Babel, page 5
He did not understand these political struggles, not then. He only sensed that London, and England at large, was very divided about what it was and what it wanted to be. And he understood that silver lay behind it all. For when the Radicals wrote about the perils of industrialization, and when the Conservatives refuted this with proof of the booming economy; when any of the political parties spoke about slums, housing, roads, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing; when anyone spoke about Britain and the Empire’s future at all, the word was always there in papers, pamphlets, magazines, and even prayer books: silver, silver, silver.
From Mrs Piper, he learned more than he’d imagined possible about English food and England. Adjusting to this new palate took some time. He had never thought much about food when he lived in Canton – the porridge, steamed buns, dumplings, and vegetable dishes that comprised his daily meals had seemed unremarkable to him. They were the staples of a poor family’s diet, a far cry from high Chinese cuisine. Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.
He took more pleasure in learning about the food than in eating it. This education came unprompted – dear Mrs Piper was the chatty sort, and would happily lecture as she served up lunch if Robin displayed even the slightest interest in what was on his plate. He was told that potatoes, which he found quite tasty in any form, were not to be served around important company, for they were considered lower-class. He found that newly invented silver-gilded dishes were used to keep food warm throughout a meal, but that it was rude to reveal this trickery to guests, and so the bars were always embedded on the very bottoms of the platters. He learned that the practice of serving food in successive courses was adopted from the French, and that the reason it was not yet a universal norm was a lingering resentment over that little man Napoleon. He learned, but did not quite understand, the subtle distinctions between lunch, luncheon, and a noon dinner. He learned he had the Roman Catholics to thank for his favourite almond cheesecakes, for the prohibition of dairy during fast days had forced English cooks to innovate with almond milk.
One night Mrs Piper brought out a round, flat circle: some kind of baked dough that had been cut into triangular wedges. Robin took one and tentatively bit at the corner. It was very thick and floury, much denser than the fluffy white rolls his mother used to steam every week. It was not unpleasant, just surprisingly heavy. He took a large gulp of water to guide the bolus down, then asked, ‘What’s this?’
‘That’s a bannock, dear,’ said Mrs Piper.
‘Scone,’ corrected Professor Lovell.
‘It’s properly a bannock—’
‘The scones are the pieces,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The bannock is the entire cake.’
‘Now look here, this is a bannock, and all the itty pieces are bannocks as well. Scones are those dry, crumbly things you English love to shove in your mouths—’
‘I assume you’re excepting your own scones, Mrs Piper. No one in their right mind would accuse those of being dry.’
Mrs Piper did not succumb to flattery. ‘It’s a bannock. They’re bannocks. My grandmother called them bannocks, my mother called them bannocks, so bannocks they are.’
‘Why’s it – why are they – called bannocks?’ Robin asked. The sound of the word made him imagine a monster of the hills, some clawed and gristly thing that wouldn’t be satisfied unless given a sacrifice of bread.
‘Because of Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Bannock comes from panicium, meaning “baked bread”.’
This seemed plausible, if disappointingly mundane. Robin took another bite of the bannock, or scone, and this time relished the thick, satisfying way it settled on his stomach.
He and Mrs Piper quickly bonded over a deep love of scones. She made them every which way – plain, served with a bit of clotted cream and raspberry jam; savoury and studded with cheese and garlic chives; or dotted through with bits of dried fruit. Robin liked them best plain – why ruin what was, in his opinion, perfect from conception? He had just learned about Platonic forms, and was convinced scones were the Platonic ideal of bread. And Mrs Piper’s clotted cream was wonderful, light and nutty and refreshing all at once. Some households simmered milk for nearly a full day on the stove to get that layer of cream on top, she told him, but last Christmas Professor Lovell had brought her a clever silver-work contraption that could separate the cream in seconds.
Professor Lovell liked plain scones the least, though, so sultana scones were the staple of their afternoon teas.
‘Why are they called sultanas?’ Robin asked. ‘They’re just raisins, aren’t they?’
‘I’m not sure, dear,’ said Mrs Piper. ‘Perhaps it’s where they’re from. Sultana does sound rather Oriental, doesn’t it? Richard, where are these grown? India?’
‘Asia Minor,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘And they’re sultanas, not sultans, because they haven’t got seeds.’
Mrs Piper winked at Robin. ‘Well, there you have it. It’s all about the seeds.’
Robin didn’t understand this joke, but he knew he didn’t like sultanas in his scones; when Professor Lovell wasn’t looking, he picked out his sultanas, slathered the denuded scone in clotted cream, and popped it in his mouth.
Apart from scones, Robin’s other great indulgence was novels. The two dozen tomes he’d received every year in Canton had been a meagre trickle. Now he had access to a veritable flood. He was never without a book, but he had to get creative in squeezing leisure reading into his schedule – he read at the table, scarfing down Mrs Piper’s meals without a second thought to what he was putting in his mouth; he read while walking in the garden, though this made him dizzy; he even tried reading in the bath, but the wet, crumpled fingerprints he left on a new edition of Defoe’s Colonel Jack shamed him enough to make him give up the practice.
