Finding Camlann

JULIA LLEWELLYN DRAINS
the last drops from her second glass of wine. She briefly considers a refill, thinks better of it. For now, she tries to distract herself with a volume of Welsh poetry that her father has sent her. She smiles as she thinks of him, Dai Llewellyn of Dyffryn Farm. He will often send her random books and literary fragments, articles and leaflets and pages torn from newspapers, usually with some dramatic arrowing or encirclement of the critical text. A thread of yellowed old string bookmarks a poem by Dylan Thomas, one that she knows well but has not read for many years.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green . . .

As she reads, she finds herself computing the rhythms in the lines, the poet’s use of stress, alliteration, and rhyme in perhaps unconscious imitation of the Welsh
cynghanedd
verse style. It is not purely a blessing, the way her mind works, always analysing, looking for patterns and codes and symbols.
Just read it as the writer intended
, her father would say, knowing the way she is.
Imagine he’s there in the room, speaking the words out loud
. She forces herself to start again from the beginning. On this second reading, the poet’s evocation of an untroubled pastoral youth, the lyrical intertwining of his verses, brings a dream-like nostalgia that merges into an inchoate sadness as the chill of mortality enters the wistful lines. In a sense, this is her own childhood, growing up at Dyffryn, though she wonders why her father should choose to remind her of it now.

Pulling her shawl more tightly around her, she closes the poetry book, uses her napkin to dab away a small drop of wine. The cover bears an unusual design, a Welsh upland landscape with green foothills rising to stark mountain peaks, dark storm-clouds roiling overhead. A narrow track leads through a gentle wooded valley before climbing into higher, more rugged terrain. There is a portentous quality in this picture that her father would find appealing, though she does not. She can hear him lecturing her about choices, taking the right path, even if it is not always the easiest. Taking the wrong path is sometimes harder, she would say in return. Taking the wrong path is sometimes right.

Julia glances at her watch: a quarter to two. Her husband is more than an hour late for their rendezvous. By now, her faint irritation has evolved into a more insistent anxiety. This was to have been a celebration of sorts, the fifteenth anniversary of their engagement, a return to one of their favourite pubs from the early days. Hugh is on his way back from the Mortimer family property at Ty Faenor, near Rhayader in central Wales, where he and his sister Ruth have been supervising recovery efforts following the heavy rains that have flooded the riverside lands. In a bulletin delivered by telephone the night before, he explained the situation to Julia in the careful, didactic manner that he reserves for such conversations. The drains around the old manor house had become badly clogged, he said, sending two feet of water into the cellars. With a couple of pumps going, everything would be under control by the morning. He would have to stay up there overnight, but an early start should see him to Malmesbury in plenty of time.

In a habitual nervous gesture, Julia begins twisting her wedding ring back and forth, prying it loose, working it over the knuckle. She swaps it to her right hand, slips it on to the third finger, begins the process in reverse. When she tries to imagine what is going through Hugh’s mind, it feels like she is striking against a dark impenetrable wall. As usual, there will be a reasonablugh a rease explanation for his lateness. He will have stayed at Ty Faenor to the last minute, determined to remain in charge at the moment of crisis. He will be on the road somewhere now, driving too fast, reinventing his poor awareness of time as a heroic dash to Julia’s rescue.

In other circumstances, on another day, in another year, she would have found it charming. But this is not the first time in recent months that Hugh seems so casually to have lost his sense of the importance of things. She takes a piece of paper from her bag, begins mentally drafting a short, matter-of-fact note to leave for him at the bar; then folds the blank sheet and puts it in her pocket, continues playing nervously with her ring.

Her meditation is interrupted by a brash announcement from the bar. ‘Mr. Gladstone? Telephone call for you.’ She sees a tall man get up from a table in the opposite corner and approach the far end of the bar. He has reddish-brown hair cut short, the weathered face of an outdoorsman, strong parallel frown-lines tempered by a gentleness in his expression as he reaches for the telephone. A memory replays itself: the steps of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a book falling from her bag, white with an orange spine, a heavy volume of Welsh history. It was picked up by a tall, awkward boy who happened to be following her up the steps. He made some dry comment, said he was reading it too, and he didn’t know it had become such a blockbuster. On the strength of this introduction, they spent an hour together in the new Egyptian exhibit at the Ashmolean, then afterwards went for tea across the road at the Randolph Hotel.

Now she watches curiously as Donald Gladstone hangs up the phone, turns and walks back to his table with an air of quiet disappointment. She remembers liking him at the time, though her interest was purely theoretical; in those days, she was intensely preoccupied with a third-year student at Jesus College by the name of Hugh Mortimer. It is perhaps not so great a coincidence, seeing Donald here, but still she feels a faint unsettling tug of superstition.

HARRY HAS GONE
up to the bar to get them both a refill, leaving Donald under some pressure to deliver an impressive score. He is convinced there is a seven-letter word somewhere in Jack’s hand. mintage would work, but there is nowhere to put it. He reaches into his briefcase, pulls out the top sheet of his manuscript, writes the letters down, scattershot, at the foot of the page; then taps unsuccessfully through various permutations with the tip of his pencil.

‘I think it’s
enigmata
.’ These words are spoken from behind his left shoulder, a quiet voice with an unmistakable Welsh lilt.

Donald turns to meet the gaze of a woman in her thirties, dark-brown hair cut to shoulder length, a pale complexion, striking green eyes behind narrow-framed reading glasses. A long embroidered shawl is wrapped loosely around her shoulders. She is achingly familiar to him, somebody he once knew.

‘You just need to use the loose a down there,’ she says, pointing to the bottom right-hand corner of the board. She picks up his discarded pencil, goes through the letters in sequence; then pauses, gives him a searching look. ‘You don’t recognise me at all, do you?’

Something in her expression brings the memory back, crystal clear. It must be sixteen years ago at least, perhaps seventeen, his second year at Oxford. He found himself behind her on the steps of the Ashmolean Museum just as a large book fell from her bag and tumbled down towards him. Picking it uan>Pickingp for her—it was John Davies’
A History of Wales—
he mentioned that he had been reading the same book, which indeed was true. She laughed at some poor joke he made, and he decided straight away that he was going to fall in love with her. ‘It’s good to see you, Julia,’ he says.

There is the flicker of a smile. ‘Now that you’ve remembered me, are you going to ask me to join you?’

‘Of course. I insist on it, in fact.’ He stands up, a little too quickly, pulls a chair across from a nearby table. ‘Will you have something to drink?’

‘What about your game?’ she says. ‘Your friend’s on his way back.’

Harry returns to the table, his hands shaking with the effort of carrying an overfilled pint precariously in each. He sets them down, glances from Donald to Julia, sizes up the situation with a knowing look. ‘Seems to me I might be superfluous to requirements.’

‘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 ahe ir fallcross 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.’