A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  ‘What if I asked you to make an educated guess, Otto?’

  He smiles at her now. ‘Yes, I was hoping you would ask. If I were to make a hypothesis based on the context in which the words are used, I should say that they refer also to totemic creatures, companions to our raven-woman. Perhaps these are the names of other totems that we find commonly in the Basque mythologies, symbols of strength and courage such as the boar and the stag. As to how these errant words ended up in the middle of a medieval Welsh text, I could not possibly say.’

  Julia waits until Otto has wandered dreamily back to his desk on the other side of the office before dialling Donald’s number. He picks up the phone straight away. ‘Julia, I’m glad you called—’

  ‘Listen, there’s something I wanted to ask you, about the poem.’ Suddenly she is talking to him in an excited rush, about Otto Zeiss and Basque and Aquitanian, animal totems from the distant past. ‘How can it be, Donald? How could such a language ever have been spoken in Britain?’

  He is calmer, more measured. ‘It’s perhaps not as unlikely as it sounds,’ he says. ‘Most archaeologists agree that the island of Britain was repopulated after the last ice age, perhaps ten thousand years ago, by peoples who travelled up the western coasts of Europe from the glacial refuge of north-eastern Iberia. They would have spoken a language that was an ancestor to modern Basque. It was possibly the main language spoken in Britain before the arrival of Celtic speakers in the early centuries of the first millennium BC.’

  ‘Can you make some sense of it, though? How these words got into the poem?’

  There is a silence now on the line. ‘Not quite,’ Donald says at last, ‘though I do perhaps have an idea. I’ll see you later on, OK? We have a lot to talk about.’

  THE CHAPEL OF Jesus College is a narrow, chilly space that seems to sap away what little warmth there is in the late autumn air. Its bold Victorian pavement of marble, alabaster, and glazed encaustic tiles sweeps through a broad gothic arch to the chancel and the vivid stained glass of the east window. Next to the altar, the young college chaplain, earnest and clean-cut, waits patiently as the late arrivals find their seats. Donald sits there quietly surveying the congregation, trying hard not to shiver in the sepulchral cold. He exchanges a glance with Margaret Rackham, who has a bench to herself at the front beneath the chancel arch, then casts his eye along the triple ranks of upright wooden pews on either side. Along with a few people of Caradoc Bowen’s own generation, frail and inscrutable old men who have the look of former spies and civil servants, there are many familiar faces from the current Oxbridge establishment, incumbent professors of poetry and history side by side with younger aspiring dons for whom Bowen was of interest mostly as an immovable object blocking their upward path through the scholarly hierarchy.

  There is a touch on Donald’s shoulder from behind, a whisper in his ear. ‘I was hoping I might find you here.’ It is an unmistakable American voice. He turns his head, catches Lucy’s knowing smile. ‘I have something to show you,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you outside afterwards, OK?’

  The chaplain clears his throat, looks meaningfully from left to right, gathering their attention, waits for the hush to fall; then launches into a short, surprising oration, his delivery slowed and softened by the expanded syllables of the south Welsh coast. ‘Caradoc Bowen was not a religious man. Not, at least, in the sense that one typically uses the term in my profession. Those of you who knew him will no doubt believe as I do that he would not thank me for sharing with you the traditional pieties of occasions such as this.’ There is a faint murmuring now from the pews: of agreement, or perhaps of modest indignation. ‘Professor Bowen was above all a remarkable scholar, an unparalleled authority on the bardic traditions of the Celtic peoples and their influence on wider British and European history, prehistory, and culture. He wrote widely on the medieval poetry of Wales and the role of mythology in shaping the national character and political fate of that country. In his younger days, he was a noted oratorical poet, and indeed I trust I do not overstep the mark in suggesting that, had he been born into another age, we might have seen Caradoc Bowen in the company of the greatest Welsh bards, Aneirin and Taliesin, Iolo Goch and Siôn Cent, whose work he so much admired. And so, with the late professor’s bold poetic spirit very much in mind, I am honoured to introduce to you the distinguished Bodley’s Librarian, who will give a brief eulogy on behalf of the university.’