He enjoyed novels more than anything else. Dickens’s serials were well and fun, but what a pleasure it was to hold the weight of an entire, finished story in his hands. He read any genre he could get his hands on. He enjoyed all of Jane Austen’s oeuvre, though it took much consulting with Mrs Piper to understand the social conventions Austen described. (Where was Antigua? And why was Sir Thomas Bertram always going there?*) He devoured the travel literature of Thomas Hope and James Morier, through whom he met the Greeks and the Persians, or at least some fanciful version of them. He greatly enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he could not say the same of the poems by her less talented husband, whom he found overly dramatic.
Upon his return from Oxford that first term, Professor Lovell took Robin to a bookshop – Hatchards on Piccadilly, just opposite Fortnum & Mason. Robin paused outside the green-painted entrance, gaping. He’d passed by bookshops many times during his jaunts about the city, but never had he imagined he might be allowed to go inside. He had somehow developed the idea that bookshops were only for wealthy grown-ups, that he’d be dragged out by the ear if he dared to enter.
Professor Lovell smiled when he saw Robin hesitating at the doors.
‘And this is just a shop for the public,’ he said. ‘Wait until you see a college library.’
Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.
‘Pick one,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You ought to know the feeling of acquiring your first book.’
Pick one? Just one, of all these treasures? Robin didn’t know the first title from the second, and he was too dazzled by the sheer amount of text to flip through and decide. His eyes alighted on a title: The King’s Own by Frederick Marryat, an author he was, so far, unfamiliar with. But new, he thought, was good.
‘Hm. Marryat. I haven’t read him, but I’m told he’s popular with boys your age.’ Professor Lovell turned the book over in his hands. ‘This one, then? You’re sure?’
Robin nodded. If he didn’t decide now, he knew, he’d never leave. He was like a starved man in a pastry shop, dazzled by his options, but he did not want to try the professor’s patience.
Outside, the professor handed him the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. Robin hugged it to his chest, willing himself not to rip it open until they’d returned home. He thanked Professor Lovell profusely, and stopped only when he noticed this made the professor look somewhat uncomfortable. But then the professor asked him whether it felt good to hold the new book in his hands. Robin enthusiastically agreed and, for the first time he could remember, they traded smiles.
Robin had planned to save The King’s Own until that weekend, when he had a whole afternoon without classes to slowly savour its pages. But Thursday afternoon came, and he found he couldn’t wait. After Mr Felton left, he wolfed down the plate of bread and cheese Mrs Piper had set out and hurried upstairs to the library, where he curled up in his favourite armchair and started to read.
He was immediately enchanted. The King’s Own was a tale of naval exploits; of revenge, daring, and struggle; of ship battles and far-flung travels. His mind drifted to his own voyage from Canton, and he reframed those memories in the context of the novel, imagined himself battling pirates, building rafts, winning medals for courage and valour—
The door creaked open.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Professor Lovell.
Robin glanced up. His mental image of the Royal Navy navigating choppy waters had been so vivid, it took him a moment to remember where he was.
‘Robin,’ Professor Lovell said again, ‘what are you doing?’
Suddenly the library felt very cold; the golden afternoon darkened. Robin followed Professor Lovell’s gaze to the ticking clock above the door. He’d completely forgotten the time. But those hands couldn’t possibly be right, it couldn’t have been three hours since he’d sat down to read.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still somewhat dazed. He felt like a traveller from far away, plucked from the Indian Ocean and dropped into this dim, chilly study. ‘I didn’t – I lost track of time.’
He couldn’t read Professor Lovell’s expression at all. That scared him. That inscrutable wall, that inhuman blankness, was infinitely more frightening than fury would have been.
‘Mr Chester has been downstairs for over an hour,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘I wouldn’t have kept him waiting for even ten minutes, but I’ve only just returned to the house.’
Robin’s gut twisted with guilt. ‘I’m very sorry, sir—’
‘What are you reading?’ Professor Lovell interrupted.
Robin hesitated for a moment, then held out The King’s Own.* ‘The book you bought me, sir – there’s a big battle going on, I just wanted to see what—’
‘Do you think it matters what that infernal book is about?’
In years to come, whenever Robin looked back on that memory, he was appalled by how brazenly he had acted next. He must have been panicked out of his mind, because it was absurdly foolish, in retrospect, how he had simply closed the Marryat book and headed for the door, as if he could merely hurry down to class, as if a fault of this magnitude could be so easily forgotten.
As he neared the door, Professor Lovell drew his hand back and brought his knuckles hard against Robin’s left cheek.
The force of the blow thrust him to the floor. He didn’t register pain so much as shock; the reverberation in his temples didn’t hurt, not yet – that came later, after several seconds passed and the blood began rushing to his head.
Professor Lovell wasn’t finished. As Robin rose to his knees, dazed, the professor pulled the poker from beside the fireplace and swung it diagonally against the right side of Robin’s torso. Then he brought it down again. And again.
