by Simon Edge
“Launch another boat!” came a cry alongside her.
Surely not? Who in their right mind would get into a lifeboat after seeing that? But the canvas cover was already being stripped off and the second boat was raised out of its cradle and lowered towards the water. Another seaman was about to step in when a wave broke on the side of the ship behind them, and the boat was tossed away amid the froth of white water, whatever ties holding it fast snapped clean away. This time, at least, there was nobody aboard. Crossing herself, Henrica could not watch any more. Letting go of the stay, she lurched in the direction of the deckhouse. It was only a few feet away but she muttered a prayer of thanks to the Blessed Virgin as she felt the door handle in her palm and pushed herself inside.
Two women she recognised from the other table at dinner were in the saloon, sitting side by side in chairs that must be fixed to the floor, otherwise they would have slid down to the wall. They stood in alarm when they saw Henrica’s bedraggled state.
“Sit down, sister,” said the younger of the two, wisps of blonde hair framing an angular face. “Catch your breath.”
Henrica did as she was told, consciously staving off the moment when she would have to return to her own companions. The women looked at her expectantly. What should she say? She ought not to spread alarm, but she had to tell someone what she had seen, and somehow it was easier with strangers. She started to tell them about the scene on deck, the launch of the first boat, the terrible moment when it was ripped loose, and then the loss of the second one. It was all so awful, and the captain surely couldn’t expect any of the women to…
“Ulrich!”
A gentleman had appeared behind her, and the older woman sprang up and took his hands. His head was as wet as Henrica’s robe.
“What’s happening, Father?” the younger woman pleaded.
The man looked dazed. “There’s nothing to… Everything will be all right. That’s to say…”
“Come on Ulrich, don’t give us that,” said the older one, pulling away from him. “They want us to get in boats where we will certainly be drowned. The Reverend Mother here saw it with her own eyes.”
Henrica dimly remembered a world where she might have been amused at that wild over-estimation of her status.
The gentleman put his hand to his brow. “Another t-two boats were lost after that,” he said slowly. “They were both empty, thank God for that at least. They’ve g-given up launching them. Now they are throwing cargo overboard to make the ship lighter, and they’re going to raise the sails. The captain says the wind may lift us off the bank. All the men are asked to help with the pumping. I was coming to tell you, my dears, that you must wait in your c-cabin and try not to worry. They promise they will have us off here, and if they do not, help will come soon. They have sent flares.”
When Henrica re-entered their little suite of cabins she had settled on what to tell the others.
“The captain has decided against putting us in the lifeboats. They are very small, and we should not have liked to get into one, so that is no loss,” she said briskly, after explaining that they were aground. She related the plan to sail the ship off the sandbank. “For the moment, the best we can do is pray that it works.”
To her surprise, they accepted this without fuss. Brigitta had been crying, but was at least calmer now, and Barbara seemed to have done a good job with them. Aurea was more subdued, which was no bad thing, while Norberta’s expression of gloom was not so different to normal.
At nine o’clock, four hours after they had run aground, Henrica ventured outside the cabin again to join some of the other second-class passengers in the tilting saloon. She heard from the stammering man called Ulrich, whose surname was Meyer, that the captain’s attempt to sail off the sandbank had driven them further onto it, so the sails had been furled. Now that it was fully light, the wind dropped further and the seas abated. It was still icy cold on deck, but Meyer said there was a friendly spirit, with gentlemen from first class rolling up their sleeves alongside labourers from steerage.
“At least t-two steamers have been sighted, which means they must have seen us t-too,” he added. “Help will c-come.”
“As long as it comes before nightfall,” said Lundgren, pulling at his long, pale fingers. “The tide will come up again tonight, and she will not stand another battering.”
“Not in f-front of the ladies, old man,” Meyer muttered with a glance at his wife and daughter.
Henrica was glad the rest of her own party had chosen to stay in their cabins.
North Wales, the present
It is the day of the literary lecture. Tim has been planning to close the pub while he goes off to the college for the afternoon. It’s not a good precedent, but neither will it make any difference to his takings. In the event, however, Alun Gwynne offers to help him out.
“I can keep the place open for you if you like, landlord. You can teach me how to use the pumps. As long as we don’t get a rush, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry, I don’t want paying. A free drink or two will do just as well.”
Tim can’t immediately think of anything obvious that could go wrong, so he goes ahead and teaches Alun how to pull a pint, makes sure the number of his Nokia is taped to the side of the bar in case of some massive emergency, and heads off on foot to St Vowelless’s.
He has made such a big deal of getting inside that he is actually nervous as he walks up the drive. He is imagining another tangle with the gatekeeper, but the old man has clearly been primed that outsiders are expected this afternoon and gives Tim a nod that might almost count as friendly as he passes through the gate. Rounding a clump of ancient rhododendron bushes, he finally gets a proper look at the place.
Having seen pictures on the website, he already has a good idea what the college looks like, but he is not prepared for how forbidding it looks in real life. The tall limestone walls with their small arched windows wouldn’t look out of place on a borstal, and the monotony of the stern grey face overlooking the front lawn is unbroken by any adornment or even a doorway.
