The Virgin and the Whale Read online

  A touching, clever novel about stories, about using them to create your own identity, and about the way they can forge bonds of love.

  It is 1919. Elizabeth Whitman is working as a nurse in the local hospital, waiting for her husband to return from war, though he is missing in action, ‘presumed dead’. She keeps him alive for their four-year-old son, Jack, by telling the story of a man she calls The Balloonist, who went away in a hot air balloon and has adventures in exotic countries.

  When she is asked to nurse a returned soldier whose head injury has reduced him to an animal-like state with no memory, Elizabeth starts telling her stories to him. It is through them that she manages to engage his interest and offer him a new life … in more ways than one.

  For Rebecca, Alice and Fenton.

  And for MN, of course.

  Stories, we all have stories. Nature does not tell stories, we do. We find ourselves in them, make ourselves in them, choose ourselves in them. If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we had better choose them well.

  — JAMES ORBINSKI

  We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense is our lives … If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story — his real inmost story?’

  — OLIVER SACKS

  You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.

  — LUIS BUÑUEL

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  the beginning

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  forty

  forty-one

  forty-two

  forty-three

  forty-four

  forty-five

  forty-six

  forty-seven

  forty-eight

  forty-nine

  fifty

  fifty-one

  fifty-two

  fifty-three

  fifty-four

  fifty-five

  fifty-six

  fifty-seven

  fifty-eight

  acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  the beginning

  In early May 2008 I received a telephone call from a softly spoken man. I will refer to him here as MN. He introduced himself and explained that he had recently read and enjoyed my first novel, Rocking Horse Road and thought that I might be interested in writing about his family’s history. Being accosted by strangers armed with their life stories is a hazard of the writing profession. Some people are convinced that theirs will be an instant bestseller if only they had someone who could ‘just write it down’. MN was very polite and outlined his story for me succinctly. I was particularly taken by one thing that he told me. I remember it clearly. He said, ‘My mother fell deeply in love with a man who had no memory.’

  Although I was still apprehensive, I agreed to meet him a few days later at a café in the centre of the city. I arrived early and sat at a table by the window facing the door. MN turned out to be a tall, slightly stooped man with a tanned face and white hair growing in tufts above his ears. He wore a navy-blue jacket and striped tie. I guessed he was in his early eighties (in fact he was ninety at the time).

  After he insisted on buying us both a cup of coffee, he explained that he and his wife had retired to what used to be their holiday home by the beach, an hour’s drive north of where we sat, although she now worried about global warming causing the ocean to rise. Personally, he didn’t think it would happen in his lifetime. He had been a civil engineer for most of his career — forty-five years with the city council — and had contributed to the design of many of the city’s bridges and roads.

  I immediately liked MN. He impressed me with his old-fashioned manners and the thoughtful way he formed his replies to my questions. He elaborated on the story he had told me over the phone and I jotted down a few notes while he spoke. It is fair to say that by the time we had both finished our coffee, twenty minutes at the most, I was firmly hooked.

  I arranged to meet MN again on several occasions over the following months. He and his wife regularly came to town to spend time with their three grown children, seven grandchildren and the most recent arrival to their extended family, a great-granddaughter. MN could usually spare me an hour or two during the course of a day when they were visiting. By this time I was the one who was keen to talk to him, often ringing to seek answers to the questions I formulated between our meetings.

  Any doubts I had about the veracity of his story had evaporated at our second meeting — at my house this time — when MN produced a small bundle of documents, some of which dated back to the First World War. There were a dozen photographs, copies of hospital and army records, as well as the first two handwritten pages of a manuscript for an unpublished children’s book. Most significantly for me, there was also a long letter from his mother written to MN in the year she died, 1969, when she was seventy-nine. All this became the basis for the story that you are about to read.

  At MN’s request I have changed the names of everyone involved. He insisted on there being absolutely no publicity for himself, his wife or their wider family. To a certain extent I have fictionalised the setting, although the city of Mansfield, and perhaps the stately home, Woodbridge, may be recognisable to those who know them by their true names. Although I have been obliged to extrapolate and embellish to fill gaps in the story, the bones of the tale and a truly surprising number of the details were all there on the day that MN first spoke to me on the telephone.

  Regrettably this book has taken longer to complete than I first imagined. Finding a suitable voice and then the structure took experimentation and numerous false starts. On three separate occasions I put the story aside, sure that I had come to a dead end, that I did not have the talent or the patience to complete it. Each time, however, I was drawn back by the promise MN’s story showed. The delays were also due to a more pragmatic reason: I needed to complete other writing projects with more immediate financial returns. However, as any novelist will tell you, false starts, delays, interruptions and procrastination are all normal parts of a book’s gestation.

  MN read the early drafts of my manuscript and gave his blessing to the idiosyncratic way that I have dealt with his family’s tale. Right from the start he said that he wanted it to be told as a story, rather than a piece of non-fiction. That is why he approached me, a playwright and novelist, and not a historian.

