Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [29]
There were reasons more immediate, and these also he gave weight to. The voyage was likely to take eight months at least and he did not expect to be occupied with medical duties for the whole of the time; there would be vacant hours to contend with. Eight months, he thought, sitting at the window of his upstairs room, looking out at the light rain which had just begun to dampen the cobbles. Perhaps longer, perhaps a year – all according, as Thurso no doubt would say. Perhaps in that time, among those new scenes, he would become somehow different. But it did not seem likely. He felt fixed for ever in his shape, impervious to change, whatever lay before him. It seemed to him that he had reached this final shape quite quickly: a few random blows had been enough. All the years before, his studies, his practice, the happy years of his marriage, he had remained unformed, impressionable, he had thought of himself as flowing towards something in a kind of pursuit. Quite suddenly this had been reversed, he had become an object of persecution. Was this the rescue, this shape of stone he was now? Those in pursuit did not turn to stone, only the pursued were wrought into shapes beyond change …
In the late afternoon he had writing materials brought up to him and sat down to write a letter to a friend and colleague in Norwich, to whom he had entrusted his collection of fossils, all he had, really, to leave or care about. He hesitated for a little while, looking from his blank page to the thin slant of rain outside. He had said goodbye before he left – this was a mere indulgence of his solitude. Almost he decided not to write at all. Then, with an impulse of impatience, he dipped pen in ink and began:
My Dear Friend,
I write on the eve of departure, to say my farewells over again and to thank you once more for all your acts of kindness towards my Ruth and myself.
A blurring of his page obliged Paris to pause here, though having only just begun; gratitude to his friend released tears in a way that thoughts of his wife could not – her name in his mind was all desolation. Clear-eyed again now but with throat painfully tightened, he resumed:
I do not in the least know what awaits me on this voyage and – though this need not at all distress you, my dear friend, and I am not seeking to make a parade of it – I am quite indifferent to what becomes of me, at least so I think at present, though if it came to a danger to my person, I dare say I should scramble with the rest, that being our nature.
If I should not return, please keep for your own use the collections you have been kind enough to house for me all this while. They are all I possess of any value. I mean to say by this that you should keep them whatever happens and regard them as yours; since even in the unlikely event of my ever returning to Norwich, I shall not want to set eyes on them again – they would recall the past too painfully. I hope the specimens will be of use in your own investigations, and in particular those preserved parts of sea animals, by which we learn of the changes of place in the waters which otherwise could not have been supposed.
I am giving up the work, because it belongs to a part of my life that is over now for ever, but I have not changed in my convictions. I can only recognize one vital principle throughout animate nature: by natural gradation of species we must always be led to an original species, and this must be the same for man. Though life may appear very compounded