The Golden Child

Dedication

For Desmond

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Penelope Fitzgerald: Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Penelope Fitzgerald Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been shortlisted for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have provided introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Introduction

The Golden Child was Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel, written in 1975, the year that her biography of Edward Burne-Jones was published. She wrote it as relaxation from her next task of writing a biography of her father and three of her uncles, the Knox Brothers, whose high-minded attitude to literature and life had so influenced her upbringing (her father was editor of Punch and her grandfather Bishop of Manchester).

Fitzgerald had had half a lifetime of struggle, bringing up three children, working as a part-time teacher in two establishments, Queen’s Gate School in Kensington and Westminster Tutors and, after the family home (a barge moored at Chelsea Reach) sank, moving to a council house in Clapham. Her husband, Desmond, an Irish, ex-Guardsman lawyer, whom she had met at Oxford when he was good looking and sociable, later took to drink, and ended up working as a clerk in Lunn Poly, a travel agency.

In her late fifties (she was born in 1916), with her three children grown up, she was at last able to do what she had always wanted and planned to do since getting a first-class degree in English at Somerville College, Oxford, which was to write. Desmond was dying of cancer and she later claimed to have written the book ‘to amuse my husband when he was ill’. He died in August 1975; The Golden Child, published in 1977, was dedicated to him.

For her first novel, Fitzgerald decided to explore the comic possibilities of a story about the British Museum, which she loved and knew well as a visitor, tramping through the great galleries with the children during their school holidays, using it as a place of retreat on her afternoons off from teaching, attending lunchtime lectures. But she wasn’t just interested in the objects in the museum: clearly, she had also been observing the foibles of the staff, the self-importance of the warders, full of gossip as to what was going on in other parts of the museum, filling in their leave forms whilst not paying attention to the visitors, together with the grandee keepers of departments, who had offices behind the scenes. She knew, without necessarily having been told, the tensions between those who loved the objects on display with an unhealthy passion and those who realised that their responsibilities included looking after, and sometimes entertaining, visitors. Her imagination had been able to intuit the backstairs intrigues, the tragi-comic ambitions and the petty rivalries of a great institution.

Fitzgerald’s imagination also drew on the phenomenon of the Tutankhamun exhibition, which was held at the British Museum in 1972 and which had been a spectacular, unprecedented and still unequalled public success. It had exceptionally long visiting hours, open until 9 o’clock in the evening every day, and was seen by over a million and a half people over a period of seven months. Fitzgerald is known to have gone to the exhibition more than once, and had presumably queued, perhaps with her pupils. She discovered, which is true of any great blockbuster, that half the experience and some of the enjoyment, is in the queuing, the sense of anticipation and the camaraderie, the idea of a pilgrimage to witness a group of objects which are in themselves deeply mysterious. She liked to entertain the notion that the exhibition was a fraud: it was actually hard to see the objects properly because of the low level of lighting. She realised how easy it would have been to trick the visitors, and this sparked her imagination.

Fitzgerald invented her own version of the Tutankhamun exhibition, as a show of relics of an ancient African civilisation called Garamantia, which does indeed exist (I had assumed that, as a work of fiction, it was a figment of her imagination). She invented, too, a cast of characters surrounding the exhibition. There is the elderly archaeologist, Sir William Simpkin, who lives in a private flat in the museum, kept on in the expectation that his fortune would be left to the museum director, so that the director would have his own personal fund for acquisitions and not have to pay attention to the competing interests of the keepers. There is Sir John Allison, the museum director, ambitious for himself, unscrupulous, as all museum directors in fiction are expected to be. He bears a more than passing resemblance to Kenneth Clark. There are the two secretaries, the stupendously lazy Dousha Vartarian, who worked for Simpkin, ‘curled in creamy splendour in her typing-chair’, and the director’s secretary, Miss Rank, who was an exceptionally competent person. There is the deputy head of security, left with the task of actually minding the public; Jones, the flat-footed warder of indeterminate rank and function, who is given the task of looking after the requirements of Sir William Simpkin; the Keeper of Funerary Art, Marcus Hawthorne-Mannering (one of Fitzgerald’s pupils at Queen’s Gate had been Eliza Manningham-Buller, who later became a colleague teaching history before entering MI5); a left-wing technician called Len Coker; and the almost-hero of the novel, Waring Smith, a junior exhibitions officer, who is an ingénue, impoverished, as all junior museum employees are, worried about his mortgage and his wife, Haggie, an offstage character who doesn’t like him having to work late.

