by Sean Pidgeon
She turns the pages rapidly now until she finds Bowen’s English translation of the poem. In the description of the final battle, where Siôn’s ‘Arthur’ fell to the creature Madarakt, Bowen renders the location of the battle-site as ‘the crooked vale where the three rivers fall’. This is the line that prompted his fruitless searching for just such a mountain valley in Wales. Julia makes a small annotation in pencil, substituting a more archaic and poetic usage of the Middle Welsh llifeiriant, interpreting it as ‘waterfalls’ rather than Bowen’s ‘mountain rivers or streams’. The line becomes ‘the crooked vale with three waterfalls’. It might be true, she thinks. It must be true. Without a moment’s hesitation, she picks up the telephone.
The Importance of
Aerodynamics
IFFLEY’S LONG-SERVING VILLAGE postman seems unaccountably cheerful as he leans his bicycle against the garden wall and makes his way to the front door of the cottage. Catching his eye through the front-room window, Donald walks across to open the door.
‘Popular today, sir. Is it your birthday?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Donald says with a smile, as he takes in hand a respectable haul. ‘Thanks all the same.’
The postman climbs back on his bike, looking askance at the heavy shower clouds now racing across the sky. ‘Clearing up by lunchtime, so they say. Pigs might fly.’ With this he is off down the lane, whistling tunelessly through his teeth.
Dropping the stack of post on the desk, Donald picks up his pencil and the notebook in which he has been writing furiously for the past three hours. A new idea has taken a fierce hold on him since he arose almost sleepless before dawn. It was Caradoc Bowen’s comment about Siôn Cent and the Song of Lailoken that set him off. Siôn claimed that his poem was taken ‘from the words of Merlin found in Cyndeyrn’s book which fate has brought to my hand’, and this book, Bowen said, should be dismissed as a pure invention, a clever ruse borrowed from Geoffrey of Monmouth.
In the preface to his Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey claims that it is a direct translation into Latin of ‘a certain very ancient book written in the British language’, quendam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum, brought to him from Wales by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Geoffrey’s mysterious source has never been found, and most historians, along with Bowen, have found it sufficient to say that the ‘ancient book’ was entirely a product of his fertile imagination, a publicity stunt designed to discredit his scholarly rivals. But Donald has always found it an appealing idea that such a book once existed, and that Geoffrey drew upon it in some way when he came to create his famous history of the British kings.
So far, this is no more than wishful thinking; but now there are other pieces of the puzzle that seem to fall irresistibly into place. First there is the identity of the ‘Cyndeyrn’ whose book was claimed by Siôn Cent as his inspiration for the Song of Lailoken. A quick check in Butler’s Lives of the Saints confirms that St. Cyndeyrn, also called St. Kentigern or St. Mungo, was a celebrated northern churchman of the sixth century AD who is known to have established a monastery at a place called Llanelwy (on English maps, St. Asaph) in the north-eastern corner of Wales. It is St. Cyndeyrn who, according to the old Welsh story mentioned by Caradoc Bowen, encountered the poet Lailoken in the forest and wrote down his prophecy concerning the threefold death.
Then there is the well-documented fact that Geoffrey, late in his life, was elevated to become Bishop of St. Asaph, a position he had long coveted. It is, at the very least, interesting that there is a geographical connection between Geoffrey of Monmouth and St. Cyndeyrn, via the Welsh diocese of St. Asaph. More intriguing still is the fact that Geoffrey’s Historia, with its famous Merlinic prophecies, and (if Siôn Cent is to be believed) the book of Cyndeyrn each contained elements of prophecy or poetry that were claimed to have been spoken by Merlin himself.
It would be easy enough to accept Caradoc Bowen’s line of reasoning, to say that Geoffrey’s ‘certain very ancient book’ and Cyndeyrn’s book were entirely fictitious. But what if the evidence, thin though it may be, is taken at face value? Could it possibly be true that both books once existed, and indeed drew on the same prophetic tradition, or even some common written source? This is the thought that struck Donald like a thunderbolt as he lay in bed in the small hours, sent him running electrified down the stairs.
