In The Tent

by David Rees

  ‘Have you!’ Tim looked at him intently.

  ‘Yes, a long distance.’ He stumbled and nearly fell. ‘I only hope I get there.’ He sat down, suddenly, on a boulder. ‘Here, let me have the tent.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll be OK. Give Ron a yell. It’s his turn.’

  ‘They’re out of sight, over the top of the pass.’

  ‘Let’s rest a minute.’ They stared up at the grim north face of Great End, slowly emerging through the cloud. ‘We’re not in trim,’ Ray panted. ‘I’m aching all over! Not just the walk. Several nights in a sleeping-bag . . . not like my bed at home.’

  Would he go to this pub with Ray? Wild horses wouldn’t drag him in there alone. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but... He tried to nudge out of his mind pictures of the altar at church, of Father Sullivan, of the host at Mass. Would he go to Confession this Saturday? He wasn’t sure that he had the courage. And he wasn’t sure, if he did, that he would be quite honest.

  He took the tent from Ray, and helped him to his feet. ‘Some time,’ Ray said, ‘I shall tell my parents.’ Tim looked blank. ‘About me, what I am.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I want them to know.’

  ‘They’d chuck you out of the house!’

  ‘Would yours?’

  ‘I’m bloody sure they would!’

  ‘They can’t love you very much, then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If they really love you they’ll accept what you are. They may not like it . . . but they’re your parents!’

  ‘They’d never accept it. Never. I’d never tell them. They’d be so hurt.’

  ‘What’s better, a lifetime of lies and pretence?’

  ‘I don’t want a lifetime of lies and pretence. But I’d lose them if they found out. I know I would! My mother would say I was trying to kill her; my father would say I was hopelessly vile and corrupt.’

  ‘They don’t sound very nice.’ That might well be true, Tim thought, but it was his prerogative to make that kind of judgement. It annoyed him to hear such a comment. ‘Mine are all right,’ Ray went on. ‘I mean, they’re good to me, don’t ask prying questions all the time, let me do what I like. More or less. We can talk about most things. I expect they imagine I sleep with girls occasionally; my father gave me a wink the morning after I’d come in once at two a.m. from a party. I don’t suppose he was that innocent when he got married! No, there’s only one thing they’d really loathe: if I stopped being Spanish.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Stopped feeling like a Spaniard, I suppose. It’s difficult to explain. Turned into a cold East Anglian or something.’

  ‘You mean not speaking Spanish, not eating their food?’

  ‘More than that. Anyway ... I think my mother would accept . . . me.’

  ‘I can’t believe it!’

  ‘It would take some doing, even so. My father... I don’t know. Some Spanish men, they . . . they have this strong family thing, about having sons. He wouldn’t like it. But I’m sure he’d wish me luck.’

  ‘They must be remarkable people. Completely exceptional.’

  ‘I don’t see why. Maybe yours are the exceptions.’

  They were at the top of the pass. Below them a great sweep of land: Angle Tarn just down from where they stood a brown and green landscape away to the left and ahead, and in the distance, like crouching lions, the two Langdale mountains, Harrison Stickle and the Pike of Stickle. To the right, the majestic rocky wall of Bowfell. John and Aaron were by the tarn, and, coming to meet them, was a line of men, struggling over Rossett Pike. A rescue party! Already there were shouts, hands waving. John and Aaron stopped.

  ‘Tim: I think I’m going to faint!’

  ‘No, no, you’re not. Lean on me.’

  Slowly they began the descent. By Angle Tarn all was clamour and confusion. The Mountain Rescue were overjoyed; they hadn’t held much hope of finding the boys alive. They clustered round, asking excited questions: Tim stared, bewildered, at their great rucksacks, their equipment, ropes, stretchers, first aid. They, in turn, were equally astonished. There seemed nothing wrong with these lads, not even a few broken limbs. All they wanted was food. Soon the four of them were eating ham rolls and mint-cake, and drinking hot coffee.

