Flying to Nowhere: A Tale (2 page)

‘The problem,’ said Vane, ‘may well be one of the availability of Church funds.’

‘Ah,’ nodded the Abbot.

‘And there is the problem, too,’ continued Vane, ‘of the pilgrims who have not returned.’

‘Why should they return?’ inquired the Abbot. ‘You know that for many the journey is the final quest of a life committed to worship. The pilgrims’ road across the mountains of the peninsula to this island is not an easy one. Many are old. When finally they reach us, as if grasping a hand held out in comfort and alms-giving, they are content to die.’

‘I have lists, and testimonies from relatives,’ said Vane. ‘I shall wish to inspect graves.’

‘To inspect graves?’ murmured the Abbot. ‘Of course.’ Again he looked out of the window, almost as if a grave or two might be glimpsed from it. This gesture, and his general demeanour, served as an indication of his wish that his relationship with Vane should reach at an early stage a useful degree of informality. But the interview remained a critical one, nonetheless, and Vane, sipping at his bowl of milk with his eyes fixed on the apparently abstracted Abbot, was put on his guard.

That same evening he retired early to the room which had been put at his disposal and unlocked the chest which contained his papers. Carefully he read over yet again his episcopal warrant, and instructed the boy to cut pens and make fresh ink. Then he prayed for guidance in his undertaking.

The Abbot slept badly. His own evening hours were available to novices who wanted to consult him on personal matters, and this lending of an ear and bestowing of advice usually served to distract him from his own thoughts, and to bring sleep. However, on this occasion the preparations for Vane’s visitation had already interrupted his daily routine of contemplation and investigation, and the evening visit of the senior novice with new material for his book of meditation prompted still further concern with their guest. From this novice the Abbot was able to gather a full account of the incident at the harbour, with details that Vane himself had not supplied—the loss of a packet from the mainland directed to the Abbot himself; the full degree of discontent of the boat-owner; the insistence by Vane that he be carried up the rocky shore and the calling-down of the sturdiest of the girls from the hayfield to perform the service, and so on. The Abbot was not pleased with any of this, and resolved to watch Vane more carefully than he had thought necessary. He questioned the novice closely, and paid scant attention to the young man’s own observations beyond remarking that the book of nature was not to be erased since it had been written for all time and only our ignorance of its future pages hinders our full understanding of its larger plan. ‘That was not what I meant,’ thought the novice. ‘He has something on his mind. He has not been listening at all.’

When the Abbot blew out his candle at last and settled his head on the pillow his thoughts were of the difficult satisfaction of Vane and of the absence of graves.

He would fall asleep and wake abruptly at the very moment of unconsciousness with a distinct and curious jerking of the left shoulder. He was ready for sleep, he knew, and yielded to it willingly, only to find himself startled and wide-eyed at this involuntary motion of the neck and shoulder.

He lay on his right side, with his right palm under his thigh and his left palm flat down under the pillow, legs bent and crossed. A single sheet of fine linen soon became clammy in the heat and was thrown off. He tried the same position on his left side, was immediately uncomfortable and returned to his right side.

He was unused to visitors with whom he must converse on a footing more equal than that of master and pupil. Had he given to Vane the impression that he was sceptical of miracles, and therefore of the curative power of the Saint’s well? Perhaps he had. If so, he regretted it, for though Vane was an intelligent man unlikely to find reason to be committed to the superstitions of the mass, he was here in a critical, investigative, potentially hostile role. Any remark of the Abbot’s which might seem at all relevant to his inquiry would certainly be noted in his papers for possible use in his conclusions—unlike his comments to the novice, for example, which might on serious reflection appear more precisely heretical. Who should assert without danger, reflected the Abbot, that natural law was immutable and already written? Didn’t that seem necessarily binding upon God who was, after all, the legislator of that law? Was it not, indeed, the rationale of disbelief in all miracles, whereas his conversation with Vane had touched only on the evident unlikelihood of such prevalence of miracles as the existence of shrines required? The Abbot concluded that it probably was, and that it was a good thing that he believed he could rely both on the discretion and, alas, on the essential obtuseness of the novice.

