A Novel Page 3

  ‘Yes, there is a little more.’ Donald motions for her to sit down next to him on the grass-covered bank, and she cannot help liking the bold, casual quality of this gesture, as if they were truly old friends rather than people who once spent half an afternoon together. She wonders what Hugh would think, if he could see her now. Of all the people in the world, he is the first to leap to a jealous conclusion.

  Donald takes out his hand-drawn map, flattens it across his knee to protect it from the breeze, taps a finger on the south coast of Wales. ‘Somewhere here, in about 540 AD, a monk called Gildas the Wise wrote a chronicle of the events of his time. According to Gildas, the Britons had some success in defending themselves against the Saxon invaders. They probably held the line roughly here.’ He traces an arc across the south-western corner of Britain. ‘Some time near the end of the fifth century, as Gildas tells the story, a British force defeated the Saxons at Mount Badon, and the battle led to a peace that lasted for over fifty years. The problem is, Gildas doesn’t say who actually fought in the battle, and he doesn’t mention Arthur at all, either in his description of Badon or anywhere else in his writings. This might lead us to think that no one of that name played a major role in the events of the time.’

  ‘So that’s your answer, I assume? Arthur wasn’t there—someone made that part up.’

  Donald smiles grimly, folds the sheet of paper and puts it back in his pocket. ‘That could be true. But if Arthur was not the hero of Mount Badon, I need to find out who he really was.’

  For Julia, there is a certain audacity in this challenge that Donald has set for himself, but also a flaw in his logic. ‘It doesn’t seem surprising to me that the historical Arthur is beyond our reach,’ she says. ‘My father would say he is purely a hero of the imagination. He’s sleeping somewhere in the otherworld, ready to awake in the Welshman’s hour of need.’

  Donald stands up, takes a few steps away, picks up a narrow rounded stone lying half-buried in the grass. ‘Even in Gildas’s time, I think it’s probably true that Arthur was more an idea than a real person. He was seen as a peerless mythical hero against whom contemporary warriors might be compared.’

  ‘But that still doesn’t really answer the question?’

  ‘No, you’re quite right, it doesn’t.’

  By now, the rain has gathered itself into a steady, chilling drizzle. Julia stands next to Donald, shivering faintly, watching as he hefts his stone and launches it on a long, low trajectory along the flank of the hill and into the trees beyond.

  She pushes the damp hair back from her forehead, takes gentle hold of his arm. ‘Let’s get back to the car,’ she says.

  DAYLIGHT IS FAILING by the time Donald pulls up in front of his rented cottage at Iffley, just above the Thames on the southern outskirts of Oxford. He can hear the telephone ringing inside. Sprinting through the soaking rain, he forces the key into the lock, shoulders open the protesting door, drops his briefcase at the foot of the stairs and grabs at the receiver as he scuffs off his muddy shoes.

  ‘Have you heard yet?’ The familiar voice sets him instantly on edge, irritated at his ex-wife’s assumption that he knows precisely what is on her mind. When he first met her, Lucy Trevelyan, the brash young visiting scholar from California who had invited herself to join his summer archaeological dig in Dorset, he was intrigued by her directness, her forceful, earthy brand of intelligence; but her eccentricities have long since become purely vexing to him.

  ‘Heard what, Lucy?’ Water is still dripping from his hair as he stands there in the semi-darkness with the night-time illumination of the west front of St. Mary’s Parish Church, projected through a mist-like sheen of rain, casting an unearthly glow across the graveyard and into his front room.

  ‘The news from Devil’s Barrow. I thought you might have spoken to Paul Healey.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘In which case, you had better watch me on the BBC news tomorrow.’

  ‘What on earth—’

  But Lucy has already hung up on him. She will score this conversation as a victory, understanding her ex-husband well enough to know he will now be suffering from an intense, almost painful curiosity that will remain unsatisfied until the next day.

  Donald switches on the corner lamp, draws the curtains together so that they almost meet in the middle. The fabric is printed with a curious animistic design, a series of wide-eyed bird and animal totems tessellated in a clever and disorientating way so that one merges seamlessly into the next. The downturned beak of an eagle becomes the head-dress of a great owl-chieftain, whose left eye is shared with a sideways-facing crow, whose upraised wing is also the shoulder of a giant black bear. The curtains were a gift, of sorts, from Lucy. There was a memorable day back in the spring when, a couple of weeks after their divorce was finalised, she arrived at the cottage with a car-bootful of towels and linens and assorted kitchen paraphernalia, determined not so much to make him comfortable as to remind him that he would be lost without her. The curtains were brought out last of all, Lucy’s pièce de résistance, her very own bedroom drapes from her Californian childhood. He might have said no, understanding very well that their installation in his sitting room was designed to ensure that, across his long and solitary evenings, she would be always on his mind. But he has found himself surprisingly immune to Lucy’s psychological assaults. The grinning totems, far from spying on him, have become his benign and eclectic companions, helping to bring this austere space just a little bit to life.

  The disappointments of marriage are, in any case, far from Donald’s mind as he walks through to the spartan kitchen, finds bread and cheese and a beer in the fridge, brings them into the front room and sits down at his desk. Julia Llewellyn. He writes the name down on a scrap of paper, repeats the lilting syllables to himself. It seems to him that Julia is beautiful in an unobtrusive way, as if she is somehow hiding herself away from the world.

  As he retraces their conversations from earlier in the day, he finds that there is something remarkable in the way she has arrived at her own quite natural answer to a difficult question that has absorbed him deeply for years of his professional life. At Solsbury Hill, she explained how her father always thought of Arthur as a pure Welsh hero, to be spoken of in the same breath as Owain Glyn Dŵr and Llywelyn the Great. This idea of Arthur as a shape-shifting hero of the imagination, an ageless warrior who will return to the aid of the Celtic peoples in their moment of crisis, is a familiar one. But something in the way Julia expresses it, as a tradition handed down to her by her father—and presumably to him by his own father—gives it a powerful new resonance, invoking an Arthur who is the inheritor of a long and varied oral tradition.

  A sudden squall of wind sighs around the eaves of the cottage and down the old brick chimney. Donald gets up from the desk, switches on the television just in time to catch the weatherman expounding excitedly on the severe conditions that are to come to southern and western parts. Settling himself on the sofa, he picks up his notebook from the coffee table and turns through the pages near the front, where he has made detailed notes on the earliest written evidence for the historical Arthur.

  First there is the famous sixth-century poem Y Gododdin, in which the bard Aneirin, speaking of the exploits of one heroic British warrior, tells us that ‘He glutted black ravens on the wall of the fort, though he was not Arthur.’ Then comes the battle-list from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, evoking a series of conflicts set in an epic landscape of forests and rivers and mountains. This list concludes with the siege of Mount Badon where, according to the presumably unreliable chronicler, ‘there fell in one day 960 men from one charge by Arthur; and no one struck them down except Arthur himself, and in all the wars he emerged as victor.’ And there is a further entry in the Welsh Annals, the Annales Cambriae, describing Arthur’s last battle:

  Gueith Camlann, in qua Arthur et Medraut corruere.

  The strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.

  The
se fleeting early references are crucial to understanding the historical basis of the Arthurian legend, and yet there is no way of knowing which of them, if any, might contain some distant memory of real events. It is an old debate and an important one, but for now Donald is too tired to keep the arguments straight. He puts his notebook to one side, settles himself to watch a BBC documentary on the fate of the ancient woodlands of Britain. He knows his father will be watching as well, at home in Chewton Mendip, and it is an oddly reassuring thought.

  The weather continues to worsen as the evening draws on. Outside, the rain comes in sheets that slam against the glass, rattling the windows in their old wooden frames. A heavy gusting wind seeks out the nooks and crannies of the aging stonework, making small cold draughts that creep and whisper about the cottage. Later, Donald dreams of the wind rushing past the beating wings of a black raven that lifts up his lifeless body from the blood-soaked ground and carries him back towards a castle wall. High above, on the dizzying parapet, a dark-haired woman prepares to make a desperate jump. He will not get there in time to catch her. ‘Not Arthur!’ the raven shrieks. ‘Not Arthur!’

  JULIA HAS NEVER been very fond of the house she shares with Hugh, an ornately gabled Victorian red-brick construction of the kind traditionally occupied by the upper strata of the Oxford academic establishment. She feels an almost physical discomfort now as its elaborate outlines loom above her in the squally, cloud-laden dusk. Cair Paravel is the name on the sign next to the darkened front door, the legacy of a noted C. S. Lewis scholar who once lived here. As a child, she was never quite transported by the tales of Narnia, but there is at least a pleasing mellifluous Welsh quality in the name.

  The Land Rover is not there in the drive, Hugh’s absence offering relief and disquiet in equal measure as Julia works the key into the lock. She walks through to the kitchen and switches on the light, bringing to life a bright modern landscape of tastefully polished surfaces, everything in its place, dun-coloured tiles merging into off-white walls, glossy brown cabinets above a geometric green-tiled floor. Her brain chooses to process it differently today: this feels like a dangerous place, a harsh perpendicular terrain with sharp angles separating smooth surfaces from long dark vertiginous drops. It will be better not to be in the house when Hugh gets home; he will know where to find her.

  Julia opens the back door and walks out into a darkened world filled with crashing waves of sound as the gale takes hold in the treetops. Running down the path to her studio, she hears the sudden sharp crack of a branch stretched past its breaking point. She does not stop to look, hurries on to the studio door and slams it closed behind her, takes a few deep breaths before reaching for the light switch. The old Bakelite fitting engages with a loud click, illuminating a long, low-ceilinged room furnished with sturdy wooden benches, a scattering of chairs and painter’s easels, trays and boxes overflowing with paper, brushes and paint bottles crowding the shelves, a long wooden work-table facing a window with a view back up towards the house.

  One wall of the studio is filled with pencil sketches, bold chiaroscuro landscapes of hills and caves and trees and old stone walls. This is Julia’s father’s work, Dai Llewellyn’s vision of an untamed Wales. The drawings seem to plumb the depths of blackness while glowing with an unearthly light: this is the only way she has found to describe them. If you asked him to explain why he chose to draw in this style, he would say only that he hoped to capture some essence of the hiraeth, the old Welsh yearning for the homeland.

  Julia’s own artwork, displayed on an adjacent wall, is something else entirely, colourful, vibrant images deconstructed and reassembled in a style dominated by geometric shapes and interlocking planes. An art critic who once visited, an old school friend of Hugh’s who meant to offer encouragement, commented that her paintings reminded him of Mondrian’s earliest cubist work. What she has never told anyone, not even her father, is that these are pictures of people, how she sees them in her mind’s eye. There is one she made of Hugh, a great dark obsidian wall with fractures high up beyond her reach and a pale orange light glinting through the cracks from a hot fire burning somewhere within.

  At the far end of the room is an expanding collage made from photographs of people Julia has known, familiar and half-forgotten faces and scenes pasted together from left to right to form a giant mosaic of her life. The past year has seen only a few additions: her mother on her sixtieth birthday at the Rhayader town hall, dressed up in an elegant blue satin dress; her father with shepherd’s crook in hand, leaning against a wooden fence-post on a steep hillside. At the right-hand edge are her Wadham College friends at a recent reunion, looking proportionately older and less carefree than the images of their younger selves that are to be found several feet to the left.

  Except perhaps for her mother’s kitchen at Dyffryn Farm, this is the room in which Julia feels most completely at home. It is a place where she can find a certain easy solitude, make her small works of art with no pressure to please anyone but herself. Above all, this has become a private space, a refuge rarely visited by Hugh, though she has never asked him to stay away. In its Victorian heyday, this was an extravagant summer-house built for the fortunate children of a wealthy Bishop of Oxford, since then used variously over the years (or so Julia likes to imagine) by pipe-smoking philosophical dons, by tragic young poets, surely by more than a few clandestine lovers. She is not a superstitious person, but it seems to her that all this imbibed experience is still somehow present in the room, memories held deep in the coats of paint on the walls, the warped wooden panelling, the windows touched by many generations of hands. There is some essence of this structure, a tangible, comforting spirit of place, that goes far beyond its mere physical history.

