Finding Camlann (23 page)

Donald sets the book to one side, digs in his bag for his road atlas. Rather than follow Giraldus’s long coastal perambulation of 1188, via St. David’s and Cardigan Bay, he traces a simpler journey up the valley of the River Wye, through the heart of Wales to Builth Wells and then Rhayader. Anxious now to be on the road, he makes his way back out of the labyrinth and rings the bell at the desk.

The source of the persistent doleful whistling becomes apparent as a large man with his head shaved to camouflage his baldness emerges loudly from a back room. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he says, wiping his hands on a green towel emblazoned with the red dragon of Wales. A strong strain of north London in his voice belies any close allegiance to this flag.

Donald hands him Giraldus’s
Journey through Wales
. ‘Just this, thanks.’

‘Not sure I’d recommend it, myself,’ the proprietor says, nevertheless carefully checking the price in the front of the book before taking Donald’s five-pound note and making change from a small wooden drawer. ‘Wales, that is.’ He underlines this emphatic statement with a westerly jerk of his thumb, alluding to the Celtic wilderness on whose very edge his cosy establishment is perched: a latter-day Barliman Butterbur at the
Prancing Pony.
‘Between you and me, mate,’ he says, lowering his voice conspiratorially, ‘I’d always think twice before trusting a Welshman.’

‘I’ll try to remember.’ Donald smiles agreeably, takes his book in its brown-paper bag and raises his hand in farewell as he heads for the door.

THE INTERTWINED HISTORIES
of the Barnabas and Llewellyn families are very much in Julia’s mind as she forces open the front gate of the vicarage past the mass of ivy that threatens to overwhelm it. From the time she first set eyes on this house as a seven-year-old girl at St. Padarn’s junior school across the road, she has thought of it as a remote, even a frightening place. Some of its mystique in those days no doubt derived from the exalted status of the sstaace. S Reverend Dr. Stephen Barnabas, vicar of Rhayader parish, who was as unapproachable to a child as should be expected in a distinguished member of the Welsh clergy. The intimidating aura of the house was compounded by the common knowledge amongst the schoolchildren that the vicar’s wife, who was never seen in public, suffered from a debilitating illness that confined her to a room upstairs in the east wing. It was generally supposed that she shared her solitude with the aged and equally elusive Uncle Hywel Barnabas, a highly accomplished church organist who was said to have been driven to the edge of madness by his wartime experiences in the Welsh Guards. Certainly the young Ralph Barnabas was never known to speak of what it was like to live at the vicarage in those days.

An overgrown front path leads alongside a neglected shrubbery to a gap in a screen of tall conifers, beyond which the house comes fully into view. It is a large Victorian structure built of red brick with a white stucco facing, tall and elegant windows on the lower floors and a row of small dormers on the top floor suggesting cramped, poorly lit bedrooms once intended for a household staff. Julia reads a sadness in its expression, the loneliness of a once-bustling residence now fallen on solitary times. She grips the lion’s-head knocker, raps on the front door, counts twenty heartbeats as she waits. She knocks again, listens for any sign of life, reaches twenty again before turning away.

Her disappointment is tempered by her sense of relief at avoiding what would have been a difficult conversation. At one time, Stephen Barnabas was a close friend of her father’s, though their relationship was later damaged beyond repair. As Dai told the story, the vicar was the first man to notice him when he came to Rhayader from Llangurig, a lost sheep in search of a new fold. A quarter of a century later, it was the Reverend Barnabas who presided over Julia and Hugh’s wedding ceremony at St. Clement’s church. That was also the year in which the Barnabas family was visited twice by tragedy.

‘The door is open, please let yourself in.’ This hoarsely delivered command comes faintly through an open window, just as Julia is walking away. She does as she is told, turns the door handle and walks uneasily through to a dim, draughty hallway. There is an impression of faded yellow and brown, the sweet and musty smell of apples and old newspapers. The Persian rugs on the floor are tired and worn, the peeling wallpaper now only faintly advertising its once-charming floral design. A thin grey cat emerges from some nook or cranny, yawns and stretches itself, jumps lightly up to a sun-drenched window-sill.

