Love, loss and pandemics

“His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him…Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air.”

These opening lines from Hilary Mantel’s second volume of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to Henry VIII, are instantly arresting. Readers of Wolf Hall,  the first volume, know that Cromwell lost his wife and both his daughters in successive summers to a deadly “sweating sickness”: “This plague …every few years fills the graveyards. Merry at breakfast, they say, dead by noon.” What are the two girls doing, then, seemingly suspended in a hot-air balloon?

In a second, the genius of Ms Mantel’s imagery becomes clear. Cromwell has given his children another life, naming his hunting hawks after them. This time around, they will be the hunters, not preyed upon by a pandemic. “Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one.”

This portrayal of Cromwell is all the more beguiling because he is also shown to be ruthlessly carrying out Henry VIII’s vendetta against Anne Boleyn. Much blood is spilled, of courtiers and noblemen, to prove the queen’s infidelity before her head is cut off. Cromwell may not wield the axe, but he is the executioner. The paradox of Mantel’s novel is that Cromwell is repeatedly shown to be capable of extreme tenderness — and of high principles.

In The Mirror and The Light,  the final volume, Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth is long dead — yet ever-present. She had succumbed to the sweating sickness in half a day. Then, as so often now, no public funeral was allowed. Cromwell’s mother-in-law says no one need know of what Liz had died, arguing that “if we all stayed at home, London would come to a standstill.” 
 

Cromwell insists the rules of families’ self-quarantining apply to everyone. Years later, Cromwell contemplates Liz’s “furred russet gown laid up in spices” in a chest along with her amethyst ring and her bonnets. “She could stroll in and get dressed,” he reflects. “But you cannot make a wife out of bonnets and sleeves; hold all her rings together, and you are not holding her hand.”

These lines rang true because for the past several months I have lived in an apartment to which my parents retired from Kolkata before they died more than a decade ago. I chance upon clippings, letters and inscriptions in books that are richly evocative. Recently, I discovered a letter of my father’s written when he was eight, which showed an early preoccupation with expressing himself precisely: “When I write raining, it is drizzling, when I write drizzling, it starts raining so I don’t know which word to use.” 

Trying to understand how the world might deal with an aggressive Communist power coincidentally several weeks before the clash with China at India’s border, I had turned to a biography of George Kennan, gifted to me years ago after I eyed it on the shelves of this paper’s books editor. Kennan was the most influential American diplomat of the early Cold War era, who articulated the policy of containment of the USSR. Totalitarian systems such as Stalin’s, he warned, recognised “no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods,” but eventually sowed the seeds of a global backlash against them. This master strategist was haunted by the death of his mother a couple of months after his birth. 
 

The deft use of Kennan’s diaries show him prone to deep bouts of regret that he was unable to have “at least one conversation with her (his mother).” He is periodically stricken by this sense of loss; as a youth he even abruptly stops dancing with a beautiful young woman. 
 

It looms over him when writing to his children from internment in Nazi Germany. “The greatest tragedy of human existence,” Kennan observes, “is that we do not all die at the same time as those we love.” It is the startling first sentence of George F. Kennan: An American Life. For all the power he wielded, Cromwell would have identified with that sentiment. Many parents would as well at the loss of a child, and many spouses, too.

Admiring these recurrent images of love still left me unable to process the randomness of the death of a family friend in June. A witty contrarian, the friend’s progression from bumping his head against the roof of a car to bleeding in the brain and then a heart attack at 59 was all too swift. But as Joanne Trautmann Banks, who edited Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries, argues, “Why should a life be judged by its eleventh hour?” The friend’s mother lost her husband at 59 and her brother in his 50s. Yet when we spoke, she seemed as gracious as ever, grateful to have a grandson and a daughter with her in this Age of Covid when hugs need to be rationed and condolence calls done via Face Time and WhatsApp with family stranded across India and the world. 

Even Ms Mantel would struggle to make poetry of this pandemic. 

Pandemic Perusing is an occasional freewheeling column on books and reading by our writers and reviewers