*****
When the political situation had eased, a nephew of the Comte de Soissons, known to be populist and in good standing with the government, made enquiries about the ring and eventually tracked it down to Gaston. Evidently it was a much-cherished family heirloom, although not intrinsically valuable, and relief at finding it safe made him talkative. He had been fond of the old man, who had lived kindly with a clear conscience and never feared death, only the possibly painful and protracted ways it might come, so he would have been grateful for a quick end. The nephew too was grateful, and not stingy in his thanks.
With the money Marie and Gaston bought a small property near Saint Cloud. Carefully tended, it supported them with a little surplus for extras and to put by. In time, with additions as the opportunity offered, it also supported their children, and later on their children’s children. As Voltaire had said, in dangerous times, the thing to do is to cultivate one’s garden.
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FAMILY REUNION
I thought we were going to have a week of my annual leave free from outside commitments so I could get on with some long-overdue maintenance jobs. How wrong can you be? Leafing through the bills and junk mail on the Saturday morning before it, I was about to throw out a sheaf of appeals from various no doubt worthy but importunate charities when I noticed caught between them a smaller envelope that turned out to be addressed to Lucy, with a French stamp. The writing looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a moment to recognise it as belonging to Lucy’s sister Sophie.
I’d known the two of them since my teens. Sophie was the glamorous one, and in those days I fancied her achingly myself but never stood a chance. For that I’ve since been very thankful as her waywardness would have driven me mad. Her elder sister, practical, affectionate and reliable, if perhaps - how should I put it? - a shade less exciting, suited my own temperament far better, and on the whole our marriage has worked very well.
“Lucy!” I called. “Letter from Sophie, I think.”
“What sort of mess has she got herself into this time, I wonder?”
Sophie, unfortunately, is one of those women who always go for exactly the wrong man, and when things don’t work out she is liable to fall flat on her face. Her most recent partner, Robert, had been in jail for assaulting her the last time I heard and Sophie herself had had a nervous breakdown. Lucy had every reason to expect this latest of her rather infrequent communications to be about yet another disaster.
Surprisingly, it was not. Sophie had bought a house on the Breton coast between Brest and Quimper, about as far to the west as you can go in France, and demanded that we should visit her there as soon as possible. I was doubtful, but Lucy jumped at the idea; although they were never particularly close as adults and hadn’t met in years, she welcomed the opportunity. The only possible time as far as I was concerned was the following week, and I cursed the short notice. However, when I checked the postmark which for once was partly legible, I mentally apologised; the letter had taken the best part of a month in transit.
I looked up the various travel possibilities while Lucy phoned her sister. It was going to be a formidable journey whichever way we went, and since I don’t like driving too far on the continent, the main alternatives seemed to be the ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff or the Channel tunnel to Paris and then by rail to Brest. Lucy was still on the phone (no surprise there) so I put a note beside her to ask which route Sophie would recommend.
Sophie had no clear preference. However, rumours of a French rail strike raised doubts about the land route, and after checking that we could hire a car in Roscoff I settled for that.
Luckily we had a calm crossing. It was a long one and I’d taken a book, but my mind wandered to Sophie’s amatory history, at least what we knew of it; there was undoubtedly a great deal she kept to herself. It started off quite innocently with a hopeless crush on a fellow-student for whom she had no chance against wealthy competition, very fortunately as she realised years later on coming across a press account of his involvement in a sordid scandal.
She got over that in time, only to fall victim to a lecherous lecturer she was naïve enough to believe in his declarations of passionate devotion to her, that is until she realised she was merely one of a harem. Swearing in a fit of indignation that she was done with men, she then concentrated on her studies and in due course got a first-class degree in modern languages. There was nothing wrong with her brain; it was her heart, or her hormones, that always let her down. To celebrate that success, and the promise of a good job with a solid and reputable travel company, she went on a tour of the ancient sites in Turkey and despite her resolution fell heavily for the guide, who lavished attention on her but of course turned out to be already married to a woman with control of the money.
Fortunately she hadn’t burnt her boats back here, and we found out about this only much later, as indeed we heard very little of her more personal activities for a good few years; she probably didn’t want to lose face by admitting a string of unsatisfactory involvements of which only vague suggestions came our way. She did write occasionally about other matters, and eventually of being put in charge when her company decided to open an office in St. Malo. There she met Robert (pronounced, of course, Rob-air).