Soon he fell asleep again, but was immediately woken by his strangely jerking shoulder. He knew that he had somehow strained this shoulder, and now remembered how.

In the early hours of that morning he had gone down to his study, using, upon some whim, the second staircase. This staircase was one that he hardly ever used, being a narrow circular one of stone fitted within a buttress of the house. Its steps were worn and their descent precipitous, around a central stone pillar which it was advisable to cling to with the left hand.

Thus he had descended, his mind not so much on his studies as upon how to remove such traces of them as might provoke awkward questions from the official visitor, due that day if the tides permitted. The dissecting chamber was well enough out of the way. He sometimes couldn’t find it easily himself in the mazes of the house. And the library he always kept locked, too, out of respect for those silent guardians of words, laboriously accumulated. Whatever lay casually in his study that Vane’s eye might light on—a forbidden monograph, perhaps, or a gland in a little dish, brought from the chamber for longer reflection upon its secret properties—he intended that morning to hide away.

But the rhythm of the stone stairs and the coolness of the central pillar beneath his palm distracted him. The pleasure of leaning at a slight angle above his feet as he placed them one after the other at that precise point on each triangular wedge of step to lend at once enough width for momentary balance and enough narrowness for downward spring and propulsion was combined with the pleasure of the friction within the light grip of his hand and kept him moving on even after he had come to the small wooden door that led to his study.

Perhaps he was still not properly awake. He tried to remember if he had known before that the staircase continued beyond that point. But whether he had known or not did not seem to matter, for it indubitably did. On and on he went, faster and faster. As he descended it became cooler, and although the Abbot’s heart raced from the exercise and his shoulders and sides were damp with sweat, he felt about his cheeks the dead cold air of cellars, and the stone beneath his palm was wet.

Round and round he went, now taking two steps at a time. It had become absolutely black so that he could not even see his feet beneath him. He supposed, therefore, that at any moment the stairs might come to an end and that he would be brought up with a jolt. But the continued sense of an unseeable void beneath him and the obsessive movement of his legs carried him on, dizzyingly.

He did not understand how the stairs could continue for so long, or where they might lead. His left shoulder ached, as did the muscles of his shins and the front of his thighs. At times his right shoulder brushed against the circular containing wall of the stairway, and he knew that the descent was narrowing. It was also now less cool and the air less easy to breathe, the pleasant cellary mustiness succeeded by a rank metallic stench. But the stairs went on.

And then there had come into the Abbot’s mind a vague image. It was less a mental embodiment of any ascertainable shape than a substantial, though imprecise, formulation of a sudden unwillingness to precipitate himself further down that winding stone flight. He knew that he might put the image from his mind. He knew very well that in his automatic downward motion assisted by gravity and the concentration of darkness, he might ignore the image, refuse to yield to it.

But there was something about the image that compelled him to yield. And he had yielded, succumbing to a sudden terror that brought out the hairs on his neck and beard and rooted him to the stone above the interminable stairway, his head spinning.

On his way up he counted three thousand and eighty-seven steps before he reached his study door.

This was the reason for his strained shoulder and his difficulty in getting to sleep. But curiously enough, having remembered the reason, the Abbot became drowsy again in contemplation of the unending stairs, and this time the troubling alertness of his fatigued muscles found an appropriate object in his own memory: thus he fell asleep dreaming not of the troublesome visitation of Vane but ofhis descent of the stairs that morning. In the dream it became hot, as though the stones had been lifted from a fire to warm a bed. And in his dream, hot as he was and totally gripped by fear as he passed the three-, the four-, the five-thousandth step, in his willed dream this time the Abbot did not stop.

During the following day, Vane covered many sheets of paper in his forthright unhurried hand. Bells rang at the appointed hour for the divine offices, but Vane, who had attended matins after rising, and shaving his finely-sculpted chin as best he could in tepid water, ignored all calls to devotion and kept at his work. At midday he was brought two wooden bowls, one containing ewe’s milk with bread crumbled in it and the other boiled plantains. He ate some of this food without enthusiasm, while reading over the accounts he had made of the morning’s interviews. Flies buzzed in the pane of the one small window through which the sun streamed between the thick stone walls.