‘I am in the drawing room, if you would be so kind as to join me here.’

Julia follows the sound of the voice into a long bright room at the front of the house, where she finds a tall man hunched over in a wheelchair next to an unsatisfying fire of glowing coals gathered parsimoniously in the middle of the grate. She steps cautiously through the doorway.

‘Do please come in. Despite what the good people of Rhayader may tell you, I do not bite.’

Julia has not seen the Reverend Barnabas for some years, and to her he seems almost shockingly aged. Though he can be no older than his mid-sixties, his deeply lined face has an almost deathly pallor to it, and his hair, which she remembers as black shot through with grey, has turned to pure white. The upper half of his body is enveloped in a thick blue woollen cardigan, the lower half in a tartan blanket that reaches to the floor.

The events that ruined Stephen Barnabas’s life happened within six months of each other. First came the death of his beloved wife, just a few weeks after Juliaȁ sr Jr in whi9;s springtime wedding. Then, in the autumn of the same year, he suffered the terrible accident that maimed him physically and also, according to local opinion, destroyed much of what was left of his belief in God and humankind. Though he returned in due course to his ministry, made some practical working accommodation with his damaged faith, he was afterwards known as an embittered and disappointed man. In Rhayader, on days other than a Sunday, his parishioners would give him a wide berth, for fear of becoming targets of his capricious ire. The word in the pubs and sitting rooms was that he would be best changing sides to the Methodist church, where a righteous anger such as his was in high demand.

The vicar looks up at Julia through bloodshot grey eyes, his gaze meeting hers only briefly before settling on a point somewhere closer to the floor. There is a faint tremor in his hands as they grip the armrests of his wheelchair. ‘It’s Julia Mortimer, isn’t it? I was very sorry to hear about your father. We had many good conversations in our time, Dai Llewellyn and I.’ His voice is closer to what she remembers, with its familiar tone of Welsh clerical condescension, mellifluous and ponderous, perfected by a lifetime of Sunday-morning oratory. But there is also a fractured quality to it, a sense of something once broken and not fully repaired.

‘Yes, he told me about that.’ Julia speaks cautiously, unsure of her ground. ‘He said you were very helpful to him when he first came to Rhayader.’

‘As was he to me. I greatly regret that I was not able to officiate at his funeral. I have not been in the best of health, as you may see for yourself.’ A smile flickers across the vicar’s face. ‘But you have not come here to listen to my dreary complaints. What may I do for you? If you’re looking for Ralph, I’m afraid he is not here very often these days.’

‘I saw him in town this morning. Actually it was you I wanted to speak to.’

‘In which case, kindly do me the favour of sitting down, so that we may at least talk face to face.’ Barnabas waves a hand in the direction of an armchair upholstered with fading red and pink roses. ‘How is Hugh, may I ask? I have not seen him in a very long time.’

Julia has almost forgotten: the vicar has known Hugh from childhood, since the days when Sir Charles Mortimer still lived at Ty Faenor and brought his grandson to Sunday services at St. Clement’s. It is strangely disorientating now to think of the young Hugh sitting there dutifully in the pews, still so tightly bound up in aristocratic convention and obligation.

‘Yes, he’s fine, thank you.’

‘I am glad to hear it. Now, will you have some tea? There is a housekeeper somewhere, though I suspect she is upstairs with her nose in a romantic novel. That is her usual occupation when she thinks I’m asleep.’