He was quite an accomplished artist and she admired his work. For a woman by now within sight of her half-century she had kept herself in pretty fair trim, and he asked to paint her. I’ve seen the picture, and it’s good in its way: superb draughtsmanship, definitely classy, but like much of his output rather lurid in the situation depicted and verging on pornography. Think of Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus” and you’ll get the kind of flavour. I imagine that having got her conveniently in the nude he encouraged nature to take its course; anyway, they set up house together and to everyone’s surprise actually married. It was a quiet affair with few guests, as most of Robert’s friends probably thought it too insufferably bourgeois, but we were invited. Quite against my expectations, I rather took to him at that time.
Despite a bohemian exterior he turned out to have the ideas on marriage once considered conventional, and to be generally a faithful and considerate husband. He did however have a rather volatile temper that gradually became more evident and occasionally flared into violence. Afterwards he was always shamefacedly apologetic, but the episodes became more alarming and eventually, after what later proved to have been a complete misunderstanding, he went definitely too far. Hence the jail sentence.
Arriving in Roscoff we had a bit of a wait for the car hire office to open, so took a stroll round the old town which is quite attractive. Sophie had given us directions not quite as explicit as they might have been, but I had a map in any case and congratulated myself on successfully negotiating the minor roads to Rumengol, cutting off the two longer sides of the big triangle with its western vertex at Brest. Pride before a fall; I then missed the turning to Landévennec. Coming to Crozon, not mentioned in Sophie’s notes, should have given me pause, but I wasn’t fully convinced of the mistake until running out of road at what we later found was the Pointe de Penhir, identified by the hideous memorial to wartime resistance. There was no alternative to turning back, but this time after looking more carefully at the map, I made sure to turn left five kilometres past Crozon and again after another five. After yet another five or six it was a relief to see Sophie herself in the garden of her little house by the long arm of the sea.
Sophie hadn’t mentioned having anyone with her in her new home, and I wondered whether that meant she was by herself or hadn’t dared to admit another folly, so it was another relief to find her in solitary possession. Less pleasing was finding ourselves expected to help sort out everything that needed doing to the place, which was plenty. “Robert’s still in jail, I suppose?” was all I dared to say about it.
Trust me to put my foot in it. Sophie burst into tears, and with a dirty look at me Lucy had to comfort her. It was another ten minutes before she was composed enou
gh to say that he had died a couple of months earlier, probably because of a brain tumour.
That well and truly took the wind out of my sails. “Well, I suppose I ought to say I’m sorry, but ...” At that point Lucy kicked me quite hard and I shut up before digging myself any deeper.
“I got a formal notification from the prison authorities, of course, but a day or two later a very sympathetic letter came from the prison chaplain who’d had quite a lot to do with him. Apparently he’d thought Robert was coming round to a better state of mind. Wishful thinking, I suspect. The tumour wasn’t found until after his death, and I imagine that was the cause of his erratic behaviour, so any real improvement might not have lasted very long. It might just possibly have been found in time, I suppose, but I don’t know whether it was operable. In any case that’s by the way; there was something he wanted me to have.”
She rummaged in what passed for her filing system to produce a rather tatty piece of notepaper that she passed to Lucy, who read it with evident surprise and then handed it on to me without comment. It was a sonnet.
“If in the silence of a summer night
I come to you in form of flesh again
Do not, I beg, my countless faults requite
But think upon my sorrow for your pain.
But if instead I come in spirit form
Intangible as disembodied breath,
A fugitive from life’s destructive storm,
Then take some satisfaction in my death.
That I have sinned I am too well aware
To trouble you with bluster or excuse.
I only ask that you may deign to spare
Some pardon for my manifold abuse.
The harm once done I cannot now undo
Yet that I loved remains for ever true.”
That floored me for a good half minute. “I didn’t know he had it in him,” was all I could eventually mutter.
“You never saw his gentler side.”
“Didn’t know he had one.” Something that had struck me as vaguely incongruous in the poem came to the surface; whatever her faults, Sophie had never been in the least vindictive - too far the other way, if anything. “Did you in fact take satisfaction? I shouldn’t have thought it of you.”
