It is common knowledge that even if one discovers the Bower, one cannot find one’s way to the heart of it. That was the whole point of the Bower.
Not, of course, that there seemed the slightest hope of doing more than unearth a few hypothetical, and almost certainly debatable, traces of where the Bower once was; and even that would be at the very best.
There were no acceptable arguments against those who questioned the worth of the whole enterprise. The unending, though intermittent, search either appealed or it repelled. That was all there was to it.
Aylwin-Scott and Tent, having walked up the towpath from Osney to Godstow, had embarked upon a vague ramble to the westward, through hedge and through briar. Improvisation, avoidance of any beaten track, was a great part of the fun. Indeed, having, while on the towpath, discussed country matters of one kind, they were now discussing country matters of another kind.
There had for some time been, not a path, not even the memory of a path, but occasional pointers to there once having been a path; gaps, not quite fully grown up, in hedges; irregular patches of ground where nothing would grow; a few fragments from skeletal stiles, and decaying planks across ditches.
“Don’t trust yourself on that,” said Paul Tent, who was the cautious one.
Michael Aylwin-Scott just flitted across it, in the manner of Harlequin. He was very tall and long-legged.
Considerably further on (particularly in terms of effort expended), they found a hand, or the partial and faded remains of a hand. It had been painted on wood; jacket sleeve, shirt sleeve, sleeve links, everything. Almost certainly the shirt-cuff depicted had been starched. Three fingers were clenched back, but the forefinger indicated imperiously, with the thumb in support. Now, however, the hand merely lay among the weeds. It was at the edge of a coppice, into which, or out of which, it had once pointed.
“If we could find the rest of it, we might discover where it was pointing to,” observed Paul Tent.
“Does it matter?”
“Time spent in finding things out is seldom wasted.”
Michael Aylwin-Scott helped quite loyally with the search, but they could find nothing more, though Paul Tent, who had red hair, was reluctant to give the order of release.
They entered the coppice and pressed straight ahead as best they could.
On the other side was a scrubby field. It looked long unused. It was also of irregular outline, the vaguest and apparently most pointless of polygons.
“The dung looks Ancient Egyptian,” said Paul Tent.
“Does it indeed?”
“You see dung like that in the Cairo Museum. Ox-dung, I suppose. Or camel-dung.”
“The whole field has rather a left-over appearance.”
“That’s exactly what it is. It’s the bit left when all the other fields had been ruled out symmetrically.”
“Yes, of course. The earth is hardly symmetrical automatically.”
“Nor is the pattern of ownership.”
“Where do we go now?”
“Across to that corner, wouldn’t you say?”
Conversation flagged.
“Damned great moles on this side of the wood,” complained Aylwin-Scott.
“No one’s tried to keep them down. The whole area looks depopulated.”
“Isn’t that what we want?”
“You’d think that no one owns this land at all.”
“In that case, the Crown owns it,” remarked Aylwin-Scott.
“I don’t suppose it’s gone as far as that. It’s just that it doesn’t pay to farm it.”
Aylwin-Scott stopped. “What do we think that is?” he asked, but quite casually.
The field rose somewhat at the centre, rather as if there were pressure beneath, vague forces soon to burst out. The two friends had surmounted the modest eminence, and could see over the unkempt hedge which wavered in and out, up and down, before and around them.
“We need the Archaeological Survey. I’ll try to find where we are on the map we have got.”
“I think it’s Rosamund’s Bower,” declared Aylwin-Scott. “Anyway, it’s exactly what I imagine it to look like.”
“To have looked like,” said Tent with a smile. He was on his knees, looking at the Ordnance Survey.
“Well, see for yourself!” patiently exclaimed Aylwin-Scott. “Have a good look.”
“Can’t see from down here.”
Aylwin-Scott sat down beside him and waited. That often happened.
