Advent

  One of the few details we know for sure about the magician’s adventures is that he once demanded to see Helen of Troy, renowned for centuries for her beauty. We know this because it’s the only inessential narrative detail that Marlowe and Goethe agree on. Their source is the cheerfully sensationalist sixteenth-century biography called (in its English translation) The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor Iohn Faustus. From chapter 55:

  . . . wherefore he called his Spirit Mephostophiles, commanding him to bring him the fair Helena of Greece, which he also did: Whereupon he fell in love with her, and made her his common Concubine and Bed-fellow; for she was so beautiful and delightful a piece, that he could not be one hour from her, if he should therefore have suffered Death, she had stolen away his Heart . . .

  Goethe, of course, knows there’s more at stake in this relationship than celebrity sex, and has Helen stand for an ideal of pure classicism against which the magus has to measure his Romantic ambitions. Marlowe’s Faust, much less wise, gets nothing from the encounter at all, unless you count two of the best pentameters in English:

  Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,

  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

  In the shadow of those towers, Cassandra’s legend is appropriately elusive as well. She’s a marginal figure in the Iliad, and Homer stays tactfully silent about her prophetic burden. It’s left to a dramatist some two or three centuries later to flesh her out. Aeschylus sends her onstage in his Agamemnon as a prisoner of war, dragged from Troy to Argos among the rest of the victorious king’s spoils. The play makes her a silent witness to the scene where Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra welcomes him back to the palace after his ten-year campaign. Her silence, in fact, is all we’re allowed to know about her at first. She doesn’t speak even when Clytemnestra invites her to follow them inside. Perhaps she doesn’t understand, Clytemnestra says; she’s a foreigner after all, her language no better than a swallow’s twittering. The watching men of Argos think she looks like a captured animal new to its cage. Or just mad, Clytemnestra retorts, but the bridle of slavery will cure her of that, once it’s made her bleed. With that parting insult the queen goes in, leaving Cassandra alone onstage with the chorus.

  Then – while, unseen inside, Clytemnestra throws a net over her husband and hacks him to death in the bath – Apollo stings her into speech at last. Otototoi, she cries, words that mean nothing but pain:

  Otototoi popoi da

  Ôpollon Ôpollon

  She knows what’s happening inside, and she knows it’s her turn for slaughter next. I’m glad to have spared her that much at least, though in the Agamemnon prophecy is a worse pain to her than murder, and she won’t escape that burden until Gawain comes along.

  The corner of England he’ll arrive in already exists and, allowing for the differences you’d expect between a world still without magic and a world under the pressure of its imminent return, can be found on the maps. Three or four of the locations in the story have pre-emptively managed to escape disenchantment and, especially in the winter months, appear nowadays exactly as Gawain will see them. Anyone can visit the station where Hester leaves her car or the cove where Tristram will drown. (Out-of-the-way beaches and train stations are potent magical places, as small children might tell you.) The ferry lands on the south side of the river at the same steps where Gav will disembark, and the footpath from there up to the crossroads goes through the same woods beside the same stream. According to an old guidebook I once found on the shelves of a holiday cottage, that stream is called dhu ra, though only one of those words appears to be properly Cornish, and I never found the name again.

  Pendurra itself – the house – did not exist when I started writing Gawain’s story. An altogether different building stands in its place, the relatively modest remnant of a vanished manor. However, by the time the early versions of Advent were finished, it turned out that I’d conjured the house into being. (No one was more surprised than me.) It appeared in the wrong place, about ten miles off, and the architectural details didn’t come out quite right either, but I had the garden almost perfect, and the atmosphere – the hush of granite and suspended ruin, the feeling of stepping onto a shoal in the river of time – is exact. Anyone who can find it can go there as well. Winter, as always, would be best.

  About the author

  James Treadwell was born, brought up and educated within a mile of the Thames, and has spent much of his life further reducing the distance between him and the river. He studied and taught for more than a decade near the crossing at Folly Bridge, Oxford, and now lives within sight of the Tideway in West London.