  ‘I’m going to faint,’ Ray whispered. And did so. The men leapt into action, glad that their equipment was justified, and Ray was revived, placed on a stretcher and covered with a blanket. The boys’ rucksacks were taken, and someone picked up the tent. All four should be carried down on stretchers, the leader insisted. Tim thought this excessive, absurdly melodramatic, but he did as he was told. Aaron, too, complied, but John flatly refused. The argument was quite heated. He was perfectly capable of walking, he said; just because he hadn’t eaten for two days didn’t mean he was a hospital case. So they let him walk.

  From the stretcher, crags, waterfalls, sheep and bracken seemed disconnected, floating in space. Tim couldn’t relate one thing to another; this, and the swaying motion, made him feel sick. He’d be better on foot, he thought, but it was too late now. He’d abdicated, handed himself over to other people’s responsibility. John was just ahead of him: a pretty impressive person, Tim decided.

  The men carrying the stretcher kept asking questions. Tim told them the gist of what had happened: there wasn’t, really, much to say. ‘What did you do all that time?’ he was asked. ‘Four of you cooped up in that tent. Weren’t you bored stiff?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘We got to know each other very well. That’s all.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He wondered if it was officially closed to visitors, but no virger came down the aisle to turn him out. In the crossing sat the members of a choir and an orchestra, pausing for a moment in their rehearsal for tomorrow’s performance of the B minor Mass. The conductor was discussing a detail with the first violinist. Otherwise it was as it might have been centuries ago, the same pillars, the same superb vault at which Fairfax’s soldiers would have gazed. Not a trace of the hideous wall remained, and the organ—the successor to the one despoiled by the New Model—was all that now separated nave from quire. His guide-book said that the Princess Henrietta Maria had been baptized here in 1644, and the font, an elegant and unpretentious piece of seventeenth-century workmanship, looked as if it dated from then, was perhaps made specially for that inauspicious occasion. It was disappointing, however, to read that it was first used in 1687, disappointing also to realize that there was nothing of interest, even in this building, that had lasted from the Civil War. But, unlike Holy Trinity and the south gate, it was not a so-called progress that had rubbed out memory; it was the opposite: a desire to preserve and enhance the beauty of one of the world’s great masterpieces.

  The conductor tapped his baton, and the choir rose. It was the closing chorus of Bach’s Gloria: cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patns. A blaze of sound! A five-part fugue so quick and light on its feet that its rhythm alone would have danced the glory of God, but voices, instruments, the soaring columns of the cathedral itself did more than dance or sing; united in one joyous dazzling tapestry, in which the trumpets were bright stitches of gold and silver that looped it together, they were the glory of God.

  Tim, moved to tears, stared at a truth he had just discovered: religion was not the dribbling of squalid secrets to a black-gowned ogre behind a grille (how many times?), not a set of prohibitions, briars that bound his joys and desires. It was this, a kind of ecstasy in which he was the trumpet while the music lasted, himself a part of God’s glory. He had sensed it before, in the mountains in sunlight, but had not known what it was. Ray, when they met, would doubtless laugh at him, but he would have found something similar in Toledo, at the Alcázar, however differently he chose to name it.

  Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris. With the Holy Ghost, in the Glory of God the Father. Amen.

  In Mickleden, the flat valley at the head of Langdale where heather and rough ground gave way to fields and h
edges, Aaron made his stretcher-bearers stop. He threw off the blanket, sat up, and before anyone could object, he was standing. ‘I shall look such a bloody fool being carried in on that!’ he exclaimed. ‘What do you imagine our mothers will say? Mine will go potty thinking I’m half dead!’ The mothers, they had been told, would be waiting for them, at the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel. ‘I’m going to walk!’ he announced.

  Tim and Ray agreed, and it was allowed. Ray could only just manage it, and Aaron limped, noticeably. ‘It’s a nail in my boot,’ he said.

  The Old Dungeon Ghyll was a hive of activity. There were newspaper reporters and a television crew, but the Mountain Rescue people pushed them aside, saying ‘Not now, not now! Later!’ to all their questions. John marched up to the bar and ordered a whisky and dry ginger.

  The landlord poured it for him. ‘On the house,’ he said.

