4th September 1855:
What a good-hearted, muddle-headed old soul is my father-in-law. He understands—why should he be disposed to understand?—so little of the matters I have now begun to raise with him. How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling. I could thank for ever my darling Liz and my darling little ones for opening my heart, even to the emaciation of my thoughts. But hungry thoughts sooner or later must feed.…
And the good-hearted Rector, in those days before Matthew’s “thoughts” began to fatten, may even have suffered some small disappointment that his son-in-law was not quite the vigorous whetstone to his own blunted faculties that he had hoped. To put it plainly, happiness seemed to take away some of the man’s bite. Well, well, he could hardly complain of that. His trivial loss was a measure of his daughter’s gain. He could scarcely grumble if preoccupations domestic and professional (old Makepeace duly retired in 1848, and Matthew was his own master) left his son-in-law with little time for stimulating debates in the Rector’s study on the relative merits of the Classics and the Sciences in fitting a man for life.
And, as the Rector baptised grandchild after grandchild, there was plentiful comfort and even relief to be drawn from watching Matthew mellow before the age-old influences of matrimony and procreation. Well, well, a man settles down and finds out how his heart truly lies, just as he, Rector Hunt, had done some thirty years ago. Once—he was to confide this much to Matthew, and then, as it
happened, during an exchange of some heat in his study—he had wanted to be a missionary. A more daring and pioneering undertaking, surely, even than laying a railway line from London to Land’s End. But instead of finding himself among the savages of Africa, he had settled for a rectory in Devon, and the role had fitted so like a natural skin that even his aspirations to further preferment had somehow evaporated. It would have been agreeable, of course, if a little chafing from his son-in-law had shown that some sharper, keener, more venturesome man still lurked within this skin. But it would have been disagreeable if, under the test of the young man’s provocation, nothing more had emerged than that he was what he was: an amiable, amenable husk of a man.
Yes, when you got him alone, there was something strangely muted and docile about his son-in-law, for all his fine, vigorous qualities, something almost—the Rector would not have seen it at first, then berated himself perhaps for overlooking the obvious, while simultaneously adjusting to a not unflattering irony—something almost suppliant. Of course! It was Matthew who looked to
him
. It was the younger man who in these changing times, in a profession which exposed him to so much modern upheaval and innovation, looked to the older man for guidance and certitude. As why should he not to one approved as a spiritual father?
But perhaps it went further than this. Gilbert Hunt could not have helped noticing, as the years passed, how Matthew’s links with his own father grew thinner, how his visits with Elizabeth to Launceston grew more infrequent and how John Pearce, even with the incentive of becoming a three-fold, four-fold grandfather, seemed to shy away from the close-knit atmosphere of Burlford. The Rector perhaps put this down to some wary residue of Methodism.
Later, he would have revised his opinion. Later too, Elizabeth would have perhaps confided in him that there had been some difference of feeling between Matthew and his father: something to do with Matthew’s not advancing himself further in the world. So, Burlford parish was not far enough in the world for the former apprentice of Launceston, and all Matthew’s attainments failed to sate the clockmaker’s pride? Matthew was not doing badly. He had advanced far enough in the world for a God-fearing man—and advancement, in the world or in the Church, was a ticklish thing.…
In any case, before this point was reached, it would have seemed to the Rector that Matthew had transferred onto him from his own father a paternal status that it was difficult not to accommodate. And, remembering that sanguine young man he had first encountered in John Pearce’s premises, he could not have imagined the almost prostrate state in which Matthew would come to him, ten years later, yes, in the Rectory study, after little Felix had died, and demand an
explanation
, a
reason
. Nothing less.
He uttered the usual formulae. He spoke of God’s will. What else could he have done? God knows, his own heart was afflicted cruelly enough by his little grandson’s death and he grieved for both parents, though it was Elizabeth who seemed better able to bear this loss of one quarter of her issue. God knows, he found it hard enough, in this thick glut of family tears, to keep his own eyes dry and remember his priorities as a clergyman. And yet (could he ever be forgiven?) he could not deny that thrill of pure joy when (God’s will not seeming to suffice) he had put his arms round Matthew in a silent, receptive embrace, while a voice inside him uttered the equation: he has lost a son, I have found one.
