he fished around in the very battered leather briefcase for his Wordsworth and his notebook, which he dumped onto the table higgledy-piggledy, so that the notebook slid off onto the floor and had to be retrieved with a great deal of bending, heavy breathing and more chair-scraping. Finally, from an old-fashioned hard spectacle case lodged in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, he produced a pair of rimless reading glasses which he settled upon his great beak of a nose, tucking the ear-pieces into the mane of grey hair around his face, in which could be faintly discerned the fleshy tips of his red ears.
Catriona took a deep breath and said, ‘Well, then, who’s going to begin?’
Marilyn spoke. ‘This Wordsworth. Was he a Buddhist?’
She was a thin-faced woman in her thirties, with lank mousy hair, who wore long, floral print dresses and baggy cardigans. She had a nasal twang which indicated an antipodean origin. At the beginning of the course, Catriona had found her intensely irritating. Her wincingly gauche, uninformed and beside-the-point comments delivered in her whiny voice had set Catriona’s teeth on edge. But, gradually, she had come round. Marilyn was not stupid, merely ill-educated. Whatever outback apology for a school she had attended had left her in complete ignorance of the most basic aspects of English literature and history, making the Canadian students Catriona had taught seem prodigies of knowledge in comparison. This realisation had shamed her. Marilyn was more stunningly uninformed on her course of study than any student Catriona had ever come across, but her role as a teacher was to cure that defect, not to despise it or be embarrassed by it.
And Marilyn, to give her credit, worked hard and learned quickly. Catriona had learned something, too. Marilyn’s oddball remarks, viewed without the prejudice of received academic wisdom, occasionally had the effect of a liberating insight.
So, the typical Marilynism yoking Buddhism, which she undoubtedly did know something about, with the poetry of Wordsworth, which she didn’t, which a few months ago might have made Catriona inwardly squirm, seemed on that evening, fresh and interesting.
One of the essential qualities in a teacher, Catriona had also learned, is to know when not to answer the student’s question. A factual answer can kill the lively thought that gave birth to the enquiry. So she didn’t reply dismissively that of course Wordsworth wasn’t a Buddhist, which was the strictly correct answer, but which, like all strictly correct answers, was actually quite misleading.
‘A Buddhist? Perhaps you’d like to expand on that observation, Marilyn.’
Marilyn flushed. ‘Well, like this bit here.’ She quoted:
‘“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.”
‘I mean, what he’s saying is that we’ve had another life. You know, Buddhists believe that you’re reincarnated. You come back to the world, to samsara, they call it, over and over again.’
Catriona smiled, ‘Until you become perfectly enlightened. Yes, I think Marilyn has a point. Do we agree that there is a sense here of having come from elsewhere, and of forgetting what has happened in that previous existence?’
Urquhart, who, as usual, was shifting in his seat, fiddling with his pen, and from time to time blowing noisily through his nostrils like a spouting whale, gave the hacking cough which announced he was about to contribute.
‘Ay, there’s a similarity. But surely the difference is that Wordsworth is saying that our souls come direct from God, “trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home.” That’s not the same as saying you’ve been a wee mouse in your previous existence.’
Marilyn had her mouth open, ready to protest about this travesty of her philosophy, but Catriona could see that there were several other members trying to catch her eye. The ball was rolling, and she didn’t want them to be side-tracked into an argument about Buddhism.
Joyce spoke. She was a dark, well-dressed woman in her forties, who was apparently the personal assistant of an extremely big cheese in the City.
‘Aren’t we getting rather ahead of ourselves here? Surely the first stanzas are about Wordsworth’s losing his poetic gift. He can’t see things as he used to as a child: “Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”’
‘Yeah. Old Wordsworth’s got this thing about his childhood, an’t he?’ said Kenny. ‘Always going on about how happy kids are. “Thou child of joy, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy!” I don’t think he grew up where I did, that’s all I can say. Any shouts of joy from me, my old man would have given me a clip on the ear, and told me to fucking shut it!’
There was a little uneasy laughter, and Joyce could be seen to make a face at the obscenity. She and Kenny had had a confrontation about what she called his gutter speech a few weeks before, and the row was still simmering.
‘So, does anyone else agree with Kenny? Does Wordsworth idealise childhood?’
Gradually, the whole group was persuaded to contribute, and once more Catriona was struck by the subtlety and perceptiveness of their responses. Unlike the normal run of students who were still too near being irresponsible children themselves, these people had taken many hard knocks and felt in their own lives the loss of faith, and the possibility of being reconciled to that loss which the poet was describing. They also, most of them, had children of their own. They had experienced that wrenching love first hand, they had seen their own children and grandchildren change from careless beings to ones bent under the ‘inevitable yoke’.
Then, as the two-hour session neared its end, Mary O’Shaugnessy, who had been watching Catriona with a calm, shrewd blue eye, addressed her directly. ‘And you yourself, Professor Turville? Where do you stand on the childhood issue? Did you as a child see things “apparelled in celestial light”? Or do you “grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind”?’
Throughout the seminar, Catriona had been steeling herself. Of all poems to have to teach at the present! She had considered whether to duck it, but that would have been unprofessional. The ‘Intimations Ode’ was a key text in the study of the poet. She had been particularly dreading the mention of this line, dreading the memories it would evoke. She had hoped that her scholarly detachment would carry her through.
She tried to speak, but her lip trembled so much the words would not come. She felt the tears starting at her eyes, and through her blurred vision saw nine faces fixed on hers in various expressions of concern and astonishment. She fumbled in her bag for a tissue, then took refuge behind it. She blew her nose, and wiped her eyes.
‘I’m sorry, a little touch of migraine.’ She glanced down at her watch. With relief she saw that the time was up. ‘Thank you, all of you, for your usual stimulating company.’ As she gave out the tasks for the next meeting, she was pleased to observe that she had regained control of herself.
She bent her head to her bag, intent on putting away her books and papers as they said their farewells and filed out. When she looked up, it was to see that the room was not empty. Alan Urquhart hovered by the door, nervously swinging the battered leather briefcase like a schoolboy, as though he couldn’t decide whether to go or to stay.
She was slipping on her coat when he made up his mind.
In contrast to the chaotic state of the rest of him, his speech could be,