  Sadly, both MN and his wife died in the winter of 2011, within weeks of each other. My only regret is that he was not able to see the published version of what has become the book you are now holding, The Virgin and the Whale. I trust that he would have approved.

  I
hope that you are as captivated by MN’s story as I was when I first heard it.

  Carl Nixon

  March 2013

  one

  How to begin?

  It is a perennial problem. Ever since the first campfires struggled to keep the clawed shadows of the forest at bay, storytellers have grappled with what combination of sound and meaning to set loose among the dancing firelight. Which words should be cast towards the expectant faces?

  Or, in a relatively recent development: what inky scratchings will lead the argosy of dark shapes on their way, bobbing in military rows across the calm pale oceans bordered by these covers?

  Spoken or written, either way the first words must be strong enough to carry the burden of everything that follows.

  Once upon a time. It has certainly stood the test. But I think not; not on this occasion.

  In the beginning was. That is undeniably one of the most ancient and powerful openings of all.

  Let me tell you a story. No, far too generic.

  A man walks into a bar. Unlikely.

  But wait. For our purpose, perhaps that last will do. Conventional wisdom holds that when trying to get an audience’s attention it’s a good idea to begin with something light-hearted; an icebreaker to draw people in, to get them on side.

  So here is the joke: Balaenoptera musculus.

  Admittedly it’s not the rib-tickler it was when first told by Carl Linnaeus back in 1758. That’s the year the diminutive Swiss botanist, one of the first to practise rigorous scientific thought, classified the blue whale into: order (Cetacea), suborder (Mysticeti), family (Balaenopteridae), genus (Balaenoptera) and species (B. musculus).

  The funny ha-ha part is that, while the Latin musculus is generally translated from the Latin as ‘muscular’, it can also mean ‘mouse’. The biggest creature ever to exist on the face of the Earth is given a name synonymous with all things small.

  Starting with a straightforward explanation may be best after all. It’s not flashy, but it will suffice.

  This story takes place in the year 1919 in a small city. It is the third largest metropolitan area of a country, which is a former colony and still a dominion of Great Britain. For the purpose of our story let us call this city Mansfield.

  The city was named by one of its founding fathers in tribute to his hometown in the English county of Nottinghamshire. As was nearly always the case, the area on which Mansfield was built already had a name. In the language of the tribe of dark-skinned and tattooed people who had lived there for countless generations the name spoke of an abundance of food, combined with the word for a basket woven from flax. The wet lowlands and estuary teemed with flounder, herring and eels. It was a cornucopia of shellfish and waterfowl. Place-of-the-overflowing-food-basket is a rough translation, although even then some of the subtleties of meaning and cultural significance are lost.

  This name went unnoticed by the vast majority of the colonists.

  On the day of its (re)naming, Mansfield, to the pale newcomers, was just a collection of temporary huts located near the coast at a swampy meeting of two rivers. Unproductive. Wasteland. Some settlers thought it so unpromising that upon arriving at the port after a voyage of many weeks they immediately upped sticks and set out for other provinces.

  By 1919, however, the swamp has been drained and the twin rivers contained between narrow banks. Mansfield has risen to become a thriving city. Its port is the busiest in the country. Wheat, barley, wool, frozen lamb and mutton, all grown and raised on the fertile plain that stretches away from the city to the west as far as the mountains, are shipped from the port as fast as they can be produced, destined for Mother England.

  The city’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly of good British stock: English on the whole and some Scottish. (Blessedly, from the point of view of the other settlers, the Irish have largely stayed away.) Most of the citizens are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. They still refer to the United Kingdom as Home (note the capital ‘h’).

  The indigenous tribe was only ever small and exposure to measles and influenza quickly reduced their numbers to almost nothing. By 1919 there is hardly a brown face to be seen in Mansfield. This lack is viewed by most of its citizens as one of the city’s most positive attributes, along with a high quality of ground water, well-maintained street surfaces, the lighting of public places and the early and widespread adoption of both electric trams and Mr Bell’s telephone system. Mansfield also boasts excellent sewerage. The tidal estuary has proved to be a very convenient depository for the city’s effluent; it is flushed twice a day.

  It may be enough by way of description to say that Mansfield is sometimes referred to as ‘the most English town outside of England’. If this conjures up images of a shallow river lined with willow trees, of Gothic Revival and Neo-Baroque buildings in stone and brick, or men in white playing cricket on summer’s emerald lawns, perhaps a central square with an impressively spired Anglican cathedral, well, then you wouldn’t be shooting very wide of the mark. Not wide at all. There are similar towns and cities to be found scattered throughout the world: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa has a few — think of Durban.