And that was when the trouble really began. If that scene
ever really took place (I imagine, I invent), then how deluded the older man was. He could not have guessed how this son-in-law, who had so far failed to be his friendly sparring partner, would one day become his earnest antagonist, on terms beyond any he could have predicted.
I see Elizabeth turn from the dressing-table, put down her hairbrush. I don’t believe that these Victorians were really, when it came to it, so Victorian. So demure and strait-laced. I don’t believe they were a different species, who propagated their kind by some method less intimate and passionate than ours. John, Christopher, Felix, Lucy. The atmosphere at Leigh House in those early days was surely ripe with love; as sticky, as fertile, as any pullulating little patch of ground that Matthew would have stooped over with his magnifying glass and collecting bottle, ready to trace yet more evidence of nature’s astonishing irrepressibility.
For that was how the villagers of Burlford must now and then have come across him, on Jacob’s Hill or in Loxley Wood, though not yet with the haunted and furtive looks he would later display when discovered in this way. Far from it. Like as not, he would wave to you and give you the time of day and tell you something savouring rather of one of Rector Hunt’s harvest-tide sermons, about how all creatures were exquisitely adapted to their purpose in creation. Which was obliging of him.
To be sure, he had his scientifical fancies, did the Rector’s new son-in-law—beetle-hunting and the like. But he was a good sort, for all his being a Cornishman larded over with Oxford learning. He made a fine picture with his young wife at church on a Sunday and said his Amen
as loud as anyone, and any man who could marry the Rector’s favourite daughter with the Rector’s own blessing was good enough for Burlford and should hold himself, what’s more, a privileged mortal. He didn’t put on airs or hide the twang in his voice. All in all, he seemed to have his head set square on his shoulders and his feet square on the ground, and everything as it should be in between, judging by results. More to the point, when he stopped jawing about bugs and caterpillars, he could lean against a gate with you and tell you all that was worth knowing about the field in front of you, just by looking. Which showed he had a care for those who lived by the land and wasn’t just a lackey to the folk in Tavistock who got rich quick (and poor again just as quick, no doubt) by burrowing about underneath it.…
Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought. And Matthew did not lack for work. I see him, as his neighbours saw him, riding off over the hill to a world that was changing even more rapidly than his father-in-law’s misgivings could encompass.
Who has heard of the copper rush of southwest Devon (you see, Potter, I have done my homework), which came and went over a century ago? Forget your Klondikes and your Californias. Who has heard of Josiah Hitchens of Tavistock, “King of Copper,” who in 1844, the same year that Matthew Pearce encountered an ichthyosaur and also happened upon Elizabeth Hunt, discovered in a wood in the Tamar valley a copper lode so rich that it would form the basis for almost two decades of the biggest copper mine in Europe and within two years return its shareholders eight hundred per cent. The “mine”—that is, a chain, a family of mines (Hitchens must have regarded them as his children), which multiplied themselves along the course
of the lode: Wheal Maria, Wheal Fanny, Wheal Anna-Maria, Wheal Josiah (naturally), Wheal Emma … Collectively known as Devon Great Consols.
Then there were all the lesser, hopeful ventures spawned by Hitchens’ discovery—including the Wheal Talbot mine, in which a certain James Neale would have a dominant interest. Then all the attendant enterprises (all work for Matthew): quays on the lower Tamar (ore out; coal in), canals, pumping systems, even the Consols’ own railway.
Under the guidance of his moribund senior partner, Matthew would have acquired the sought-after skills of a mining surveyor and watched the sinking of shaft after shaft. Beneath the day-to-day bustle of it all, the uncanny irony must surely have struck him. That he should be plunged, so literally, so nakedly, into the realms of Geology. That he should be lowered—for sometimes it must have been required of him—into those subterranean zones from which no one returns without having their view of life on the surface modified. When he rode back over the hill to Burlford and took in the timeless cluster of rooftops and church tower, the rookeried beeches behind the Rectory, how did it seem? Like a welcome refuge? (After all, he and Elizabeth might have chosen to live in Tavistock itself.) Or, more and more, like some piece of brittle, nostalgic scenery?
