Byron’s Mistake

The man opposite her had gone to sleep under a large hat. He did it very discretely, having presumably put the hat on for just this purpose. Behind the profile of the hat and his slumped shoulders lay the grey lake, and the grey sky and the mountains with swathes of snow on their slopes, a dense whiteness in all that grey, with rivulets of white streaking down the sides like melted icecream. Beth studied the landscape through the big plate glass window of the conference room. The man with the hat snored gently; next to him a woman from the World Health Organization in a bright red suit scribbled vivaciously with her conference pen. Her long dark hair, curled at the ends, swung over the white paper.

Beth struggled to listen to what Professor Weinberg from Hamburg was saying. It seemed to her, and to some others round the long blonde conference table, that whatever point he was making had probably been made just a few times before. The most striking thing was his own perception that it was new. People nodded, too polite to comment. Actually, Beth noticed, it was mostly the men who nodded, perhaps recognising in Professor Weinberg’s self-absorbed verbosity something of their own, while waves of mild habitual irritation passed over the faces of the women in the room – passed, and then were gone, because women don’t like to rock the boat, either. They know that polite behaviour is important, whether or not you’re at an international conference on ‘The science of education research: current challenges and opportunities’.

The word ’science’ occupied an intentionally provocative role in the conference title. Were the practices of education researchers scientific or not? Should they be? What is science? Who cares? ‘The modern pressure towards standardised assessment at all levels of the curriculum,’ intoned Professor Weinberg, ‘is precisely the metaphor of global capitalism; education is just another commodity, it is entered into the same pornographic discourses. Our task as academics must therefore be to study, to expose, these discourses, not to participate in them’.

Andrea Dworkin, the feminist exposer par excellence of pornography, had died of obesity a few days ago. Beth had bought The Guardian at enormous cost from a newsstand outside the metro. And there she was, in all her swollen and shameless glory, frizzy unruly hair like the clouds on the Swiss mountain tops, the famous dungarees, the glowering unadorned confrontational look. It had always been hard to tell from what people wrote about Andrea Dworkin quite what was fact and what was fiction in her life. In all our lives, thought Beth, doodling stars and moons on her conference pad, and wondering what she was doing in this concrete and glass box at the top of a building on the top of a hill overlooking the glassy metallic waters of Lake Leman.

In the afternoon they discussed Beth’s paper. As an economist, she took the line that good research is essential to an evidence-based education system. Her argument, not a very popular one it seemed at this conference, was that academics have a duty to take the real world seriously. Understanding that world requires a primary grasp of numbers as well, as, of course, an appreciation of the quality of individual experience – being a woman, how could she not think or say that, given that women’s individual experiences could often be so different from men’s?

‘But your emphasis is on the methodology of statistical aggregation and randomised control procedures, isn’t it, Dr Levinson?’ inquired Professor Abramovsky, a small round American with a head like a hardboiled egg. He leaned forwards, resting his short fat arms on the table, anxious to pursue the chase. ‘I would like us, as a group, to challenge this obsession with measurement. I agree with Karl here that we must interrogate the ideologies of instrumental rationality and objectivism. Education research must surely be concerned with a discursive and deliberative democracy’.

The man on Beth’s left, a Professor of Education from Italy in a wellcut suit, had been tapping away on his laptop for some time, making the occasional slightly off-the-point remark, as now: ’In my own field, that of ICT, a large amount of money is spent on equipment for schools which may or may not be an aid to pedagogy.’ The Italian professor dropped the remark into the pool of conversation like a jewel that people ought to value. Somebody added another comment about the evils of state regulation. Beth felt increasingly like a plaything, an easy target at a shooting range where fathers win cheap toys for their children in an atmosphere scented with candy floss. She was herself a kind of toy, a pawn in a chess game. She smiled to herself at the familiarity of the feeling - it was like an old friend, nothing to be afraid of.

