by Fuller, John
‘I am a victim of what I can see, feel, hear,’ she continued. ‘But why should I be?’
‘Why, indeed?’murmured the Abbot,looking at the place where her jaw became her ear and was framed with falling hair that was also crushed into the pillow.
‘I don’t blame you for not listening,’ thought Mrs Ffedderbompau, and she smiled a smile which the pain made the more radiant.
‘How is your glow worm?’ asked the Abbot.
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Ffedderbompau. His question was like a space on a table on which she could put down a heavy load. She had much to tell him about the glow worm he had found for her. ‘I put her into a small thin box, such as pills are usually sent in, and between eleven and twelve last night I saw her shine through the box very clearly on one side, the box being shut.’
‘Remarkable,’ said the Abbot.
‘I put white paper into the box, and the worm into the paper: it shone through the paper and box both.’
‘She is a beacon of the hedges,’ said the Abbot. ‘The blown embers of Nature’s dying fire.’
‘But in the morning, about eight of the clock,’ went on Mrs Ffedderbompau, ‘she seemed dead, and holding her in a very dark place, I could see very little light, and that only when she was turned upon her back and by consequence put into some voluntary motion.’
‘And now?’ enquired the Abbot. ‘How is she now?’
‘Look for yourself,’ said Mrs Ffedderbompau.
The Abbot did look.
‘Why,’ he laughed, ‘she is walking briskly up and down in her box, shining as clearly as ever!’
Mrs Ffedderbompau laughed too.
‘Yes!’ she exclaimed, eagerly conspiring with him in pleasure at the observation, as though there were nothing else worth serious comment.
14
The windows of the cells were so small and high that the moon simply cast its ghostly patches on the ceilings without generally illuminating the sleeping shapes and their few possessions. And yet the outlines seemed quite clear in the half-darkness; the scrubbed bowl, the scowling cherubs at the shoulders of an oratory, the metal clasps of a book on a small table.
The novice who was shortly to undergo the night of examination reached out his hand and touched one of the clasps. His book was not finished, and he thought it might never be finished. The reflections in it of things as they really were could be no more, he decided, than insufficient reflections of things only as they seemed to be, reflections of reflections, moonlight patches at a pathetic remove from the sun.
Down the central passage between the rows of cells one of the brothers walked with a candle. His shadow, slanted and gigantesque before him, wavered and retreated as he moved forward.
The novice, lying on his cot with his hands clasped on his chest, saw the light from the candle through the crack above his door. He thought:
‘Fire, whether near or distant, is all that we have to represent the illumination of the spirit. Its light passes fitfully over the darkened surfaces which are neither here nor there without it.’
After a while the light outside his room was gone, and he thought about the coming examination. For him it was like the lighting of a candle made ready for the testing touch of an external flame and required to bear it steadily against all wind of doubt and trial. The candle had not created its flame, and could preserve it for no longer than the length and thickness of the wax allowed, but for a lifetime the light was bestowed and he must prove its worthy guardian.
The flame danced upon the liquid tip of the wax as if in despite of the only substance that could give it life. It was tethered there, like the last leaf on a tree blasted by the storm. The novice thought:
‘The spirit struggles to be free, vain as the wave struggling to attain the shape of a horse, or a horse struggling to fly.’
And he gave out a great cry in the solitude of his cell. None of the monks did more than stir slightly in their sleep, for they were dead tired with the unaccustomed labour of excavating the stone conduit at the brow of the mountain near the Saint’s well. Under Vane’s direction they had worked for two days and revealed a passage hollowed from the giant blocks of stone that took the overflow of the well at a steady gradient down its cylindrical channel, wide enough for the passage of bodies, and polished smooth to speed their descent. The monstrous pipe of stone was set into, and indeed constituted the basis of, the path that led down from the well to the abbey. At intervals Vane ordered the monks to dig away at the cropped turf and topsoil to establish the continuation of the chiselled boulders beneath.
