Free Arthur & George by Julian Barnes Page A

days’ study with Landolt.
    Thus able to claim he had been trained in two countries, he took rooms in Devonshire Place, was elected a member of the Ophthalmological Society, and waited for patients. He also hoped for work passed on by the big men in the profession, who were often too busy to calculate refractions for themselves. Some regarded it as mere donkey-labour; but Arthur considered himself competent in this field, and counted on overflow work drifting his way.
    Devonshire Place consisted of a waiting room and a consulting room. Yet after a few weeks he began to joke that both were waiting rooms, and that he, Arthur, was the one doing the waiting. Idleness being repugnant, he sat at his desk and wrote. He was now well-apprenticed in the literary game, and turned his mind to one of its current bedevilments: magazine fiction. Arthur loved a problem, and the problem went like this. Magazines published two kinds of stories: either lengthy serializations which ensnared the reader week by week and month by month; or single, free-standing tales. The trouble with the tales was that they often didn’t give you enough to bite on. The trouble with the serializations was that if you happened to miss a single issue, you lost the plot. Applying his practical brain to the problem, Arthur envisaged combining the virtues of the two forms: a series of stories, each complete in itself, yet filled with running characters to reignite the reader’s sympathy or disapproval.
    He needed therefore the kind of protagonist who could be relied upon to have regular and diverse adventures. Clearly, most professions need not apply. As he turned the matter over in Devonshire Place, he began to wonder if he hadn’t already invented the appropriate candidate. A couple of his less successful novels had featured a consulting detective closely modelled on Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Infirmary: intense observation followed by rigorous deduction was the key to criminal as well as to medical diagnosis. Arthur had initially called his detective Sheridan Hope. But the name felt unsatisfactory, and in the writing Sheridan Hope had changed first into Sherringford Holmes and then—inevitably as it seemed thereafter—into Sherlock Holmes.
    George
    The letters and hoaxes continue; Shapurji’s plea to the malefactor to examine his conscience seems to have acted as further provocation. Newspapers announce that the Vicarage is now a boarding house offering rock-bottom terms; that it has become a slaughterhouse; that it will despatch free samples of ladies’ corsetry on request. George has apparently set up as an oculist; he also offers free legal advice and is qualified to arrange tickets and accommodation for travellers to India and the Far East. Enough coal is delivered to stoke a battleship; encyclopaedias arrive, along with live geese.
    It is impossible to continue for ever in the same state of nerves; and after a while the household almost turns its persecution into a routine. The Vicarage grounds are patrolled at first light; goods are refused at the gate or returned; explanations are given to disappointed customers for esoteric services. Charlotte even becomes adept at appeasing clergymen summoned from distant counties by urgent pleas for assistance.
    George has left Mason College and is now articled to a firm of Birmingham solicitors. Each morning, as he takes the train, he feels guilty for abandoning his family; yet the evenings bring no relief, merely another form of anxiety. His father has also chosen to respond to the crisis in what seems to George a peculiar fashion: by giving him short lectures on how the Parsees have always been much favoured by the British. George thus learns that the very first Indian traveller to Britain was a Parsee; that the first Indian to study Christian theology at a British university was a Parsee; so was the first Indian student at Oxford, and later the first woman student; so was the first Indian man presented at