It is not clear how much Fitzgerald really knew about the realities of working in the British Museum, but what she wasn’t sure of, she was easily able to invent from her knowledge of other bureaucracies, including the BBC, and from friends like Mary Chamot, a Russian émigré who had been an assistant keeper at the Tate Gallery. And she had her own experience of dealing with museum officials whilst writing her biography of Burne-Jones. She told her former publisher, Richard Garnett, that one of the reasons she wrote the book was as an act of revenge against ‘someone who struck me as particularly unpleasant when I was obliged to go a lot to museums & to find out about Burne-Jones’. However she had absorbed her raw material, she had sardonically observed the curious ways of post-war British institutions, the obsessive hierarchies, the technicians who often know far more than the specialists, the left-wing politics, and the sense of superficial busy-ness masking a wider entropy. She knew only too well, and understood and empathised with, the world of middle-class professional impoverishment, the feelings of resentment towards someone who is in any way unusual, and the ways that museum specialists bury themselves in their subject, ignoring the emotional upset of the world around them.

The Golden Child is taut, finely plotted like a thriller, richly comic, with some of the elements of exaggerated satire characteristic of a campus novel, like Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, published in 1975. She described it as a ‘mystery story’ and, oddly, never counted it amongst her novels.

I was working in the Victoria and Albert Museum during the 1980s. Aspects of the ways museums operated then are very recognisable, when the not-so-young and dandy museum director, Sir Roy Strong, was holding grand exhibitions to the disdain of his much more posh keepers. Reading the novel now I am struck by how admirably it catches so many of the characteristics of England in the mid-1970s (although no date is given as to when the novel is set and she herself described it as a historical novel): the sense and near enjoyment of hopeless decline, pre-Thatcherite economic irrationality, government jobs supported, but inadequately, by the state, a mirror image of the USSR.

Penelope Fitzgerald came across, to those who knew her, as highly intelligent and hopelessly vague, preoccupied by the world of the inner imagination, an enthusiastic member of the William Morris Society, passionate about art and literature. She was hostile to wealth, as she had been brought up to be by the Knoxes. Having spent much of her life marking scripts by schoolchildren, she disguised from them and her colleagues that she could write like an angel, using words poetically, constructing sentences which are descriptively precise, never conveying anything more than is strictly necessary. This reticence about her own genius partly accounts for why it took so long for the qualities of her fiction to be properly recognised and why her third novel, Offshore, was patronised even when it won the Booker Prize. Her writing reads easily and her books are not long, as if they are written rapidly, but they have an extreme, defined and reticent precision in their use of language.

It was not necessarily a bad thing for her fiction that she spent so much of her adult life unable to find the time to write, bottling up her annoyance with human imperfections, including her own, and observing the world with her sharp views of pomposity.

I only encountered Penelope Fitzgerald once.

It was in 1996, towards the end of her life, when she won the Heywood Hill Prize. The prize-giving was on the lawns of Chatsworth and was combined with an annual meeting of all the mayors of Derbyshire. A colliery band played. The sun shone. Noel Annan gave a speech of great eloquence, placing the writing of her most recent (and last) novel, The Blue Flower, within the realms of European humanism.

In The Golden Child, Fitzgerald was at the beginning of that late-flowering writing career.

Charles Saumarez Smith

2014

1

THE enormous building waited as though braced to defend itself, standing back resolutely from its great courtyard under a frozen January sky, colourless, cloudless, leafless and pigeonless. The courtyard was entirely filled with people. A restrained noise rose from them, like the grinding of the sea at slack water. They made slight surges forward, then back, but always gaining an inch.