  One of the most interesting features of Mansfield at this time is its whale. The ‘Mansfield Whale’, as it is called, is not, unfortunately, a live specimen. (That truly would have been something, perhaps exhibited in a specially constructed pool or fenced-off part of the harbour.) The city possesses the intact skeleton of a Balaenoptera musculus.

  This had been acquired by the Mansfield Museum just over a decade earlier, in 1908. The government of the day generously contributed £200 towards the cost of acquiring and housing the specimen. Another £300 had been raised by public donation.

  The blue whale was already dead when it washed up on a remote beach on the far side of the country. It took four men a month working twelve-hour days to hack, scour and boil away the stinking blubber, the muscle and stubborn ligament from the bones. These were then taken by barge, ship and rail to Mansfield. The bones were later loaded onto carts at the train station and pulled by teams of draught horses to the museum grounds, where they were painstakingly reassembled using metal rods drilled through the calcium.

  The skeleton measures 99 feet in length — using the accepted standard method of measuring whales; that is by taking the length of a straight line between the point of the jaw and the notch in the tail, which marks the termination of the backbone.

  Head length: 21 feet.

  Length of ‘hand’: 12 feet.

  Width of tail: 21 feet.

  Not surprisingly, the galleries of the Mansfield Museum were unequal to the task of housing such an exhibit; they were simply far too small. A long corrugated-iron shed was built adjacent to the museum in the grounds of the Botanic Gardens specifically for the job. (Corrugated iron! That most ubiquitous of building materials in the colonies; strong, light, cheap, able to be stacked like playing cards, adaptable to almost any circumstance. It is even pleasing to the eye, given one generation and half a chance.)

  The shelter — really just a roof, as it is open on three sides — pushes in against the stone wall on the southern side of the museum close to the main entrance to the Botanic Gardens and is visible from Nelson Avenue. Beneath the iron, the whale — all 9 tons — is suspended above the bare earth by heavy chains.

  On the day of the skeleton’s official unveiling, 23 March 1909, the Mansfield Press reported that ‘thousands arrived to pack the whale shelter and overflow into the adjacent galleries’.

  The reason for the overwhelming interest was that, at the time, it was the biggest whale skeleton held by any museum in the world. Such a coup sent a surge of civic pride washing through Mansfield. Its ripples lapped against the shores of the entire nation. The ‘Mansfield Whale’ was even mentioned in such august publications as The Times of London and The Washington Post. ‘Our whale’ put Mansfield on the map.

  But (there is always one) …

  Here at the
start of our story, in 1919, the time since the end of the Great War can still be counted in months. While the citizens of Mansfield looked away across the oceans to husbands and fiancés, sons and brothers fighting in Europe, rain has blown in under the roof of the corrugated shelter. The crowds have long ago dispersed. The once crisp white bones are faded to grey. The metal rods have rusted, leaving stains the colour of strong tea around the edges of the drilled holes. The damage is most obvious in the multiple joints of the hands. Lichen has found a home along the southernmost jaw (20 feet 8 inches).

  Only visitors to the city and young children still stop to marvel at the seemingly impossible scale of the creature’s construction. For the rest of the citizens of Mansfield, familiarity and the numbing toll taken by the war have rendered the huge skeleton if not invisible, then very close to that terribly lonely state.

  two

  Let’s choose at random a day in that year — although in a good story nothing, of course, is truly random; every aspect is selected carefully — say, 9 May 1919.

  Elizabeth Whitman is walking through York Park. She is still ten minutes away from arriving at the museum and the long shed where the whale is housed. It is a little before eight o’clock in the morning. Elizabeth is wearing a grey and white nurse’s uniform with her own heavy woollen coat over the top. Her auburn hair is firmly pulled back, each wisp tamed. She is coming from the small working man’s cottage in the north-east of the city where she lives with her mother and father and her four-year-old son, Jack. She is on her way to her job as a sister at the hospital. In your imagination, see her move with brisk steps — nurses’ steps; there is always something to do in the wards, someone’s needs to attend to.

  Elizabeth follows the stretch of gravel path running alongside the Stratford River around the edge of the park where the willow trees lean out over the shallow water. As we watch, she approaches, and crosses, the bridge that marks the eastern entrance to the park. She has arrived at Nelson Avenue, close to the centre of Mansfield. On the other side of the avenue are private homes, a small hotel and the staff club for the nearby university. Bicycles and trams ply the avenue. Leaving the bridge, she turns south. Now, Elizabeth is passing the stone walls of the private boys’ college, where two magpies stand guard on the manicured grass. (For reasons of birth and economics she is aware that her son will never attend that particular school.) Slightly later, no more than a hundred of her steps, she is in front of the stone façade and columned entrance of the museum. Twenty feet beyond those she is beside the painted iron fence with the fleur-de-lis spikes that marks the eastern perimeter of the Botanic Gardens. If she turns her head slightly to the right Elizabeth cannot avoid seeing the whale.