William (after William Penn) Benet Barnell. He had early suppressed the William and of course rejected Ben. The origin of Benet, passionately clung to by its owner, was not clear, except that it had something to do with his mother and with Spain. Pat always claimed that he, Pat, was unlucky and ‘put down’. However he made what seemed to be a sensible, even happy, marriage with sweet Eleanor Morton, daughter of an amicable solicitor, and training to be a singer. However Pat did not like music. He was also, as Benet soon found out, dissatisfied with his son. He wanted a daughter. He once asked Benet if he would like a little sister, to which Benet shouted ‘No, no, no!’ In any case no more children came. Pat’s ill luck continued. Eleanor died quite early on in a car crash, Pat driving. Pat himself, a dedicated smoker, died of lung cancer, by which time Benet had grown up, had left the university, where he had studied philosophy, and followed his father into the Civil Service. Benet had loved his parents and regretted later that he had not revealed his love more openly. Remorse.

  Uncle Tim (he did not marry, neither did Benet) was for Benet, and indeed for others, a romantic and somewhat mysterious figure. He had been involved in ‘various wars’. He had left the university without a degree but had been (this much was known) a talented mathematician. He became, using this talent no doubt, an engineer, and somehow thereby came in contact with India, where he then spent much of his life, returning at intervals to England. During his absences Pat ‘took over’ Penndean, but more often, to Benet’s chagrin, rented it.

  Nobody quite discovered what Uncle Tim did in India, after his war, except perhaps building bridges. Perhaps they simply did not ask him; even Benet, who adored him, did not ask him until late in his life when Tim gave him what sometimes seemed to Benet strange answers. Pat used to say that his brother had ‘gone native’. Uncle Tim more than once asked his family to visit India and to see the Himalayas. Benet longed to go but Pat always refused. Late and at last Uncle Tim started spending longer and longer times at Penndean and then settled down there altogether.

  Thinking of the books, Benet recalled how Tim, who, though no scholar, loved reading, used to utter, again and again, his ‘quotes’ or ‘sayings’, ‘Tim’s tags’ lines out of Shakespeare, sentences out of Conrad, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘Another step Mr Hands, and I’ll blow your brains out.’ When he was dying Benet heard him murmur, ‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.’ Of course Benet had had his classical education, but had inclined to the philosophical side. His sense of the Greeks had come to him later, distantly from memories of his grandfather, and from Tim and Tim’s books. In a strange way the books, which were indeed not all ‘classics’, were somehow deeply soaked in some spirit of the Ancient World. Benet had sometimes tried to analyse this atmosphere, this rich aroma, this trembling resonance, this wisdom, but it eluded him, leaving him simply to bask within it. He recalled now, something which Tim liked to picture again and again, the moment when Caesar, angry with the Tenth Legion, addressed them as Quirites (citizens), not as Commilitones (fellow soldiers)! Benet, even as a child, instantly shared the grief of those devoted men as they hung their heads. There were some magic things which these books and utterances had in common. A favourite inner circle, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lord Jim, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, Kim. Tim also liked Kafka, which might have seemed strange, but on reflection Benet understood that too.