  She has tried unsuccessfully to explain this feeling to Hugh, who pretends to understand her but, on the rare occasions when he comes down here, sees only timber and glass and the accumulated human and structural assaults of the years. She thinks of Donald’s layers in the landscape, his father’s layers in the rock, her own layers in the living fabric of this building. It’s all about layers. This seems a strong, satisfying way to explain the sense of belonging that she feels in this place.

  Julia sits down at the table, looks through the window at the blackness outside, the rain now whipping against the pane. A light comes on up at the house. She sees Hugh at the back door, torch in hand, sweeping the beam over to the garden fence where a heavy limb has come down from one of the old oak trees. He goes back inside, returns with a large bow saw. After that, she loses him in the darker shadows at the side of the house. He must have seen that she is down here in the studio, though he does not come to find her. This at least she can understand: it is a simple, predictable reprisal for her earlier act of abandonment.

  The telephone is ringing when she walks into the kitchen. She answers it just as Hugh comes back inside, and she is relieved to hear the kindly familiarity of her mother’s voice.

  ‘How are you, love? I was wondering about you, so I thought, why not just pick up the phone?’

  Hugh is still wearing his waterproof jacket. He takes it off, shakes the rain from it and hangs it carefully on the back of a chair. He throws an inquiring glance in Julia’s direction, then turns and leaves the room. She can hear his heavy footfalls on the stairs.

  ‘I’ve been tidying the bedroom cupboards,’ Cath Llewellyn is saying. ‘I found a few old things of yours—do you want me to send them?’

  ‘If you like. How’s Dai?’ From an early age, she began calling her father by his Christian name, a habit her mother still only grudgingly accepts.

  ‘Your father’s not been very well, these past few days. I’ve got him tucked up in bed.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘I’ve just told you, now.’ Julia’s mother, an Englishwoman born and raised in Sussex, has picked up something of the lilting intonation of central Wales in her long years at Dyffryn Farm.

  ‘Has the doctor been out?’

&nbs
p; ‘Your dad’s a little over-tired, that’s all. Nothing to worry yourself about.’ Cath Llewellyn’s small self-conscious cough signals a switch to her favourite weighty concern. ‘How are things with you?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, Mam,’ Julia says.

  ‘You’re not happy, though. I can hear the catch in your voice.’

  ‘I really can’t talk about it now.’

  Julia fights off her mother’s astute enquiries as best she can, hanging up only after promising to call back as soon as she has a chance. She is left with a vague unsettling sense of guilt: she has been neglecting her parents, too wrapped up in her own concerns. It will be good to get up and see them some time soon, make a long weekend of it, get her hands into some real work on the farm.

  Hugh comes back downstairs in a clean white shirt and jeans that give a knowing emphasis to his height and his dark good looks. In his hand is a small white paper bag decorated with a looping Celtic motif. He pulls out a chair and sits opposite her at the kitchen table. ‘For you,’ he says, pushing the bag towards her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, casually enough. It does not seem the right moment to open it.

  There is something in Hugh’s body language, a certain way he carries himself, to which Julia has always been susceptible. He can turn it on at will, and he does so now, looking at her with a certain directness and sincerity in his dark-brown eyes. ‘I’m so sorry about today,’ he says, frowning slightly. ‘We got the cellars pumped out all right, but the top fence up at Cwm Cyncoed came down in the wind during the night. I had to make sure everything was shipshape before I left. I dropped Ruth off at the station, then drove down to Malmesbury as fast as I could.’ He stretches out his hand and lays it on top of hers, the long fingers gripping with a warm pressure.

  ‘It doesn’t matter very much,’ Julia says, resisting a powerful urge to draw her hand away.