  The mothers appeared. There was a tremendous hullaballoo, tears, embraces, and amazement, like the Mountain Rescue team’s, and their sons were not injured. People pressed into the bar, newspapermen, others who just wanted to stare. The landlord took the boys and their mothers through to his own quarters at the back of the hotel, and now, in privacy, out came the explanations: the history of the families’ distress; the interest of the media and how irritating that had been at times, how helpful at others; how Mr Hewitt had arranged for the four women to travel at once to Ambleside. One of the Sunday papers wanted the exclusive rights to the story. ‘There is no story,’ Tim said, but Aaron told him to shut up. Mrs Hewitt had been a tower of strength, Mrs Keegan said, particularly as far as Mrs Brown was concerned: Aaron’s mother had been in hysterics ever since she’d heard they were missing.

  It all fell on Tim’s ears like a torrent, a bewildering barrage in an alien language: he nodded his head, said yes and no in the right places, but, inside, he was filled with an acute sense of disappointment that the ordeal on the mountain was over. That, too, was bewildering, for he had had no intuition that this might be his reaction. Those long days and nights of yearning for food had passed; he was alive and safe, and here was one of the hotel staff putting a plate of bacon, egg, sausage, tomato, mushroom and fried bread in front of him, with toast and marmalade and coffee to follow: yet, in his mind, he was still in the tent on the inhospitable top of Glaramara, the four of them in a kind of friendship he had never known before and never would again, while outside the vast landscape and sky, mountain and cloud, cut them off from the rest of the world, held total sway, magnificent and terrifying.

  A doctor came and examined them, and said they were remarkably fit, considering; all they needed was sleep. Sleep? Yes, he insisted, despite their protests; in a moment they would go upstairs and rest. After that they could talk to reporters and television interviewers if they wished. Then, Tim supposed, the tedious journey; to Ambleside to pick up their mothers’ luggage, on to Penrith to catch the train, and by this evening he would be back in the dull grey East coast port with its uninteresting scenery and the uninteresting span of his life. Of course there would be changes. He had to grapple, alone, with the weight of majority opinion, and two thousand years of religious tradition. And he would have to pick up the reins of school work, home, parents. What he feared most was that all he had gained in the tent would be lost: the self-discoveries and the resolutions would evaporate in the cold light of routine; the friendships formed would dilute in the ordinary patterns of life.

  He talked with Mrs Suñer, Mrs Brown and Mrs Hewitt. Mrs Suñer and Mrs Brown had known each other for some time through the friendship between their sons; John had met both women, and Ray and Aaron had met Mrs Hewitt before: only he and his own mother were strangers. Mrs Brown had had little responsibility for her son’s good looks: she was squat and plain, a talkative fussy pub landlady, obviously formidable with the customers at closing time, ‘an old nag,’ Aaron had said, rightly. She was giving Mrs Hewitt a lengthy history of Ron’s previous escapades, much to his embarrassment; ‘so much more of a lad for mischief than my other three!’ Mrs Hewitt was quiet, like John; there was a great ease between them, a confidence and belief in each other that did not require much expression in words. What anxieties she had experienced they had all heard in those few memorable minutes on the radio; she felt no need to repeat herself. She was simply happy that all had turned out well; John was a young man of good sense whom she trusted implicitly. Ray and his mother jabbered non-stop in Spanish. Mrs Suñer, jet black hair and dark skin, shining dark eyes, looked older than she probably was: it was all emotion, excitement, exclamation, wild expansive gestures.

  His own mother showed up worst, Tim thought. Despite the distress the women had shared, Mrs Keegan stood aloof from the friendship that had formed between the other three. It was a sort of snobbery. They were the wives of ordinary working men: a builder, a publican, a chef. Tim’s father was a civil servant. Not that Mrs Keegan had anything to be snobbish about. Her parents, both of labouring stock, had emigrated to England because their house had been burned down in the civil war of 1922; Grandpa Casey had worked for a brewery in Cork and eventually drank himself to death in Ipswich. But Mrs Keegan, determined to succeed in the English middle class, had lost all her Irishness; not even the slightest trace of an accent remained. The millstone of Roman Catholicism was her only ancestral bequest to her son. She looked at her watch, yawned, drummed her fingers, and kept Aaron, John, and Ray at arm’s length. She wanted to get back home as soon as possible, where she would doubtless issue a papal bull forbidding Tim to take part in such an expedition ever again.

