Hearing Secret Harmonies Part 2

'All right.'

'They have to be gutted.'

Murtlock seemed pleased at the thought of that.

'Fiona can do the gutting. That will be good for you, Fiona.'

She agreed humbly.

'You'll be able to prophesy from the entrails,' I said.

No one laughed.

'Bring the bucket back before you leave in the morning,' said Isobel. 'I expect we shall see you in any case before you go, Fiona?'

The matter was once more referred to Murtlock for a ruling. He shook his head. The answer was negative. We should not see them the following day.

'No.'

Murtlock gruffly expanded Fiona's reply.

'We take the road at first light.'

'Early as that?'

'Our journey is long.'

'Where are you making for?'

Instead of mentioning a town or village he gave the name of a prehistoric monument, a Stone Age site, not specially famous, though likely to be known to people interested in those things. Aware vaguely that such spots were the object of pilgrimage on the part of cults of the kind to which Fiona and her friends appeared to belong, I was not greatly surprised by the answer. I supposed the caravan did about twenty miles a day, but was not at all sure of that. If so, the group of megaliths would take several days to reach.

'We were there some years ago, coming home from that part of the world. Are you planning to park near the Stones?'

It was a characteristic 'long barrow', set on the edge of a valley, two uprights supporting a capstone, entrance to a chambered tomb. The place had been thoroughly excavated.

'As near as sanct.i.ty allows.'

Murtlock answered curtly.

'Sanct.i.ty was being disturbed a good deal by tourists when we were there.'

A look of anger pa.s.sed over his face, either at the comment, or thought of the tourists. He was quite formidable when he looked angry.

'If you're interested in archaeological sites, we've a minor one just over the hill from here. You probably know about it. The Devil's Fingers The Fingers, as Mr Gauntlett calls it.'

If he knew something of Mr Gauntlett's house being haunted, he might well have heard of The Devil's Fingers. The name seemed new to him. He became at once more attentive.

'It's worth a visit, if you like that sort of thing. Only a short detour from the road you'll probably be taking in any case.'

'A prehistoric grave?'

'No doubt once, though that's been disputed.'

'What remains?'

'Two worn pillars about five foot high, and the same distance apart.'

'No portal?'

'Only the supports survive, if that's what they are.'

'The Threshold.'

'If a tomb, the burial chamber has long disappeared through ploughing. The general consensus of archaeological opinion accepts the place as a neolithic grave. There have been dissentient theories boundary stones in the Dark Ages, and so on. They don't amount to much. Local patriotism naturally makes one want the place to be as ancient as possible. The lintel probably went for building purposes in one of the farms round about. The uprights may have been too hard to extract. In any case there's usually a superst.i.tion that you can't draw such stones from the earth. Even if you do, they walk back again.'

'Why the name?'

'One Midsummer night, long ago, a girl and her lover were lying naked on the gra.s.s. The sight of the girl's body tempted the Devil. He put out his hand towards her. Owing to the night also being the Vigil of St John, the couple invoked the Saint, and just managed to escape. When the Devil tried to withdraw his hand, two of his fingers got caught in the outcrop of rock you find in these quarrying areas. There they remain in a petrified condition.'

Murtlock was silent. He seemed suddenly excited.

'Any other legends about the place?'

'The couple are sometimes seen dancing there. They were saved from the Devil, but purge their sin by eternal a.s.sociation with its scene.'

'They dance naked?'

'I presume.'

'On Midsummer Night?'

'I don't know whether only on the anniversary, or all the year round. In rather another spirit, rickety children used to be pa.s.sed between the Stones to effect a cure.'

That was one of Mr Gauntlett's stories.

'Is the stag-mask dance known to have been performed there?'

'I've never heard that. In fact I've never heard of the stag-mask dance.'

Murtlock was certainly well up in these things.

'Do the Stones bleed if a dagger is thrust in them at the Solstices?'

'I've never heard that either. There's the usual tale that at certain times when the c.o.c.k crows at midnight, I think the Stones go down to the brook below to drink.'

Murtlock made no comment.

'Covetous people have sometimes taken that opportunity for seeking treasure in the empty sockets, and been crushed on the unexpected return of the Stones. The Stones' drinking habits are threatened. They will have to remain thirsty, unless the efforts of various people are successful. One of the quarries is trying to extend in that direction. They want to fill up the stream. Local opposition is being rallied. Where else will the Stones be able to quench their thirst? That was what the old farmer who talked to us was referring to.'