It is a tantalising idea, but his excitement is tempered by the recognition that this is just the kind of loose, hopeful reasoning that he has so often criticised in the more enthusiastic popularisers of Arthuriana. For now, he is too tired to develop his ideas any further. His eyes are dry and gritty, his head pounding from the intensity of his concentration. He puts down his pencil, stretches his arms high over his head, then begins to sort distractedly through the pile of post on the desk. There is the latest volume in the Archaeologia series from the Society of Antiquaries, some apparently misdirected marketing pieces (Johnson’s Fine Shrubs and Perennials, Ma Baker’s Texas Fruit Cakes), a newsletter from the local ramblers’ club, bills for electricity and water rates. He sets to one side a leaflet for the Tintagel symposium on the archaeology of Devil’s Barrow, which is due to start at the weekend. Two envelopes at the bottom of the pile immediately catch his interest.
The first, postmarked in Oxford, is addressed to him by hand in a tiny flowing script. Inside is a letter written on faded paper headed with the Jesus College crest, three silver stags on a bright green field. It is a short and surprising note from Caradoc Bowen, thanking him for his visit and expressing the wish that he should come again whenever he likes. It occurs to Donald that Bowen must have looked him up in the phone book to find his address. He feels a small surge of gratitude, almost of affection, for this curious old man. With a renewed sense of optimism, he picks up the second letter. It is from London sw1, a long white envelope bearing the sinuous blue logo of Crandall & Boyd.
Dear Donald
I’m afraid I have some bad news. You may have heard that C&B have been in some financial difficulty recently. We’ve been hit by rising paper prices, high bookshop returns and, frankly, some disastrous publishing decisions. Things came to a head last week, and we were asked to review all existing book contracts, particularly those that are very overdue. Yours came up for consideration, and I’m afraid I couldn’t save it, in spite of what you gave me when you came up to London. It’s really not finished yet, is it? I am so very sorry.
Here’s my advice. Keep working on your book, and send it to me when you are truly satisfied with it. I’ll either resubmit it here, or try to place it somewhere else. It’s important work, and it deserves to be published.
We’ll be sending you a formal contractual release in due course.
Very best wishes, and good luck.
FELICITY WICKES
Executive Editor
Donald holds Felicity’s letter by one corner for a few seconds, then lets it fall to the floor. This is a not entirely unforeseen disaster, and he finds that the news brings no immediate feeling of shock or outrage. A fantasy darts into his mind, of burning his manuscript in public, page by page, perhaps on the Iffley village green, explaining to the bewildered onlookers that it was all wrong anyway. In a sense, it no longer seems to matter. If he is right about Geoffrey and the ancient book, he will have something truly important to say to the world.
He is outside at the bottom of the garden, pruning back a tough old rosebush that has survived despite a summer’s worth of benign neglect, when he hears the telephone ring. At first he thinks to ignore it; then changes his mind, remembering that he is expecting a call from his father. As he sprints back through the kitchen, he notices with a twinge of guilt that an archaeological report he promised to send along, a study of Roman lead mining in the Mendip hills, is still there on the table. On top of it is a first edition of W. G. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape, which he found in a second-hand bookshop and intends to give to his father as a gift. He gets to the phone on the eighth ring, lifts the receiver a
nd pauses for half a second to catch his breath.
‘Hello, Donald. Are you there?’
It is disorientating to hear the warm, familiar voice. ‘Julia—’
‘Could we meet somewhere? I have an idea I want to discuss with you, about the poem. It’s too complicated to explain over the phone.’
Donald’s eye falls on the leaflet for the Tintagel symposium, there in front of him on the desk. ‘I’m heading down to Cornwall tomorrow for a conference on the Devil’s Barrow finds. If you’d like to sign up, it’s not too late. I’m sure we could find some time to talk.’
‘Yes, I’d like to come,’ Julia says, with only the barest hesitation. ‘Just tell me what I need to do.’