  Pat used to say of Tim that he remained ‘absolutely childish’. This was perhaps an aspect of his character which Benet saw rather as a heroic romanticism. Some years ago Benet, accidentally talking to an Indian diplomat at a Whitehall party, mentioned casually that his uncle worked in India, and was amazed to find that the diplomat had heard of Tim. He said of him, ‘Dotty, crazy, but brave as a lion.’ Benet was sorry that he had then lost track of the diplomat, not having even discovered his name. Tim’s books were indeed adventure stories, as Benet saw them in his own childhood; but as he grew up he saw more in his uncle and his tales, a sort of warm ringing undertone, a gentle compassionate light or sound, an awareness of the tragedy of human life, good and evil, crime and punishment, remorse. Tim must have seen terrible things in India; perhaps done terrible things, which he might or might not have regretted, but which, in the sunny peace of Penndean, were never spoken of. The strange sound was then a sort of silent pain, which he rehearsed again and again among his broken heroes - Macbeth with bloody hands, Othello having killed his wife, the bizarre devastation of Kafka’s people, T.E. Lawrence, Jim jumping from the ship. For consolation, Kim and the Lama. Another thing which Pat said of Tim was that he was covered all over in sugar. Benet (then adult) objected. It was not sugar. It was a sort of faintly beautiful profound grief. Alice listening to the Mock Turtle weeping. When Tim was dying he was reading Through the Looking Glass. This was a strange point at which Benet often paused. Well, why not? Was not Lewis Carroll a mathematician? Tim did not display his mathematical mind to his family, though he did once try to explain Gödel’s theorem to Benet. Building bridges? Pat, and Benet when young, thought of Tim’s Indian activities as those of some simple labourer; then, after he had (as Pat said) ‘gone native’, as a descent into some sort of occult necromancy. A regular joke was to ask Tim if he could perform the Indian Rope Trick, then laugh when Tim took this seriously and started to explain. To Benet alone, in later years, Tim, now old (confused some said, but Benet never accepted that) spoke of the magic of mathematics, of calculating prodigies, of the deep reality of human intelligence, beyond words and outside logic. Many people in India, he said, could easily master contrivances beyond the comprehension of the brightest Cambridge scholars. It only dawned later on Benet why Tim tenderly avoided playing chess.

  Leaving at last the silence of the library, Benet moved towards the drawing room, pausing in the hall to survey himself in the long mirror. The hall was large and rather dim, deprived of the sunlight of the summer afternoon; it contained an old Sheraton writing desk, never opened, and was the only part of the house to have parquet flooring. The mirror was also dim, a little smudged at the sides. Ever since childhood Benet had wondered what he looked like. This wonder was connected with ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What am I?’ Benet had discovered quite early in life that Uncle Tim shared this lack of identity. They sometimes discussed it. Does everyone feel like this, Benet had wondered. Tim had said that no, not everyone did, adding that it was a gift, an intimation of a deep truth: ‘I am nothing.’ This was, it seemed, one of those states, achieved usually by many years of intense meditation, which may be offered by the gods ‘free of charge’ to certain individuals. Benet laughed at this joke. Later he took the matter more seriously, wondering whether this ‘gift’ were not more likely to precede a quiet descent into insanity. Later still he decided that, after all, ‘I am nothing’, far from indicating a selfless mystical condition, was a vague state of self-satisfaction experienced at some time by almost anyone. Yet more profoundly he wondered whether Tim, thought by so many of his friends and acquaintances to be ‘rather dotty’, were not really a receiver of presents from the gods.

  Benet now, looking at himself in the mirror, experienced a usual surprise. He still looked so remarkably young. He also, when thus caught, always seemed to have his mouth open. (Did he always go about with his mouth open?) He was of medium height, about the height of Uncle Tim, though shorter than Pat. He was lean and slender, always neatly dressed even when gardening. He had thick ruffled hair, copious red and brown, flowing down over his ears, without any streaks of grey, a broad calm face, a high bland brow, dark blue eyes, a neat straight no
se, full lips which often smiled though their owner was now often sad. Ever since he had left the Civil Service he had had troubles. Tim of course - his unsuccessful return to philosophy - his having never been in love - was that a trouble? What am I to do next? Of course this business with the girls had been a happy distraction.

  The drawing room was a big room with glass doors opening on to the main lawn. There were books here too, in low wooden bookcases, all sorts of books, atlases, cookery books, guides to English Counties, to London, France, Italy, big books on famous painters, books about games, books about animals, trees, the sea, books about machines, about science and scientists, books about poetry, about music. Of these books Benet had read only a few. Benet’s numerous philosophy books were beyond in the study, a room which opened off the drawing room. The drawing room floor was covered with a huge dark, dark-blue almost black, now very worn, carpet covered with minute trees and flowers and birds and animals, brought back from India by Uncle Tim when he was still young. There was a fine open fireplace surrounded by a heavy curly mahogany Victorian surround, numerous pictures on the walls, some of Quaker ancestors with dogs, more recent water colours with various views of the house, and of the river Lip. Uncle Tim had donated some Indian miniatures, said to be very valuable. There were numerous old armchairs with embroidered cushions, and a (not valuable) piano introduced into the house by Benet’s sweet short-lived lovely mother, Eleanor Morton. Benet recalled the happy childhood evenings when she played and they all sang. She soon set her opera music aside. Tim and Pat and indeed Benet preferred ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’, and (a song which brought tears to Tim’s eyes) ‘The Road to Mandalay’.

