Flying to Nowhere: A Tale (7 page)

‘Think so, do,’ she said. ‘And if I were, where would my mother’s daughter be now, then?’

He shook his head, smiling.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘with the Tylwyth Teg themselves. Bound with ropes of gossamer and carried off to live with the fair family. And I to take her place.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Well, why should fairies drudge? It can’t be so, for the fair family have the bees and creatures to do their small service. Why should they live with folk?’

‘So you aren’t a fairy?’

‘No more than you are a brother. Or have you come to take orders?’

‘Never,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I would rather be out of here, you can be sure of that.’

‘The brothers hope for a great reward,’ she said, as if he should consider her information carefully before making such a rash decision as to leave the island. ‘If they are ordained they will live for ever.’

‘Do you believe that?’ asked Geoffrey.

She thought for a moment.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘But they must be quite beyond this world, and if you can get quite beyond this world, beyond sleeping and eating and cows and grass and sky and all of it, then...’

‘Then what?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘Just then,’ said the girl. ‘And if.’

‘And what can there be beyond?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What do
you
think?’

He looked at her looking at him, all eyes and hair, and the blood drained out of his cheeks and into his ears and he could not imagine at that moment anything at all like beyond, for it was all now, cows and grass and sand and sky and smiling lips.

For days Mrs Ffedderbompau watched the pair from her window, Tetty walking in the orchard, smiling and twisting the ends of her long hair, Geoffrey at her shoulder, talking of something or other. Or the two of them on the hill below the path, outlined against the sea, walking at that slight distance which results from intense conversation.

She sent Tetty for mushrooms, for which in her broken state and fever she felt a slight craving. When the girl appeared in the orchard with the basket, Geoffrey was as usual with her, walking just behind her, with one arm extended and the hand on her shoulder. The manner of walking, at once proprietorial and tender, stirred echoes within her, but of precisely what, she could not say.

From that moment she decided that she knew very well that she would not recover. And in that moment of knowing that we must know that we know, or else we might as well not know, there came to her suddenly and blindingly all that she had till then not fully known.

Or had she once known it? Was it perhaps that now understanding itself had to suffice and could not issue in action?

In the hot drench and prickle of the bedclothes she could not move in, the thoughts cast masterful shadows like imaginary limbs. They moved about the room behind her eyes, as if ready to pounce upon the innocent and vulnerable surfaces, wood, linen, glass, and press them into service. It was memory asserting the perpetual rights of experience, as she willed a cupboard to open, a cloth to be unfolded, a liquid to be poured.

Did it matter whether or not these things happened?

She thought that what had happened once couldn’t be undone and was good for all time, that what was going to happen, was indeed at that moment happening, was perfectly as good as anything else that ever had.

Did it matter to whom these things had happened, were happening, or were going to happen?

She felt, mysteriously, that it didn’t matter at all. For what she knew that she knew was certain as it could be, and what she didn’t know was not in question at all.

By concentrating on one thing, she not only established that thing, but avoided the trouble of having to establish any more than that thing.

She began with the basket, and the hand through it that grasped its further rim lightly, the handle on the forearm, the empty woven bulk resting on the hip. Placed on the grass it awaited its filling.

Fill it!

Behind shut lids her eyes scanned the darkness as if it were greenness, searching for the tell-tale pattern of white. No, nothing so much as a pattern, but more like the trail of drops from a full bowl of milk carefully carried. And no, not so much white, as bone or wool was, misleading the eye, but the dull living colourless curdled colour of spider eggs, round like them, too. But hard and motionless in the grass, neither struggling to hide nor survive, quiet and yet signalling proudly, both a promise and a surprise with their tight unborn scent of almonds, urine and milk. Webs, roofs, babies... What were they, neither plant nor animal? She filled the basket quickly with the fat curled buds, which rested against each other companionably, respectful of contact, bowed and nodding together in a gathered resignation, uprooted palaces with the glorious savour of the fields upon them, their lintels flecked with soil.

