A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  Alec was travelling abroad at the time, away on his summer break from university, leaving Donald to hold everything together as best he could. It was in those difficult weeks that he began to forge a new and unexpected bond of affection and common interest with his aloof and distant father. It was at that time, too, that he first became the beneficiary of James Gladstone’s boundless knowledge of the British landscape. Beginning a tradition that has continued on and off over the years, they would head out together on a Saturday or Sunday, tramping across the fields and through the deciduous woodlands of the Surrey hills. It was on those walks that he learned the meaning of hedges and banks and barrows and ditches, the many-layered tracings of humans on the primal environment.

  ‘Shall I go on through to the study?’ Donald says.

  ‘Yes, why don’t you? I’ll join you in a moment. If it’s cold in there, you might like to get the fire going.’

  James Gladstone’s study is a long bright room at the back of the house, a comfortable, disorderly space strewn with half-read newspapers and library books. To the left, two formal armchairs and a settee upholstered in pale green face an ornate Victorian fireplace. A vintage typewriter stands on a burnished old walnut desk in the corner. At the rear, tall windows look out on a rambling garden planted with rosebushes and apple trees, leaf-strewn grass running down and merging into the farmers’ fields that rise gently at first and then more steeply towards the Mendip escarpment. A bird table near the front of the lawn is visited sporadically by chaffinches, robins, and sparrows, the occasional dunnock and greenfinch.

  Donald crumples up several sheets from yesterday’s Times and sets them in the empty grate. Taking rough kindling from a brass container next to the hearth, he builds up from twigs to sticks to thicker cut branches, finally to the quarter-split oak logs from the cast-iron rack in the corner, then touches a lighted match to the newspaper. With the fire well set, he sits down in the nearest armchair, takes up a geological magazine and flicks idly through it, soon finds himself wrapped up in a familiar sensation of comfort and peace.

  His father returns with the loaded tea tray. ‘Have a ginger biscuit, won’t you?’ he says. ‘They’re rather good. Audrey Jenkins brought them over, though of course your mother wouldn’t have approved.’

  Donald wonders for a moment whether he is referring to the ginger biscuits—a famous dislike of Elizabeth Gladstone’s—or to the role of Mrs. Jenkins of Priory Farm. He has an unexpected and faintly unsettling vision of an austere affair being conducted in secret, wonders what his mother would have thought of that. ‘Not for me, thanks,’ he says.

  With the faintest of sighs, James Gladstone picks up the blue and white floral teapot with both hands, frowning with concentration as he pours. The sound is strangely pleasing, a thin mezzo-soprano tinkling that deepens, as the cup begins to fill, into a more substantial tenor gurgle.

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No thanks. You ought to know by now.’ Donald reaches into his briefcase, takes out a small green booklet. ‘I’ve brought you a copy of the archaeological survey you asked for. It’s quite detailed on the surface markers of the Roman mine workings.’

  While his father skims through the report, making occasional vague noises of assent and disapproval, Donald leans back in his chair and gazes into the mesmerising world of crackling orange and yellow, willing the flames to greater heights. At length his father closes the booklet, puts it down next to the tea tray. ‘There are some useful observations,’ he says, ‘but still I don’t feel that we’re getting to the heart of the matter. We won’t really know what’s down there until we dig for it.’

  ‘We’ve had that conversation before, Dad—’

  ‘I know, I know, there’s no need to say it. One can’t dig up the whole country merely to please an amateur enthusiast like me.’

  Donald reaches into his briefcase again. ‘There’s this, too. I found it in a second-hand bookshop.’

  A smile of genuine pleasure comes to James Gladstone’s face as he takes up the first edition of Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape, turns reverently through the pages. ‘This is marvellous, Donald. If there were one book I should have liked to have written, this would have been it.’

  ‘It’s not too late.’

  ‘Yes, of course it is, don’t be so silly. Now tell me, what have you been up to? Gadding about the country looking for the elusive Arthur? I’ve been reading the draft you sent me.’

  ‘And?’ Donald’s forced smile is a poor camouflage for his genuine feeling of nervousness. His father’s approval is more important to him than he would care to admit.

