This memento, worth nothing in itself, is still in my possession, said Austerlitz. It means more to me than almost any other picture, first because despite their fragility the relics preserved in it, the lichen and the dried lanceolate willow leaves, have remained intact for more than a century, but also because it reminds me daily of Hilary, without whom I would surely never have been able to emerge from the shadows of the manse in Bala. Moreover, it was Hilary who, after my foster father’s death in the Denbigh asylum early in 1954, undertook the task of winding up his meager estate and then set on foot the process of my naturalization, which in view of the fact that Elias had obliterated every indication of my origin involved a good deal of difficulty. When I was studying at Oriel, like Hilary himself before me, he visited me regularly, and we took every opportunity of making excursions to the deserted and dilapidated country houses to be found all around Oxford, as elsewhere, in the postwar years.
While I was still at school, said Austerlitz, as well as Hilary’s support my friendship with Gerald Fitzpatrick in particular helped me to overcome the self-doubts that sometimes oppressed me. In line with the usual practice at public schools, Gerald was assigned to me as a fag when I entered the sixth form. It was his job to keep my room tidy, clean my boots, and bring the tray with the tea things. From the first day, when he asked me for one of the new photographs of the rugger team where I featured to the extreme right of the front row, I realized that Gerald felt as isolated as I did, said Austerlitz, who scarcely a week after our reunion at the Great Eastern Hotel sent me a postcard copy of the picture he had mentioned, without further comment. On that December evening, however, in the hotel bar, which was quiet now, Austerlitz went on to tell me more about Gerald, and how he had suffered from awful homesickness ever since his arrival at Stower Grange, entirely against the grain of his naturally cheerful disposition.
All the time, said Austerlitz, in every free moment he had, he was rearranging the things he had brought from home in his tuck box, and once, not long after he became my fag, I found him at the end of a corridor one dreary Saturday afternoon, with the autumn rain pouring down outside, trying to set fire to a pile of newspapers stacked on the stone floor beside the open door which led into a back yard. I saw his small, crouched figure in the gray light behind him, and the little flames licking around the edges of the newspaper, but the fire would not burn properly. When I asked what he thought he was doing, he said he wanted to make a huge blaze, and would not mind if the whole school were reduced to a pile of rubble and ashes. After that I kept an eye on Gerald. I let him off tidying my room and cleaning my boots, and I made the tea myself and shared it with him, a breach of regulations regarded with disapproval by most of my fellow pupils and my housemaster himself, rather as if it were against the natural order of things. In the evenings Gerald often accompanied me to the darkroom where, at this time, I was making my first experiments with photography. This little cubbyhole behind the chemistry lab had not been used for years, but the wall cupboards and drawers still held several boxes with rolls of film, a large supply of photographic paper, and a miscellaneous collection of cameras, including an Ensign such as I myself owned later. From the outset my main concern was with the shape and the self-contained nature of discrete things, the curve of banisters on a staircase, the molding of a stone arch over a gateway, the tangled precision of the blades in a tussock of dried grass.