Torn between hatred of the island and a desire to get to the bottom of its mysteries, Vane would gaze out to sea as the monks bent to each new task, as if the appearance of the boat from the mainland were an expected signal for him to cease his commands, draw his investigations to a close and return to the Bishop.
But the boat did not come, and he continued to work the silent monks as though they were animals. The Abbot thought it wise to give him the authority to do so, and the monks, stooped all day in the heat, could think it no more than their duty to obey.
15
When the milk was solid enough, Tetty cut it with a knife and the cut bled whey. She made parallel cuts and the milk quivered. She could just tip the heavy bowl, making each scar of milk budge. She then made cross-cuts until the surface of the milk was a mesh of squares. Another girl helped her to turn the contents of the bowl into a basket, a tumbling mass of slippery strips, the whey draining away.
They were crumbling handfuls of sage into the cheese when Geoffrey came in with news of the excavations.
‘The channel leads right up to the Abbot’s house,’ he said, helping them to hang the dried bunches on to the hooks in the rafters.
‘So?’ smiled Tetty.
‘Vane thinks the Abbot is stealing the bodies of the pilgrims.’
‘Why, who could he be stealing them from?’
Tetty put her hands lightly on Geoffrey’s shoulders and jumped down from the chair she was standing on.
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Geoffrey.
‘Don’t you?’ said Tetty, putting the tip of her finger to his nose.
‘He’s stealing from the pilgrims.’
‘What would the pilgrims want with their bodies when they’re dead? Anyway, you can’t steal something from itself.’
‘Why not,’ persisted Geoffrey.
‘You could steal a gold watch from a house,’ said Tetty, ‘but you couldn’t steal a gold watch from a gold watch.’
‘This is silly,’ said Geoffrey, ‘and I’m exhausted.’
He sat down on the cool stone bench that was built down one side of the dairy, leaning his head back against the wall. Tetty gave him a piece of bread, but after one bite he put it down on the stone beside him.
When all the cheese was draining, and the basins were being scoured, there was a noise outside like a sharp intake of breath. Geoffrey opened his eyes in time to see two of the older girls disappearing from the dairy, one carrying a knife. He looked questioningly at Tetty, who was looking out of the door. When she hurried out too, he followed her.
The outer door was closing. Or was it opening? As the girl with the knife passed through she confronted the Manciple tying his donkey to the porch. Or was he untying it?
‘Who was that person who just left?’ he smirked. ‘Someone I’ve not seen before, I think.’
They looked around, but there was no one.
‘There,’ said the Manciple. ‘He went round the corner, into the yard.’
The girl who was carrying the knife had it raised and held out in front of her bodice like the handle of a pan. She kept it there.
‘You seem alarmed,’ he continued. ‘Was it an intruder?’ No one said anything. Tetty and the second girl went into the scullery, where they found a child hiding in the corner between a cupboard and the wall. Her face was pale, and her eyes were wide and bright, but she was not crying.
At the insistence of the
Manciple they searched the yard, but found no one, nor expected to. The Manciple shrugged, and looked with amused hostility at Geoffrey.
‘Your Master is looking for you,’ he said.
‘Is he?’ returned Geoffrey.
‘I believe so,’ said the Manciple absently, gazing at his nails.
Tetty buttoned the child’s dress and led her into the dairy. The Manciple was provided with the loaves he had come for and left the farm, his donkey’s panniers full. The girls resumed their work.
‘I would kill that man if you wanted me to,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’d cut little squares out of his ugly face.’
One of the girls laughed as she filled a pail, but Tetty said nothing. He tried to talk to her about other things, but she wouldn’t speak. After playing with a mousetrap for a few minutes he left and returned to Vane.