During the tea break, she peered curiously at the screen of Professor Ghezzi’s computer. Had he perhaps been taking careful notes of their discussion? The text, a startling emerald green on white, was, of course, in Italian, but Beth, who had a rudimentary knowledge of several languages, could see nothing in it to do with pedagogy. On the other hand, there were a number of words - l’amore, il bacio, gli occhi verdi, even ‘un corpo molto sexy’ - which communicated something quite different, Professor Ghezzi’s affection and carnal lust for someone who was apparently called Olina.

The next day they were taken in a bus for the obligatory conference excursion to a twelfth century castle right on the edge of the lake. The clouds had vanished, but the air was still sharp under the clear blue sky. Along the pathway by the lake bloomed a haphazardly planted kaleidoscope of flowers: orange poppies, pink hyacinths, red tulips, purple pansies, yellow forsythia. Beth got down on her knees and took a photograph with her new digital camera of poppies against the background of the now blue lake. The woman from WHO, who was called Linda Ferber, asked her whether she liked gardening or photography. But it was just the image of the orange poppies holding their lacy heads blazonly up against the blue, the pale sun shining through their petals, that had attracted her.

Beth walked behind the others as Nicholas Guerin, their host, paid their admission and shepherded them into the chateau. There were thirty two individual spaces to admire, including inner courtyards, vaults and a prison. The castle was set on a rock which had first been occupied in the Bronze Age. Then, in 1536, Chateau Chillon had been captured by the Swiss, who used it as a military depot. Later it became a base for collecting taxes on merchandise transported from Italy to Switzerland via the St Bernard Pass. Their guide, who gave them this information in a rapid heavily French-accented English, looked rather tired and detached. Linda, who had a medical background, told Beth she thought his yellow tinge might indicate actual jaundice.

The walls of Chillon were made of thick, deeply pitted stone. The air inside was heavy with a stale dank smell, the accretion of centuries: the blood and sweat of Roman soldiers and medieval merchants; the politer perspiration of the Swiss tax men; the bodily wastes and longings of the nobles and the peasants; the copulations, deaths and childbirths of the uncounted, but countable, generations who had lived her.

The air clung like a damp towel to Beth’s twenty-first century skin. She shivered and pulled her sweater from the rucksack on her back. Then a hand on her shoulder startled her. ‘I do hope you didn’t take my remarks yesterday personally,’ said Professor Abramovsky. He looked at her intensely with his two little gimlet eyes. ‘Oh no’, said Beth, with a gaiety she didn’t feel, and moving away from him as quickly as possible. She stood by a window in the heavy wall, a space entirely filled with the blue coldness of sky, and from which you could look down to the waters of the lake lapping on the castle foundations only a few metres below. ‘No, please don’t worry about it. We economists are very thick-skinned.’ Like the castle – but it was a lie, and he probably knew it.

‘Number fifteen,’ said the guide, ‘a remarkably well preserved pair of thirteenth century latrines.’ In the small antechamber, a dark wooden seat against one wall had two round holes in it, bigger than Professor Abramovsky’s eyes, but similarly menacing. When you looked down through them, there was a straight drop to the lake, a very convenient exit route for anybody’s waste products. The German professor was examining the latrines carefully, accompanied by the man with a hat.

Beth left them to it. She went on ahead to what the tourist brochure described as Chateau Chillon’s most famous feature, number seven, the prison. It was here that the Prior of St Victor’s, Geneva, François de Bonnivard, had been chained to a pillar for six years in the sixteenth century. His crime was Republicanism: defending Geneva as an independent state. There was a dark oil painting of him, or rather of someone’s idea of him, as a crouched cloaked figure, by one of the large central pillars supporting the ceiling. But Bonnivard himself isn’t nearly so famous as Byron’s poem about him, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, said the brochure in Beth’s hand.