I took hundreds of such photographs at Stower Grange, most of them in square format, but it never seemed to me right to turn the viewfinder of my camera on people. In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long. Gerald enjoyed helping me, and I can still see him, a head shorter than I was, standing beside me in the darkroom, which was dimly illuminated only by the little reddish light, holding the photographs in tweezers and swishing them back and forth in a sink full of water. He often told me about his family on these occasions, and most of all he liked talking about the three homing pigeons who would be expecting his return, he thought, as eagerly as he usually awaited theirs. Gerald’s Uncle Alphonso had given him these pigeons a year ago for his tenth birthday, said Austerlitz, two of them a slaty blue, one snow-white. Whenever possible, if someone was going to Bala or Aberystwyth by car, he would send his three pigeons to be freed at a distance, and they always infallibly found their way back to their loft. Once, towards the end of last summer, Tilly the white pigeon did stay away much longer than the homeward flight should have taken her, after being dispatched on a test flight from Dolgellau only a few miles up the valley, and it was not until the following day, when he was on the point of giving up hope, that she finally returned—on foot, walking up the gravel drive with a broken wing. I often thought later of this tale of the bird making her long journey home alone, wondering how she had managed to reach her destination over the steep terrain, circumventing numerous obstacles, and that question, said Austerlitz, a question which still exercises my mind today when I see a pigeon in flight, is one that, against all reason, seems to me connected with the way Gerald finally lost his life.—I believe, Austerlitz went on after some considerable time, it was on the second or third parents’ visiting day that Gerald, proud of his privileged relationship with me, introduced me to his mother, Adela. She can hardly have been thirty at the time, and she was very glad that after his initial difficulties her young son had found a protector in me. Gerald had already told me about his father, Aldous, shot down over the Ardennes in the last winter of the war, and I had also heard how his mother was now living with only an old uncle and an even older great-uncle in a country house just outside the small seaside town of Barmouth. Gerald claimed that its position was the finest anywhere along the entire Welsh coast. Once Adela had discovered from Gerald that I had no parents or any family at all, I was invited to their house repeatedly, indeed constantly, even when I was doing my national service and when I was up at Oxford, and I could wish now, said Austerlitz, to have vanished without trace in the peace that always reigned there. At the very beginning of the school holidays, when we traveled westward up the Dee valley in the little steam train from Wrexham, I would feel my heart begin to lift. Bend after bend, our train followed the winding of the river, the green meadows looked in through the open carriage window, and so did the houses, stony gray or whitewashed, the gleaming slate roofs, the silver shades of the willows, the darker alder woods, the sheep pastures climbing up beyond the trees, and higher still the mountains, sometimes tinged with blue, and the sky where the clouds, coming in from the sea, always drove eastwards. Scraps of steam vapor flew past outside; you could hear the engine whistling and feel the air cool on your forehead. Never have I traveled better, said Austerlitz, than on this journey of seventy miles at the most, which took us three and a half hours. When we stopped at Bala, the halfway station, of course I could not help thinking back to my time in the manse, visible up there on its hill, yet it always seemed to me inconceivable that I had really been among its unhappy inhabitants for almost the whole of my life. And every time I set eyes on Lake Bala, particularly when its surface was churned up by the wind in winter, I remembered the story Evan the cobbler had told me, about the two headstreams of Dwy Fawr and Dwy Fach which are said to flow right through the lake, far down in its dark depths, never mingling their waters with its own. The two rivers, according to Evan, said Austerlitz, were called after the only human beings not drowned but saved from the biblical deluge in the distant past. At the far end of Lake Bala the railway line passed over a low anticline into the Afon Mawddach valley. The mountains were higher now, coming down closer and closer to the tracks until you reached Dolgellau, where they retreated again, and gentler slopes fell to the estuary of the Mawddach, which reaches far inland like a fjord. Finally, when we left the southern b
ank and crawled to the opposite side over the bridge, almost a mile long and supported on mighty posts of oak, on our right the riverbed, inundated by the sea at high tide and looking like a mountain lake, and on our left Barmouth Bay stretching to the bright horizon, I felt so joyful that I often scarcely knew where to look first. Adela used to fetch us from Barmouth station, usually in the little black-painted pony trap, and then it was only half an hour before the gravel of the drive up to Andromeda Lodge was crunching under our wheels, the bay pony stopped, and we could get down and enter into our holiday refuge. The two-story house, built of pale gray brick, was protected to the north and northeast by the Llawr Llech hills, which fall steeply away at this point. To the southwest the terrain lay open in a wide semicircle, so that from the forecourt of the house you had a view of