Arthur & George

architectural shapes might not flit sympathetically between their brains, while their bodies were hundreds of miles apart?
    His stained-glass window would rise to the full height of a double-storey hallway. At the top the rose of England and the thistle of Scotland would flank the entwined initials ACD. Below there would be three rows of heraldic shields. First rank: Purcell of Foulkes Rath, Pack of Kilkenny, Mahon of Cheverney. Second rank: Percy of Northumberland, Butler of Ormonde, Colclough of Tintern. And at eye level: Conan of Brittany (Per fess Argent and Gules a lion rampant counterchanged), Hawkins of Devonshire (for Touie) and then the Doyle arms: three stags’ heads and the red hand of Ulster. The true Doyle motto was
Fortitudine Vincit
; but here, beneath the shield, he placed a variant –
Patientia Vincit
. This is what the house would proclaim, to all the world and to the accursed microbe: with patience he conquers.
    Stanley Ball and his builders saw little but impatience. Arthur, having set up headquarters at a nearby hotel, would constantly drive over and badger them. But at last the house took recognizable shape: a long, barn-like structure, red-bricked, tile-hung, heavy-gabled, lying across the neck of the valley. Arthur stood on his newly laid terrace and cast an inspecting eye on the broad lawn, recently rolled and seeded. Beyond it the ground fell away in an ever narrowing V to where the woods took over. There was something wild and magical about the view: from the first moment Arthur had found it evocative of some German folk tale. He thought he would plant rhododendrons.
    On the day the hall window was hoisted into place, he took Touie with him to witness the unveiling. She stood before it, her eye passing over the colours and the names, then coming to rest on the house’s motto.
    ‘The Mam will be pleased,’ he observed. Only the slight pause before her smile made him realize something might be awry.
    ‘You are right,’ he said immediately, though she had still not uttered a word. How could he have been such a dunderhead? To put up a tribute to your own illustrious ancestry and forget your very mother’s family? For a moment he thought of ordering the workmen to take the whole damn window down. Later, after guilty reflection, he commissioned a second, more modest window for the turning of the stair. Its central panel would hold the overlooked arms and name: Foley of Worcestershire.
    He decided to call the house Undershaw, after the hanging grove of trees beneath which it lay. The name would give this modern construction a fine old Anglo-Saxon resonance. Here life might continue as before, if cautiously and within limits.
    Life. How easily everyone, including himself, said the word. Life must go on, everyone routinely agreed. And yet how few asked what it was, and why it was, and if it was the only life or the mere amphitheatre to something quite different. Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with … with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.
    His old Southsea friend General Drayson had become convinced of the spiritualist argument after his dead brother spoke to him at a seance. Thereafter, the astronomer maintained that the continuance of life after death was not just a supposition but a provable fact. Arthur had politely demurred at the time; even so, his list of Books To Be Read that year included seventy-four on the subject of Spiritualism. He had despatched them all, noting down sentences and maxims which impressed him. Like this from Hellenbach: ‘There is a scepticism which surpasses in imbecility the obtuseness of a clodhopper.’
    Until Touie’s illness announced itself, he had everything the world assumed necessary to make a man contented. And yet he could never quite shake off the feeling that all he had achieved was just a trivial and specious beginning; that he was made for something else. But what might that something else be? He returned to a study of the world’s religions, but could no more get into any of them than he could into a boy’s suit. He joined the Rationalist Association, and found their work necessary, but essentially destructive and therefore sterile. The demolition of antique faiths had been fundamental to human advancement; but now that those old buildings had been levelled, where was man to find shelter in this blasted landscape? How could