Inside the building the Deputy Director, Security, reviewed the disposition of his forces. The duties that led to congratulation and overtime had always in the past been strictly allocated by seniority, as some of the older ones were still, for the hundredth time, pointing out, grumbling that they were not to the fore. ‘‘This is a time when we may need force,’ the DD(S) replied patiently. ‘Experience, too, of course,’ he added conciliatingly. The huge bronze clock in the atrium, at which he glanced, had the peculiarity of waiting and then jumping forwards a whole minute; and this peculiarity made it impossible not to say, Three minutes to go, two minutes to go. ‘Three minutes to go,’ said DD(S). ‘We are all quite clear, I take it. Slight accidents, fainting, trampling under foot — the emergency First Aid posts are indicated in your orders for the day; complaints, show sympathy; disorder, contain; increased disorder, communicate directly with my office; wild disorder, the police, to be avoided if possible. Crush barriers to be kept in place at all entries at all times. No lingering.’

‘Sir William doesn’t approve of that,’ said a resolutely doleful voice.

‘I fail to account for your presence here, Jones. You have already been drafted, and your place, as usual, is in Stores. The real danger point is the approach to the tomb,’ he added in a louder voice; ‘that’s been agreed, both with you and higher up.’ The bronze hand jumped the last minute, both inside and on the public face outside the building, and with the august movement of a natural disaster the wave of human beings lapped up the steps and entered the hall. The first public day of the Museum’s winter exhibition of the Golden Child had begun.

It was the dreaded Primary Schools day. The courtyards had been partitioned by the darkly gleaming posters announcing the Exhibition. On each poster was a pale representation, in the style of Maurice Denis, of the Golden Child and the Ball of Golden Twine, with much fancy lettering, and a promise of reduced prices of admission for the very old and the very young. The moving files wound, like a barbarian horde, among these golden posters: five or six thousand children, mostly dressed in blue cotton trousers once thought suitable only for oppressed Chinese peasants, and little plastic jackets; half unconscious with cold, having long since eaten the sandwiches which were intended for several hours later, more or less under the control of numbed teachers, insistent, single-minded, determined to see and to have seen. Like pilgrims of a former day, they were earning their salvation by reaching the end of a journey.

At one point in the courtyard a faint steam or smoke, like that of a camp-fire, rose above the cloud of breath from the swarming red-and-blue-nosed children. It was the field kitchen of the WVS, with urns at the simmer, strategically placed to help those who might otherwise collapse before they reached the steps. Here they all paused a moment, drank an inch of hot catering tea, sweetened at too early a stage for any choice to be made, threw down their plastic cups on the frozen ground and then advanced over what soon became a carpet of plastic cups, blowing on their stiff hands in order to turn the pages of the catalogue which they already knew by heart.

They were not ignorant, these heroically enduring thousands. On the contrary, they were very well informed, and had been for months, as to the nature and content of the Treasure, past which they would file today, perhaps for thirty minutes.

Life among the Garamantians was not really much as we know it today due to their living in Africa in 449 B.C. (HERODOTUS) says they did this. They exchanged gold for salt. (HERODOTUS) says they did this. They had gold, other people had salt, contrary to what we see in England today. They buried their Kings in caves in rocks. So the caves were (TOMBS). When the King was a small child they buried him in a small cave. The dead body was covered with gold. He had a ball of golden (TWINE) to find the way back from the Underground. This was confusing, as is the London Underground. Twine is what we call string, but the Garamantians used different words, due to living in Africa in 944 B.C. When they spoke the sound was likened to the shrill twittering of a bat. Well, personally I have not heard a bat, but it is a Faint Shriek. The child also had Golden Toys put with him to play with after death, as there was no way for him to have proper things — bikes, choppers etc. — as we know them today. I will end here as sir has told us to give in the (CATALOGUE).