  Benet surveyed the room, re-arranging upon the mantelpiece, which still subsisted inside the Victorian surround, the netsuke which Owen Silbery had given him long ago; then he went through into his study. This also looked upon the terrace, and the immense lawn which had been dotted here and there with various tall and bushy trees by Benet’s great-grandfather and other far more remote ancestors, even beyond the Quaker time. A little farther off there was a small copse of dainty birch trees, and beyond that the dark forest of huge Wellingtonias. Somewhere else, beyond the fountain and the rose garden, Benet had vaguely dreamed of erecting some little Grecian building with marble columns; within which, the girls had insisted, there might one day be a warm indoor all-the-year-round swimming pool! Had the girls convinced him at last about that pool? Smiling, he opened the window which Sylvia was always shutting, and let in a thick warm pressure of air, filled with the odours of flowers and mown grass and mingled with the music of blackbirds, thrushes, larks, finches, sparrows, robins, collared doves and a distant cuckoo. He thought for a delicious moment how lucky he was - then he turned to worrying about his guests, about tomorrow and the wedding.

  After that, and when he was about to leave the room, he looked down at what he had been writing earlier in the day, not upon a typewriter or word-processor, machines which he despised, but upon the inky foolscap pages of his book on Heidegger. Benet had intended for some time to write, or attempt to write, that book. However, he found it difficult to plan the work and to decide what he really, in his heart, thought of his huge ambiguous subject. He had made a great many notes, with question marks, in fact his book so far consisted largely of notes, unconnected and unexplained. Benet found himself accusing himself of being fascinated by a certain dangerous aspect of Heidegger which was in fact so deeply buried in his own, Benet‘s, soul that he could not scrutinise or even dislodge it. Of course Benet admired Sein und Zeit and loved (perhaps this was the point) the attractive image of Man as the Shepherd of Being. Later Heidegger he detested; Heidegger’s sickening acceptance of Hitler, his misuse of the Pre-Socratic Greeks, his betrayal of his early religious picture of man opening the door to Being, his transformation of Being into a cruel ruthless fate, his appropriation of poor innocent Hölderlin, his poeticisation of philosophy, discarding truth, goodness, freedom, love, the individual, everything which the philosopher ought to explain and defend. Or was the era of the philosopher nearly over, as Pat used mockingly to tell him? Benet wished now that he had talked more with Uncle Tim about the Indian gods. How close had Tim come to those gods whom Benet himself knew only through Kipling and Tim’s rambling talk? Was it too late to learn the Hindu scriptures - was it all too late? A big bronze dancing Shiva, dancing within his ring of fire, forever destroying the cosmos and re-creating it, had stood upon Tim’s desk, which now was Benet’s desk. I wish I had started all this up earlier, thought Benet, I kept putting it off until I retired, I should have held on to philosophy, instead of going into the Civil Service, as Pat insisted. Of course Benet had never believed in God, but he had somehow believed in Christ, and in Plato, a Platonic Christ, an icon of goodness. Pat had not believed in God, indeed he hated Christianity. Eleanor had been a silent Christian. He recalled now how he had intuited her Christianity. Of course he never thought of such things then. And now - well, Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the century? But what was Benet thinking somehow so deeply about when he turned his mind to that remarkable thinker? It seemed to him that after all his philosophical reflections, there was a sound which rang some deeper tremor of the imagination. Perhaps it was his more profound desire to lay out before him the history of Heidegger’s inner life, the nature of his sufferings: the man who began as a divinity student and became a follower of Hitler, and then -? Remorse? Was that the very concept which sounded the bell? What had Heidegger said to Hannah Arendt after it was all over? What had that pain been like - what had those millions of pains been like? A huge tormented life? Was Heidegger really Anti-Christ? ‘The darkness, oh the darkness,’ Benet said aloud.