  The boys were sent upstairs to rest. Tim shared a room with Aaron.

  ‘So a Sunday paper wants our story,’ Aaron said, as he took off his clothes. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll screw a good sum of money out of them; don’t worry.’

  ‘Yes. All right.’

  ‘John and Ray think it’s OK if I do it. Split four ways equally, of course. Maybe I can get enough to buy some equipment for my group. Loudspeakers.’

  ‘What group?’

  ‘Aaron’s Rod. I told you.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘Look. About Friday. We’ll go to my place afterwards, shall we? Better than yours, really. We can drink as long as we like there; I mean it’s a pub and Dad will let us. You can all stay the night too. Mum said.’

  ‘Did my mother put you off?’ Aaron did not answer. Tim slipped between the sheets. ‘I don’t know why we’re going to bed at this hour of the day; I’m not a bit tired.’ But in less than a minute he was fast asleep.

  ‘I’m completely converted to the cause of Parliament,’ Saint-Hill said, for the third time. ‘My Royalist beliefs were nothing other than wild delusions. I thought the monarchy stood for all that was best in the English tradition, the protection of personal freedom. I was wrong.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how you thought King Charles represented freedom,’ Tim said.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know.’ Saint-Hill was impatient. ‘I simply regarded him as an aberration. I was thinking of his father, and his father’s illustrious predecessor, Queen Elizabeth.’

  ‘What about her brother Edward? And Henry the Eighth, Henry the Seventh?’

  Saint-Hill ignored this. ‘The King has always been the symbol of justice, the guardian of his subjects’ rights, the defender of their liberties. Of course there have been exceptions from time to time. Now I see that the symbol isn’t just tarnished. It’s smashed in pieces. But it has been replaced by something far better, a Parliament of freely elected men, who will allow us to return to the greatest liberty of all: quietly getting on with our own business.’

  ‘You may be right.’ It was certainly true, in Exeter at least, that the change to a Parliamentary administration was proving beneficial. There were, of course, some regrettable minor occurrences, such as Anthony’s death, and the incident with the cathedral’s organ pipes. But the conversion of the cathedral into two places of Dissenting worship was the only innovation the authorities had forced on the city churc
hes. The clergy were allowed to keep their livings provided they were not too flagrant in their display of Laudian observances. The ringleader of the strange dance in Cathedral Yard had been put in the stocks for blasphemous conduct. The message, whispered abroad from Fairfax’s headquarters in the castle, was that diligent and sober behaviour was the watchword; the citizens should act industriously and honestly and no-one would come to any harm. The most influential Royalist sympathisers, however, were brought in for questioning and were heavily fined, in order to stop them financing any further escapade that might be started on the King’s behalf. All protested they were now ruined, though this was far from the truth.

  Tim was walking about the streets with Saint-Hill, observing how rapidly things were returning to normal. Since the city had surrendered, trade was once again possible, and though supplies were still short, there was some food available, and prices had fallen dramatically. The first ships to arrive since the estuary had been cleared had docked that morning. Cargoes of coal, fresh fruit, flour and cheese were unloaded, and what little cloth the city had in store was transferred to the ships for export. Cows, sheep and pigs had earlier been driven in to market from distant towns and villages: business was brisk.

  Neighbours, who for too long had not spoken to one another, now' mingled freely; and the alehouses were busy, though in a discreet fashion: the distaste for strong drink in some quarters of the Parliament administration was well-known, and one of Fairfax’s .first orders was to treble the penalties for drunkenness. Sir Thomas, however, was not an extremist. He had over-ruled the wishes of some of his subordinates that the taverns should be closed indefinitely; such an action, he argued, would not help to bind up wounds. It was not his intention to alienate those who disliked Puritanism, but to win them over.

  Saint-Hill led Tim into the White Hart, and observed, as they sipped from pewter mugs of beer, that it was quite remarkable that the supply of liquor in the city had not dried up altogether during the siege. This was probably because the alehouses had been so unfrequented; it was good to see people he had not met for months now daring to be sociable. ‘What plans do you have in mind,’ he asked, ‘now your employment here is finished?’