“I think he meant it in a kind of legal sense,” explained Lucy. “As reparation for an offence, I mean. You know, as in the challenge to a duel - ‘Sirrah, I demand satisfaction!’.”
Sophie nodded, still a little tearful, so that was evidently how she had taken it, and the conversation moved on to other things. Rain in the afternoon had ceased, the wind dropped to nothing, and the sky over to the west had largely cleared. The remaining clouds, lit obliquely from below, were a blaze of gold.
“It’s got a bit stuffy in here. Shall we take our nightcaps out on the terrace?” suggested Sophie once she had regained her composure, and we agreed. The setting sun had laid a trail of shimmering light along the inlet leading out towards the Atlantic, and reminded me of that scene in Bulgakov’s novel where Pontius Pilate, released at last from his centuries of inertia, strides off upon the path of moonlight to meet his redeemer.
“It’s a lovely evening,” I commented, “and so quiet here.”
“The silence of a summer night ...”, murmured Lucy.
“What ...?” I asked, rather too loudly, and Lucy hastily signalled me to hush.
But Sophie hadn’t heard. She was standing oblivious at the edge of the terrace, facing out to the west, arms outstretched in welcome, intent on something that I couldn’t see.
Lucy, understanding her sister so well, just turned to me and shrugged, eyes uplifted in mock-despair.
Some people never learn.
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FOWLER’S CAVE
“And what brings you here, young man?”
Molly Birtwistle wasn’t normally inquisitive - curiosity was not encouraged in Skiddledale - but a visitor to the valley, and evidently an Australian at that, was an event so far beyond normality as to give her some excuse. The phone line had been down for some days, mobiles never worked in the valley, and the man had arrived unannounced at the pub asking if he could take a room for perhaps a week. Business had been slack, and his custom was not to be despised, so he received what amounted to an open-arms welcome from Jack: “Aye, lad, I think we can put thee up.” Molly had been too busy adjusting her programme, and providing a decent evening meal for the visitor, to ask any questions earlier, but she could now relax a little.
I heard about all this from my uncle Ned, who had popped in for a pint that evening. Not a native Skiddledaler, having inherited his house from a fairly distant relative, he understood but did not share the habitual taciturnity of the valley, and gladly treated the stranger for the sake of more interesting company.
After mutual introductions at the bar, Nick Goodwin explained that one of his forbears, Tom Fowler, had come from the valley but had been transported for poaching and breaking the arm of a gamekeeper on the estate of a landowner in the next valley. There was a bit of history there. Tom had somehow become friendly with Sir Archibald’s son Timothy and on one occasion when the squire’s cricket team was short of a man, Tom was pressed into service and saved the match by scoring a crucial twenty-odd runs at the tail end. Nevertheless he was afterwards snubbed as a social inferior and bore his resentment to his death; hence the poaching raids in later life.
In his teens he had spent much of his time exploring the unfrequented head of the valley with his dog, Spot. In one place the collapse of an underground cavern, goodness knows how many thousand years before, had left a kind of amphitheatre now sparsely occupied by mostly low scrub. However, against the northern wall where run-off had created an area of slightly greater fertility, a screen of more substantial growth had formed. Spot of course had to investigate behind it, and disappeared for a surprisingly long time despite being called repeatedly. Eventually he returned with a piece of ancient bone that Tom at first thought must have come from a sheep but on closer examination might perhaps be human.
That warranted closer investigation, so Tom forced his way between the bushes and the rock face, finding an opening a few feet wide and deeper than the length of his arm or even of a stick that he carried. Not much light reached even the mouth so of course the interior was completely obscure. Tom thought he might return some time with a lantern, but kept quiet about it on returning home as he thought it might some day be useful to have a secret hide-out.
The occasion came when he was on the run after the spat with the gamekeeper. He found that the cave opened out after a couple of feet into quite a large chamber with more than adequate headroom for occupation, and he spent a few days camped out there before being caught on a hunt for provisions. He had to clear quite a lot of clutter but was able to make it tolerably comfortable. What amazed him once his eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light was a series of painted drawings on the flatter areas of wall: animals, humans and in one alcove, a complete hunting scene. He had enough skill to copy the more impressive into a notebook along with a sketch of the approach and an account of the discovery, and that notebook had now come down to Nick. He was anxious to find the cave and investigate.
