Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [116]
"Did I hear you say you were looking for Magnus Flett?" he said politely, leaning in his silvery way over the table. "Now, you will excuse me for interrupting, but I couldn’t help overhearing you saying something or other about old Magnus Flett. Magnus Flett, why he’s just next door, you know."
"Next door?"
"The Sycamore Manor. You must have walked right by it. It’s where the old folk are, the ones as have no family that can keep them. When I was a lad there were sycamore trees in the back garden but they’re gone now, of course. It was a private house before the Council took it over. That’s where old Flett is. The famous Mr. Flett, I should say."
Victoria shook her head; she looked more comely tonight than she would have guessed. "Our Magnus Flett’s dead," she said with a measure of solemnity. "He was born in 1862. We don’t know when he died, but we’re sure of when he was born because the date is on some legal documents my aunt has."
"That would be his nibs all right," Mr. Sinclair nodded, smiling. "That is if you believe he’s the age he says he is, and I happen to be of one of them who takes the man’s word on it. His picture’s in the Orcadian every year on his birthday. This year they had the London papers up as well. The poor old lad was a hundred and fifteen years old, just think of that. Oh, not more than a month or so ago it was, a birthday party like you never saw. They had a cake big as this table here. Candles alight, a regular bonfire, course he slept right through it all. Why, Mr. Flett, he’s the oldest man in the British Isles."
It was not his age alone that made old Magnus Flett famous. It was his prodigious memory.
In the summer of 1977, the year Victoria and her colleague, Lewis Roy, and her elderly Great-aunt Daisy visited the legendary Orkney Islands on their separate expeditions of discovery, Magnus Flett’s reputation did indeed rest on those 115 years of his. This is a very great age. There is a woman in the Ukraine who is said to be 121, and a pair of brothers in Armenia whose ages are given, respectively, as 118 and 116 (with documents to support their claim).
An Inuit woman living in the Anglican Church hostel at Rankin Inlet has sworn on a Bible that she is 112 years of age (she took up a cigarette habit at eighty-five, whisky at ninety). And then there is the undisputed champion of human antiques: Mr. Gee of Singapore, still ambulatory at 123, though only his wife (aged ninetysix) has actually clapped eyes on him in recent years. Proven or unproven, great old age is heartening to observe, and Magnus Flett with his remarkable span of years is a celebrity. He has been profiled in the British weeklies ("A Life in the Day of Magnus Flett," The Sunday Times, 16 March 1962, p. 54). And once, ten years ago, he appeared before the BBC television cameras, staring straight out at the audience and doing "his thing."
"His thing," much more so than his age, is what has made the man famous: his ability, that is, to recite the whole of Jane Eyre by heart, chapter by chapter, every sentence, every word. Mr. Sinclair describes this achievement to his visitors, his soft voice softened even further by awe.
An impossible feat, some people might say, people who are unfamiliar with the retentive qualities of the human brain. Probably these same people have never heard how certain devout individuals in long ago days memorized the complete New Testament. That even at the beginning of our own century it was not unusual to find quite ordinary mortals who had the Gospels by heart, though, later, Sunday School prizes were given out for such trifling accomplishments as the Beatitudes or the One Hundredth Psalm. Scholars have for years insisted that the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf was recited at banquets by