Jeal Cushing's Crusade

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30392-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Derek Cushing - thirtyish, balding, unassuming archivist/researcher into European expansion in East Africa - is also the son of Gilbert, father of Giles, and husband of Diana. On the last count, though, he has begun to fear that he is wearing cuckold's horns. His plan for addressing the crisis leads him to take his wife, son and ageing father to stay at the Cornish mansion of the smooth-talking gallery owner he believes to be his wife's lover. But this, at least, is a place where disputes may be brought to a head. First published in 1974, Cushing's Crusade was Tim Jeal's third novel, for which he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. 'Mr Jeal is a writer very much out of the ordinary, trenchant, elegant, subtle.' Sunday Telegraph 'A charming, highly enjoyable and most accomplished novel.' Nina Bawden, Telegraph 'Extremely funny, perceptive and moving.' Guardian

Tim Jeal is an acclaimed novelist and biographer, whose Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer was published by Faber in 2007 and was a BBC Radio Four 'Book of the Week'. Stanley was named Sunday Times Biography of the Year, and, in the US, won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography for 2007. Tim's memoir Swimming with my Father was published by Faber in 2004 and was also a BBC Radio Four 'Book of the Week' and was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize for autobiography. In September 2011 Faber will publish Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure, which, thanks to much original research, will shed fascinating new light on the 'Search for the Nile' and its colonial consequences. In 1973 Tim Jeal's Livingstone (1973) was selected as a 'Notable Book of the Year' by the New York Times Book Review and one of the 'Best and Brightest of the Year' by the Washington Post Book World.Livingstone formed the basis for a BBC TV documentary and a film for the Discovery Channel. It has never been out of print. Nor has Tim Jeal's Baden-Powell (1989), which was a 'Notable Book of the Year', and was chosen by Channel 4 for its 'Secret Lives' strand. In 1975 Tim was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jeal, Tim

Leseproben

Chapter 2

Shortly after 4.00 p.m. on July 13, ten days before his scheduled departure for Scotland, Derek Cushing lifted the receiver of his phone in the Afro-Asian Institute and dialled his dentist’s number. Derek was not worried about his teeth but wished to leave a message for his wife, who had informed him that morning that she had a dental appointment for four o’clock. The receptionist was apologetic and regretted that she could not give Mrs Cushing a message, since to her certain knowledge no Mrs Cushing had an appointment that afternoon. Did Mrs Cushing have an appointment on any other day that week? The receptionist denied knowledge of any such appointment. Derek thanked her and rang off. He had simply wished to let Diana know that he intended going straight from work to the address where they were having dinner and would not go home first.

Diana could be absent-minded and mistake a day, but to mistake the week of a dental appointment was taking absent-mindedness further than Derek thought probable. She had lied to him on occasions in the past and he had been known to lie to her and perhaps there was nothing in it, and if there was something in it perhaps it didn’t matter anyway. If she felt like telling him that she had gone to the dentist and had instead spent the afternoon in a sauna bath, that was her business. Derek was irritated only because he now felt impelled to go back to the flat before going on to the dinner party.

At breakfast the following day, after eating an all but hard-boiled egg without complaint, Derek cleared a visual path between the three large packets of cereal on the table and said, ‘I really am a selfish sod. I forgot to ask how you got on at the dentist.’

‘Better late than never,’ replied Diana. ‘A couple of fillings; that was all. I’ve got to go back on Friday to let the hygienist have a go at my gums. Hygienist, my foot; it’s as bad as calling dustmen “disposal operatives”.’

So she had added another lie. If one lie was innocuous, were two lies rather different?

‘Why did you change dentists?’ Derek asked abruptly.

She was buttering some toast. He watched carefully to see whether her knife stopped dead or whether she seemed put out in any less obvious way.

‘Christ, how awful. You didn’t go to meet me at Gilchrist’s, did you?’

‘I phoned and you didn’t have an appointment.’

‘I’m surprised I didn’t tell you. I’ve got a new man.’

‘What was wrong with Gilchrist?’

There was no sign of embarrassment, no surprise, no evidence of quick thinking. Diana took a sip of coffee and smiled.

‘I didn’t like Gilchrist’s eyes. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but they’re yellow, not the pupils but the whites. They’re usually bloodshot too. They made me feel ill, the way he used to peer into my mouth with his eyeballs brushing my cheeks.’

‘And the new dentist has white whites?’

‘Very white. He’s an Indian so I suppose that might make them seem whiter than they are.’

‘Should I go to him too?’

‘If you don’t like Gilchrist’s eyes, it mightn’t be a bad idea.’

Could anybody possibly leave a dentist because of the whites of their eyes? Derek pondered the question for a few moments before conceding that Diana was capable of it. Or had she just thought of it there and then? Suddenly he felt irritated. Nobody ought to leave dentists because of their eyeballs. That might be a reason to leave an oculist. The only physical defect that could possibly justify leaving a dentist was a mouthful of bad teeth; no, delirium tremens and Parkinson’s disease should be added.