“I’d have thought the professional palaeontologists would have been interested enough to help with that. It must be rare; after all, you never hear of cave art in Britain.”
“That’s the problem. I gather there’s hardly any, and what there is was engraved, not painted, so the professionals I’ve approached simply don’t believe it.”
“Always the same, isn’t it? Amateurs with new ideas are never welcome. Do you have any directions to the actual location?”
“No, just the drawings. Tom knew where it was, obviously, but probably didn’t want to give anything away.”
“Reasonable enough. Do you think I could have a look at the drawings?”
That was the start of Ned’s involvement. He had some free time and Nick was only too pleased to accept local assis
tance. Enquiries of sheep farmers, the most likely people to know about such a feature of the landscape, were less help than Ned had hoped, as no one recognised the drawing; of course, the bushes in front of the cave mouth must have changed completely in the two centuries or more since it was made. However, three possible locations might fit the verbal description, and the second looked most promising, although if there were actually a cave mouth it could be reached only with the branches cut back from the rock.
Returning the next day with more lights and a range of cutters, they cleared enough for at least Nick to see there was cave mouth and get inside, where he found the situation just as described and took a series of photographs (digital, so they could be quickly recovered and copied). After that they cleared the way enough for Ned too to enter and confirm the discovery. Nick was all for going straight to the Press with the shots, but Ned urged caution.
“People don’t worry too much about property rights up here, but that’s because only sheep have any interest in the place. Once this story gets out, you can’t tell what may happen; maybe only a few specialists will take any notice, but it’s far more likely to bring tourists, and I’m not at all sure they’d be welcome. We’d better discuss it with Jack Birtwhistle at the pub this evening. I’ll arrange to have dinner with you there, and we can explain the situation afterwards.”
Jack, appraised of the situation, called in some of his cronies and as expected there was a serious disagreement over whether an influx of visitors would be a good or a bad thing. However, Ned pointed out that there was no need for a hasty decision on that, as the paintings could have been there for anything up to forty thousand years and weren’t going to fade in the next month or so.
However, Nick’s discovery needed to be registered officially without necessarily publicising the location. Fortunately the phone line had at last been repaired, and Ned was able to e-mail the photographs to me with a list of the professionals whom Nick had contacted. The one who had been most disparaging proved to have a bitter academic rival, so that was obviously the man to approach and I made arrangements for the two of them to visit him.
He was immediately enthused by the photographs and, sworn to secrecy on the location, promised to visit it personally with one or two trusted colleagues as soon as it could be set up. Without proper dating he wouldn’t commit himself on the age of the paintings, although he suggested somewhere around twenty thousand years, but their real significance lay in their being so far further north than anything comparable previously known. Because of its importance, he was as anxious as anyone to keep the place secret at least until the date could be roughly confirmed. There was an important conference coming up, and he looked forward with glee to the prospect of presenting a bombshell.
All this was conveyed to Jack Birtwhistle, who was as relieved as anyone that the question of publicity could be postponed. While eager for the extra business that tourism could bring, he realised that it could be disruptive and had no wish to anger his regular customers. Meanwhile, life could go on as usual, but to avoid being caught on the hop, he made tentative enquiries about a hypothetical possibility of setting up a minibus service to the head of the valley and painted an “UNFIT FOR CARS” sign for the track beyond the pub. He was confident that few tourists would want to walk the distance, and any who did could be welcomed unreservedly; they were sure to be hungry and thirsty on their return, and there was nowhere else to go. When the query about the minibus sparked a disturbing question of why it might be wanted, he invented a totally spurious tale about the Ramblers’ Association and a possible walking route to Hawes for which a start along the way might be appreciated.
His thoughts about this were interrupted by an appalling racket from upstairs. His yell of “What the hell’s going on up there?” was evidently drowned out and, with hands over his ears, he went to investigate. His son Robin was there with a friend Sandy who had a received as a birthday present a radio cum CD player of the “ghetto blaster” variety that they were putting through its paces. Unable to make himself heard, Jack signalled them to turn it down as they reluctantly did but only to a merely deafening level; in fear for his hearing, he charged in and turned it off. “If you’ve got to use that damned thing, do it outside!” he told them.