Suddenly she remembered a small volume with a patchy green cover called An Anthology of Longer Poems which had rested on the bookcase in her grandmother’s bedroom. The epigraph printed on the cover, ‘War Emergency Binding’, had fascinated her as a child. What was a War Emergency Binding, and how was it different from an ordinary one? What economies had been made in its production, what measurable and possibly senseless sacrifices? These were the inquiries of a nascent economist, though no-one recognised it at the time.

Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ is on the long side, even for Beth’s grandmother’s anthology. It has fourteen stanzas of invented narrative about François de Bonnivard’s life. Byron makes him one of six unfortunate brothers; two died in battle, one was burnt at the stake, and, of the three consigned to the Chillon prison, only François survived. The poem is a celebration of morbid despair; Byron even has Bonnivard so resigned to his fate by the end of his spell in the prison that he doesn’t want to leave. When the Bernese come to release him in 1536, he complains that he doesn’t want his freedom after all; this damp stone vault has become a second home, and the spiders and the mice and even his chains have become his friends.

Beth, alone in the vaults ahead of the rest of the party, breathed deeply and tried to imagine what life would have been like for François de Bonnivard. She closed her eyes and heard the people walking above her, the incantations of guides and the chatter of tourist voices. She listened to the water of the lake washing over the walls outside, and the cries of birds crossing the cold sky. She had for a brief instant a sense of herself as differently embodied, another kind of person altogether, someone living long ago in a world without economists or flushing toilets, without reality-disputing Professors of Education and expensive international conferences. It was an embodiment in a world full of death, nasty smells, random violence and unpredictable ends. It lasted a moment, and then the moment was gone.

When she opened her eyes, Beth saw Professors Abramovsky, and Ghezzi and Weinberg and Ferber and the others from the conference coming into the cellar, led by the jaundiced guide who was most anxious to launch into the Byron and Bonnivard story, his pièce de resistance. ‘We do not know in what year Byron came here, but the castle has fascinated many romantic writers, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Rousseau and Shelley. According to Byron,’ he told them, ‘Bonnivard’s footprints are engraved on the floor. But no-one has been able to find them. On the other hand, there are many graffiti on the pillars.’ They all peered dutifully at pillar number three where a small piece of glass had been fixed over the inscription ‘Byron’. ‘However,’ said the guide keenly, looking rather less yellow now he was fully into his story, ‘Byron was in error. This wasn’t actually the pillar to which Bonnivard was chained. Bonnivard’s pillar was that one over there, the fifth one.’

Again, they turned to look, but in itself the pillar told them nothing. It just stood there, a material support, a measurable weight of stone. ‘Byron’s mistake,’ said Beth to herself and then out loud, delightedly. ‘Byron couldn’t count!’

The male professors gave her a very taken-aback look, mixed with consternation. ‘We’ll of course he couldn’t, he was a romantic,’ commented Professor Ghezzi at last, no doubt thinking fondly of Olina with her gli occhi verdi in her apartment overlooking the Piazza Navona in Rome.

‘That’s the problem, isn’t it guys?’ challenged Professor Abramovsky, meaning by ‘guys’ to include Beth and the other women. ‘The texture of life. We can’t measure texture, we can’t get it down to numbers.’

‘Well, Byron certainly couldn’t,’ observed Beth tartly. The men had trouble reading her expression, as she had her back to the light. ‘It’s a terrible poem anyway - far too long,’ she said to Linda, as the guide moved them out into the last courtyard.

They trooped outside into the sunshine. Above them, a little way up the mountain, roared a motorway. People on metal chairs in a cafe opposite were sipping plastic cups of beer. The guide took a photograph of them all lined up against the flowers. Afterwards, when Beth looked at it, sent electronically as an attachment to the conference report, she decided to enhance it digitally by making the flowers more prominent and removing two of the attendees altogether. She was so pleased with the result that she hung it on the wall in the basement of her flat, between a photograph of her grandmother and an eighteenth century illustration of an opium poppy.