the full length of the estuary from Dolgellau to Barmouth, while these places themselves were excluded from the panorama, which was almost devoid of human habitations, by a rocky outcrop on one side and a laurel-grown hill on the other. Only on the far side of the river could the little village of Arthog be seen—in certain atmospheric conditions, said Austerlitz, you might have thought it an eternity away—infinitesimally small, with the shadowy side of Cader Idris rising behind it to a height of almost three thousand feet above the shimmering sea. While the climate of the entire area was remarkably mild, temperatures in this especially favored place were a couple of degrees higher even than the Barmouth average. The garden, which had run completely wild during the war years and went up the slope at the back of the house, contained plants and shrubs that I had never seen in Wales before: giant rhubarb and New Zealand ferns taller than a grown man, water lettuce and camellias, thickets of bamboo and palms. And a brook tumbled down over a rocky wall to the valley, its white spray constantly pervading the dappled twilight under the leafy canopy of the tall trees. But it was not only the plants, natives of warmer climates, that made you feel you were living in another world: the greatest exotic attractions of Andromeda Lodge were the white cockatoos which flew all around the house within a radius of up to two or three miles, calling from the bushes, bathing and luxuriating in the fine spray from the cascading brook until evening fell. Gerald’s great-grandfather had brought several pairs home from the Moluccas and established them in the orangery, where they soon increased and multiplied, forming a large colony. They lived in small sherry casks that had been stacked on top of each other in a pyramid against one of the side walls, and departing from their native custom, said Austerlitz, they had lined these casks themselves with wood shavings from a sawmill down beside the river. Most of them even survived the hard winter of 1947, since Adela kept the old orangery stove heated for them through the two icy months of January and February. It was wonderful, said Austerlitz, to see the dexterity with which the birds clambered around the trelliswork, hanging on by their beaks, and performing all kinds of acrobatic feats as they came down; to watch them flying in and out of the open windows or hopping and walking along the ground, always active and always, or that was the impression they gave, intent upon some purpose or other. In fact they were very like human beings in many ways. You might hear them sigh, laugh, sneeze, and yawn. They cleared their throats before beginning to converse in their own cockatoo language, they showed themselves alert, scheming, mischievous and sly, deceitful, malicious, vindictive and quarrelsome. They liked certain people, particularly Adela and Gerald, and persecuted others with downright malice, for instance the Welsh housekeeper who seldom showed her face out of doors. They seemed to know exactly when she would be going to chapel, always wearing a black hat and carrying a black umbrella, and on these occasions they lay in wait to screech at her in the most obnoxious way. They also reflected human society in the way they ganged up together in ever-changing groups, or then again paired off in couples sitting side by side as if they knew nothing but harmony and were forever inseparable. They even had their own cemetery, with a long row of graves in a clearing surrounded by strawberry trees, and one of the rooms on the upper floor of Andromeda Lodge had in it what was obviously a purpose-built wall cupboard, full of dark green cardboard boxes containing a number of dead birds of species related to the cockatoos, their red-chested or yellow-headed brothers, Hyacinth and Scarlet Macaws, Ruby Lorikeets and Blue-Winged Parrotlets, Horned Parakeets and Ground Parrots, all brought back by Gerald’s great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather from his circumnavigation of the globe, or alternatively ordered from a trader called Théodore Grace in Le Havre for a few guineas or louis d’or, as noted on the provenances placed inside the boxes. The finest of all these birds, in a collection which also included some native woodpeckers, wrynecks, kites, and orioles, was the African Gray parrot. I can still see the inscription on his green cardboard sarcophagus: Jaco, Ps. erithacus L. He came from the Congo and had reached the great age of sixty-six in his Welsh exile, as his obituary recounted, adding that he had been very tame and trusting, was a quick learner, chattered away to himself and others, could whistle entire songs and had composed some too, but best of all he liked to mimic the voices of children and to have them teach him new words. His one bad habit was that if no one gave him any apricot kernels and hard nuts, which he could crack open with the greatest ease, he went about in a bad temper chewing and shredding the furniture. Gerald often took this special parrot out of his box. He was about nine inches long, and as his name suggests had ash-gray plumage, as well as a carmine tail, a black beak, and a pale face that you might have thought was marked by deep grief. Indeed, Austerlitz went on, there was some kind of cabinet of natural curiosities in almost every room at Andromeda Lodge: cases with multiple drawers, some of them glass-fronted, where the roundish eggs of parrots were arranged in their hundreds; collections of shells, minerals, beetles, and butterflies; slowworms, adders, and lizards preserved in formaldehyde; snail shells and sea urchins, crabs and shrimps, and large herbaria containing leaves, flowers, and grasses.