The entrance is inside a central courtyard, an enclosure so resolutely colourless that it could be in the most unforgiving urban tenement, rather than on a tree-lined Welsh hillside. The door is open, and he follows a gaggle of other obvious interlopers into a long, low hall, its ceiling punctuated by broad-slung whitewashed arches. There’s a whiff of polish that takes him back to his school days, all grim respectability and no outdoor shoes on the parquet. A sign on the staircase warns that the upper floors are out of bounds, which ordinarily wouldn’t deter Tim. But there’s also a woman in a steward’s badge and tweed skirt waiting to take their entrance money and make sure he goes where he’s meant to, so if he’s going to nose around, he’ll have to do it later.
He follows the other visitors into another whitewashed room with sombre black beams crisscrossing the ceiling. There is a low fireplace at each end and nothing on the walls. From the inside, he observes, the windows look much larger than they do from the front: each group of four arched apertures forms a larger bay. It means that there is plenty of light flooding in from the front terrace and a good view down the valley towards the sea: surprising, considering how hidden the building itself is. The room is arranged with functional plastic chairs in a double horseshoe around a speaker’s lectern. There is a photocopied handout on each, and a table at the side with a tea urn and a plate of custard creams. About a dozen chairs are already occupied. The crowd consists of a pair of shrunken elderly women with sticks, two or three ruddy couples in jumpers with daypacks, and assorted single men, several of them in clerical collars. Tim is swamped by a wave of gloom as he contemplates the afternoon ahead. What possessed him to get so excited about coming here?
Everyone else is poring attentively over the handout, which seems to consist of handwritten notes entirely in block capitals on the lecture they are about to hear. To Tim, the notes are all b
ut incomprehensible. Instead he turns his attention to the structure of the room. He looks up at the lattice of beams on the ceiling. That might be a good place for a poet doubling as a secret agent of the Illuminati, or an unscrupulous publican with a flair for invention, to locate a hidden inscription or cryptic geometric clue. Those windows, too: there is surely something mystically significant about the way the four small arches create a larger fifth one, and then are repeated in the same pattern over and over again all over the building. He could imagine counting the windows of all the rooms from the inside, then making the same count on the outside and finding they don’t tally, which leads to the discovery of a secret tunnel in which can be found…
He should be doing this himself, he thinks, instead of talking Barry Brook into it. He has just as much of a flair for conspiratorial cliché. All he lacks is the publishing deal and the worldwide following of hundreds of millions of gullible fans.
One of the men in clerical collars – small, round, bald, sixtyish – has got up from the front row and is now standing behind the lectern surveying the room with a beatific beam.
“Welcome, friends, to this annual gathering, where today we celebrate the extraordinary genius of a man who lived here nearly a century and a half ago, and who within these walls composed what is now widely regarded as one of the greatest poems in the English language…”
Really? Tim sneaks a look around him and everyone else is nodding away reverentially. Perhaps it’s true, and he has completely underestimated how famous his guy is. All the better for Project Grail.
“…And what I propose to focus on in the next hour or so, before I take questions and then release you for tea and biscuits…”
Most of the audience murmur polite amusement at the notion they should need releasing.
“…is its setting in the Welsh landscape, and particularly of course its Jesuit perspective. And it’s with the theological aspects that I propose to begin, so if I can draw your attention to the first note on the sheet that you should have found on your chair…”
The speaker is as good as his word. The talk is very religious, very literary and thoroughly baffling. There’s a lot about ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, and everyone else is nodding away, as if they know what those words mean. For Tim, it’s an effort to stay awake. He keeps sneaking a regular look at his watch, but he seems to have entered a zone where time slows to a crawl – a spooky supernatural concept for a pulp thriller writer, perhaps, but a depressing discovery for anyone having to suffer this torture in the real world. It doesn’t help, with these west-facing windows, that he is sitting in a patch of warm sunlight. He stifles the third yawn in quick succession. It would be brilliant to be able to drop off now and wait this ordeal out in a nap. But he has never been able to sleep in a chair without support for his head, and these seats barely come up to the small of his back.
He glances at the people around him to see if the rest of them are as bored as he is. They all seem entranced, nodding and laughing at pleasantries that aren’t by any stretch of the imagination proper jokes. A helmet-haired old lady closest to him is bent over a notepad, meticulously recording the speaker’s every pearl.
That’s when he sees her. She’s on the right-hand side of the horseshoe near the furthest window: a dazzle of red hair swept back into a pony tail, skin so white it could almost be blue, high cheekbones, no makeup and various bits of clanky jewellery at ears, neck and wrists. Only a fool would say she looks like Nadine, but she could be Nadine’s much hotter cousin. She must have come in when he was staring at the ceiling or plotting priests’ holes in the arched windows. Otherwise he would have noticed.
Finally, the talk comes to an end. There are ten minutes for questions, which is another ordeal, but then, mercifully, it is over and Tim can hit the tea urn and the custard creams.