Out they went, but in the open air the volume failed to satisfy them. Robin remembered overhearing about the cave, and suggested that as an enclosure it might improve matters if they could get there without having to carry the machine all the way. The next afternoon they spotted Albert Williams heading that way with a trailer loaded with sacks of feed, and begged a lift; Sandy’s dog decided to join them, and they saw no reason why he shouldn’t.
Three hours later, Jack had an emergency call from Albert; Sandy had appeared, badly bruised and in great distress with a story of Robin’s being caught in a rock fall. “Get everyone you can up here.”
There weren’t many around, but he piled the few into his car and dashed off up the valley. In a sense they were too late: Albert and his hands had already got Robin out, and his wife had patched up the cuts, but the broken leg needed hospital care. On the way Jack got the story.
The lads had found the cave and thought the effect very satisfactory; the dog evidently didn’t and stayed outside. Robin had brought along a relatively innocuous bottle of something or other from the bar with a good supply of crisps and they were making quite a party of it. Then the CD came to an end and the dog, relieved at the silence, came in for attention and a nose around. He must have somehow altered the volume setting because when the next CD started, the result was too loud, the dog bolted and Robin jabbed at the control, inadvertently turning it up instead of down. The reverberation was terrible and the cave roof started to collapse; Sandy scrambled out safely, but Robin was caught by a rock on his legs.
“At least you’re safe,” was Jack’s comment.
“Yes, but there’s the Rugby match tomorrow.”
“Well, one thing’s certain; you won’t be playing.”
As Molly said afterwards, that was the least of the worries. What were they going to say when Professor Whatsisname turned up to look at the wall paintings and couldn’t get at them, even if they hadn’t been destroyed?
However, at least Robin had lost his taste for rock music.
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TIGER
Tom raced down the garden, across the sunken lane and up into the meadow beyond, towards a pond where he had often fished unsuccessfully for newts and tadpoles. After a long spell of miserable weather it was a gorgeous spring day with brilliant sunshine, a few white clouds, and a breeze just strong enough to blow the cobwebs away without being uncomfortable - at least, not to a healthy, active young lad. However, a clump of gorse and hawthorn a couple of hundred yards away seemed to be blowing about more than the wind seemed to warrant, even in the stronger gusts, and he wondered why. Could there be something moving within it? He had occasionally seen a fox thereabouts, but if an animal was indeed responsible it must have been of a much bigger kind. As he went closer to look, the disturbance seemed to shift, and a moment later the puzzle resolved itself when out sprang a tiger.
“What a splendid animal,” he thought, not registering the oddity of the situation. It slowly surveyed the surroundings, spotted Tom and paced majestically towards him. For some reason he didn’t run. Then out came another tiger; the first looked towards it, and a silent conversation seemed to pass between them. The second turned its head, uttered a low sound, and a cub emerged cautiously from the thicket. It too looked around, then ran to its mother who tapped it gently with a paw and started to lick stray tufts of fur into place.
The cub soon had enough of this, wriggled free from the restraining paw and ran up to Tom, rubbed against his ankle and rolled over, looking up expectantly. The requirement was obvious, and Tom duly crouched to rub its chest while the parents looked on benignly. When he thought duty satisfied, he would have stood up, but the cub clasped his hand in its paws and clearl
y wanted more. At last the incongruity struck him: tigers don’t do this. Come to think of it, they had no business to be there at all. The wind had risen with a chilly edge, and looking up, he realised that without his noticing, the clouds had spread into a complete canopy while the older tigers were growing hazy and grey. The cub under his hand was curiously still.
A snore startled him and he jerked awake. The cat on his knee stirred lazily and yawned, stretching out a paw and turning to look directly at him with the appearance of a question; Flora had always seemed almost human. With a shock, Tom noticed for the first time how prominent among the wrinkles were the veins of the hand resting on her fur. The years that had passed over him so lightly were now taking effect, and however reluctantly, he had to recognise that he was definitely getting on. For his age he was still remarkably fit, and he gratefully recognised his good fortune there, but the signs of deterioration - increasingly frequent lapses of memory, silly mistakes in familiar activities - had already caused him some anxiety. His thoughts often ran now to possible futures, none of them very encouraging, as well as to events in the past; he sometimes wondered what might be the connections between them. What premonition or lurking memory, for instance, could have prompted that curious dream about tigers?
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