  Margaret Rackham stands up without ceremony, walks up to the pulpit and pauses for a moment, gathers her thoughts, then looks her audience unflinchingly in the eye. ‘Today I would like to share with you one aspect of Caradoc Bowen’s life that has almost been forgotten,’ she says. ‘When he was a young man, he first made his name with a dramatic performance at the national Eisteddfod, the Welsh literary and cultural festival, which in that year was held in his home town of Dolgellau in the shadow of the sacred peak of Cadair Idris. In that famous recital, he rejected utterly the neo-Druidic pomp and ceremony introduced by Iolo Morganwg in the eighteenth century in favour of a quiet, captivating, song-like delivery of his own poetry as well as certain verses that he said were of more ancient origin than his listeners could begin to comprehend.’

  She pauses now, smiling faintly at the restive congregation. ‘Cranc Bowen lamented the irremediable decay and ultimate loss of the Welsh bardic tradition, a process whose beginnings he dated to the century following the failure of Owain Glyn Dŵr’s revolt. Along with this tradition went a great body of Celtic verse reaching back at least to the time of Aneirin in the fifth and sixth centuries, and possibly a thousand or more years before that. Only a few poor fragments were captured in medieval times in the Great Books of Wales. As far as Cranc was concerned, this was the precious lifeblood of the Welsh nation. He saw it as his role to preserve what was left of it in any way he could.

  ‘Bardic poetry was Caradoc Bowen’s heart and soul, and so it might seem curious to memorialise him through the work of an Englishman, and a Cambridge scholar to boot.’ Now there is an unmistakable nervous shuffling in the audience, but Margaret Rackham continues undaunted. ‘Thomas Gray was nevertheless a poet he greatly admired, and I can think of no more fitting memorial than the extract I shall read to you from one of Gray’s own favourite works, the final lament of a Welsh bard pursued by the soldiers of Edward the First as they crushed the life from a nation whose resistance had fallen with its hero, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, now laid to rest beneath a marble slab in the solitude of Cwmhir. Though close to his own end, Gray’s forsaken prophet foretold a time of reckoning for the English crown, a new dawn and a brighter day for his own people.

  ‘Fond impious man, think’st thou yon sanguine cloud

  Raised by thy breath, has quench’d the orb of day?

  To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,

  And warms the nations with redoubled ray.

  Enough for me: With joy I see

  The different Doom our fates assign.

  Be thine Despair, and sceptred Care;

  To triumph, and to die, are mine.’

  He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height

  Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.

  LUCY IS THERE at Donald’s side as they file out of the chapel into pale crepuscular sunshine filtering through persistent layers of morning fog. She is over-dressed and theatrical in a flowing blue floral dress and elaborate matching shawl, drawing curious stares and admiring glances from the younger dons who are milling around in the quad.

  ‘That was a strange choice of reading, don’t you think?’ she says. ‘Almost as if our distinguished professor had intended to kill himself. You don’t suppose that’s what happened, do you? I heard you were there to see it.’

  ‘I really don’t want to talk about it, Lucy.’ Beyond his ordinary irritation at her, Donald is still thinking about Margaret Rackham’s eulogy. ‘Why are you here, anyway? You didn’t even know him.’

  ‘Paul Healey told me about it.’ She give
s him her best sardonic smile. ‘He said I’d probably find you here.’

  Donald takes a moment to interpret what she has just said to him. ‘I didn’t know you were on speaking terms. It’s only a few weeks since you humiliated him on national television.’

  ‘Actually I had dinner with him in Cambridge last night. Paul has asked for my advice on Devil’s Barrow, now it’s come out that his bone dates are all wrong. You’d be surprised, we have become quite good friends.’

  Seeing the mordant look on her face, Donald decides to leave this cryptic statement alone. It is not the first time he has thought her capable of getting her way by sleeping with Paul Healey. ‘Let me ask you something, Lucy. Imagine that your magical chalice-woman lived at the beginning of the first millennium BC, as the dating now suggests. What sort of a culture do you think she inhabited?’