After he hangs up the phone, Donald picks up Felicity’s cancellation letter and lays it out flat on the table. He folds it in half lengthways, opens it up again, then folds the corners down in two symmetrical triangles, joining in the middle. He makes two more symmetrical folds into the middle, folds the whole in two, then creases each side back down at an angle, half an inch below the apex, to make two swept-back wings. Finally, by making small tears in the trailing edge, he adds two narrow rectangular flaps, one at the back of each wing.
He goes upstairs to his bedroom, uses both hands to force open the narrow sash window. A breath of chilly air steals into the room. He lifts his creation from underneath, adjusts the flaps, then launches it gently through the opening. Its nose lifts at first in the breeze, then dips suddenly, forcing the plane into a steep descent that ends in a crash-landing against the churchyard wall. Two small boys on their way back from choir practice clap ironically. One of them picks up the aircraft, makes a small modification at the tail, then relaunches it. The second flight is beautiful: looping and diving, swept up by the wind, the plane performs stately aerobatics above the middle of the road before gliding to a perfect landing on top of a mildewed old tombstone. This time, all three of them give it a round of applause.
HUGH IS WAITING there in the twilight as Julia wheels her bicycle in at the back gate. It will later occur to her that he meant this as a gesture of reconciliation, a throwback to a simpler time when he might genuinely have done such a thing, but now it feels more like an ambush as he steps out from around the corner of the garden shed.
‘I told Ruth I would walk down and meet her in town for dinner,’ he says.
Julia pushes her bike into the shed, shuts and padlocks the door. ‘Please say hello from me.’
Hugh lingers by the gate, makes a show of lifting the latch and opening it. ‘I was hoping we could talk,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you. I’d like to try to make things right again, if I can.’
Caught off guard, Julia finds herself speaking words that she hardly meant to say. ‘By having dinner with Ruth?’
‘I’ll cancel it.’
‘It’s fine, Hugh, there’s no need. I wanted to ask you something, though. Do you mind if I go away for a couple of days? There’s an archaeological symposium in Tintagel.’
‘That’s a bit of a stretch for you, isn’t it?’ He says this almost carelessly, though she can read the uneasiness in his face.
‘It’s related to the discoveries at Devil’s Barrow, the thing we saw on the news.’ Julia is torn by a sudden feeling of guilt and regret that is out of all proportion to what she has said to him, or not said. ‘Would you like to come with me?’
Hugh looks at her for a long moment, his expression difficult to read. ‘Yes, I would, but the timing’s really bad for me. We’re about to close on the Merton thing.’
‘So we’ll talk after I get back?’ she says.
‘Yes, we’ll talk. I hope you have a good trip.’ With this, he is through the gate and on his way with a backward glance and a hand raised in what seems a deliberately casual farewell.
Up at the house, Julia packs a small suitcase, working quickly and decisively; then sets it down by the front door, ready to go. Later in the evening, when the place begins to feel too dark and empty, she phones her mother at Dyffryn Farm.
‘Your father’s been much better,’ Cath Llewellyn says. The relief is palpable in her voice. ‘Just a twinge of angina, the doctor says. He’s been ordered to stop smoking and leave off the heavy work. I even got him out for a walk today, just the two of us, strolling hand in hand along Cyncoed Lane. Can you imagine?’
Julia smiles at her mother’s girlish enthusiasm. Her parents have been lucky in their love for one another. ‘Can he come to the phone?’
‘He’s sleeping like a baby. I’d best leave him to it, love. Will you speak to him tomorrow?’
IT IS A brisk November morning, the air clear and sharp with an edge of early frost, the lushness now fading from the landscape as the hills and pastures take on the muted shades of approaching winter. Coaxing the Morris up the steep and twisting lanes, Donald drives carelessly on, his thoughts drifting back to his new theory about Geoffrey of Monmouth and Siôn Cent. Two days have passed since he awoke in the small hours at home in Iffley, convinced that he had found a way to solve one of the greatest riddles of Arthurian scholarship. Since then, he has hardly dared think about it, fearing that it will not seem quite such a good idea as it did in the first flush of discovery.
