My father had revelled in the thought that I might be a spy, for it was a life he understood, being only a hair’s breadth from his own. One day he’d handed me a miniature silver camera. ‘It takes special film,’ he said gleefully, flipping open the back and showing me where the miniature spool fitted in its matchbox-sized casing. Over the years he’d rigged up infra-red light-beams to photograph nocturnal wildlife, staked out the love-nests of cabinet ministers, tracked and photographed the movements of nuclear waste on secret midnight trains, climbed over fences, sneaked cameras into places he, and they, should not have been. Patience, detection, subterfuge and record. What historians did for a living was far more mysterious to him than the work of spies.
My vision blurs. We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. The summer lunch recedes. I cannot pull it back. Fog seeps in from the rugby pitch where Prideaux strode. Slow, white breaths. There’s a hush in my head; it grows louder. ‘I am not a spy,’ I’d told my father. ‘I’m a historian.’ But watching everyone around the table, their faces entranced by my hawk, it seems I’m not even that any more. I am the Fool, I think, dully. I used to be a Research Fellow, a proper academic. Now I am in motley. I am not Helen any more. I am the hawk woman. The hawk pulls on the rabbit leg. Wasps circle her like electrons. They land on her feet, on her nose, seeking shreds of rabbit flesh to take back to their paper nest in some nearby Cambridge loft. She flicks them away with her beak and I watch their yellow-and-black striped abdomens spinning through the air before they right themselves and fly back to the hawk. This summer lunch feels deeply unreal. Shadows of damask and silver, a photogravure in an album, something from Agatha Christie, from Evelyn Waugh, from another time. But the wasps are real. They are here, and they are present. So is the hawk, the sun at their centre. And me? I do not know. I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within.
Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. In the evenings, by the light of the Aladdin lamp, in the soft white glow of its fluorescing mantle, White is doing his old life to death. He is committing the murder in a novel he’d started writing at Stowe, and now it is nearly finished. The book is called You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down, and it is the story of the decline and fall of a public-school headmaster called Dr Prisonface. Prisonface is terrified of life; he is a chameleon, a mirror, existing only through his reflection in the eyes of others. He loses his job at the school. He woos and is rejected by a boyish dark-haired barmaid, flees in terror from the advances of her mother. He flies with drunken aviators descended from Romantic poets. He tries to teach Hollywood moguls how to be Gentlemen and is humiliated when they mow down grouse with tommy guns. The book is a vicious satire on the educational system and the cult of the English Gentleman, but it is also a psychological exorcism, a caustic narrative written to burn away his former life. White called Prisonface to life in order that he should suffer, be punished, mocked, reduced to rags and die. From headmaster to private tutor, from farmworker to beggar, he fails at everything he attempts. Everyone he meets on the way lectures him on why he is useless and unreal, and the book’s narrator, too, puts the boot in at every opportunity.
Towards the end of the book, limping and homeless, Prisonface meets a mysterious man on a country road. The man has saturnine, strangely carved features, and walks in darkness, a black dog by his side. He is a supernaturally suave figure: Prisonface is drawn to him, drawn to his power, recognising in it ‘the wisdom of certainty, the happiness of reality, the mastership of right’.8 The stranger had once been a schoolmaster too, at a place called Golden Gates, but left because he could not bear the people teaching there. Now he is married, lives in a cottage in the woods and is content. The man is White’s vision of his future self: a White freed, a White triumphant, a man who lectures Prisonface, over several pages, on the failings of the school system: ‘To anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,’9 the man says, ‘it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.’
Sitting by the lamp, White finishes writing the speech that is perhaps the least cruel, the most humane in the whole book. He is speaking to his past self with pity and compassion.
‘You went back to school voluntarily from the University because you still needed to go to school, because there was something still to find. You went back under the hen’s wing for safety, because you were still too small a chicken, but also in search of something: you want the talisman that would make you fit to leave.’10
‘What am I searching for?’
‘That you will only know when you find it.’
‘Is it wisdom or manhood?’