by Adam Thorpe
‘It’s made up of thousands of snippets of Latin verse, from Horace to Petronius to Notker the Stammerer. You name it, it’s in there, somewhere. I even found Caligula’s line about wishing the Roman people had only one neck. I think that about the English, sometimes.’
Alastair was Scottish. Greg found this fact irritating from time to time. His sister, Jill, had called her kids Jeanie and Angus.
‘Alastair, what the hell are you on about?’
‘A sort of Victorian scholar’s parlour game, that’s what it is. For instance, that bit about the oxen and barbarian wagons is lifted straight from Ovid; Perque novos pontes—’
‘But that’s the whole damn point,’ Greg cried, secretly panicking. ‘History’s a scrapheap, a pile of rubble. Eliot’s fragments. Out of which we make anew. As Rimbaud did, and Baudelaire. And Beckett. It’s avant-garde! It’s revolutionary!’
The fountains’ hundreds of jets emerged and sent spindrift over them, as if they were next to the sea – along with a strong smell of chlorine.
‘A very clever pastiche,’ Alastair went on, remorselessly. ‘By an unknown and sexually frustrated public-school master, I reckon.’
Greg blinked. It was like hearing someone slag off Ivor Gurney or John Clare.
‘OK, I admit there’s a mildly pornographic and scatological element, a Joycean streak, but that explains why it’s in Latin.’
‘Don’t see it.’
‘A language open only to the initiated.’
Alastair laughed. Greg had always considered Alastair’s laugh to be one of his least attractive characteristics. Even Jill had to admit that. While the rest of his brother-in-law was as civilised as a Roman villa, his laugh was pure barbarian. Pictish, perhaps.
‘Schoolboys of that period would have had little problem deciphering it, Greg, or even spotting the references.’
‘OK, I know, but if the book had been written initially in English, just imagine what would’ve happened. Scandal. Look at that brilliant bit about his slippery fish swimming into her and the treacherous evidence of foam and—’
‘Ausonius. Wonderful poem on the Moselle river, originally.’
‘But – look – what? Hey, pfff, I don’t care,’ Greg spluttered. ‘The point is, it would’ve been dismissed as a blue book, to be sold in plain brown covers.’
‘Blue covers, surely.’
‘When in fact . . . Anyway, nothing’s new under the sun.’
‘If you say so,’ said Alastair.
Greg manfully described what he imagined this strangely coloured rivulet, this little prophetic pipe under the Channel, might have done to the moribund English scene – its High Victorian smugness, its stifling bourgeoisified good taste. The dream-like references to the Siege of Paris of 1870 had led him to believe, he went on, that Pool had actually been there as a young man, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Mallarmé, Verlaine . . . perhaps even partaking in the Communards’ brief rule that followed, swept along by revolutionary ideas. Alastair was not impressed, however; his interest was in the rubble of the Roman world, not the twentieth century’s – in the salvaging operation of Cassiodorus and not the smashing operation of the avant-garde some fifteen hundred years later.
Greg retrieved his mug from the fountain just as the sunken jets reappeared. He had to jump back but got a little wet. Alastair was laughing.
‘That’s barbarism,’ Greg said; ‘paper mugs here, of all places.’ Deep down, he was angry with Alastair for subverting William Pool, each soft Edinburgh know-it-all syllable like a pebble thrown at porcelain.
The next week he took the train to Paris. He found nothing after a day’s search in the archives, but in the city-history museum near the rue des Rosiers he saw, in a glass case devoted to scraps from the Siege, a ration card distributed to one W. S. Poole of 32 rue Trucage. The street had disappeared under an office block. He phoned Alastair that evening, sweating with excitement.
‘How many Pools in this particular fish?’ was all Alastair said, who’d had a tiring trip back from Egham on a faulty train.
The weeks turned into months and Alastair, who was drowned in administrative duties at Royal Holloway, started to resent Greg’s frequent pleas to get a move on. Greg’s own muse had vanished: he’d found a three-day job in the local picture-framing shop and the customers drained him with their emotional needs. He spent most of his spare time worrying at his Pool prose, urging Alastair’s lifeless literalism into bloom.
‘You’ve drowned in it,’ said Alastair.