‘I’ve never heard such a lousy reason for leaving a dentist,’ he said. Diana was looking at him with unfeigned surprise. He was being assertive, which was unusual enough, but, more unusual still, he was being assertive at breakfast. ‘What I mean is,’ he went on, ‘I don’t understand such a reason.’

Diana lit a cigarette and exhaled twintusks of smoke from her nostrils. She seemed amused now.

‘I would have thought I’d made it pretty clear. Anyway, why should you understand? Is my one aim and object in life meant to be making myself comprehensible to you?’ she paused and then added, ‘There’s no reason to look so persecuted. You’ve as good as said you don’t believe me. Fine. If you don’t, it’s your tough titty.’

‘Thank you for being so explicit.’

‘Pleasure,’ she replied.

Diana had started to read the paper, and since Derek could think of nothing else to say he left for work.

*

For Derek the morning rush-hour was a special violation. He was convinced that people who worked in shops or other crowded places did not detest the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure and the constant buffeting as he did. How could they know the agony of the timid archivist, accustomed only to the womb-like security of his library, when he was plunged into the alien maelstrom of the commuters’ cauldron? On some mornings Derek managed to establish a scholarly distance to the whole sub-human business by making classical comparisons: Charon the ticket-office clerk to whom he gave his coin, the lift Charon’s boat, the doors of the train the gates of Hades, and Pluto himself the power of money that sucked all men into the bowels of the earth. But on this particular morning such thoughts held no consolation. In the tube, just as the train was leaving Baker Street, it came to Derek that Diana had been lying to him. Since she lied to him quite often, it was not the lying itself that alarmed him, but the conclusion that on this particular occasion it might matter that she had lied. Although he mistrusted intuition he could not escape this feeling. My wife, Mrs Cushing, has this morning attempted to persuade me that she spent the greater part of Wednesday afternoon at the premises of an Indian dentist. If she lied to me what am I to understand? Derek was now on the escalator, gliding upwards past many underwear advertisements. Dear Mr Cuckold, if you are so blindly and wilfully stupid, is it surprising that your wife is deceiving you, deceiving you furthermore with grotesque and improbable stories? Can you think of any reason except the most obvious one why your wife should have lied to you? Pure bloody-mindedness is admittedly a possibility, and a desire to tease, irritate and wound should not automatically be ruled out; but since your wife has recently started an afternoon course in antique furniture restoration, and has during the last four months purchased as much clothing as in the past four years, can you reasonably suggest that such arguments hold water?

During the morning, to try to take his mind off his wife, Derek retreated to the basement archive room. Having locked himself in, he went behind the stacks containing the Institute’s Far Eastern Missionary Correspondence and opened a carefully concealed tin chest. Inside was the private correspondence of the Imperial British East Africa Company for the years 1879 to 1901. Since the donation of these documents, by an elderly Scottish widow, at the beginning of March, Derek had known that he would be able to write a far more comprehensive account of the British intervention in East Africa than Professor Elkin, who was writing a book on the same subject. All Derek had to do was to refrain from cataloguing the chest’s contents till the professor’s finished manuscript was with his publisher. Normally, reading these previously unpublished letters, written by Lugard, Mackinnon and Kirk, banished all other thoughts from Derek’s mind, but this morning their usual magic failed. His thoughts repeatedly returned to Diana.

For some reason he kept on imagining himself in his bedroom at the flat; but the room had changed dramatically. Gone from the dressing table was the clutter of pots of cosmetics, scraps of cotton wool, spilt powder and hair-rollers, usually left by Diana; gone too were her clothes and the two Indian rugs on the floor. No trace of her remained. The emptiness of the room struck him so forcibly that for a moment he had to hold on to the tin chest to remind himself where he was. A sudden stab of panic under the diaphragm made it hard for him to breathe for several seconds. This was not grief, not self-pity, but naked fear. Fourteen years suddenly dismissed; the safety net of habit gone, his assumptions and expectations splintering like glass. When he had recovered sufficiently he returned to the manuscript room, where he was immediately accosted by a scholarly Asian wishing to know about population figures for Perak in the 1790s.

Only when most of the readers had gone out to lunch was Derek able to think about his panic in the archives. Any decent man would surely not have trembled in such circumstances. Rage, jealousy, sorrow, reproach would have been more appropriate than fear. Would a normal red-blooded male sit helplessly on a tin chest and suffer without disgust or distress the idea of a strange tongue stroking his wife’s nipples? Would he not roar out in savage abandonment: ‘Some scheming bastard has besmirched my wife!’? Yet no biblical denunciations had formed in his brain; instead, under his diaphragm, tremors of panic still quivered. What really puzzled and distressed him was the certainty that although he thought he loved Diana, separation from her did not in itself terrify him. His fear had been far more personal and overwhelming. He had not been so much afraid for his marriage as afraid for himself.

Early in the afternoon Derek...