24th June 1856:
I perceive the Rector apprehends the literal undermining of his parochial security. Tavistock marches outwards—underground! Says: “My dear Matthew, I fear there will soon be nothing left of our familiar surroundings but a precarious crust. When you ride into Tavistock, do you not expect at every moment your swift descent into the lower world?” Answer, to the point: “I assure you, sir, we surface dwellers are in no such danger.”
Do not say: “But the picture we cherish of our familiar world may be a thin crust for all that.”
And then there was the railway. By 1849 it had reached Plymouth, with further track laid in Cornwall. A little matter, in between, of spanning the Tamar estuary at Saltash: it would take ten years. Matthew worked on the Ivybridge-to-Plymouth section and on the projected Tavistock branch line, and, as early as 1848, would have been involved in the preliminary surveys and geological soundings for Brunel’s great Saltash bridge. It was during this time that Matthew himself was first introduced to Brunel (these little glimpses of the great—you can see why Potter is keen) and came under the spell of the engineer’s mixture of practical genius and formidable energy.
18th August 1854:
… I have grasped the meaning of I.K.B.’s perpetual cigars: he
must
have them, as furnaces must have chimneys—they are lit from
within
.
(So Brunel was a smoker too.)
And it was during this time which marked the high tide of Victorian endeavour and the high tide of Matthew and Elizabeth’s marriage that the couple, like true devotees of the new age, travelled to London (by express train, naturally) to see the Great Exhibition.
11th September 1855:
I remember—but four years ago—how we journeyed up to see the Exhibition. I do not think there could have been two happier people. It was her first journey of any length by train, and she was full of the astonishment of the thing—how it could not be possible that the cattle and the hedgerows and barns and millponds passed by so quickly and smoothly, as if
they
moved, not us; and how London, which she had never seen, was surely too
far
a place to be reached so rapidly. And I was full of
how it was all, indeed, quite possible, giving a reprise—she acknowledged it—of my observations on that day we first met, and expounding the further mysteries of gradients and viaducts and cuttings and tunnels, until she threw up her hands and said, “Stop it, stop it, please! I would rather admire than know!” Whereupon I said, continuing to tease, “I grant you the joys of ignorant wonder, but, to quote your father—that is, to quote one of his quotations:
‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’
” (giving a fair imitation of the Rector’s best scholastical style). Whereupon we laughed like children out of school, apologising, in his absence, to the good man.
Then she said suddenly, “Why—that is it! We should call him Felix!”—for she was then newly with child for the third time. “Is not that a
happy
name?!” “So it is another boy?” I said. “Of course,” she said. “And how can you tell?” “I simply can. Was I wrong with John and Christopher? You see, my dear Matty, in this case
I
know and
you
must admire.”
And a boy it was. And I will never forget how her eyes sparkled, how we laughed, with the countryside rushing past us. And those words still ring in my ear: “I would rather admire than know.”
The green valley, the church, the ivied Rectory, the huddled cottages, the copse, loud with rooks, behind the churchyard. An image out of a picture book of ye olde England, but it still exists. I should go there, perhaps (in
my
condition?). A sort of pilgrimage. A legitimate piece of field research. I can imagine it. There will be chicken wire in the church porch to stop birds nesting—there always is. And there will be a little, charred, utilitarian enclave in one corner of the graveyard, with a heap of grass cuttings and discarded flowers and an ancient, rusted incinerator. There always is. And
they
will still be there. Or some of them. Not Matthew, of course. Nor the elder brothers. Nor Lucy. But the Rector, and Mrs Rector. And Elizabeth. Real
people, real bones (not this cast of characters). And, with a headstone older than them all (the graves of infants are always affecting), Felix.