There were no birds in the sky, despite the nearness of the coppice. Perhaps only nightingales nested therein? What was more, there was no mooing or baaing or braying; no sound of diesel lorries or of midget radios or of light aircraft. Nothing, in fact, but gnats and mosquitoes flighting from the unkempt bushes.
Aylwin-Scott waited and waited; swatting and scratching intermittently.
In the end, Tent reluctantly summed up. “There are simply not enough landmarks. You’d have to use trigonometry.”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“Haven’t got the Tables,” Tent answered quite seriously.
“Can we find the way back?”
“Of course we can.”
“That’s always important.”
“Of course we can find the way back,” said Tent again.
“In that case, let’s look at the Bower.”
They rose and began to descend the slight slope ahead of them.
“We ought to be able to decide for ourselves what it really is,” observed Tent.
“It’s Rosamund’s Bower,” said Aylwin-Scott, unwaveringly. “It’s obvious that it is.”
The intervening hedge proved to be the most difficult of all to scramble through.
“Curse it,” cried Tent. “I’m wounded.”
But Aylwin-Scott, who had experienced less difficulty, had gone a little ahead.
Then, once more, he stopped. It was probably to enable the injured, and always more circumspect Tent to catch up.
“My God, Michael,” said Tent in the end. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Not many people have, it seems. The people who made the map, for instance.”
“I think we ought to be careful,” said Paul Tent.
“I’m going in,” said Michael Aylwin-Scott, gazing at the object.
“It was a maze. You were supposed to need a key, or a guide of some kind.”
“We haven’t got either.”
Paul Tent sat on the ground once more and again began to puzzle over the map. “Cry out, if you need help,” he said.
Inside, all was as unkempt and unowned-looking as the surrounding fields. Nonetheless, there were faint tracks though the scrub and brush, and there was nothing whatever to do but to take one’s chance, pushing, stumbling, persisting; arms above the head, hands before the face, eyes mostly shut, shoulders humped.
The air was neither dusty nor musty; if one choked at all, it would be on the universal sweet scent of honeysuckle. No blue songsters warbled. No leaden crows adjured. No kingfishers darted, even though the sound of rippling and cascading water became steadily less mistakable, sometimes coming, sometimes going, sometimes flowing, sometimes ebbing.
The dim track rounded angles, and each time one supposed it would end. Also there were choices to be made: at present there seemed nothing to do but leave things to chance or to instinct.
Upon traversing possibly the ninth or tenth turn, Aylwin-Scott saw, as it were, a vision before him.
The vision filled the whole oval ahead, so that this indeed seemed to be the end of the route, but it was a remarkably simple vision, in that it merely presented Paul Tent, recumbent upon the neglected hummocks outside, and fretting away at the map. There was, however, something else to be seen, standing at a little distance behind Tent, still fairly close to the thick, spiky, hedge, which cast a gloom that prevented Aylwin-Scott seeing what the thing was, in the very limited time available.
For the vision was gone almost as soon as come, and Aylwi
n-Scott could see that the faint track continued, after all, and much as hitherto, with the same vague splits or bifurcations.
Many minutes seemed to pass before he came upon a second vision. This time, it amounted to no more than a figure of about his own stature which suddenly appeared facing him, hardly even blocking the way, and was gone in a moment. All the same, it had been there long enough for Aylwin-Scott to know who it was: it was a figure of himself, a little older; possibly even twenty years older. He did not at all care for the look of the figure, just in itself; but, of course, there was more to the experience than that. Michael Aylwin-Scott was just the man to know very well that to meet one’s double is to presage one’s death.
He stood without breathing. Then the thought came to him that he had not seen his true double. The implication must be a little different from what he had at first supposed.
He released his breath very slowly, and plodded on. He suspected there could be no returning. Quite probably the Bower had by now closed in behind him. Tent would have looked, but Aylwin-Scott did not. The going was hard enough as it was.