In the afternoon Mrs Ffedderbompau held the lottery. Her curtains were drawn against the sun, and she could barely turn her head towards the door when the girls filed in. Some of the younger ones giggled and held their noses, and they were sent away. Blodwen had brought the bowl with the stones in it, and Mrs Ffedderbompau directed each of them to take the stones in turn until there was only one left, and it was Gweno’s turn to take it. The others, who had been picking their stones out eagerly, now lost interest. They put their stones back into the bowl and left the room one by one, looking at Gweno with wonder, curiosity and a new respect.
When they were alone, Mrs Ffedderbompau motioned her to come closer to the bed. Gweno obeyed, although the smell was so strong.
‘Child,’ whispered Mrs Ffedderbompau. ‘Let me see you as you were made, uncovered.’
Gweno stood uncertainly.
‘Go on with you, slow thing. Take off your clothes.’
Gweno undid her dress, pulled it off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, standing in its crumpled folds as clean and naked as a peeled stick. The signs of her sex stood on her innocent body like the marks of punctuation that betray meaning in an unknown language, the most common yet most secret code, the very arrows and targets of nature. And Mrs Ffedderbompau sighed for the frail beauty of these indications of nature’s hopes.
‘Do you know, child, what it is that you will have to do?’ Gweno nodded.
‘I don’t believe you do.’ Mrs Ffedderbompau sighed again. ‘But it will be explained to you. Remember, my dear, that the novice’s ordeal is partly a ceremony, a traditional celebration of the meaning of his ordination with tokens of the new powers he pretends to, and it is partly a real test of those powers. And in all that he has renounced and in all that he has become, he is a true mirror of the Saint.’
Gweno lifted a corner of her fallen dress with her bare toe. Her eyes remained lowered with what mixture of sullenness, shame and boredom Mrs Ffedderbompau could not say.
‘Keep the Saint in mind, my dear,’ she said. ‘The Saint guards our spirit, and restores it when the body is assailed.’ And Gweno, one lock of dark hair falling across her lowered face, thought of the dry bird and the broken rock and the terrible rotting dead private soiled smell of Mrs Ffedderbompau.
16
The shelves of the Abbot’s library were covered with coin-sized patches of fungus the colour of raw liver. Those that were most developed were raised from the wood and could be turned aside with the fingernail to reveal greenish spores on their underside. When the Abbot tried to rub them off the shelves, he found his hands stained as if from the grease of door-hinges.
Curious! He scraped at the fungus with a corner of his habit. The cleaned wood seemed fresh and slippery, with a twiggy smell, and the occasional knot oozed gum. He had done nothing about the stony seeping from the walls, and now his sandals slithered about in the dirty veils of moisture on the flags, and the pediments of the wooden shelves were soaking up the liquid from the floor.
He was putting the finishing touches to his sermon, and had needed to consult some books. In any case, the sound of Vane’s hammering and digging disturbed him and he wanted to escape from it. Vane had already traced the channel to an exterior wall, and had now excavated half the courtyard beneath his study. Stripped to the waist, he led the operations with a single-minded fervour. The last view the Abbot had had of him was as he lowered himself into the opened conduit some thirty feet below the window. It almost looked as though he were wriggling into a bed, pulling the Abbot’s house over him like a blanket.
It always seemed possible to retreat further and further into the house to escape from intruders. Although turning left at the end of every corridor should have brought him back to his starting-point, it never did, and staring up the broad chimneys never brought a view of sky. The library, though a cellar, had cellars beneath it, and those cellars had access to rooms that were not cellars and which the Abbot had never seen. The humidity at the centre of his house seemed to be not due to the weather, but to be self-generating, like the property of a living organ. The library, dank, acrid and awash, became at once this organ’s necessary manifestation and its secret function. The words it contained were closed from immediate view, nourished by the structured textures and surfaces that contained them.
The Abbot gently stroked the supple leather of the book he was reading. He fancied it yielded beneath his palm like the flank of some peaceable grazing creature. Could leather be cured of its curing? Could the sightless hides be reassembled, clasps turn to bells, the branded spines grow tails again?