  ‘It’s very nicely done, I should say, though there was one thought that occurred to me repeatedly as I was reading through the manuscript. Thoroughness and objectivity are doubtless of great importance in your profession, but you mustn’t allow yourself to become entirely hidebound by what history and archaeology can definitively tell you. As generations of scholars have proven beyond a doubt, that approach won’t get you any closer to the true origins of Arthur.’ James Gladstone looks meaningfully at Donald now, eyebrows raised, gently challenging him to refute this argument. ‘A thousand years from now, your clever Oxford people will still be debating the reliability of the battle-listings in the Historia Brittonum, still searching for the location of Mount Badon.’

  ‘I don’t disagree, but I think I’ve said all those things in the book.’

  ‘Well, almost, but not quite. We all know Arthur is a slippery sort of fellow, and you’ve tried to grab at him from almost every conceivable direction. But there’s one approach I think you haven’t quite done justice to.’

  Donald is transported back a quarter of a century, to his father poring over a schoolboy essay on ancient Greece or the Roman empire, pointing out some unconscionable error of classical history or political geography. ‘What did I get wrong, Dad?’

  ‘Just humour me in a little thought-experiment, if you would. Let’s imagine you were the first modern human to explore the British landscape, and let’s say you happened to set eyes on a curiously shaped hilltop, one that could be seen from many miles in all directions. Think of Glastonbury Tor, if you want a real example. What would you have done?’

  It is a very strange question, even by James Gladstone’s unorthodox standards. Donald sits there quietly for a while until the answer comes to him in a flash of insight. ‘I would have named it,’ he says.

  ‘That’s exactly right.’ Donald’s father looks approvingly at him. ‘An unusual place like that would demand a good story to explain it—a creation myth, you might say. So you would have named it, probably by invoking some great character or story drawn from the mythology of your people. You would have called it Lud’s Hill or Mabon’s Throne or something like that.’

  Donald is long accustomed to his father’s oblique approach to such conversations; he will never tackle a subject head-on if an indirect line of attack can be found. ‘Where are you going with this, Dad?’

  ‘Well, there’s an obvious inference to be drawn. If only we could get back to the original names of things, names that are settled deep into the bones of the landscape, we would learn a great deal about our distant ancestors. I suggest you think carefully about that when you come to reconsider all the rocks and caves and mountain-tops that are named for the mythical Arthur.’

  ‘I’ve already discussed the toponymic evidence at some length in the book, Dad. It would be easy to over-interpret it.’

  ‘I am merely suggesting that you should supplement the evidence, such as it is, by using your own intellect and imagination. Now then, perhaps you’ll drink your tea before it gets cold, and tell me what else you’ve been up to. Or is it all about the book at the moment?’

  Straight away, Donald’s thoughts turn back to Julia Llewellyn, and what the next twenty-four hours may bring. ‘I did meet someone interesting the other day.’ For a moment, he imagines he sees a new candour in his father’s gaze; but they have never discussed the women
in their lives, and it seems too late for the breaking of ancient taboos. Instead he describes his meeting with Caradoc Bowen, tells his father about the Song of Lailoken and Bowen’s interpretation of the text.

  James Gladstone calmly takes all of this in, cradling his cup and saucer and smiling faintly in his usual unfathomable way. ‘You may be interested to hear that I once had dealings with Professor Bowen. He wrote to us at the Survey, a long time ago now, to enquire about the prevalence of lower Devonian sandstone formations in the mountainous regions of Wales.’

  ‘Is there something special about Devonian sandstone?’

  ‘Well, I suppose its most notable feature is that the high iron oxide content typically gives it a rather striking dark red colour. As I recall, Bowen was especially interested in this, and also in the steepness of the terrain. For some reason, he was looking for places in Wales where he might find tall cliffs made of reddish-coloured rock. We had no idea why, but still we obliged him by sending him several large geological maps marked up with the most likely locations.’

  It all seems to fall perfectly into place. In his analysis of the Song of Lailoken, Bowen made a forceful argument that the battle descriptions in the poem referred to real events, that these were the battles of Owain Glyn Dŵr as captured in verse by the bard Siôn Cent. There is one particularly vivid depiction of Glyn Dŵr and his companions trapped in the crooked valley, grimly awaiting the final English attack.