The book was finally finished early in the following year. Retaining only the title in Latin but explaining the book’s origins, Greg sent it off to all the major publishing houses.
Animula Vagula Blandula was rejected twenty-seven times. Greg’s publishers’ – a specialist poetry press – reckoned it was his own work, a massive folly. Greg eventually brought it out himself, at no small expense, in 2003. The printer had promised endpapers and there were none, but that was the only technical disappointment before the distributors’ report.
The problem was not just the crassness of the official chain-bookshop buyers, it was the meanness of the critical reaction. There were, in fact, only three printed reviews: one in the Good Book Guide, which was equivalent to having a recipe in Good Housekeeping; a tart piece in the Times Literary Supplement, mostly devoted to the declension of ‘vagus’ and declaring, finally, in a great trumpet of intellectual perspicacity, that the book was ‘mostly well written’; while the Literary Review dismissed it as ‘a pastiche of sub-Victorian drivel’. The local Redditch rag ran the story of Greg’s discovery, suggesting (in so many words) that Pool was a sex fiend, and accompanying the article with a frighteningly appropriate photograph of Alastair. Through the latter’s connections it was considered by the Front Row panel on Radio 4, who laughed a lot and reckoned the book was an inept fraud – a claim which incensed Greg to such an extent that, if he’d had any money at all, he would have embroiled himself in a lengthy legal tussle with the BBC.
Twenty-one copies were sold, the rest rearranged as a desk unit and spare bed in Greg’s tiny study.
‘Pool’s day will come,’ he said to Alastair, tapping them. This had become Greg’s catch-phrase. Alastair’s book on Cassiodorus had just received a rave in the Guardian, so Alastair couldn’t have cared less, either way. ‘The thing is, he’s still ahead of his day, because his day is our day.’
‘Gregory,’ Alastair said, annoying his brother-in-law immediately, ‘concentrate on your own work.’
‘My own work’s finished. I’m dried up.’
‘As Ovid said, Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘You should know. You helped translate it.’
Alastair opened the copy on Greg’s desk and found the last page.
‘They change their skies but not their souls running over the sea.’
‘It’s the last bloody line of the book, Alastair. A beautiful line. Stunning. That’s not Ovid, that’s William Pool.’
‘It was Ovid originally. Word for word. You don’t believe me, do you? Scissors and paste, Greg.’
‘I can’t believe you,’ Greg said, his head in his hands.
He read the last page to himself while Alastair fetched a couple of beers from the fridge. Greg felt a sense of hopelessness, as if a close friend had betrayed him:
He had not been heavy on the earth, though he was old. He whispered to Charlotte, when she brought him his cocoa with her shoulders bared to the gaslight: ‘Let the hard turf cover me tenderly near Aberaeron, where the ocean leans on the land. A clear dawn shall free me from time’s age-old laws, and I shall leave on the rushing stream of fortune to find my place, my end, far from fancy goods and the envy of the false—’
‘Come on,’ Charlotte said, ‘your cocoa’s getting cold.’
‘Like the trails of words,’ he murmured; ‘like the trails of words themselves, that change their skies but not their
souls running over the sea.’
He had been invited back to Redditch the following day – to read from the book, not his own work. At first he hadn’t wanted to go back to Redditch, but then he had perceived it as a symbolic and necessary return to the source. He would read that last page, even if there was no one in the audience, and then he would cross to the pub and place the original copy back in the shelf behind the girl in her bikini, if she was still there. She probably wasn’t, because everything changed, everything was built from rubble, there was nothing new under the sun and he didn’t care, not now. He didn’t care.
‘There you go,’ said Alastair, returning with the beers. ‘Get this down you and cheer up. You’ve a face like a douchebag. There’s life after Pool, you know. Find a girl. Write some verse. Translate some Anglo-Norman stuff. There’s lots of it, entirely neglected. The Roman de Waldef. The verse of Chardri.’
‘I don’t know Anglo-Norman.’
‘You’ll find enough literal versions and you could work them into poetry, produce an anthology. Now there’s another undiscovered country. Forget Pool, forget the Latin. I’m throwing out ideas, Greg.’
‘I’ve got this poem about Redditch,’ Greg replied, wiping the foam from his upper lip. ‘It’s only two lines long. Want to hear it?’
TROLLS
The pony was skitty on the rocks as he led it across the stream. The glacier had moved in his dreams and he was no longer sure which outcrop was which. A great nervousness in the sky under the drizzle and the wet moraine field dazzling whenever the sun broke through. It was hell to cross. All those smooth uncertain stones, squealing against each other.
A plume of smoke rose from the tin-roofed house as he picked his way over the trackless moorland, pulling the pony after him, to where the tents still stood under the rocks.
Anthony and Gillian welcomed him as if he had been away days, over-indulgent in their leather boots and expensive jackets. And this irritated him, he saw something mocking in it, as if his desire for solitude was something improper.
‘Was it good?’
‘I had to go a fair bit round the lake to be totally alone,’ he said. ‘There was this homemade jetty and a rowing boat and this bloke working on it. But the lake’s big. It’s right under the glacier, practically. It was good. It was good being alone.’
‘Don’t mind us,’ said Anthony.
‘I won’t,’ said Clive, smiling.
Tobias, who had some tummy problem since they’d drunk from the hot spring the day before, appeared from behind the outcrop and said, ‘Clive, you have to go to Fallujah. CNN just called.’
‘Very funny,’ said Clive, who (like the others) had kept his mobile on message function from the day they had started out.
Steinn was down by the house, chatting with the old woman there.
‘Keeping the natives happy,’ said Anthony.
They struck camp with the usual minor dust-up over missing pegs and set off, waving to the old woman standing in the doorway – for whom the strangers and their tents had not been the astonishing intrusion they had all imagined it would be. Clive knew this, having met her son by the homemade jetty. The son must already have been in his fifties, with a curiously pale, almost bleached face, like a wraith or a piece of driftwood. He spoke quite good English. He told Clive that they frequently received ‘trekkers’ – the term his, no doubt borrowed from an American, a borrowing which amused Clive because it was the name Gillian gave to her boots. The man asked Clive what his job was.
‘Freelance cameraman. Without his camera.’
‘Films?’
‘News,’ said Clive. ‘Dangerous places. I needed a break.’
The son had nodded and carried on fiddling about in the tiny rowing-boat, its oars folded like a dead man’s hands. Much later, at dusk, when Clive was cooking his sausages over the fire, he had seen the boat sculling in the distance, a dark spot on the last red bars of water. It had heightened his own loneliness, rather than removed it.
The path wound through the moorland. They disturbed eager little plovers. Chill gusts reminded them where they were, because the sun was burning on their faces. An inordinate amount of lavatory paper was snagged on thorns or bundled under lichen-covered rocks.
‘It was the same in the Himalayas,’ Clive said. ‘It’s all those Aussies, I reckon.’
Gillian was Australian, from Melbourne. He had meant it as a joke, but Tobias was shaking his head, taking it seriously. Gillian hadn’t heard – she was leading the pony just ahead, and the pony’s hooves made quite a lot of noise on the stones.
‘This is when I hate the masses,’ said Tobias. ‘You open up the land to the people, and this is the result. They should all be hung.’
‘Hanged,’ said Anthony, who was nineteen years older than his partner. ‘Never hung. Unless you’re talking testicles.’
Steinn was their guide. He was probably in his mid-thirties and had long hair bunched up under his bobble hat. Clive told him, when they’d paused by a tumbling stream to snack their provisions, the curious fact about the glacier, the way it had moved while he was asleep. He’d gone to sleep on the pebbles with a view of the ice shining in ribbed blue under the moonlit snow, dreamt it was surging slowly towards him, woke up at dawn to find that it was no longer the same shape, that it had shifted, lowered its bulk, like something alive settling into itself, advancing towards its prey. If he had taken a photograph beforehand . . . The others were listening.
‘It’s between you and the glacier,’ said Tobias.
‘A fight to the death?’ suggested Anthony, without a hint of a smile.
‘I don’t mean that,’ Tobias continued, in his best Etonian drawl; ‘one musn’t see everything in terms of conflict. I mean that either Clive’s seeing things, or the glacier’s moved.’
‘Not both at the same time?’ suggested Clive.
Gillian snorted. She’d known Clive for years and there was a loyalty. ‘I believe glaciers do move,’ she said.
‘Yes, about an inch a century,’ said Tobias.
‘They are . . .’ Steinn began, searching for the word.
‘Vanishing?’
‘Enlarging?’
‘Very cold?’
‘Thank you, Anthony. Melting?’
‘Yoh, melting,’ said Steinn, jabbing a finger at Gillian. ‘Globble warming.’
‘Global,’ Gillian corrected. ‘Sure it wasn’t a troll? They’re big enough, aren’t they?’
Steinn laughed. ‘Sure! Maybe!’ He pointed at a ridge from which boulders protruded like vertebrae. ‘There was being a troll. It dance at night, then the sun shine and he is freezed.’ He froze himself for a moment, his hands spread, his back curved over.
‘Trolls are seriously large,’ said Tobias. ‘Large as glaciers. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ He left them, disappearing behind some rocks.
Steinn stirred and waggled his eyebrows, bleached like a burn victim’s on his copper-red face. ‘Huldufolk,’ he said, pointing to a grey, wind-twisted boulder. ‘Hidden people. My grandmother, he was communicating with the hidden people. They are very beautiful and clever. Very good at sex,’ he added, with a laugh.
‘Good gracious, can’t wait,’ said Gillian.
‘Gnomes,’ said Anthony. ‘My gran had lots of them in her garden. The mind boggles.’
‘Also afturganga, very bad. Not like huldufolk, but dead.’
‘Zombies,’ said Gillian.
‘Yoh,’ agreed Steinn. ‘Zombies, come to take away us all to dead place. And Gluggagaegir.’
Anthony chortled. ‘My bath running out?’
‘They look in the windows, nighttime. For stealing.’
Steinn put his hands either side of his face and stared through an imaginary window, with boggling eyes. Clive’s boots shifted on the pebbles with a noise like something being torn. It was really very quiet and empty, here. The air smelt of lichen.
‘Can’t have been a troll, in my case,’ said Clive. ‘It was dawn.’
&n
bsp; ‘Well, they obey their own rules, do trolls,’ Gillian said, glancing at the ridge, its spine cobbled on the sky-line. A thrush pranced about over the stream. The pony ignored it. ‘Maybe that’s why people who plant really provocative things on the web are called trolls.’
‘Are they?’ said Anthony.
Clive frowned and looked away. He didn’t want to hear about the web on a trekking expedition in Iceland.
‘Y’know, someone who deliberately stirs things up on the web,’ Gillian went on. ‘Flaming. To flame is to troll, because it gets people flaming angry. Making us look even more stupid than we already are? It’s a kind of trap. Flame bait.’
‘Trep,’ Clive echoed, irritated.
‘How did you lose your foot?’ asked Anthony, after a few moments of quiet. ‘Or does everyone pose that question, at some point or other?’
‘At some point,’ said Clive.
‘Do you mind being posed it?’
‘Katmandu. In a riot. Dum-dum bullet.’
‘Gosh. How odd. Katmandu.’
‘People lose their feet everywhere,’ Gillian pointed out.
‘I hope not everywhere,’ said Anthony, curling his long fingers around his bony knees, ‘or we’ll be tripping over them.’ He appeared to be wearing a deerstalker, but it was not: it was merely a designer article from Jermyn Street. ‘I thought people were more likely to lose their equilibrium in Katmandu, man.’
‘Most people express sympathy, and wince,’ said Clive.
‘Not me,’ said Anthony. ‘I’m frightful and unfeeling. Aren’t I, Tobby?’
‘Probably,’ Tobias replied. He had reappeared, buckling his trousers. ‘Did you see the eagle? Or certainly a falcon. I’ll look it up in the bird book.’
‘Too late,’ said Anthony. ‘You have to look it up as you’re spotting or you won’t know a hawk from a handsaw.’
‘I always thought that meant something by Black and Decker,’ said Tobias. ‘Hamlet’s dad’s handsaw.’
‘The only bird I know is a parakeet,’ said Gillian.
Anthony shook his head. ‘I don’t think we have one of those here, guv.’