A Novel Page 5

  ‘Morning, Miss Llewellyn.’ Colin, the security guard, whose reddened drinker’s face is in perfect counterpoint to his turbulent crop of white hair, gives every appearance of having only recently returned from the pub. ‘Running a bit late today, are we?’

  ‘Mondays,’ Julia says, with a smile. ‘I really hate them.’

  ‘I’m right with you there, miss. There’s always Tuesday, of course.’ Colin chuckles quietly at this, waves her through the inner door. ‘On you go, now.’

  The dictionary’s offices are tucked away in the corner of a modern addition to the mostly Georgian edifice that houses the larger Oxford University Press. Julia walks through to an open-plan space whose near-silence is disturbed only by the faintest of murmured conversations, the aggregated whisperings of pages turning, papers shuffling, pencils annotating in margins. As she heads for her desk, she glances across the room at her friend Otto Zeiss. Otto is a rounded, jovial man of about sixty, a specialist on Indo-European languages who moonlights at the OED three days per week. For now, she is glad to see from the glazed expression on his face that he is off on some far-away train of eastern thought, travelling through an exotic world of Sanskrit and Tocharian B.

  Stacked neatly on Julia’s chair is a new batch of word-slips sent in by the dictionary’s network of readers around the globe. These tiny bibliographic infusions are its lifeblood, its arterial connection to fourteen centuries of English literature. It is easy and calming work to go through them, and Julia is glad of it this morning. First she organises the slips alphabetically, then scans them for obvious ambiguities that will need to be resolved later, and finally begins the much slower and more painstaking process of cross-referencing to the dictionary itself. From time to time she sets aside a usage that particularly catches her attention, to be shared later with colleagues.

  Belomancy. 1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. 272 A like way of Belomancy or Divination by Arrowes hath beene in request.

  Snippets. 1664 BUTLER Hud. II. iii. 824 Witches Simpling, and on Gibbets Cutting from Malefactors snippets.

  Sorryish. 1793 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 330 You would be sorryish to hear, that poor Moll Cobb is gone to her long home.

  In this way, word by word, the morning hours tick comfortably by. Just before noon, her telephone rings, a familiar voice on the line. ‘Julia? This is Donald Gladstone. I hope you don’t mind—’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind.’ Her reply is more terse than she intended, though this has the useful effect of disguising just how glad she is that he has called. ‘What’s new in the world of archaeology?’

  ‘The usual stuff, I suppose—holes being dug, reports being written and filed away.’

  Julia has a vision of Donald buried somewhere deep in an underground maze, surrounded by great towers of worthy paperwork ready to collapse on top of him. ‘How romantic you make it sound.’

  ‘I don’t mind it at all, really. But listen,’ Donald says, more animated now, ‘I was just reading something that made me think of you, and how you challenged all my narrow-minded English assumptions on our walk up Solsbury Hill. I was wondering if we might meet up somewhere to continue that conversation.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Julia says, the words coming too easily. She forces herself to stop and think. If it is the wrong thing to do, it should be harder to say yes. ‘Do you mind if I ring you back tomorrow? We can make a proper plan then.’

  At lunchtime, she declines Otto’s offer of a sandwich in the canteen, keeps on working for an hour or more. By mid-afternoon, there is a dull throbbing pain in her right temple. Thinking to clear her head, she steps outside into fitful autumn sunshine with gusts of winds swirling up the yellowed leaves from the sycamore trees in the park across the road. She turns to the right on Walton Street, cuts through to St. Giles, then makes her way down into the medieval heart of Oxford. The streets are filled with a busy traffic of dour-faced pedestrians, students on rattling bicycles, a legion of raucous buses. High above, the declining autumn sun catching the uppermost ramparts of the old college buildings bathes them in a soft, rose-coloured light.

  Julia crosses Broad Street to the music shop on the corner, wonders about going inside, instead continues along Turl Street to the neo-gothic archway and heavy wooden gates that mark the entrance to Jesus College. It is years since she has been here, but the porter seems to recognise her, waves her cheerfully through as if she last came this way the day before yesterday.