  We strove for the heights but they held us there

  Caught us at sun’s falling, trapped at axe’s edge

  Grimly we gathered, in close rank, certain of death

  Crags raised red like bloodied fists above us

  The distant water rushing, whispering, sighing

  The river, a wolf’s-head smile carved far below.

  Caradoc Bowen thought he could find this place, the valley where Glyn Dŵr made his final stand, by interpreting the clues in Siôn Cent’s poem. This was the obsession that drove him, that caused him to lose the confidence of his peers and tarnished his reputation as one of the foremost scholars of the Celtic world.

  ‘I can tell you’ve an interesting idea lurking in there somewhere,’ James Gladstone says, looking at his son with kindly scepticism. ‘Do let me know when it has found its way out.’

  ‘Did Bowen ever contact you again?’

  ‘Not as I recall. It would have taken him months, even years, to visit all the places we marked on the map. If he ever found what he was looking for, we certainly never heard about it.’

  ‘I don’t imagine he ever did find it.’ Donald feels a faint stirring of unease as he reflects on his meeting with Caradoc Bowen and the unexpected letter that followed. Anxious now to be on his way, he glances at his watch.

  The gesture does not escape his father’s notice. ‘Will you stay for lunch, at least?’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Dad, but I have a long drive ahead of me.’

  Backing out of his father’s drive a few minutes later, Donald is oppressed by a vague sense of melancholy and guilt. The lanky, stooping figure in the doorway recalls random scenes from half a lifetime of partings at this green door with its perennially flaking paint, memories of driving back to university after the Christmas break, of setting off on a trip to Scotland with Sally-Ann Bright, the red-haired girl from the second-hand bookshop on St. Aldates, around the time he almost asked her to marry him. It crosses his mind that it might be the most natural thing in the world for Audrey Jenkins to be standing there on the doorstep with his father; his mother, after all, never lived in this house. It has always been an austere and solitary place, with James Gladstone’s slowly fading grief lying over it like a dusty shroud. Perhaps Audrey would let in some much-needed daylight.

  Donald forces the Morris into first gear, gives one last wave, senses rather than sees his father turn back wearily into the empty house. He rejoins the main road in Chewton, follows it up the gentle rise of Nedge Hill to the top of the plateau. As the dim green expanse of the Somerset levels begins to open up ahead of him, forming a broad new horizon above the southern Mendip edge, his spirits begin to lift. The city of Wells comes gradually into view, the buildings of the old market town clustered tightly about their majestic cathedral. In the hazy distance beyond, Glastonbury Tor, an improbably steep-sided island, seems to float somewhere above the plain. Driving on through the narrow, busy streets of Wells, then on out to the south-west across wide-open countryside towards the distant county of Cornwall, Donald is gripped by a new sense of excitement at the possibilities of the world.

  A Castle Built High

  Above the Sea

  WITHIN HALF AN hour of leaving his father’s house, Donald is driving through a marshy landscape haunted since the seventeenth century by ghostly cries said to belong to the soldiers of the Duke of Monmouth, who was taken prisoner by the royalist forces of his Roman Catholic uncle, James II, after the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685. Monmouth was executed for treason at the Tower of London in July of that year. He calmly paid the axe man, Jack Ketch, to do a clean and merciful job, but Ketch lost his nerve, taking five bloody strikes to relieve the duke of his head.

  Then comes the cider country between lines of rugged hills to the west and south, the Quantocks and the looming Blackdown range marking the border between Somerset and Devon. The weather seems well adjusted to Donald’s state of mind, showers arriving overhead at regular intervals between short intermissions of bright sunshine and crystal blue sky. On the far side of Honiton, a grim resolve asserts itself as he finds himself trapped by a series of heavy downpours in the middle of a convoy of high-sided lorries. These unstable vehicles veer from side to side as they catch the wind, their wheels kicking up huge drowning sheets of spray. He is forced to work his way through the pack, pulling out to overtake each in turn, putting his foot to the floor and hanging on determinedly as the Morris inches its way past, then finally back to the safety of the inside lane.