Adela had once told him, said Austerlitz, that the transformation of Andromeda Lodge into a kind of natural history museum had begun in 1869, when Gerald’s parrot-collecting ancestor made the acquaintance of Charles Darwin, then working on his study of the Descent of Man in a rented house not far from Dolgellau. Darwin had paid frequent visits to the Fitzpatricks of Andromeda Lodge in those days, and according to a family tradition he always praised the wonderful view from the house. It was from the same period, according to Adela, said Austerlitz, that the schism in the Fitzpatrick clan dated, a schism continuing to the present day, whereby one of the two sons in every generation abandoned the Catholic faith and became a natural scientist. For instance Aldous, Gerald’s father, had been a botanist, while his brother, Evelyn, over twenty years his senior, clung to the traditional Papist creed, regarded in Wales as the worst of all perversions. In fact the Catholic line of the family had always been represented by its crazier and more eccentric members, as the case of Uncle Evelyn clearly illustrated. At the time when I was spending many weeks every year with the Fitzpatricks as Gerald’s guest, said Austerlitz, Evelyn was perhaps in his mid-fifties, but was so crippled by Bechterew’s disease that he looked like an old man, and could walk only with the greatest difficulty, bending right over. For that very reason, however, and to prevent his joints from seizing up entirely, he was always on the move in his rooms on the top floor, where a kind of handrail had been fitted along the walls, like the barre in a ballet school. He held on to this handrail as he inched his way forward, moaning quietly, his head and bent torso scarcely higher than his hand on the rail. It took him a good hour to make the rounds of his quarters, from the bedroom into the living room, out of the living room into the corridor, and from the corridor back to the bedroom. Gerald, who had already developed an aversion to the Roman faith, once claimed, said Austerlitz, that Uncle Evelyn had grown so crooked out of sheer miserliness, which he justified to himself by reflecting that he sent the money he did not spend in any given week, usually amounting to twelve or thirteen shillings, as a donation to the Missi
on to the Congo for the salvation of black souls still languishing in unbelief. There were no curtains or other furnishings in Evelyn’s rooms, since he did not want to make unnecessary use of anything, even if it had been acquired long ago and simply had to be brought from another part of the house. Years before, he had had a narrow strip of linoleum laid on the wooden floor where he walked beside the walls, to spare the wood, and his dragging footsteps had worn the linoleum so thin that you could make out almost nothing of its original flower pattern. Not until the temperature on the thermometer beside the window had dropped to below fifty degrees Fahrenheit for several days running was the housekeeper allowed to light a tiny fire in the hearth, a fire burning almost no fuel at all. To save electricity, Evelyn always went to bed when darkness fell, which meant around four in the afternoon in winter, although lying down was perhaps even more painful for him than walking, so that as a rule, despite his exhausted state after his constant perambulations, it was a long time before he could get to sleep. Then, through the grille of a ventilation shaft that linked his bedchamber to one of the ground-floor living rooms and inadvertently functioned as a kind of communication channel, he could be heard calling on numerous different saints for hours on end, in particular, if I remember correctly, Saints Catherine and Elizabeth, who suffered the most cruel of martyrdoms, begging them to intercede for him in the contingency, as he put it, of his imminent appearance before the judgment seat of his Heavenly Lord.