The above, one of many projects faithfully carried by their authors to the source of knowledge, was accurate as far as it went. Of the Garamantes Herodotus tells us that they lived in the interior of Africa, near the oases in the heart of the Sahara, and that ‘their language bears no resemblance to that of any other nation, for it is like the screeching of bats’ (nukterides). Twice a year, when the caravans of salt arrived from the north, it was their custom to creep out without being seen and to leave gold in exchange for the salt, for which they had a craving; if it was not accepted, they would put out more gold in the night, but still without allowing themselves to be seen.

They dried the bodies of their dead kings in the sun and buried them in coffins of the precious salt, hardened in the air to a rock-like substance and painted to look like the persons inside; but the corpse itself was covered with gold leaf, which does not corrupt, and since the Garamantians believed that the dead would like to return often, although they might not always be able to do so, they buried with them a ball of fine golden string, to wind and unwind on their journey to the unseen.

The schoolchildren also knew that the Golden Treasure of the Garamantes had been rediscovered in 1913 by Sir William Simpkin, then a very young man and, it must seem, considerably luckier than the archaeologists of today.

Sir William Livingstone Simpkin was born the son of a (MAINTENANCE ENGINEER) which was then called a stoker at a warehouse. They lived down by the old East India Docks. He was named after an explorer. Some say there is a fate in names. He did not go much to school and helped at the warehouse unloading the crates, similarly to what we do for Saturday jobs. Well, this crate had tiles in it from (LACHISH) which is mentioned in the Bible. Well, all these tiles had been sent for a great (ARCHAEOLOGIST) Sir Flinders Petrie. So he took a kindly interest in him. You could train for a bit at London University, he said. Then you would understand the writing on them tiles. So this was how he got started on his work. Unfortunately, his wife is dead.

Sir William, in extreme but clear-headed old age, and after a lifetime of fieldwork, had come to roost in the Museum itself. The vast building was constructed so that no one could see in through any of the windows; otherwise the little lean old figure, with large white moustaches like those of Sir Edward Elgar, might have been glimpsed at a desk on the fourth floor, gently turning the pages of a book. He would have been recognised, even though it was many years since he last appeared on TV, for his appearance had passed into popular mythology. His almost transparent ancient fingers lay across the sepia photographs and the letters and newspaper cuttings crumbling at the edges to dust.

Sir William was playing at defeating Time by turning his pages at random. Here, in the section of June 1913, was Al Moussa, the Chief Minister, who had been persuaded into allowing him to examine the tombs, on condition they were sealed again for ever. Al Moussa was smiling nervously, in formal morning dress, and with many medals; he had not lasted long. There, on the next page, armed with lethal old rifles, were the band of wild Kurds, expelled from Turkey, who had guarded the expedition across the desert, raggedly devoted to their master; all went well till the return to Tripoli, when the Kurds, deprived of their women for many months, rushed headlong into the brothel quarter, scattering their cargo of notes and scientific measurements to the wind.

‘Poor fellows!’ murmured Sir William.

He turned, for a few moments only, for he was quite without personal vanity, to the official photograph of the actual rediscovery of the tomb; he looked so young, like a scanty bundle of washing, it seemed to him now, there in his tropical whites, pointing to the blurred and shadowy entrance.

‘Pardon me, Sir William, I wonder if you’d just take a look at this.’

It was Deputy Security who had trampled into the room and, awkwardly jolting the old man from past to present, laid a piece of bright yellow paper, a leaflet, on the open photograph album.

GOLD IS FILTH

FILTH IS BLOOD

Do you realise that there are People who are Manipulating you in their Own Interests and who are seeing to it that you go to the Exhibition in your Millions in Spite of the fact that it is under a Curse. This So-called Treasure, which has been hidden from Mortal Eye for sixty years, is several times referred to in Holy Writ, where we are told that to ‘look upon Gold is the Body of Death’. When the Treasure arrived on this soil, the Dockers and Transport Workers were not allowed to Move it by Order of their democratically elected Unions. Ask yourself, Why was This? The Truth is that those who look upon the Exhibition are doomed, and yet they are paying 50p for the Privilege. Know the Truth, and the Truth shall Save Ye 50p.