  Thus he makes a halting south-westerly progress towards Exeter, the Roman city of Isca Dumnoniorum established in 79 AD at the south-western limit of imperial administration in Britain. In the sparsely populated peninsular lands to the west, the Roman presence was restricted to a handful of lonely military outposts and trading stations along the edges of the moors. This was otherwise deemed a rugged and inhospitable land best left to its Celtic peoples, the Dumnonii, who maintained a form of independence through four hundred years of imperial rule.

  The rolling green hill-country of Devon carries Donald to the edge of Dartmoor, where he skirts to the north of the bleak rocky uplands on which Holmes and Watson heard the baleful cry of the hound. Dropping down into the valley of the Tamar, he crosses the river at Launceston, ancient capital and gateway to Cornwall. Soon he begins passing signs to numerous small villages, Tregadillett, Tregeare, Tresmeer, Treneglos, Tremail, and Trelash, evidence enough for a Cornishman that England has truly been left behind.

  This is the land of Lucy Trevelyan’s paternal forebears, who once held sway in the parish of St. Veep near Lostwithiel on the south Cornish coast, where they were noted for their fertile production of Tory politicians and historians in Victorian times. As far as Donald can remember, Lucy never showed any interest in renewing her ancestral ties to the famous Trevelyan clan. It occurs to him in a theoretical way, as he urges the Morris on up to the higher ground, that Lucy’s disparagement of her provincial forebears is as much an expression of her need to be at the cultural centre of things as it is a rejection of the conservative values that were so firmly embedded in her Cornish lineage.

  There is a more straightforward explanation, too, that Lucy’s posture towards her Trevelyan kin is a simple denial of any shred of allegiance to her own father. When she was in her early teens, Philip Trevelyan, himself a scholar of some repute, was discovered in flagrante with a postgraduate student half his age, whereupon Lucy’s embittered American mother, never at home in England, seized the moment to take her daughter and two young sons back to California. T
hese experiences helped Lucy to grow into adulthood with a strongly developed sense of self-determination. When, in her late twenties, she arrived to take up a readership at St. Anne’s College, Oxford (having already made her mark in the women’s studies department at Berkeley), she was fully prepared to deploy her illustrious surname as a battle-sword of her personal academic freedom.

  To the right, the land is now dropping gently away to the valley of the River Ottery. To the left rises the barren edge of Bodmin Moor, a vast and desolate tract of rocky outcrops and treeless hills where, long before the Roman occupation, tunnels were dug by bronze-age man to find the precious tin ore. The sun is low in the south-west, making sharp, craggy silhouettes of the angular granite tors that rise like puzzling sculptures on the hilltops. Somewhere high up there on the moor is Dozmary Pool, where it is said that Sir Bedivere, commanded repeatedly by the dying King Arthur, threw Excalibur into the deep dark water, there to be received by the Lady of the Lake.

  Donald leaves the main road at Trewassa, heads down a narrow back road towards the coast. As the lane twists and turns interminably across the heathland, it seems to him that he has taken a wrong turning into some ancient, inescapable maze. At last he drops down a long hill into the village of Tintagel, where he finds a cluster of brick and stone buildings, old and new, assembled in homage to the Arthurian tourist trade. It is not yet two o’clock; he is more than an hour early for his rendezvous.

  The Cornish tourist season is long past, leaving windblown, half-deserted streets with the atmosphere of Blackpool or Skegness after the summer crowds have left. Donald parks the car on Fore Street, walks on past the King Arthur’s Arms and the Excalibur Tea Room, with its brightly painted sign depicting an imposing Arthur in full armour, visor up, sipping tea from a delicate floral cup. At the Uther Pendragon Bookshop, he stops to look in at the window display, smiles with a grim irony as he sees the predictable collection of real-Arthur potboilers set alongside various new-age enchantments that might cause even his ex-wife to blush. A serious-looking couple hovers nearby, debating quietly over the purchase of a yellow plastic sword that their young son has discovered in a large bin outside the door of the shop. Grinning broadly, the boy unsheaths this weapon from its scabbard and flourishes it in front of them.