Too quickly, alas; an unlikely bounty. For try as she could, she could see nothing else but useless fragments: a finger and thumb at the thick base, pressing back the fronds, easing its root; lips half open with the eagerness of the task; the plucking, the deliverance. And so the basket filled. And she was not inside Tetty’s head at all, but inside her own. The fragments of another’s life were too clearly borrowed to be real.

The mushrooms were brought to her at last, but they weren’t the ones she had imagined. Some were taken to be simmered, but she found she couldn’t eat them. The rest were left in a bowl in her room, where for a time their fragrance cast a spell.

‘They are drying into the air,’ said the Abbot when he saw them.

There could be no reply to this, unless it were to complain, with an air of comedy that weariness and pain could all too easily dispel, ‘and so am I.’ She quite wanted to say other things, some of them of mild importance indeed, things that would not normally be said, and might not be said even now at this late hour of life unless some courage could be found— or the right moment. What were the subjects of these remote communications? Geography and accident, the power of sacraments, unspoken love, time and death, celibacy and widowhood. What suitable occasion might be found to air them? A deathbed. Only a deathbed? And would anyone listen even then?

In the end Mrs Ffedderbompau decided to raise a more theoretical issue.

‘Why,’ she asked, ‘am I inside myself and not somewhere else?’

The Abbot smiled faintly, his hands on his knees, leaning back in the uncomfortable chair. He was prepared for kind words, unusual feelings, even for confessions, efforts at truth. But her question was too close to his own inquiries to be easily pursued.

‘I am a victim of what I can see, feel, hear,’ she continued. ‘But why should I be?’

‘Why, indeed?’murmured the Abbot,looking at the place where her jaw became her ear and was framed with falling hair that was also crushed into the pillow.

‘I don’t blame you for not listening,’ thought Mrs Ffedderbompau, and she smiled a smile which the pain made the more radiant.

‘How is your glow worm?’ asked the Abbot.

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Ffedderbompau. His question was like a space on a table on which she could put down a heavy load. She had much to tell him about the glow worm he had found for her. ‘I put her into a small thin box, such as pills are usually sent in, and between eleven and twelve last night I saw her shine through the box very clearly on one side, the box being shut.’

‘Remarkable,’ said the Abbot.

‘I put white paper into the box, and the worm into the paper: it shone through the paper and box both.’

‘She is a beacon of the hedges,’ said the Abbot. ‘The blown embers of Nature’s dying fire.’

‘But in the morning, about eight of the clock,’ went on Mrs Ffedderbompau, ‘she seemed dead, and holding her in a very dark place, I could see very little light, and that only when she was turned upon her back and by consequence put into some voluntary motion.’

‘And now?’ enquired the Abbot. ‘How is she now?’

‘Look for yourself,’ said Mrs Ffedderbompau.

The Abbot did look.

‘Why,’ he laughed, ‘she is walking briskly up and down in her box, shining as clearly as ever!’

Mrs Ffedderbompau laughed too.

‘Yes!’ she exclaimed, eagerly conspiring with him in pleasure at the observation, as though there were nothing else worth serious comment.

The windows of the cells were so small and high that the moon simply cast its ghostly patches on the ceilings without generally illuminating the sleeping shapes and their few possessions. And yet the outlines seemed quite clear in the half-darkness; the scrubbed bowl, the scowling cherubs at the shoulders of an oratory, the metal clasps of a book on a small table.

The novice who was shortly to undergo the night of examination reached out his hand and touched one of the clasps. His book was not finished, and he thought it might never be finished. The reflections in it of things as they really were could be no more, he decided, than insufficient reflections of things only as they seemed to be, reflections of reflections, moonlight patches at a pathetic remove from the sun.

Down the central passage between the rows of cells one of the brothers walked with a candle. His shadow, slanted and gigantesque before him, wavered and retreated as he moved forward.

The novice, lying on his cot with his hands clasped on his chest, saw the light from the candle through the crack above his door. He thought:

‘Fire, whether near or distant, is all that we have to represent the illumination of the spirit. Its light passes fitfully over the darkened surfaces which are neither here nor there without it.’

