The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

Author:Kate Grenville
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

The first problem was not one of meaning but of music: how to convey in the familiar twenty-six letters those alien sounds. Thinking out the way to start was like stretching a muscle that had been unused too long.

He turned over the first page of the notebook. Those first entries had given him the beginning, but they were not the way he meant to continue. On the inviting field of the following page drew up four columns: Letter. Name. Sound. As in the English word.

He felt a thrill, a physical thing, anticipation like an appetite.

He was reminded of what he had not thought of for years, his old copy of Lily’s Grammar of the Latin Tongue: the worn maroon cover, watermarked as with dark clouds, the spine that was coming away from the binding—his father had got it cheap from a stall at Southsea—and the woodcut in the frontispiece of men picking fruit with grand studied gestures.

Recklessly he turned over page after page of the notebook, heading each with a letter of the alphabet as Lily had done: Native Tongue to English, then again for English to Native Tongue.

Now he took a second notebook and on its flyleaf he wrote: Grammatical Forms of the Language of N. S. Wales. Words were all very well, but with nothing more than words one was forever a child, piping out the names of things. Grammar was the gearing that made them useful.

To begin with, he would have to limit himself to actions that could be acted out: to eat, to go or walk, to drink, to yawn, to creep. Foreign they might be, but these people must walk and drink, eat and yawn and creep.

He had better start modestly, with the indicative mood. I eat. You eat. He, she or it eats. Nothing much could be communicated without a sense of past and future, so he had better try for that too: I will eat, you will eat. I have eaten, you have eaten. And of course he must gather the useful imperative: Eat!

On the left-hand side of the page he wrote the English. Beside each entry were the spaces that would be filled, word by systematic word, with the unknown tongue. He headed the page opposite the empty verb templates with a title he hoped might gather up some of what was missing: other inflexions of the same verb.

He laid the notebooks out side by side on the table. The Vocabulary, the Grammatical Forms. The books were like the jaws of some ingenious machine. Between them they would crack open the nut of this language.

It would be an extraordinary task. Even Kepler, even Newton, had not been presented with a tabula rasa but had built on other men’s work. Unlike them, he would be setting off to meet the unknown with only his ears, his pen and these little notebooks.

Rooke was aware of a tightness in his chest that was new to him. It took him some time to recognise that this was how it felt to be in the grip of a vision.

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