Robin would have been more frightened if he’d ever suspected Professor Lovell of violence, but this beating was so unexpected, so wholly out of character, that it felt surreal more than anything else. It didn’t occur to him to beg, to cry, or even to scream. Even as the poker cracked against his ribs for the eighth, ninth, tenth, time – even as he tasted blood on his teeth – all he felt was a deep bewilderment that this was happening at all. It felt absurd. He seemed to be caught in a dream.
Professor Lovell, too, did not look like a man in the throes of a tempestuous rage. He was not shouting; his eyes were not wild; his cheeks had not even turned red. He seemed simply, with every hard and deliberate blow, to be attempting to inflict maximum pain with the minimum risk of permanent injury. For he did not strike Robin’s head, nor did he apply so much force that Robin’s ribs would crack. No; he only dealt bruises that could be easily hidden and that, in time, would heal completely.
He knew very well what he was doing. He seemed to have done this before.
After twelve strikes, it all stopped. With just as much poise and precision, Professor Lovell returned the poker to the mantel, stepped back, and sat down at the table, regarding Robin silently as the boy climbed to his knees and wiped the blood, as best he could, from his face.
After a very long silence, he spoke. ‘When I brought you from Canton, I made clear my expectations.’
A sob had finally built up in Robin’s throat, a choking, delayed emotional reaction, but he swallowed it down. He was terrified of what Professor Lovell would do if he made a noise.
‘Get up,’ Professor Lovell said coldly. ‘Sit down.’
Automatically, Robin obeyed. One of his molars felt loose. He probed at it, wincing when a fresh, salty spurt of blood coated his tongue.
‘Look at me,’ Professor Lovell said.
Robin lifted his eyes.
‘Well, that’s one good thing about you,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘When you’re beaten, you don’t cry.’
Robin’s nose prickled. Tears threatened to burst forth, and he strained to hold them back. He felt as if a spike were being driven through his temples. He was so overcome with pain then that he could not breathe, and still it seemed the most important thing was to display no hint of suffering at all. He had never felt so wretched in his life. He wanted to die.
‘I won’t tolerate laziness under this roof,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Translation is no easy occupation, Robin. It demands focus. Discipline. You are already at a disadvantage for your lack of an early education in Latin and Greek, and you’ve only six years to make up the difference before you begin at Oxford. You cannot sloth. You cannot waste time on daydreams.’
He sighed. ‘I hoped, based on Miss Slate’s reports, that you had grown to be a diligent and hardworking boy. I see now that I was wrong. Laziness and deceit are common traits among your kind. This is why China remains an indolent and backwards country while her neighbours hurtle towards progress. You are, by nature, foolish, weak-minded, and disinclined to hard work. You must resist these traits, Robin. You must learn to overcome the pollution of your blood. I’ve gambled greatly on your capacity to do so. Prove to me that it was worth it, or purchase your own passage back to Canton.’ He cocked his head. ‘Do you wish to return to Canton?’
Robin swallowed. ‘No.’
He meant it. Even after this, even after the miseries of his classes, he could not imagine an alternate future for himself. Canton meant poverty, insignificance, and ignorance. Canton meant the plague. Canton meant no more books. London meant all the material comforts he could ask for. London meant, someday, Oxford.
‘Then decide now, Robin. Dedicate yourself to excelling at your studies, make the sacrifices that entails, and promise me you will never embarrass me so much again. Or take the first packet home. You’ll be back on the streets with no family, no skills, and no money. You’ll never get the kinds of opportunities I’m offering you again. You’ll only ever dream of seeing London again, much less Oxford. You will never, ever touch a silver bar.’ Professor Lovell leaned back, regarding Robin through cold, scrutinizing eyes. ‘So. Choose.’
Robin whispered a response.
‘Louder. In English.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Robin said hoarsely. ‘I want to stay.’
‘Good.’ Professor Lovell stood up. ‘Mr Chester is waiting downstairs. Collect yourself and go to class.’
Somehow Robin made it through the entirety of that class, sniffling, too dazed to focus, a great bruise blooming on his face while his torso throbbed from a dozen invisible hurts. Mercifully, Mr Chester said nothing about the incident. Robin went through a list of conjugations and got all of them wrong. Mr Chester patiently corrected him in a pleasant if forcedly even tone. Robin’s tardiness had not shortened the class – they went far past suppertime, and those were the longest three hours of Robin’s life.
The next morning, Professor Lovell acted as if nothing had happened. When Robin came down for breakfast, the professor asked if he’d finished his translations. Robin said he had. Mrs Piper brought out eggs and ham for breakfast, and they ate in a somewhat frenzied silence. It hurt to chew, and at times to swallow – Robin’s face had swollen even more overnight – but Mrs Piper only suggested he cut his ham into smaller pieces when he coughed. They all finished their tea. Mrs Piper cleared the plates away, and Robin went to retrieve his Latin textbooks before Mr Felton arrived.