But suddenly, and round only a few more of the blind turns, past a few more of the double entries, the prospect changed greatly: the going became half-mown grass, filtering between half-dead hedges partly clipped, it was true, but extremely high, so that they made the sky too distant to be easily visible, even by one so tall as Aylwin-Scott. There was even a lingering peacock, which screamed vindictively, and continued to scream. All its feathers were greying, so that it looked to be the oldest peacock Aylwin-Scott had ever come upon, and it seemed to be resenting to the full both that fact and his own presence. He reflected that it matters less how old and grey a peacock is when there is no observer; and that now an observer had quite irrationally intruded.
Aylwin-Scott hesitated, much as Paul Tent would have done. He feared to pass an angry bird with an eye of stone and a splinter beak. Moreover, its clawed, grey feet seemed to belong more to an eagle.
But as he tried to meet the ancient eye and stare it out, the creature was no longer there, and his way was blocked instead by a big woman; a grey sister of mercy perhaps, or to judge by her demeanour, a grey Abbess, one with uncounted souls dependent upon her. The peacock had been assuredly male, but the Abbess had the same eye as the peacock and a similarly shrivelled and pointed face, though her feet were lost in her long robe. Her garments were old and dirty. Beyond doubt, she had attained to a position in the convent where neatness and tidiness were no longer demanded.
Michael Aylwin-Scott could only sink to the ground before her. The words “a big woman” are frightening in themselves.
“Get up,” she cried, in her peacock scream. “You know perfectly well who I am.”
And so he did, though needless to say, she had been very differently arrayed, or would be, and not as a dingy peacock either. At that very moment, he could see her (of course, in his mind’s eye) in that faded green scrap she wore day after day when Susannah and he were with her at Rocquebrune—or would so wear!
He lunged at her, without, however, quite touching her, taking care not to.
“Why can’t you leave us alone?” he cried. “Just sometimes.”
She positively hissed at him. “And what are we to suppose would happen in that case?”
There was so much to be said in reply that nothing could be said. “Everything would be different,” was all he could offer.
“As it is, you are responsible for what happened to Charlotte. How many more people do you wish to destroy? Apart from me, of course.”
“I was at no time a free agent.” He managed a surprising level of dignity, at least in his own eyes; but, from first to last, the simple question had been, and still was, that if he were not responsible, then who was? Certainly not Susannah. Certainly not the woman confronting him, who was one that never in any matter strayed a single small step. Certainly not Ken Hunt, oaf though he was. Least of all, sweet Charlotte herself, so pale and frail.
“And what have you to offer an attractive woman in any case? You have never kept a job for more than six months, and you try to behave as if you were all the oil in Texas.”
“Meeting you was the worst thing that has yet actually happened to me,” he said, quite quietly; and still, as he thought, with dignity.
“Not as bad as what happened to you in the City, and again in Montreal, and yet again in wherever it was.” She laughed like a foghorn. “You’d be the world’s biggest loser, Michael, except that you’re on far too small a scale to be a big anything.”
“Filthy interloper,” observed Aylwin-Scott; again quite quietly.
“I don’t even believe your stories about Oxford. No one does.”
“Hag,” observed Aylwin-Scott, in much the same tone.
“Lies to women. Lies about money. Lies about your education. Lies about everything.”
He flipped his hand at her cheek. It was far from an uncontrollable assault, but he lacerated his fingers, none the less, so that blood streamed over his trousers and was soon sprinkling a quite large area of the sketchy grass. The Abbess’s grimy habit was much indued.
“Sacrilege!” screamed the Abbess. “Sacrilege! Sacrilege!”
Aylwin-Scott half expected the appearance of roughcast villeins with choppers taller than themselves, but all that happened was that instead of the grey Abbess, there was again the faded peacock, and, this time, he was somehow on the far side of it. The bird was eyeing him as stonily as ever, but had fallen silent. Every few seconds it lifted its immense grey foot and snatched away a lump of turf. It could of course also be added that the deadly bird now stood between Aylwin-Scott and the notion of retreat; though obviously there might be other routes.