  He is gratified to see a look of surprise flicker across her face. ‘I didn’t know you cared. But since you ask, I think she lived in the final days of the matrilineal society that once held sway throughout Old Europe. Each tribe had its powerful female shaman, the triune mother goddess made manifest on earth, venerating the cup and the cauldron as symbols of the magical power of the earth to bring forth life and sustenance. She was, in my humble opinion, one of the last great shamans of a vanishing culture.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s possible the culture had somehow become debased by that time—the triple goddess as a three-headed white serpent, to be propitiated by human male sacrifice in the form of a gruesome threefold death?’

  ‘Which was the hallmark of the incoming Celts, not of the indigenous Britons. Clearly she was the victim, and not the aggressor.’

  Lucy’s complacency is infuriating, goading Donald to challenge her; but he refuses to give her the satisfaction. Instead he leads the way to a quieter corner of the quad. ‘I need to ask your advice about something else.’

  She lays the back of her hand against his forehead. ‘Are you feeling quite well today, my love?’

  ‘You know it’s a last resort for me.’ He smiles at her, despite himself. It is a very long time since he last had a normal conversation with Lucy, least of all on a topic of mutual intellectual interest. In the past, they would always end up arguing, passionately in the early years, acrimoniously later on, as they came to despise one another’s point of view. Now he is badly in need of her professional advice. ‘I’ve been thinking about the work you did in the Balkans.’

  Her laugh is entirely disarming. ‘That’s not quite what I expected you to say. What is it you want to know?’

  In their early years together, Lucy began an ambitious study of the deep-rooted folkloric traditions of eastern Europe, desperately (in Donald’s view) trying to glean some support for her matriarchal vision of Old Europe. What he remembers most, apart from her constant over-interpretation of the evidence, is the surprising robustness of the traditional tales that were handed down by local storytellers, the themes that were preserved with remarkable consistency over time and space.

  ‘Something Margaret Rackham said about Bowen and his ancient verses at the Eisteddfod got me thinking about the bardic system, and how well it could work over a long period of time. If a poem was passed on orally from bard to bard for many centuries before it was first written down, would you expect the original text to be faithfully preserved, or would it diverge into something quite different?’

  Lucy looks at him now with a shrewd little twist of the mouth. ‘Well, as any good public schoolboy could tell you, one example of what you’ve just described is the poetry of Homer, the Iliad with its story set in the Trojan War. There’s an entire body of theory that explains how phrases such as eos rhododaktylos, for rosy-fingered dawn, or oinops pontos, for wine-dark sea, hew to a certain metrical pattern that makes them easier for the poet to compose and for others to remember. So the answer is yes, it is possible for specific lines of text to survive over many generations. Is that what you were hoping I would say?’

  ‘I was curious, that’s all.’

  She grabs dramatically at his sleeve. ‘I do hope you’ll tell me if you’re on to something big, Donald? Give me proper credit in your book?’

  ‘I’ll be sure to send you a signed copy.’

  Lucy seems cheerful now, almost radiant. ‘Talking of which, I’d like you to tell me what you think of this.’ She hands him a thin brown envelope. ‘Whenever you have a chance.’

  ‘I’ll have a look later on, I promise.’ Donald puts it in his jacket pocket. He glances at his watch; only a few minutes to his rendezvous with Julia.

  Lucy seems momentarily distracted by something behind him. ‘And now all of a sudden you seem to be in a hurry. I was hoping you might buy me a drink.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone.’

  ‘Well, some other time, dearest. And by the way, how is your friend Julia? I thought she might be here.’ Lucy does not wait for an answer, takes him by the arm as they walk, leans in close. ‘I’ve been thinking, Donald, you’re far too caught up in your Arthurian world. Julia is like Guinevere to your Lancelot, and we all know what happened to her in the end.’

  FROM FORCE OF habit, Julia follows the route she would usually take to the Bodleian, the cut-through from the Lamb and Flag pub to Parks Road, then down past the library to the Radcliffe Camera, finally looping back along Brasenose Lane to Turl Street and the entrance to Jesus College. Just as she arrives, there is a steady stream of people filing out of the college grounds. Leaving her bicycle propped up against the outside wall, she runs a hand through her hair, walks up to the gate.

