The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(182)

When, a few days later, the surgeon at the whaling station removed his bandage, he discovered they had amputated his thumb and forefinger, but this seemed a small price to pay for being alive. He lay for at least a week longer in that rustic but comfortable-enough bunk, regaining his strength, silently savoring his remarkable victory over the Envoy, reliving every detail of the infernal expedition up to the final dramatic moments when he was convinced he would fail and everything would be in vain, that he would never be able to accomplish the heroic feat.

During this time he also remembered reading somewhere, perhaps in one of the many articles about the Baltimore author, that Edgar Allan Poe and the explorer Jeremiah Reynolds were the sole survivors of an extraordinary expedition that had culminated in a mutiny, which until then Wells had never thought to connect with the voyage of the Annawan. Clearly the two men had thought they managed to trap the Envoy permanently in the ice (perhaps by fleeing, after a sudden brainwave, to the stern of the ship where the ice was thinner?) and had somehow managed to return to civilization, where they had decided to lie about what had happened to them at the South Pole. However, now that Wells had seen with his own eyes what really happened, he did not blame them for having lied to the world. Would they have been taken for anything but madmen otherwise? Yes, it had been better to invent a mutiny and pray the matter would be forgotten, and that they could carry on their lives where they had left off. Wells did not remember what had become of Reynolds, but Poe had become one of the world’s greatest writers. Wells himself considered Poe one of his favorite authors and had assiduously read all of his works, including The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, that unwholesome tale permeated with a profound horror, the origin of which Wells had now discovered.

Once he had recovered, Wells set sail for New York and then London, a serene smile on his lips. He would be able to start a new life now, free from guilt. He had earned it. And although he could have settled anywhere in America, he had chosen to go home. He wanted to see London again, to make sure that everything was as it should be, in its proper place. But more than anything, he had to admit, he needed to be close to the Wells who would be born a year later, to see him live from afar, perhaps watch over him. Yes, he wanted to see what the life he could no longer live would be like, for he had to forge another life now, and his missing right thumb and forefinger, which he had once used to hold a pen, intimated to him that he must resign himself to an ordinary life. To being, simply, one among many.





XLI

H. G. WELLS ARRIVED IN LONDON A YEAR BEFORE he was born.

During the long voyage, contemplating the vast, shimmering ocean from the ship’s deck, Wells had had more than enough time to make plans: he would start a new life under the name Griffin; he might even let his hair and beard grow so that no one could recognize him—though there might be no need for that, for by the time the real Wells (why could he not help referring to him as the genuine one?) reached his age, he would be a venerable old man whose wrinkled face would be disguise enough. There were other, more important considerations, he told himself. Where would he settle in order to begin this new life, for example? After weighing up the various options, he decided on Weybridge, partly because it was one of the towns around London that had most suffered during the Martian invasion, but also because it was the same distance from the capital as it was from Woking and Worcester Park, where the other Wells would settle. Because he was clear about one thing: he had no choice but to start a new life, even though it would be little more than a mere existence, because he would never consider it his own life. His true life, with its satisfactions and miseries, would be lived by the other Wells, and only by remaining as close to him as possible, by becoming a witness to the most significant events in the life of his double—those he had already experienced and those he would never experience—could he manage to endure life. He applied himself to this as best he could: he settled in Weybridge, took employment at a chemist, and let each day run uneventfully into the next, like a stream into which he had no interest in casting his line.

From time to time, he would take a carriage to witness parts of his real life: he saw himself as an infant in Bromley, where his parents owned a small china shop. He saw himself slip from the innkeeper’s son’s hands and break his leg as he fell onto one of the beer tent stakes, and then, in his convalescence, reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe. He saw himself dazzling Mr. Morley, who ran a college in Bromley, with his lively intelligence; wilting in the heat inside the Rodgers and Denyer draper’s shop in Windsor, where his mother had sent him to work; and excelling at Midhurst Grammar School, from where, aged only fifteen, he was sent as an apprentice to Mr. Edwin Hyde’s Southsea Drapery Emporium.

Wells observed all this from a safe distance, torn between compassion and nostalgia, taking great care not to alter the chain of events, letting his double do exactly what he had done, to the letter. But when the time came for his double to begin an apprenticeship at the Southsea Drapery Emporium, Wells decided this was the moment for him to show himself, because there was one thing in his life he had long wanted to alter. He had given the matter a great deal of thought, studying every possible ramification his intervention might entail, before concluding that it was probably not significant enough to cause any major change. And so Wells traveled to Southsea, where, planted opposite the drapery shop in which his twin was languishing, he allowed his memories to come flooding back. He remembered his unhappiness and bewilderment at his mother’s insistence on keeping him out of school and university and forcing him to learn the accursed trade of draper, which he was supposed to exercise until the end of his days, as if it were the most commendable job in the world. Unless he ventured inside, or peeped through the shop window, Wells could not see himself, but he imagined his double smoothing out the fabric after showing it to the customers, folding and unfolding lace curtains, realizing how hard it was to roll up a bolt of linen, or dragging mannequins back and forth in accordance with Mr. Hyde’s enigmatic intentions, and doing all this with a book sticking out of his overall pocket, which would soon earn him a reputation as a daydreamer and an idler.