  It was here in the springtime of her first year at Oxford that she sat down next to Hugh Mortimer at a seminar on medieval Welsh poetry given by Hugh’s academic mentor, Caradoc Bowen, the long-time Professor of Celtic Studies at Jesus. She had first met Hugh back home in Wales, a few months before her sixteenth birthday. He was staying with his grandfather, Sir Charles Mortimer, who lived at Ty Faenor just a few miles along the valley from Dyffryn Farm, and he seemed the most mysterious and intriguing person she had ever come across. At the time she could do no more than worship him from afar, weaving her own secret stories of how they would fall in love, run away together into the mountains and never come back. Now, at eighteen, ambitious, poised, confident in her half-formed opinions, she was determined to make him her own.

  During their first evenings together in Oxford, Hugh explained to her about his branch of the Mortimer family, a deep-rooted aristocratic dynasty with a long history in the border country between England and Wales. She remembers one night with a special clarity, sitting outside shivering faintly on a cool May evening at the Turf Tavern as Hugh described the happy Welsh summers of his childhood. He would be packed off every August to stay with Sir Charles, an intensely serious but kindly man who in his later years had come to value the Mortimer family manor of Ty Faenor above all else. His death when Hugh was seventeen precipitated a bitter conflict with Hugh’s father, Robert, who had always favoured the expansive family estate at Melverley in Shropshire over the wilder and less productive Welsh lands. From that time, Hugh rejected the prospect of the patrician life his parents intended for him, instead devoting himself to political causes that were opposed to everything they stood for. He came to consider himself a true Welsh nationalist, having learned from his grandfather that he was descended not only from the Anglo-Norman Mortimers, but also from the royal Welsh dynasty of Owain Glyn Dŵr.

  Hugh spoke to her with a surprising intensity in those days, but had a way afterwards of laughing at himself, of shrugging off all such pretension. Beneath his confidence and easy charm, he seemed burdened by a certain world-weary nobility and sadness. For Julia, this was a heady concoction that left her in no doubt as to what she wanted.

  She walks on past the dining hall, through the connecting passage to the Second Quad. The entrance to Hugh’s rooms was here, through the last door on the left and up the stone staircase to the top floor. It was all once as familiar to her as her own space at Wadham. She remembers Hugh running down these steps on the day he left Jesus College for the last time, vowing never to speak to Caradoc Bowen again.

  As she walks around the perimeter of the quad, she sees eyes in the darkened windows, dozens of them all looking at her at once, the tall Dutch gables with their semi-circular pediments making haughty eyebrows that arch a little higher at every move she makes. It occurs to her that Bowen, though surely by now in his eighties, is still here somewhere: perhaps even now watching her, stern-faced, remembering how she took Hugh Mortimer away from him. She hurries on, glad to complete her circuit and escape through the gate to the anonymous, bustling safety of the Oxford streets.

  The afternoon brings a merciful break from routine, an annual meeting of editorial staff from across the press. The first presenter is the OED’s Chief Editor, Peter Harington, who is to give a progress update on the new edition of the dictionary. Julia arrives early, sits in an empty row near the back of the room. In due course she is joined there by Otto Zeiss, who proceeds to entertain her with his usual trenchant asides.

  Before long, Harington is standing up at the
front of the room in characteristically fulsome flow. ‘For those of us who are lucky enough to have a close acquaintance with the OED,’ he says, ‘it seems a very contradictory sort of beast. Its ongoing care requires a labour simultaneously of the highest forms of human expression and of that harmless drudgery of which Samuel Johnson was the first and most distinguished exponent. Its content, meanwhile, is of serious interest to rather few, yet remains of inestimable importance to world scholarship.’

  ‘Und so weiter,’ Otto murmurs, his face set in a mask of solemnity. ‘He gave the same talk five years ago. And ten and fifteen years ago also. The world will come to an end, and still he is giving this talk.’