  He rose and left the study and crossed the great carpet to the glass doors and walked out onto the lawn. Here he listened again to the sounds, which he had failed to hear when he was so strangely struggling with that mysterious demon. The sweet sounds of the garden birds, and now, coming from the river, the geese flying overhead uttering their strange tragic gabble. Damn it, he said to himself, I am supposed to be organising this evening, and tomorrow! Oh I wish it was over and all well. Of course nothing will go wrong, they themselves will orchestrate everything!

  Benet was now checking the dining table. The dining room, adjacent to the hall and the front door, looked upon the drive where, emerging from among the trees, cars were soon to be expected. Sylvia, who loved Benet dearly, almost as much as she had loved Uncle Tim, smiled tolerantly across the table as he intently pushed things about, then she quietly left the room. The placement was proving difficult as usual. There were few guests, only from the ‘inner circle’. Strictly Benet should have Mildred on his right and Rosalind on his left. However, actually, Benet wanted to have Edward on his right, he wanted very much to talk to Edward, he felt that Edward needed protecting and he wanted to be fatherly to him. So then Edward would have Mildred on his right. Then there were Owen, and Tuan alias Thomas Abelson. But would that do? Owen was always difficult and should not sit next to Mildred whom he knew so well, nor to Rosalind whom he sometimes reduced to tears. Was Tuan, so called by Tim after Conrad’s novel, a solution? Hardly, put anywhere he was rather inarticulate. Suppose Benet took him on, upon his left? Benet was shy of this, and would feel bound to talk a lot to him, thus reducing his time to Edward. At last he decided to keep Rosalind on his left, Owen between Rosalind and Tuan, and Tuan thus next to Mildred, who was next to Edward who was next to Benet. Rosalind would have to look after herself, and Tuan would be at the far end of the table facing Benet. He must remember to put out the cards. It was a small table where they would all hear each other, of course it could be lengthened by leaves. Benet reflected upon how rarely he had done that since Tim died. A moth appeared and fluttered quietly across the room. Benet blew it gently away, not wanting to damage its frail antlers. Sylvia was the one who made war on moths.

  A small dark car appeared out of the wood and slewed round noisily upon the beautifully r
aked and weeded gravel. Benet hurried out into the hall and opened the front door. Mildred and Rosalind emerged, waved, then began to unpack various boxes. Benet went forward to help. He had known Rosalind and her sister and their mother, on and off, through summers when they had come back to the cottage in Lipcot. Rosalind had grown up almost as beautiful as Marian, and, following Shakespeare’s heroine, persistently dressed as a boy, not in jeans, but as a real trousered well-dressed boy, even with waistcoat. Her bright straight golden hair, falling beyond her shoulders, was allowed as boyish. Mildred was an old friend. Long ago Benet, or so he claimed, had dissuaded her from becoming a nun. Later, for a while, she was a member of the Salvation Army. However, she remained nun-like. Owen who had known her longer than Benet, often painted her, spoke of her pale wistful pre-Raphaelite look. She wore long dark brown dresses and her long thick dark brown hair was supported by big tortoiseshell combs. She lived austerely in a small flat, worked as a dress-maker, caring for the poor, visiting the sick, assisting the homeless. She also frequented the British Museum; ‘her gods are there,’ Owen used to say. Apparently or perhaps she had some sort of small pension. She had, some time ago, entered the lives of Owen and Benet through Uncle Tim, who said he had found her wandering late at night near Saint Paul’s. What Tim, or Mildred, was doing there was never made clear. She spoke in what some called an ‘aristocratic voice’. Others said ‘like a head mistress’. She too, through Benet, had met the girls some time ago. She quite often went to church and was prepared to be called ‘some sort of Christian’.