After a while the light outside his room was gone, and he thought about the coming examination. For him it was like the lighting of a candle made ready for the testing touch of an external flame and required to bear it steadily against all wind of doubt and trial. The candle had not created its flame, and could preserve it for no longer than the length and thickness of the wax allowed, but for a lifetime the light was bestowed and he must prove its worthy guardian.

The flame danced upon the liquid tip of the wax as if in despite of the only substance that could give it life. It was tethered there, like the last leaf on a tree blasted by the storm. The novice thought:

‘The spirit struggles to be free, vain as the wave struggling to attain the shape of a horse, or a horse struggling to fly.’

And he gave out a great cry in the solitude of his cell. None of the monks did more than stir slightly in their sleep, for they were dead tired with the unaccustomed labour of excavating the stone conduit at the brow of the mountain near the Saint’s well. Under Vane’s direction they had worked for two days and revealed a passage hollowed from the giant blocks of stone that took the overflow of the well at a steady gradient down its cylindrical channel, wide enough for the passage of bodies, and polished smooth to speed their descent. The monstrous pipe of stone was set into, and indeed constituted the basis of, the path that led down from the well to the abbey. At intervals Vane ordered the monks to dig away at the cropped turf and topsoil to establish the continuation of the chiselled boulders beneath.

Torn between hatred of the island and a desire to get to the bottom of its mysteries, Vane would gaze out to sea as the monks bent to each new task, as if the appearance of the boat from the mainland were an expected signal for him to cease his commands, draw his investigations to a close and return to the Bishop.

But the boat did not come, and he continued to work the silent monks as though they were animals. The Abbot thought it wise to give him the authority to do so, and the monks, stooped all day in the heat, could think it no more than their duty to obey.

When the milk was solid enough, Tetty cut it with a knife and the cut bled whey. She made parallel cuts and the milk quivered. She could just tip the heavy bowl, making each scar of milk budge. She then made cross-cuts until the surface of the milk was a mesh of squares. Another girl helped her to turn the contents of the bowl into a basket, a tumbling mass of slippery strips, the whey draining away.

They were crumbling handfuls of sage into the cheese when Geoffrey came in with news of the excavations.

‘The channel leads right up to the Abbot’s house,’ he said, helping them to hang the dried bunches on to the hooks in the rafters.

‘So?’ smiled Tetty.

‘Vane thinks the Abbot is stealing the bodies of the pilgrims.’

‘Why, who could he be stealing them from?’

Tetty put her hands lightly on Geoffrey’s shoulders and jumped down from the chair she was standing on.

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Geoffrey.

‘Don’t you?’ said Tetty, putting the tip of her finger to his nose.

‘He’s stealing from the pilgrims.’

‘What would the pilgrims want with their bodies when they’re dead? Anyway, you can’t steal something from itself.’

‘Why not,’ persisted Geoffrey.

‘You could steal a gold watch from a house,’ said Tetty, ‘but you couldn’t steal a gold watch from a gold watch.’

‘This is silly,’ said Geoffrey, ‘and I’m exhausted.’

He sat down on the cool stone bench that was built down one side of the dairy, leaning his head back against the wall. Tetty gave him a piece of bread, but after one bite he put it down on the stone beside him.

When all the cheese was draining, and the basins were being scoured, there was a noise outside like a sharp intake of breath. Geoffrey opened his eyes in time to see two of the older girls disappearing from the dairy, one carrying a knife. He looked questioningly at Tetty, who was looking out of the door. When she hurried out too, he followed her.

The outer door was closing. Or was it opening? As the girl with the knife passed through she confronted the Manciple tying his donkey to the porch. Or was he untying it?

‘Who was that person who just left?’ he smirked. ‘Someone I’ve not seen before, I think.’

They looked around, but there was no one.

‘There,’ said the Manciple. ‘He went round the corner, into the yard.’

The girl who was carrying the knife had it raised and held out in front of her bodice like the handle of a pan. She kept it there.