This time Murtiock showed no interest. The threat to The Devil's Fingers might have been judged something to shock anyone who had spoken of the sanct.i.ty of another prehistoric site, but he seemed altogether unmoved. At least he enquired no further as to the conservation problem as presented to him. He did, however, ask how the place could be reached, showing close attention when Isobel explained. He discarded all his elaborately mystical facade while listening to instructions of that sort.

'Is it a secluded spot?'

'About half-a-dozen fields from the road.'

'On high ground?'

'I'd guess about five or six hundred feet.'

'Surrounded by gra.s.s?'

'Plough, when we were last there, but the farmer may have gone back to gra.s.s.'

'Trees?'

'The Stones stand in an elder thicket on the top of a ridge. It's one of those characteristic settings. The land the other side slopes down to the stream.'

Murtlock thought for a moment or two. His face was pallid now. He seemed quite agitated at what he had been told. This physical reaction on his part suggested in him something more than the mere calculating ambition implied by Hugo's story. Forces perhaps stronger than himself dominating him, made it possible for him also to dominate by the strength of his own feelings. He turned abruptly on the others, standing pa.s.sively by while his interrogation was taking place.

'Tomorrow we'll go first to The Devil's Fingers. We'll reach there by dawn.'

They concurred.

'You'll find it of interest.'

He made an odd gesture, indicative of impatience, amazement, contempt, at the inadequacy of such a comment in the context. Then his more mundane half-amused air returned.

'Barnabas will leave the bucket by the kitchen door when we set out in the morning.'

'That would be kind.'

'Don't forget, Barnabas.'

Henderson's lip trembled slightly. He muttered that it would be done.

'Then we'll bid you goodbye,' said Isobel.

Fiona, a.s.suming the expression of one taking medicine, allowed herself to be kissed. Henderson rather uneasily offered a hand, keeping an eye on Murtlock in case he was doing wrong. Rusty gave a grin, and a sort of wave. Murtlock himself raised his right hand. The gesture was not far short of benediction. There was a feeling in the air that, to be wholly correct, Isobel and I should have intoned some already acquired formula to convey that grat.i.tude as to the caravan's visit was something owed only by ourselves. There was a short pause while this antiphon remained unvoiced. Then, since nothing further seemed forthcoming on either side, each party turned away from the other. The four visitors moved towards the caravan, there to perform whatever rites or duties, propitiatory or culinary, might lie before them. We returned to the house.

'I agree with whoever it was thought the dark young man creepy,' said Isobel.

'Just a bit.'

Departure the following morning must have taken place as early as announced. No one heard them go. A candle had apparently proved superfluous, because Henderson never arrived to demand one. His own responsibilities, material and moral, must have turned out too onerous for him to have remembered about the bucket. It was found, not by the kitchen door, but on its side in the gra.s.s among the tracks of the caravan. The crayfish were gone. Traces of a glutinous substance, later rather a business to clean out, adhered to the bucket's sides, which gave off an incenselike smell. Isobel thought there was a suggestion of camphor. A few charred laurel leaves also remained in an empty tomato juice tin. Whatever the scents left behind, they were agreed to possess no narcotic connotations. This visit, well defined in the mind at the time, did not make any very lasting impression, Fiona and her companions manifesting themselves as no more than transient representatives of a form of life bound, sooner or later, to move into closer view. Their orientation might be worth attention, according to mood; meanwhile other things took precedence.

2.

TWO COMPENSATIONS FOR GROWING OLD are worth putting on record as the condition a.s.serts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one's own, tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add. The other mild advantage endorses a keener perception for the authenticities of mythology, not only of the traditional sort, but when such are any good the latterday mythologies of poetry and the novel. One such fragment, offering a gloss on the crayfis.h.i.+ng afternoon, cropped up during the summer months of the same year, when I was reading one night after dinner.

The book, Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso Orlando Furioso bedside romance of every tolerably well-educated girl of Byron's day now requires, if not excuse, at least some sort of explanation. Twenty years before, writing a book about Robert Burton and his bedside romance of every tolerably well-educated girl of Byron's day now requires, if not excuse, at least some sort of explanation. Twenty years before, writing a book about Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy Anatomy of Melancholy, I had need to glance at Ariosto's epic, Burton being something of an Ariosto fan. Harington's version (lively, but inaccurate) was then hard to come by; another (less racy, more exact), just as suitable for the purpose. Although by no means all equally readable, certain pa.s.sages of the poem left a strong impression. Accordingly, when a new edition of Harington's Orlando Furioso Orlando Furioso appeared, I got hold of it. I was turning the pages that evening with the sense essential to mature enjoyment of any cla.s.sic of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium. appeared, I got hold of it. I was turning the pages that evening with the sense essential to mature enjoyment of any cla.s.sic of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.