As he snatched away his gaze and resumed his advance, he perceived that the man he had seen earlier, his own near-double, once more stood before him. Perhaps he had been there all the time, listening and noting, and concealed from Aylwin-Scott by the immense figure of the Abbess. Assuredly, there was now the bird behind, and the double before.
Certainly there was no hint of a smile on the man’s face, neither of delicate amusement, nor of ironical understanding. He looked utterly inimical. Also, he looked twenty years or more older than before. As far as Aylwin-Scott could see, his hair was now grey completely, instead of merely streaked and patched. It was also much sparser. The furrows on his face were wider and deeper and more. There was even a scar across his left cheek continuing up the side of his brow, like the maquillage of a warrior Indian. The mouth had changed shape perceptibly, and the hands were those of a pugilist.
The theory relating to one’s double had plainly taken on further complexity. Nothing in the content of life or death is ever simple: not even an omen.
“Well?” enquired Aylwin-Scott, his hands in his pockets.
But, of course, the man was no longer there, and all that Aylwin-Scott could do was go forward as if he never had been and never would be again.
Considering the total expanse of the Bower, not only as calculated by laboratory computers but as actually beheld by himself and, up to a point, witnessed by his friend, Aylwin-Scott thought that the particular alley seemed fantastically protracted.
He could hardly look behind him to confirm that impression, because he might then become reinvolved with the peacock. He could just imagine the bird leaving the ground at his first backward glance, and, with one swift trajectory, swooping to where he was and swiftly pecking away his head. The imagining of things like that was habitual to him, and, no doubt, he would not have been the man he was, part poet, part dreamer, part babe, had it been otherwise.
The long avenue might have been slightly less depressing had the hedges been less dizzying, and the whole presentation in more whole-hearted trim. But it had to be supposed that neither electronic hedge-cutters nor leviathan grass-mowers were at the service of those who maintained the place. An immemorial retreat and seclusion were best maintained by immemorial crafts. At least the dim web of alt
ernative routes seemed so far to have been traversed with what might be called success.
Not that the fundamentals within the Bower were significantly distinct from those prevailing in the terrain surrounding it. The walk up which Aylwin-Scott was advancing might be half-heartedly under grass, but the ground was the same lumpy, furrowed, ancient earth that Tent and he had toiled across. In fact, the going was still so hard and rough that Aylwin-Scott even began to feel footsore, absurd though that seemed. Of course there were all those records of pilgrims and penitents having to struggle across actual sword-blades for years on end; suffocated and surfeited with honeysuckle sweetness; battling with their ever recurring selfdoms and other demons; lured by the distant promise of lapping water.
At the end of the walk, a certain relief might once have been available, because there were to be seen the remains, however scanty, of a small stone kiosk, or perhaps even shrine, which unmistakably had once offered a bench of a kind, long, long ago. Here the wanderer might sink exhausted, or enlist new strength for the trials ahead, or both. Aylwin-Scott even smiled slightly when contemplating the jagged remnants: after all, at the heart of the bower was the flower of life, the rose of love. He rounded the turn at the end of the long tramp.
A man stood there soberly, as if awaiting him. This fellow did not even trouble to stand in his path, as his near-double had twice done, and the bold woman who had always been so right about everything, or always would be.
The man was dressed as a Seneschal. His hair, if he had any, was hidden by his headdress.
“What now?” Aylwin-Scott enquired.
“Neglect and deprivation. Criminal charges, I’m afraid, master. You need a licence from the court to do things like that, and I admit it’s not easily got.”
“What is?” enquired Aylwin-Scott. An idle question, of course.
“The court likes grown people to be fully fed and clothed at all times, let alone their little children.”
“How could an ordinary person possibly know that?”
“You’ve got an Oxford degree, master. Not everyone has a thing of that kind. A guiding star, we might put it.”
The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Page 45