‘Please don’t go to any trouble.’ By now, Julia feels deeply ill at ease. Finding herself at a loss, she glances around the room, takes in the formal, upright furniture, Constable’s
Dedham Vale
on one wall, Richard Wilson’s
Lake Avernus
on another, dust-motes spiralling in the sunlight through the tall front windows. She feels trapped in some distant moment in time, a perception reinforced by a polished brass carriage clock sitting unwound on the mantelpiece, stopped at ten to three. Beside it is an intricately carved wooden sculpture; something about it strikes her as deeply familiar.

‘Do you recognise the style?’ Barnabas says. ‘Your fa sx20gn="ther made that piece for me many years ago. It depicts the Celtic deities Teutates, Esus, and Taranis. We were arguing about religion—he was not an overly pious man, as you will know—and I think he was trying to make a point about spiritual pluralism. As I recall, his assertion was that the old pagan religions had as much validity in their way as all the accumulated dogma of the Christian church. I suspect, after all, he was right about that, and I wish I might have had an opportunity to tell him so.’

Julia senses a premeditated quality in the vicar’s telling of this anecdote, as if he is measuring her in some way against her father’s beliefs. ‘How did you first meet him?’ she says, curious now to hear his side of the story.

The vicar smiles faintly. ‘I remember it very well indeed. Dai turned up one rainy Sunday in my church, not long after he first came to Rhayader. He asked to speak to me afterwards, meaning to contradict what I had said in my sermon about the need to abandon our old enmities with our English neighbours. To me he seemed quite the most interesting man I had met in Rhayader, with a strong intelligence and a head full of wild ideas about Welsh nationhood. I think I saw in him a special challenge to my immature pastoral skills.’

There is a history here that is half-familiar to Julia, stories she has heard in passing, though she paid little attention to them at the time. ‘My father said you used to stay up talking together late at night.’

‘Yes, that’s true. In the years before your mother came on the scene, we would often sit up into the small hours in this very room, deep into a bottle of port and some grand argument over the meaning of the world.’

A wistful thought comes to Julia now, that she is probably sitting in the same chair her father would have occupied during these long nocturnal debates. ‘I’d like to understand why you fell out with him in the end, when you were once such good friends.’

Stephen Barnabas gives the faintest of shrugs, as if she is referring to some trifling thing, a regrettable but inevitable circumstance. ‘I suppose there was a natural distance that grew between us over the years. For me, the demands of the church were becoming ever greater, while your father was trying to make a proper go of things out at Dyffryn Farm. And we had our differences from time to time.’

‘About the nationalist cause?’

The vicar’s shifting gaze comes to rest on his hands clasped together in his lap. ‘That was certainly one of our areas of disagreement,’ he says. ‘I had seen what happened in other parts of Wales when the violence came, the terrible divisive bitterness of it, and I did not want the same affliction to visit us here.’

‘My father would have agreed with you about that.’ Julia’s statement is blunt, combative. ‘He was passionate about Welsh independence, but he was never a violent man.’

Barnabas wheels himself a half-step closer to the fire, reaches awkwardly for the poker and uses it to agitate the reluctant fire back into life. ‘Yes, I came to realise much later just how true that was. At first, he was my only real connection to the more militant members of Plaid Cymru, the younger men who would sit there in a corner at the Black Lion on a Friday night, working themselves up into a fervour over the latest English insult. Dai was a calming influence on them—he knew where they had come from, you see, having made the same journey himself. Between us I thought we had the situation well under control, until everything went so very wron s so us I thg in the autumn after you were married.’

‘Because of the Cwmhir dam?’

‘Yes, because of the dam, and God knows I was not immune to the feelings that it provoked.’ The grey cat, choosing its moment to enter the room, approaches the wheelchair with the clear intention of jumping up into the vicar’s lap. He swipes at it with the poker, startling the poor creature into a hasty retreat. ‘But that was not the worst of it. We might have managed things in our own way, were it not for the rabble-rousers and agitators who descended on Rhayader like carrion-birds after the news about Cwmhir got out.’

Julia feels calmer now, more in control of the conversation. ‘I heard it was people from Oxford who were behind all the trouble.’