In spite of the t.i.tle, Orlando's madness plays a comparatively small part in the narrative's many convolutions. This does not mean Ariosto himself lacked interest in that facet of his story. On the contrary, he is profoundly concerned with the cause and cure of Orlando's mental breakdown. What happened? Orlando (Charlemagne's Roland), a hero, paladin, great man, had gone off his head because his girl, Angelica, beautiful, intelligent, compa.s.sionate, everything a nice girl should be so to speak female counterpart of Orlando himself had abandoned him for a nonent.i.ty. She had eloped with a good-looking utterly boring young man. Ariosto allows the reader to remain in absolutely no doubt as to the young man's total insignificance. The situation is clearly one that fascinates him. He emphasizes the vacuity of mind shown by Angelica's lover in a pa.s.sage describing the young man's carving of their intertwined names on the trunks of trees, a whimsicality that first reveals to Orlando himself his own ba.n.a.l predicament.

Orlando's ego (his personal myth, as General Conyers would have said) was murderously wounded. He found himself altogether incapable of making the interior adjustment required to continue his normal routine of living the Heroic Life. His temperament allowing no half measures, he chose, therefore, the complete negation of that life. Discarding his clothes, he lived henceforth in deserts and waste places, roaming hills and woods, gaining such sustenance as he might, while waging war against a society he had renounced. In short, Orlando dropped out.

Ariosto describes how one of Orlando's friends, an English duke named Astolpho, came to the rescue. Riding a hippogryph (an intermediate beast Harington calls his 'Griffith Horse', like the name of an obscure poet), Astolpho undertook a journey to the Moon. There, in one of its valleys, he was shown all things lost on Earth: lost kingdoms: lost riches: lost reputations: lost vows: lost hours: lost love. Only lost foolishness was missing from this vast stratospheric Lost Property Office, where by far the largest accretion was lost sense. Although he had already discovered in this store some of his lost days and lost deeds, Astolpho was surprised to come across a few of his own lost wits, simply because he had never in the least missed them. He had a duty to perform here, which was to bring back from his s.p.a.cetrip the wits (mislaid on an immeasurably larger scale than his own) of his old friend and comrade-in-arms, Orlando. It was Astolpho's achievement if so to be regarded to restore to Orlando his former lifestyle, make feasible for him the resumption of the Heroic Life.

Journeys to the Moon were in the news at that moment (about a year before the astronauts actually landed there) because Pennistone had just published his book on Cyrano de Bergerac, whose Histoire comique des etats et empires de la lune Histoire comique des etats et empires de la lune he used to discuss, when we were in the War Office together. Pennistone was more interested in his subject as philosopher and heresiarch than s.p.a.ce-traveller, but, all the same, Cyrano had to be admitted as an example of a remark once made by X. Trapnel: 'A novelist writes what he is. That is equally true of authors who deal with mediaeval romance or journeys to the Moon.' I don't think Trapnel had ever read Ariosto, feel pretty sure he had never attempted Cyrano though he could surprise by unexpected authors dipped into but, oddly enough, he used to discuss, when we were in the War Office together. Pennistone was more interested in his subject as philosopher and heresiarch than s.p.a.ce-traveller, but, all the same, Cyrano had to be admitted as an example of a remark once made by X. Trapnel: 'A novelist writes what he is. That is equally true of authors who deal with mediaeval romance or journeys to the Moon.' I don't think Trapnel had ever read Ariosto, feel pretty sure he had never attempted Cyrano though he could surprise by unexpected authors dipped into but, oddly enough, Orlando Furioso Orlando Furioso does treat of both Trapnel's off-the-cuff fictional categories, mediaeval romance and an interplanetary journey. does treat of both Trapnel's off-the-cuff fictional categories, mediaeval romance and an interplanetary journey.