Working in the relative coolness of his room all day, Vane did not suffer from the unusual heat. He noticed, though, that most of the novices who came to answer his questions were exhausted and listless. They spoke briefly and without interest, saying no more than was necessary to respond to his interrogation with a dutiful politeness and the appearance of honesty.

In the afternoon he was visited by the Manciple, a lay brother of unpleasing appearance who said least of all. He had a squat heavy head, with dark eyebrows and patches of unshaven bristle on his jowls. He appeared to have almost no neck and kept his face entirely and fixedly on Vane’s, grinning hideously in what appeared to be an equal measure of stupidity and guile. To some questions he simply nodded or assented, when a statement of fact or choice of alternatives had in fact been required of him. At one point he ignored a question altogether and, glancing at the half-eaten bowls over which the flies now crawled in close abandon, asked if there was not some kind of food which Vane particularly craved and which might perhaps be obtained for him? Was he used to meat? They did not have much meat on the island, but every effort would be made to make their distinguished guest comfortable. He had only to give the word.

Vane muttered some reply, put down his pen and warily rubbed his eyes. He felt that he was, in general, getting nowhere. When the Manciple had left, he rose and walked about the room, observing idly the suggestive shapes formed by the cracks and flakes of the whitewashed plaster. Later, after nones, the Abbot returned to make inquiries about his progress, genial but unrelaxed, like the bedside visitor of a sick man.

‘You have no register of pilgrims,’ complained Vane.

The Abbot raised his eyebrows.

‘Should we have such a thing?’ he said, in surprise. ‘Who is to tell who is a pilgrim and who is not?’

‘It would have been advisable,’ said Vane.

‘And laborious,’ replied the Abbot. ‘It would require interrogation of boat passengers, a system of classification. We don’t have the time for such a thing.’

‘Should you not know who is on the island?’ asked Vane.

‘Visitors to the island hardly go unnoticed,’ said the Abbot. ‘They need lodging. Either here or at the farm.’

‘And those who lodge here are pilgrims?’

‘Possibly.’

‘They attend at the well to be cured?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Come,’ urged Vane. ‘The miracles of Saint Lleuddad’s well are the foundation of the abbey’s charter. The well is the object of all the pilgrims who follow the long saint’s road to the island to be cured.’

‘Or to die,’ said the Abbot.

Vane sighed.

‘We seem to have had this conversation before,’ he said.

‘Please don’t misunderstand me,’ said the Abbot. ‘Pilgrimage is a symbolic act, is it not? It is only the outward sign of an inward direction. It is the earnest of our spiritual condition, a manifestation of the natural tendency of life to seek its fulfilment. Life is not a condition for which, I think you will admit, there is any cure.’

‘I hope you would not say such a thing to the Bishop,’ said Vane. ‘There have been many bequests for the upkeep of the well, in gratitude for the cures it has effected.’

‘Or in the hope of the reward of health,’ said the Abbot. ‘The Bishop’s exchequer is heavy with the remorse of the rich.’

‘Heavy enough to support the foundations of this abbey,’ put in Vane.

‘I acknowledge it,’ said the Abbot. ‘But I cannot arrange cures. Cures are not for sale.’

‘Are you saying that there are no cures?’ asked Vane.

‘Perhaps there have been cures, but I do not know in every case what has caused them,’ replied the Abbot.

‘When was there last a cure?’

‘I cannot say.’

Vane frowned and was silent. After a moment he went to his papers on the table and looked through them, picking one folded sheet out with deliberation.

‘I think I should read you this,’ he said. ‘It is only one of many pieces of evidence that has reached the Bishop that something is amiss here, but it will serve to represent them all. And I hope that when I have read it to you, you may have some answer to give me.’

The Abbot inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment.