A Novel Read online

  ‘I’ll be glad to finish the game—’

  ‘I haven’t the heart for it anyway, truth be told. On you go now.’

  Brooking no further argument, Harry settles himself back down, pulls his cap more firmly on to his scalp and begins the cheerless process of returning the tiles to their green cloth bag.

  ‘I’ll find us somewhere else to sit,’ Julia says, matter-of-fact. ‘Dry white wine for me, please.’

  Up at the bar, George stops just short of winking. ‘Friend of yours, Mr. Gladstone?’

  ‘I think so,’ Donald says, in a low voice.

  The publican assumes a more philosophical expression as he busies himself with the drinks. ‘Right you are,’ he says. ‘She’s been sitting there a long time, all on her own. Either way, these are on the house.’

  Julia circles her fingers around her wine glass, pulls it towards her. Her fingernails are short and perfectly manicured, except for one or two raw patches where she has pulled at the peeling skin. ‘So what have you been doing with yourself all these years?’

  ‘Mostly scraping around in the mud and dust.’

  ‘Archaeology? I remember, that was your thing at Oxford. You gave me quite the lecture on scarabs and cartouches.’

  ‘I’m very sorry about that. I must have bored you to death.’ At the time, she was like no one Donald had ever met. There was a forbidding sort of cleverness to her, an abruptness and a remarkable intensity in the questions she asked him as they made their tour of the Egyptian exhibit. After the Ashmolean, they went for tea across the road at the Randolph; and then, at the end of it all, there was a matter-of-fact goodbye on the corner of Broad Street. Maybe he even tried to kiss her clumsily on the cheek. He remembers seeing her a couple of weeks later, hand in hand with another man.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you kept going with it.’ Julia takes a sip of her wine, looks at him with a surprising familiarity. ‘Archaeology suits you, somehow.’

  ‘I’m not sure how to take that.’

  ‘As a compliment, of course. Unless there’s something disreputable about your profession.’

  ‘There is a certain stereotype.’

  She tilts her head to one side, dark hair falling across her face. ‘You should probably grow a beard, maybe invest in some slightly shabbier clothes.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I have the complete wardrobe at home.’ Donald sips at the foam spilling over the edge of his glass. ‘So that’s me, anyway. What about you? How did you get to be so good at anagrams?’

  ‘It’s an occupational hazard.’

  ‘You compile crosswords for a living?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Julia says, straight-faced, ‘though I wouldn’t mind that. I work as a researcher on the Oxford English Dictionary.’

  ‘What kind of research?’

  ‘It’s to do with words—long words, mostly.’

  ‘Now you’re just mocking me.’

  ‘It was a funny question.’ Julia seems momentarily preoccupied as the door of the pub creaks opens, admitting a breath of cool air and a group of latecomers, men in discoloured orange boiler-suits who go straight up to the bar to get their orders in. She drinks most of what is left of her wine, smiles at him in a distracted kind of way. ‘So what brings you to the Smoking Dog on a Sunday lunchtime?’

  ‘Just catching up on some work. My dad was supposed to meet me for lunch, but he didn’t feel up to it. And you?’

  Julia hesitates, and he senses a faint anxiety directed at him or perhaps elsewhere. ‘I was supposed to meet someone here as well.’ It seems at first that she might expand on this statement, but instead she empties her glass, lays a hand on the sheet of paper with the anagram: the first page of Donald’s manuscript. ‘Is this what you’re working on?’ she says. ‘Do you mind if I have a look?’

  He has no choice in the matter, anyway. She has already begun to read, a small frown-line creasing her brow. When she looks up at him, it smooths itself out, leaving just a faint trace behind. ‘If all this scholarship is really so misguided, why don’t you go ahead and correct it?’

  ‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Donald says, wishing he had chosen some less pompous phrase.

  ‘Why not?’ Julia’s gaze is disconcertingly direct.

  It is exhilarating, in a way, to be so directly challenged. ‘My point is that we won’t ever know very much about that period of British history, and it’s a mistake to try too hard to fill in the blanks.’

  ‘In which case, is there really anything left to write about?’

  ‘Yes, I think there is.’ Donald picks up his glass, pretends to study its contents. ‘The problem with the history we read in books is that it’s too full of dramatic turning points, heroic leaders and decisive battles, as if these events alone were responsible for the subsequent state of the world.’

  ‘Would the historians agree with you on that?’

  ‘Probably not.’ Donald takes another mouthful of beer, feels a sudden surge of eloquence. ‘But here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Imagine you were trying to trace the historical origins of King Arthur, to understand how he came to be celebrated as his country’s greatest hero.’

  ‘I’m imagining,’ Julia says. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, it’s not as simple as you might think, because all we can really say about the Arthur of history is that his name appears in a battle-listing of unknown antiquity that was copied down by a medieval monk, and again in two entries in the Annales Cambriae, the medieval Welsh Annals. That’s all there is, two possibly independent sources for the famous battles of Arthur, and no one has been able to demonstrate convincingly that those battles ever took place.’

  ‘Which doesn’t necessarily mean there were no battles.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Donald says, ‘and because our enduring image of Arthur is the heroic leader who turned the tide against the invading Saxons, it’s natural to assume the battles did actually happen, even if we know nothing about them. The popular mythology of these events, the interpretation that is the most appealing to us, is that the battles were real.’

  ‘So it’s a circular argument, in a way,’ Julia says. ‘Arthur as battle-hero is something we want to be true, but there’s no proper historical evidence, so we improve on the history by making up stories about it—and those stories become established as the popular perception of what really happened. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely yes.’ Donald thumps his fist on the table, then grabs at his glass to rescue it from a dangerous wobble.

  Julia laughs, a silvery, girlish sound. ‘Not that you feel very strongly about it.’

  ‘Sorry about that. But you’ve hit on such a crucial point. Generations of Arthurian enthusiasts have been so anxious to find a real Arthur who matches up to our expectations of him that they have felt compelled to say he really did exist, and this is who he was, and this was his heroic role in defeating the Saxons. But if you take away all the wishful thinking, the evidence just doesn’t support it.’

  Julia picks up the manuscript page again, reads to the end. ‘Is there more?’ she says. ‘I want to know what the archaeologist has to say about Arthur.’

  He has a momentary fantasy of reaching into his bag, taking out a handsome volume bound in dark blue leather: The Origins of Arthur, by D. E. Gladstone. ‘Yes, there’s a whole book, but I haven’t quite finished it.’

  ‘I’d like to read it, when you do.’

  Donald cannot help wondering whether she means to make herself quite so intriguing, sitting there watching him with her ironical half-smile. He hesitates now, stares down into his last two inches of beer. ‘There’s a place not far from here,’ he says. ‘I was planning to go there this afternoon with my father, but he couldn’t make it. Would you like to come along with me instead?’

  On Badon Hill

  JULIA GLANCES AROUND the inside of the antique Morris Traveller, dark green with a rear section framed in honey-coloured wood, takes in the austere simplicity of its controls, the wo
rn leather seats, the interior trim polished to a smooth dark patina. ‘This belongs in a museum,’ she says.

  ‘My mother had it before me,’ Donald says. ‘I suppose it’s become a kind of family heirloom.’

  He turns the key in the ignition, reaches for the starter. The engine answers his muttered incantation, coughs half-heartedly into life. Shifting noisily into gear, he pulls out into the sparse Sunday afternoon traffic. Julia remains silent, picking at the ragged skin next to her thumbnail as the text of the note she left for Hugh plays itself relentlessly back to her. I ran into an old college friend. You weren’t here, so we decided to go out for a drive. She tries to imagine how he will interpret it, hopes he will simply shrug his shoulders, turn around and drive home; but her inadequate sentences keep returning to disturb her peace of mind. If this is an act of revenge, there will be precious little vindication in it.

  Her anxiety begins to ebb away as they head out of Malmesbury to the west, joining a minor road that carries them rapidly into the farther depths of the English countryside. Soon they are crossing earthy red farmland, curving fields broken by dense stands of beech and oak whose autumn colours brighten and soften the afternoon sunlight filtering deep into the gold-shadowed recesses of the wood.

  ‘It’s good that you find time to spend with your father,’ Julia says. In the silence that has gathered, her words fall more abruptly than she intended.

  ‘We’re both on our own now, so it’s not so hard.’

  Glancing across at Donald, whose attention is focused almost too fiercely on the road ahead, she considers the complexities of his statement, wonders which one of them was not on his own before. His father, presumably, at some point; and Donald as well? At the very least, she would like to ask him about his mother, but something in his expression seems to forbid the question.

  ‘What does your father do?’

  ‘He’s a geologist, retired a long time ago.’

  Julia sees a diagram, complex strata with neatly lettered labels down either side. ‘It’s all about layers,’ she says, speaking the phrase that comes fully formed into her head.

  Donald’s expression is amused rather than surprised. ‘I think I know what you mean,’ he says.

  ‘His layers in the rock, your human layers on top. It’s a connection between you.’

  ‘We meet somewhere in the middle, I suppose. Over the years, he’s taught me pretty much everything I know about the British landscape.’

  They have c0me to a small crossroads, signs to Hullavington and Norton to the left, Tetbury and Easton Grey to the right. Donald reaches down next to his seat, pulls out a well-worn Ordnance Survey map. ‘We should probably make sure we know where we’re going.’

  ‘Show me,’ Julia says.

  He finds a stub of pencil under the dashboard, traces out the route. They are to head south-west along the line of the Fosse Way—the old Roman road from Lincoln to Exeter—then cut off just past the Somerset border and follow the back-roads from there to their destination, a small steep-sided hill on the far side of the village of Northend.

  Julia takes the map out of his hand, deftly refolds it and flattens it out on her lap. ‘I think there’s a shorter way,’ she says. ‘I suggest you turn left at the next crossroads we come to.’

  Soon they are making steady progress along the western fringe of Wiltshire, following the rectilinear fragments of modern road that preserve, in spirit at least, the original line of the Fosse Way. Just beyond the Three Shire Stones, where thick slabs of rock mark the meeting point of three ancient counties, they turn on to a narrow lane, almost a tunnel beneath tall hedges on either side. Walls made of local limestone are buried deep within the foliage, slowly crumbling into pale shards that have mixed with the thick mud thrown up into a ridge along the centre of the lane. As they drop down into Northend, they meet a tractor lumbering up the hill towards them, its driver eyeing them with guarded curiosity as Donald squeezes the Morris into the hedge to make enough room for him to pass.

  On the far edge of the village, they pull off the road next to a church whose grey-gold stonework glows faintly in the hazy sunlight filtering through a thickening layer of cloud. Donald turns off the ignition, brings the engine stuttering to a halt. The ensuing silence seems almost absolute, broken only by the faint pattering of the raindrops that are now beginning to fall on the windscreen. The churchyard in front of them is neglected and overgrown, gravestones tilting here and there through the weeds. Beyond the church, a tall grass-covered hill rises steeply to a flat summit.

  There is a tight knot of anxiety in Julia’s stomach. By now, for sure, Hugh will have arrived at the Smoking Dog. She imagines him opening the door of the pub, breathless, expectant, to find only her terse note left with the barman.

  ‘We can walk up past the churchyard,’ Donald says, ‘but first I need to explain why we’re here.’ He reaches for his pencil and a scrap of paper, begins to outline a large irregular shape. ‘This is Britain, circa 500 AD.’ He adds three large arrows, from the west, north, and east. ‘For the past century, since the Roman withdrawal, the island has been under siege from at least three different directions. Here,’ he says, stabbing at the first arrow, ‘Irish pirates have been raiding the western shores. Here, Picts from Scotland are harassing the North Britons. And here, the Saxons and other Germanic tribes are landing in increasing numbers on the eastern and southern shores. According to popular tradition, this is when Arthur emerged as the hero who roused the British defence.’

  The rain has progressed to a fine drizzle, making small rivulets on the glass that soon join up to form an intricate watery landscape. There are pictures in it, too, plump grey sheep on a distant hillside, the rugged contours of a steep-sided valley. Julia thinks of home, the upper slopes of Moel Hywel above Dyffryn Farm.

  ‘When I was growing up near Rhayader,’ she says, ‘my father used to tell me stories about the great warriors of the past, Arthur and Llywelyn and Owain Glyn Dŵr. He said they started out as pure Welsh heroes, to be spoken of in the same breath, but Arthur’s story was stolen and corrupted by the English. All the talk about round tables and magical swords was a lot of nonsense concocted as a means of legitimising the English monarchy.’

  ‘That’s not very far from the truth,’ Donald says.

  There is something vexing to Julia in the guarded way he says this. ‘I think it’s precisely the truth. The English were not content with taking our land—they had to steal our favourite stories as well.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Donald puts his hands up in self-defence. ‘I didn’t steal them.’

  She laughs at him now, at the wry expression on his face. ‘You mustn’t get upset at me. I’m my father’s daughter, that’s all. How did you get to be so interested in Arthur, anyway?’

  ‘I suppose it started when I went up to Bangor to do my Ph.D. My thesis advisor was a terrifying Welsh bulldog by the name of John Evans. He wanted me to write about the archaeology of the famous dark-age citadels of the Cambrian mountains, but I was much more interested in the mythical traditions connected with those sites. Before I knew it, I was making a full-blown study of the legendary heroes of Wales, including Arthur and Owain Glyn Dŵr. Evans thought it was a frivolous topic for a student of archaeology, and told me to stop. He threatened to throw me out of his research group, which made me all the more determined.’

  ‘What happened in the end?’

  ‘We came to an agreement. I got to write what I wanted to write, but I had to put in a lot of gritty archaeology as well. I spent two years digging trenches on the top of Dinas Emrys.’

  It is a place Julia knows well, from visits with her father. She smiles at this image of a youthful Donald stranded in a ditch on the fog-bound hilltop. ‘Shall we go for our walk? You can tell me more on the way up.’

  On the far side of the church, they find a steep muddy track that takes them on a zigzag path between thick clumps of scratching gorse. The rain has backed off, though threatening to return in full f
orce. Ahead of them, the path opens up to a long gentle upward sweep over close-cropped turf towards the summit. In the distance, to the east and south, waves of rounded hills spread out to the horizon. To the south-west, the Georgian city of Bath makes a dramatic splash of cream-coloured stone that fills the valley and spills up the surrounding slopes.

  At the brow of the hill, they find a small sign put up by the National Trust: Little Solsbury Hill, Ancient Monument. A modest earthwork rampart, all that remains of the iron-age fort that once occupied the hilltop, encloses a broad grassy space grazed by half a dozen lugubrious dairy cows.

  ‘It’s a lovely view,’ Julia says. ‘But I’m still not quite sure why we’ve come here.’

  There is something charmingly professorial in the way Donald walks away a few paces, then turns back to face her, using his hands for emphasis as he talks. ‘Do you remember the Arthurian battle-listing I told you about? It was written down in the ninth century, in a book called the Historia Brittonum. The manuscript includes a list of twelve battles in which Arthur supposedly took part, including one at a place called Mount Badon.’

  ‘Is that where we are now? On Mount Badon?’

  ‘I’d like to think it was here. This is one of several sites that have been proposed, and I think it’s a plausible location.’ Donald shrugs, defensive or perhaps dismissive, she cannot tell. ‘The archaeologist in me wants to know for sure, but the precise geography doesn’t really matter. The more interesting question is whether a warrior known as Arthur was the leader of the Britons that day.’

  The afternoon has descended into a chilly gloom, the sun now lost behind swirling cloudbanks driven from west to east by a freshening breeze. Bowing their heads into the wind, they walk on to the farther edge of the hill and stand there for a while looking down a long slope studded with small birch trees and dense thickets of the dark-green gorse. It must be four o’clock at least, no more than a couple of hours until sunset.

  ‘Is there more to the story?’ Julia says.