Among other adventures on the Moon, during this expedition, Astolpho sees Time at work. Ariosto's Time as you might say, Time the Man was, anthropomorphically speaking, not necessarily everybody's Time. Although equally h.o.a.ry and naked, he was not Poussin's Time, for example, in the picture where the Seasons dance, while Time plucks his lyre to provide the music. Poussin's Time (a painter's Time) is shown in a sufficiently unhurried frame of mind to be sitting down while he strums his instrument. The smile might be thought a trifle sinister, nevertheless the mood is genial, composed.

Ariosto's Time (a writer's Time) is far less relaxed, indeed appallingly restless. The English duke watched Ariosto's Time at work. The naked ancient, in an eternally breathless scramble with himself, collected from the Fates small metal tablets (one pictured them like the trinkets hanging from the necks of Murtlock and Henderson), then moved off at the double to dump these ident.i.ty discs in the waters of Oblivion. A few of them (like Murtlock's medallion at the pond) were only momentarily submerged, being fished out, and borne away to the Temple of Fame, by a pair of well disposed swans. The rest sank to the bottom, where they were likely to remain.

On the strength of this not too obscure allegory, I decided to go to bed. Just before I closed the book, my eye was caught by a stanza in an earlier sequence.

And as we see straunge cranes are woont to do, First stalke a while er they their wings can find, Then soare from ground not past a yard or two, Till in their wings they gather'd have the wind, At last they mount the very clouds unto, Triangle wise according to their kind: So by degrees this Mage begins to flye, The bird of Jove Jove can hardly mount so hye; can hardly mount so hye; And when he sees his time and thinks it best, He falleth downe like lead in fearfull guise, Even as the fawlcon doth the foule arrest, The ducke and mallard from the brooke that rise.

The warm windy afternoon, cottonwool clouds, ankle-deep wild garlic, rankness of fox, laboratory exhalations from the quarry, parade ground evolutions of the duck, hawk's precipitate flight towards the pool, all were suddenly recreated. Duck, of course, rather than cranes, had risen 'triangle wise', but the hawk, as in Ariosto's lines (or rather Harington's), had hung pensively in the air, then swooped to strike. I tried to rationalize to myself this coincidental pa.s.sage. There was nothing at all unusual in mallard getting up from the water at that time of day, nor a kestrel hovering over the neighbouring meadows. For that matter, reference to falconry in a Renaissance poem was far from remarkable. Something in addition to all that held the attention. It was the word Mage. Mage carried matters a stage further.

Mage summoned up the image of Dr Trelawney, a mage if ever there was one. I thought of the days when, as a child, I used to watch the Doctor and his young disciples, some of them no more than children themselves, trotting past the Stonehurst gate on their way to rhythmical callisthenics whatever the exercises were on the adjacent expanse of heather. In those days (brink of the first war) Dr Trelawney was still building up a career. He had not yet fully transformed himself into the man of mystery, the thaumaturge, he was in due course to become. The true surname was always in doubt (Grubb or Tibbs, put forward by Moreland), anyway something with less body to it than Trelawney. In his avatar of the Stonehurst period he had been less concerned with the predominantly occult engagement of later years; then seeking The Way (to use his own phrase) through appropriate meditations, exercises, diet, apparel.

Once a week Dr Trelawney and his neophytes would jog down the pine-bordered lane from which our Indian-type bungalow was set a short distance back. The situation was remote, a wide deserted common next door. Dr Trelawney himself would be leading, dark locks flowing to the shoulder, biblical beard, grecian tunic, thonged sandals. The Doctor's robe (like the undefiled of Sardis) was white, somewhat longer and less diaphanous than the single garment identical for both s.e.xes and all weathers worn by the disciples, tunics tinted in the pastel shades fas.h.i.+onable at that epoch. People who encountered Dr Trelawney by chance in the village post-office received an invariable greeting: 'The Essence of the All is the G.o.dhead of the True.'

The appropriate response can have been rarely returned.

'The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.'