He would lose first those books bound in vellum, for the bindings would turn back to stomachs and digest the contents. Or the shelves would grow into a hedge and keep out the hand that reached for knowledge.
He replaced the book while he still had access to the shelves, before its covers might twist from his grasp with newborn awkwardness, trailing from embryonic gums a voided spittle of silent language.
17
He had not forgotten Mrs Ffedderbompau, but his visits had less and less use, and his mind could not reach her. She, for her part, could no longer even attempt to project her will upon the world she imagined. Even the world she saw, a dim arc of webs and beams, had nothing about it worth ordering. To be carried away, like a pet, in the folds of a garment: that was an objective indeed. If she could ride, a mite or a fairy, on the Abbot’s left ear, clinging to a tuft of his hair! The spirits of the dead would have a short life of this sort, she reflected, aunts perched on the shoulder, a grandfather tucked into a sleeve like a handkerchief. Who would be lumbered with these crumbs of matter, themselves hoarding a distant army of forebears? Washed away with useless flakes of skin, fingernails, moisture, hairs, the whole world a litter of discarded receptacles of eternal life all as dry as the husk of glow worm, starved in its paper box.
She concentrated her attention now on the perhaps doubtful existence of the throbbing effigy of discomfort that used to be her body. Experience told her that if she moved her arm she would find a cooler surface of the bed, but she was too weary to do more than lift the middle fingers of her hand, a gesture symbolising the awareness of the passing of time as in talking or waiting, a gesture that indicated or demanded the exercise of a barely-won patience. But this was a private piece of manual rhetoric, conducted beneath a blood-stained sheet. After a moment her hand was still.
She felt now beyond the disaster that had befallen her, beyond her nature and age, or any age she had ever been. And so she felt less and less sure of having any identity at all. Was it Gweno she had sent away, with her chaperones, to play her part in the novice’s night of examination, or had she gone herself and was Gweno left dying here? She could easily think (indeed, some days since had hoped) that she might be carried in her bed to the abbey, borne on the shoulders of the brothers in the folds of her soft cortège, to observe the dedication, the humiliation, the drenching, the sermon, the processsion with the witnesses to the chamber.
The sermon in particular she would have dearly loved to hear, not for its theme (which by tradition concerned some aspect of the efficacy of the Saint) nor for its tr
uth alone, but for the truth as understood by her friend the Abbot, so solemn and shy in his dealings with the world as she had lived it, but possessing a wisdom which she craved, and a nature which she half knew she loved.
The whisperings from the dairy below, the muffled din of crockery, the slight scrape and jar of benches as the harvest girls finished their supper—these and other more distant sounds of the farm were converted in her mind to the sounds of the congregated brothers in the abbey. She imagined the Abbot ascending the pulpit, his lips slightly compressed in concentration, the beard mingled with the dark folds of his habit, his hands reaching to grip the rim of the stone pulpit, and her heart suddenly fluttered and lurched in a full knowledge of what she was leaving and what in her full life she had most lacked.
To the dark and silent room she voiced her last words, a rebuke to the emptiness about her, a challenge to the ceremonies that at the same moment were elsewhere taking place:
‘We have failed to make the little bird fly!’
Her mouth stayed open, a thread of moisture between the lips. In its absolute stillness her face seemed smaller, harder, more beautiful, like a sudden relic of itself, almost lifesize. It was as though the curtain of motion and colour had been momentarily lifted so that the reality behind it could be appraised, and the mechanism, though found to be irreversible, was a wonder for ever to the hushed audience of surrounding objects. And so the Abbot began his sermon.
18
Brothers, I show you here a mushroom by which you shall learn about flying. And in my other hand is my text from Ezekiel xiii.20: ‘Wherefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against your pillows! Be mindful of our brother who is brought before us in the image of the blessed Lleuddad, bearing the pains and scourging of the Lord. Hold him in your eyes and hear my words.