His proposition is that the ‘ancient book written in the British language’, which Geoffrey claimed was brought to him from Wales by his friend Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, was not merely the product of a lively imagination. It was a real thing, and it drew on the same tradition, perhaps even the same original source, as the book of Cyndeyrn cited by Siôn Cent as his inspiration for the Song of Lailoken.
Caradoc Bowen would tell it differently. He would say that neither of these books ever had a tangible existence. His masterly analysis of the Song of Lailoken leaves little room for doubt that Siôn Cent was the original author of the poem, that he constructed it with exquisite care to meet his own purpose of exalting the memory of Glyn Dŵr. The book of Cyndeyrn was nothing more than a clever fiction, a ploy to legitimise his master’s claim to a predestined kind of greatness, to guarantee his seat in the Welsh heroic pantheon. To claim that these books were connected in some way is to suggest only that Siôn’s invented source was inspired by Geoffrey’s earlier fabrication.
In any case, Donald resolves to keep his ideas to himself until he has found some more convincing evidence. Meanwhile, he tries to concentrate on not getting lost in the Somerset hills. A road closure has diverted him to an unfamiliar route, requiring him to navigate by a sort of dead reckoning based on half-recognised landmarks and the position of the sun. By now he has reached the meeting point of the three minor roads that climb up from the valley of the River Yeo to the top of the northern Mendip escarpment. To his right is the Castle of Comfort Inn, a haven since the seventeenth century for travellers crossing the hills to the cathedral city of Wells. A left turn at the next junction will put him on the track of the Roman road connecting the old lead mines with Sorviodunum and Venta, Old Sarum and modern Winchester, to the east. He makes the turn, skirting the northern edge of the Stockhill forest, an artificial plantation whose evergreen ranks stand in stark contrast to the sparse Mendip landscape. The road takes a kink to the right at Red Quarr Farm, then runs in a perfectly straight line for several miles across the high rugged farmland.
With the open road empty ahead of him, Donald crashes through the gears, accelerating the Morris to sixty across this solitary plateau. He brings the car shuddering to a halt in Green Ore, a blank and austere village whose name recalls a lost way of life now preserved only in the warren of lead miners’ tunnels reputed to lie undisturbed beneath the fields. A left turn brings him on to the main road from Wells to Midsomer Norton, dipping to the north-east over Nedge Hill and down into the Chew Valley.
Just beyond Chewton Mendip, he follows a narrow lane for half a mile, then turns on to a gravel drive that leads to a grey stone house. It is an angular Victorian building with tall symmetrical windows in need of paint, a slate roof with severa
l broken tiles, a front wall riotously overgrown with ivy. Grendel’s Lair carved into a wooden nameplate above the door announces the name that Donald’s father gave to the house, in a rare attack of whimsy, when he first moved here from the outer London suburbs.
Donald hears the door opening as he gets out of the car. ‘Hello, Dad. Sorry I’m late.’
‘I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. Traffic not so good today?’ James Gladstone is tall and slightly stooped, with a long, pale face and thinning grey hair combed neatly to one side. His voice has something of wartime Britain in it, John Mills in We Dive at Dawn. ‘Well, get yourself in out of the cold. I’ll put the kettle on.’
A distillation of bittersweet memories runs through Donald’s head as he kicks the gravel off his shoes and steps into the chilly front hall. It was only after a long and difficult campaign with his older brother Alec that their father was persuaded to accept an offer of early retirement from the civil service and move back to his native Somerset from the family home in Surrey, where he had lived on carelessly for several years after their mother’s untimely death. For James Gladstone, the loss of his wife was a shattering blow that entirely destroyed his enthusiasm for his career with the Geological Survey, where the two of them had met and worked together for twenty-five years. Donald was only thirteen when it happened, and still from time to time he is haunted by a vision from his youth, of his mother lying there in silence, the fire burning low in the grate, the heavy blue wallpaper with its exotic Japanese flora and fauna, the old carriage clock on the mantelpiece. He will never forget the expression on her face, no longer of fear but of sad acceptance, her faint smile meant for his encouragement but in fact only drawing his attention to the dreadful, slowing tick-tick-tick of the clock.