One of the firmest tenets so Moreland always said in the later teachings of Dr Trelawney was that coincidence was no more than 'magic in action'. There had just been an example of that. Orlando Furioso Orlando Furioso had not only produced that evening a magical reconstruction of considerable force, it had also brought to mind the reason why such activities as Dr Trelawney's were already much in the air. A recent newspaper colour supplement article, dealing with contemporary cults, had mentioned that with much of what Hugo Tolland called the good old Simple Life a revival of Trelawneyism had come about among young people. That was probably where Murtlock had acquired the phrases about killing, and no death in Nature. It was Dr Trelawney's view also that of his old friend and fellow occultist, Mrs Erdleigh that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. However much the uninstructed might regard them both as 'dead', there were still those for whom they were very much alive. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how the 'liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies'. Perhaps Vaughan's words, filtered through a kind of Neo-Trelawneyism, explained the girls' T-s.h.i.+rts. had not only produced that evening a magical reconstruction of considerable force, it had also brought to mind the reason why such activities as Dr Trelawney's were already much in the air. A recent newspaper colour supplement article, dealing with contemporary cults, had mentioned that with much of what Hugo Tolland called the good old Simple Life a revival of Trelawneyism had come about among young people. That was probably where Murtlock had acquired the phrases about killing, and no death in Nature. It was Dr Trelawney's view also that of his old friend and fellow occultist, Mrs Erdleigh that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. However much the uninstructed might regard them both as 'dead', there were still those for whom they were very much alive. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how the 'liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies'. Perhaps Vaughan's words, filtered through a kind of Neo-Trelawneyism, explained the girls' T-s.h.i.+rts.

In any case it was impossible to disregard the fact that, while a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one's own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have been supposed to have made their final exit, even if like Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh somewhat in the role of Hamlet's father. The touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains, are none of them uncommon. An event some days later again brought forcibly to mind these lunar rescues from the Valley of Lost Things. This was a television programme devoted to the subject of the all-but-forgotten novelist, St John Clarke.

Above all others, St John Clarke might be judged, critically speaking, as gone for good. Not a bit of it. Here was a consummate instance of a lost reputation in this case a literary one salvaged from the Moon, St John Clarke's Astolpho being Ada Leintwardine. Keen on transvestism, Ariosto would have found nothing incongruous in a woman playing the part of the English duke. Maidens clad in armour abound throughout the poem. Ada Leintwardine, as a successful novelist married to the well-known publisher, J. G. Quiggin, could be accepted as a perfectly concordant Ariosto character. In any case she had latterly been taking an increasingly executive part in forming the policy of the firm of which her husband was chairman. Quiggin used to complain that St John Clarke's novels (all come finally to rest under his firm's imprint) sold 'just the wrong amount', too steady a trickle to be ruthlessly disregarded, not enough comfortably to cover production costs. Nor was there compensatory prestige rather the reverse in having a name in the list unknown to a younger generation. In fact Quiggin himself did not deny that he was prepared to allow such backnumbers to fall out of print. Ada, on the other hand, would not countenance that. Her reasons were not wholly commercial; not commercial, that is, on the short-term basis of her husband's approach.

Ada's goal was to have a St John Clarke novel turned into a film. This had become almost an obsession with her. Ten years before she had failed she alleged by a hair's breadth to persuade Louis Glober to make a picture of Match Me Such Marvel Match Me Such Marvel, and, after Glober's death, vigorous canva.s.sing of other film producers, American or British, had been no less fruitless. Meanwhile, St John Clarke's literary shares continued to slump. Ada, though she made fairly frequent appearances on television, had not herself produced a novel for some years. Remaining preoccupied with the St John Clarke project, she at last achieved the small advance in her plans that a television programme should be made about the novelist's life and work. This she regarded as a start, something to prepare the ground for later adaptation of one of the books.

Even their old friend, Mark Members, agreed that the Quiggins' marriage, whatever its ups and downs, had been on the whole a success. Members, who had no children himself, used to laugh at the disparity between Quiggin's former views on rebellion, and present att.i.tude towards his twin daughters, Amanda and Belinda, now of university age and troublemakers. Quiggin's grumbling on that subject usually took place when Ada was not about. One of the twins had recently been concerned (only as a witness) in a drug prosecution; the other, about the same time, charged (later acquitted) with kicking a policeman. Quiggin was less reconciled to that sort of thing than, say, Roddy Cutts in relation to Fiona's caprices. In business matters the Quiggins got on well together too, showed a united front. It was the exception that there should be disagreement about St John Clarke.

Quiggin was doubtful as to the wisdom of propagating the novelist's name at this late stage. He feared that a small temporary increase in demand for the books would merely add to his own embarra.s.sments as their publisher. His objection did not hold out very long. In due course Ada had her way. She seems to have brought about her husband's conversion to the idea by pointing out that he himself, as former secretary of St John Clarke, would play a comparatively prominent part in any doc.u.mentary produced. Quiggin finally gave in at one of their literary dinner parties, choosing the moment after his wife had produced an aphorism.

'The television of the body brings the sales everlasting.'

Quiggin bowed his head.