  She catches a glimpse of Donald in the corner of the quad, facing away from her, deep in conversation with a woman who looks immediately familiar. It takes her only a second: this is Lucy Trevelyan, whom she saw on the BBC talking about Devil’s Barrow and the magical chalice. She can see straight away that there is an intensity and an intimacy in the way Donald is speaking to his ex-wife. Lucy hands something to him, smiling, and he puts it in his pocket. Now she catches sight of Julia, holds her gaze for a long moment. There is a look in her eye that speaks unmistakably of ownership, of forbidden territory. And why should Donald not fall back into Lucy’s embrace? She is an attractive, intelligent, imposing woman who knows everything there is to know about him; whereas Julia, by comparison, hardly knows him at all. Her claim on him is one night of love in a seedy bedroom at the Black Lion Inn. Lucy takes Donald by the arm, smiling, whispers something to him as they walk.

  Julia ducks around the corner out of sight, gets back on her bicycle and pedals away through the familiar streets, keeps going until she finds her way to Christ Church and the path that leads across the meadow to the river. She sits there for a long time on a bench by the water, watching the mallards gliding in perfect arcs, wondering how it would feel to go through life like that, contentedly circling.

  DONALD WAITS AT the gate for half an hour before knocking on the door of the porter’s lodge.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ The hoarse voice carries with it an aura of mild irritation and stale pipe tobacco.

  ‘Do you have a phone book, by any chance?’

  ‘Ah yes, I see,’ the porter says, emerging partially into the daylight. He is wearing a faded blue jacket and matching tie emblazoned with the Jesus College crest, silver stags on green. ‘You’re not the first person to be properly stood up at the college gate.’ He gives a low chuckle as he turns back into the dim interior of the lodge. ‘Be with you in just a second.’

  Donald finds the phone number under Mortimer, makes a note of the address and the house name: Cair Paravel, one of the self-important donnish residences of north Oxford.

  ‘I don’t suppose I could use the phone?’ he says. ‘It’s a bit of an emergency.’

  The porter taps the side of his nose. ‘I shan’t tell,’ he says. ‘Be my guest.’

  There is no answer at the Mortimer house. Donald walks back up to Broad Street, finds a wooden bench near the entrance to Trinity College
and sits there watching the passing cyclists. After a while, he takes Lucy’s envelope out of his pocket, fumbles it open with chilly fingers. There are two folded pages inside, the introduction to a book: The Last Prophetess, by Lucinda Macaulay Trevelyan. She begins in her trademark hyperbolic, provocative style.

  The British soil is finally giving up her deepest secrets. The recent unburyings at Devil’s Barrow have bequeathed to us a magical chalice whose like has never before been seen, the arms of its protector still wrapped about it, the wracked remains of her guardsmen piled beneath her in the burial mound. We picture this woman as the earthly interlocutor of the mother goddess, perhaps the last of the great prophetesses of Old Europe. Are we not entitled to ask whether her magic is still alive in the landscape of Britain?

  He screws the sheets of paper into a ball. A little while later, with a small twinge of guilt, he smooths them out as best he can, tucks them into the back of his notebook. As he does so, something falls out from between the pages, a drawing done in pencil, the one Julia gave him at Trevethey Mill. The picture shows an imposing cliff-face in a landscape of desolate Welsh hills. This is Craig-y-Ddinas, where Arthur and his knights have been sleeping for centuries in a cave deep within.

  There was something Donald’s father said to him when they were talking about his book. 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. He digs in his bag for the geological map, traces his finger from the lower part of the valley to the top of the third cascade. Two inches to the right, just beyond the densely massed contours that indicate the face of the eastern cliff, is something he did not pay much attention to when he first looked at the map. It is the symbol for an ancient long barrow or burial chamber, and written next to it in a small antique script is its traditional local name: a name that is unremarkable in its way, but now fills him with a sudden exhilaration.