There is actually a crush for it and, as soon as he has his tea, someone jogs him and he ends up with milky slop in his saucer. Pouring it back into the cup, he looks around for his redhead.
“Did you enjoy that?” barks a voice at the level of his chest.
It is the helmet-haired old lady who was taking notes. Gripping his arm, and standing close enough to spit crumbs in his face, she says urgently: “I adore Hopkins. When I taught him for A-level I used to take my class into the woods to eat bluebells to help them understand the difference between inscape and instress.”
“And did that… help?” says Tim, edging backwards to see if her grip on his arm will ease. It doesn’t.
“Wonderfully,” she bellows. “It was all about the being of a bluebell, which you couldn’t understand just by looking at it.”
“And did they find it easy? The poem, I mean?”
He is still physically ensnared, so he has to say something.
“Good heavens, no!” she cackles, in another shower of spit and custard cream. “Utterly mystified by most of it. But the cleverer ones began to get it in the end, and that was part of the fun. Even the ones who didn’t understand a word seemed to like the sound of it. In a sense, I think that’s the whole point, don’t you?”
Tim is groping for something non-committal when she releases his arm abruptly and turns her back on him. He assumes that she is just raiding the biscuit plate again and will return to him, but she is now clutching someone else to tell them about the bluebells. This strikes him as rude, but it at least gives him a chance to look for the redhead, who turns out to be behind him, nodding away at one of the clerics. He takes a step towards them and stands there, hoping she’ll invite him into their conversation. She doesn’t, and he’s wondering if he’ll have to back away again when the cleric comes to his rescue.
“Are you a Catholic too?”
“Me? God, no,” says Tim, then remembers he shouldn’t sound so dismissive. Or blaspheme. “I mean, not that there’s anything… Erm. Are you?”
He addresses that to her, obviously.
“Originally,” she says. “The hair’s a giveaway, right? Irish parents. I was weaned on potatoes instead of milk.”
The cleric – praise be! – excuses himself in search of more tea.
“It went very deep at one stage,” she is saying. “Until the age of nine I genuinely wanted to be a nun when I grew up. But don’t worry, I got over it.”
Her voice is unexpectedly robust. Ballsy, he might even say. And northern. Please don’t let her hate southerners. At least she’s also English, so he’s not going to fall foul of that particular local prejudice.
He has shown no interest in other women since Nadine. That is the emasculating effect Nadine has had on him, he tends to tell himself: she has put him off for life. But now, as this freckled beauty smiles up at him, he can feel he may not be completely past it. He looks into her laughing blue eyes and grasps that he’s in with a chance here, more than a chance. Even Tim, cursed with a woeful lack of confidence in his own sexual allure, can see that he must represent by far the most eligible prospect in this room.
“Have you been to one of these before?” he asks.
“Do I come here often, you mean?” She is laughing at him. “Actually it’s my first time. But I’m a big fan of the work, especially the Wreck, which is why it’s awesome that they focused totally on it today.”
No argument there.
“And you?” she asks. “A big fan?”
“Oh completely. And I’d have to say the Wreck is my favourite too.”
He hasn’t read a line of any of the guy’s other poems so it’s technically not a lie.
She grins.
“What’s your favourite stanza?
Panic.
“Stanza?”
“You know, verse.”
“Oh right. I don’t think I’ve got a favourite one. I mean it’s all so….” He fumbles for the word, any word.
“Rich?”
“So rich, exactly, that it’s hard to pick ou
t… I mean there are phrases, obviously. Erm, On a pastoral forehead in Wales, for instance. That always stands out because I live round the hill and I’m always looking at the same forehead.”
“Oh yes! And the wonderful double-meaning as well!”
Trying not to let the renewed panic show, Tim angles his head in a way that’s meant to show he is far too gentlemanly to interrupt her flow, and that she should continue.
“You know, he mentioned it in the talk? A place full of both sheep and priests.”
He hasn’t noticed that, which is embarrassing, because he now sees you’d have to be thick not to. And he certainly doesn’t remember that bit from the talk. Maybe he really did nod off through part of it.
“Of course! Marvellous, isn’t it?”
Marvellous? What’s getting into him? He doesn’t normally sound like such a southern arse.
“Any other favourite lines?”
He now desperately wishes he had paid any attention at all to the speaker.
“Oh loads, of course. Erm. Thou mastering me God, obviously.” Yes, he can actually quote the first line! There’s hope for him yet. “And then there’s The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the… something.” No!!! Surely he didn’t just say that? He is getting so carried away that he has managed to draw attention to the one thing above all else that will mark him out as a charlatan, a shallow intruder with no culture who has insinuated himself inside these walls for the most mercenary of reasons. He must think of another line quickly before she has time to…
“The treasure never eyesight got…” she repeats, eyes narrowed. Even her eyelashes are red. “Remind me where that comes?”
“Verse twenty-six,” says Tim too quickly. “Or thereabouts.”
Her beautiful brow crinkles into the slightest of frowns then smooths as her eyes brighten and she recites the entire verse. Then she laughs, a great throaty guffaw, as she sees him gaping.