  ‘We are the taxonomists of a vast evolutionary structure,’ Peter Harington is saying, ‘a genetic encoding of the English language that captures with equal precision the most high-flown and the most mundane of human utterances. The work we do now will surely persist, in one form or another, for countless generations to come. It is proper that we remember this as we bend our arm to the daily lexical toil.’

  There is a good deal more in this vein, followed by upbeat presentations from other divisions of the press, those concerned with the publication of scientific journals and medical textbooks and the classics of world literature. After the meeting has finished, there is an early move for the OED staff to the Old Bookbinders Arms, a Monday afternoon ritual of long standing. Today’s expedition is invested with a special significance as a celebration of the completion of the letter C.

  Julia is content to sit in a cosy nook at the Bookbinders, drinking the glasses of wine that others put in front of her. She does her best to fend off the Chief Editor’s enthusiastic questions about her Welsh childhood, then listens patiently to Otto as he proceeds to expound at length, in his grave Viennese way, on the possibility that the Phoenicians influenced the vocabulary and syntax of Old High German, prompting the suggestion that this great seafaring people may have established settlements as far north as the Baltic Sea.

  She stays an hour longer than she meant to, rides her bicycle reluctantly home through the darkened streets. The house feels empty at first, and she is glad of it, but her sense of reprieve is short-lived. Hugh has settled himself quietly in the living room with a stack of paperwork and two fingers of whisky in a heavy crystal glass. The television is on for the evening news, with the volume turned almost all the way down.

  ‘Good time?’ he says, not looking up. He is wearing his reading glasses, which give him less the look of a scholar than of a politician striving for empathy.

  ‘Just the usual Monday crowd.’ She sits down in the opposite corner of the room, close to the television. The mellowness from the wine is fading into a commonplace exhaustion.

  ‘I have a question for you.’

  Something in his voice puts Julia on her guard. ‘What is it, Hugh?’

  ‘If I needed to find out more about the history of the Merton College landholdings, where would you suggest I look?’ His tone is matter-of-fact, as if it were not almost unheard-of for him to ask for her help on a work-related question. It crosses her mind that he is making an effort to connect with her, that he is perhaps trying very hard. She wonders whether he will want to make love to her tonight; whether she should be the one to make the first move.

  ‘Best to go to the Merton library,’ she says. ‘I know someone over there—I could set it up, if you like.’

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  Julia looks at him sharply, wondering if she has misinterpreted him. But he has returned to his paperwork, making a show of turning pages, underlining passages of text. Now her attention is caught by something on the news; she reaches to turn up the volume.

  ‘Some are calling it the archaeological discovery of the century. To help us put it into context, we are joined by the leader of the excavation, Professor Paul Healey of Cambridge University, and by Dr. Lucinda Trevelyan of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, who has also had an opportunity to examine the finds.’ The seasoned interviewer, Miles Johnson, gravely furrowing his brow, speaks with an authoritative staccato delivery honed by several decades at the BBC. ‘Paul Healey, you have not gone quite so far as to say that you have discovered the bones of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, but neither have you denied it.’

  Healey is a small, weatherbeaten man in his fifties, quick to smile in a twinkling, insubstantial way. He now adopts for the camera what seems to Julia a carefully calibrated expression of wry incredulity, a projected irony that is reinforced by a hint of a Merseyside accent. ‘I have of course said nothing of the sort. What we have discovered is a quantity of ancient human skeletons—in my experience, they don’t come with name tags attached.’

  ‘That’s not really an answer, though, Professor Healey?’

  ‘It’s an archaeologist’s answer, Mr. Johnson. I can only interpret the evidence that I see in front of me.’ Again, the ready smile. ‘Anything beyond that is pure speculation.’

  Johnson turns his attention to the other studio guest. ‘Some enthusiasts are saying, Lucy Trevelyan, that the ceramic cup found at Devil’s Barrow might be the Holy Grail itself. What do you make of that?’

  Lucinda Trevelyan, who has remained tight-lipped during the initial exchange, is a tall woman in her late thirties, oddly but not inelegantly dressed in a long flowing dress decorated in a dramatic abstract motif. Her face has a narrow, hawkish kind of beauty to it, though firmly set in deep lines of disapproval.

  ‘That’s nonsense, of course,’ she says, ‘insofar as you are speaking of the Grail as a Christian symbol derived from medieval French romance.’ She speaks with a restrained fervor in an American voice that is low-pitched and soft but devoid of all self-consciousness, her arguments brooking no opposition. ‘And this is, in any case, entirely the wrong question to ask.’

  ‘Which would be the right question, in your opinion?’

  Lucy Trevelyan is careful to avoid eye contact with her fellow studio guest. ‘I should like to ask Professor Healey how he was able to conclude that the burials date from the fifth century AD.’

  Paul Healey, now wearing a look of faint amusement, has evidently been expecting this question. ‘As I have made very clear, that was a preliminary conclusion only, based on the evidence of Roman coins discovered in the pit—’

  ‘People drop coins by mistake, or deliberately throw them into holes in the ground for good luck. This is quite an ancient practice, I think you will find.’

  ‘—and as my distinguished colleague is well aware, a formal carbon dating of the organic remains is now under way.’

  Johnson steps in adroitly to bolster Healey’s flagging argument. ‘That’s right, is it not, Dr. Trevelyan? We’ll have a definitive answer soon enough.’

  ‘Well, yes, I imagine a proper dating of the bones will settle the question. In the meantime, there are other kinds of evidence that are generally reliable. For example, the ritual cup discovered in the burial pit was still enclosed in the embrace of its protector, suggesting to me that it is unlikely to have been a random accretion, something that just happened to be thrown in there. In my opinion, the style and decoration of this artefact point to a far earlier date, possibly fifteen hundred years earlier than has been suggested.’

  Paul Healey’s laugh is perhaps intended to be scornful, though he puts a little too much good nature into it. ‘That’s pure speculation, of course—’

  ‘Speculation that is informed by many years of careful study.’ Lucy Trevelyan now turns to face her adversary with an expression of pure insouciance. ‘I believe you have entirely misinterpreted the archaeological evidence, Professor Healey. As your own team has noted, the woman whose remains were discovered at the top of the funerary pile was a person of high status. She is, in my opinion, most readily identified as a priestess of the matriarchal culture that was widespread across Old Europe prior to the Indo-European incursions that finally reached Britain in the latter part of the second millennium BC.’

  By now, Julia
is completely caught up in this oddly compelling exchange. Despite Lucy Trevelyan’s obvious eccentricity, there is an appealing passion in her, a kind of intense, charismatic self-belief that cares nothing for correctness or convention.

  Lucy, who is entirely in command of the camera, pauses significantly, and Miles Johnson cannot help but take the bait. ‘That seems a rather dramatic claim. Does the evidence in fact support it?’

  ‘The evidence must of course be allowed to speak for itself, but I believe it is plausible, indeed likely, that the female remains from Devil’s Barrow are those of one of the last keepers of an ancient matrilineal civilisation that once held sway across the European continent. This was a culture that persisted for many centuries in Britain before it was utterly destroyed by the Celtic warrior elites who swept across the island from the south and east.’

  ‘Are you suggesting,’ Johnson says, ‘that this woman was killed in some kind of last-ditch defence of her people?’

  ‘I would not make such an extravagant statement as that. I merely observe that her lifeless body was thrown on top of a heap made from the corpses of the warriors who died with her, and that they in turn seem to have been killed in some perverse act of ritual sacrifice. They were made to suffer the threefold death, a gruesome practice known to have been a hallmark of the incoming Celts. This was their own dreadful, contemptuous corruption of the ancient British reverence for the triune gods of earth, sun, and moon, and of the places made sacred by the power of three.’