Flying to Nowhere: A Tale (8 page)

‘You seem alarmed,’ he continued. ‘Was it an intruder?’ No one said anything. Tetty and the second girl went into the scullery, where they found a child hiding in the corner between a cupboard and the wall. Her face was pale, and her eyes were wide and bright, but she was not crying.

At the insistence of the Manciple they searched the yard, but found no one, nor expected to. The Manciple shrugged, and looked with amused hostility at Geoffrey.

‘Your Master is looking for you,’ he said.

‘Is he?’ returned Geoffrey.

‘I believe so,’ said the Manciple absently, gazing at his nails.

Tetty buttoned the child’s dress and led her into the dairy. The Manciple was provided with the loaves he had come for and left the farm, his donkey’s panniers full. The girls resumed their work.

‘I would kill that man if you wanted me to,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’d cut little squares out of his ugly face.’

One of the girls laughed as she filled a pail, but Tetty said nothing. He tried to talk to her about other things, but she wouldn’t speak. After playing with a mousetrap for a few minutes he left and returned to Vane.

In the afternoon Mrs Ffedderbompau held the lottery. Her curtains were drawn against the sun, and she could barely turn her head towards the door when the girls filed in. Some of the younger ones giggled and held their noses, and they were sent away. Blodwen had brought the bowl with the stones in it, and Mrs Ffedderbompau directed each of them to take the stones in turn until there was only one left, and it was Gweno’s turn to take it. The others, who had been picking their stones out eagerly, now lost interest. They put their stones back into the bowl and left the room one by one, looking at Gweno with wonder, curiosity and a new respect.

When they were alone, Mrs Ffedderbompau motioned her to come closer to the bed. Gweno obeyed, although the smell was so strong.

‘Child,’ whispered Mrs Ffedderbompau. ‘Let me see you as you were made, uncovered.’

Gweno stood uncertainly.

‘Go on with you, slow thing. Take off your clothes.’

Gweno undid her dress, pulled it off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, standing in its crumpled folds as clean and naked as a peeled stick. The signs of her sex stood on her innocent body like the marks of punctuation that betray meaning in an unknown language, the most common yet most secret code, the very arrows and targets of nature. And Mrs Ffedderbompau sighed for the frail beauty of these indications of nature’s hopes.

‘Do you know, child, what it is that you will have to do?’ Gweno nodded.

‘I don’t believe you do.’ Mrs Ffedderbompau sighed again. ‘But it will be explained to you. Remember, my dear, that the novice’s ordeal is partly a ceremony, a traditional celebration of the meaning of his ordination with tokens of the new powers he pretends to, and it is partly a real test of those powers. And in all that he has renounced and in all that he has become, he is a true mirror of the Saint.’

Gweno lifted a corner of her fallen dress with her bare toe. Her eyes remained lowered with what mixture of sullenness, shame and boredom Mrs Ffedderbompau could not say.

‘Keep the Saint in mind, my dear,’ she said. ‘The Saint guards our spirit, and restores it when the body is assailed.’ And Gweno, one lock of dark hair falling across her lowered face, thought of the dry bird and the broken rock and the terrible rotting dead private soiled smell of Mrs Ffedderbompau.

The shelves of the Abbot’s library were covered with coin-sized patches of fungus the colour of raw liver. Those that were most developed were raised from the wood and could be turned aside with the fingernail to reveal greenish spores on their underside. When the Abbot tried to rub them off the shelves, he found his hands stained as if from the grease of door-hinges.

Curious! He scraped at the fungus with a corner of his habit. The cleaned wood seemed fresh and slippery, with a twiggy smell, and the occasional knot oozed gum. He had done nothing about the stony seeping from the walls, and now his sandals slithered about in the dirty veils of moisture on the flags, and the pediments of the wooden shelves were soaking up the liquid from the floor.

He was putting the finishing touches to his sermon, and had needed to consult some books. In any case, the sound of Vane’s hammering and digging disturbed him and he wanted to escape from it. Vane had already traced the channel to an exterior wall, and had now excavated half the courtyard beneath his study. Stripped to the waist, he led the operations with a single-minded fervour. The last view the Abbot had had of him was as he lowered himself into the opened conduit some thirty feet below the window. It almost looked as though he were wriggling into a bed, pulling the Abbot’s house over him like a blanket.

It always seemed possible to retreat further and further into the house to escape from intruders. Although turning left at the end of every corridor should have brought him back to his starting-point, it never did, and staring up the broad chimneys never brought a view of sky. The library, though a cellar, had cellars beneath it, and those cellars had access to rooms that were not cellars and which the Abbot had never seen. The humidity at the centre of his house seemed to be not due to the weather, but to be self-generating, like the property of a living organ. The library, dank, acrid and awash, became at once this organ’s necessary manifestation and its secret function. The words it contained were closed from immediate view, nourished by the structured textures and surfaces that contained them.

The Abbot gently stroked the supple leather of the book he was reading. He fancied it yielded beneath his palm like the flank of some peaceable grazing creature. Could leather be cured of its curing? Could the sightless hides be reassembled, clasps turn to bells, the branded spines grow tails again?

He would lose first those books bound in vellum, for the bindings would turn back to stomachs and digest the contents. Or the shelves would grow into a hedge and keep out the hand that reached for knowledge.

He replaced the book while he still had access to the shelves, before its covers might twist from his grasp with newborn awkwardness, trailing from embryonic gums a voided spittle of silent language.

He had not forgotten Mrs Ffedderbompau, but his visits had less and less use, and his mind could not reach her. She, for her part, could no longer even attempt to project her will upon the world she imagined. Even the world she saw, a dim arc of webs and beams, had nothing about it worth ordering. To be carried away, like a pet, in the folds of a garment: that was an objective indeed. If she could ride, a mite or a fairy, on the Abbot’s left ear, clinging to a tuft of his hair! The spirits of the dead would have a short life of this sort, she reflected, aunts perched on the shoulder, a grandfather tucked into a sleeve like a handkerchief. Who would be lumbered with these crumbs of matter, themselves hoarding a distant army of forebears? Washed away with useless flakes of skin, fingernails, moisture, hairs, the whole world a litter of discarded receptacles of eternal life all as dry as the husk of glow worm, starved in its paper box.

She concentrated her attention now on the perhaps doubtful existence of the throbbing effigy of discomfort that used to be her body. Experience told her that if she moved her arm she would find a cooler surface of the bed, but she was too weary to do more than lift the middle fingers of her hand, a gesture symbolising the awareness of the passing of time as in talking or waiting, a gesture that indicated or demanded the exercise of a barely-won patience. But this was a private piece of manual rhetoric, conducted beneath a blood-stained sheet. After a moment her hand was still.

She felt now beyond the disaster that had befallen her, beyond her nature and age, or any age she had ever been. And so she felt less and less sure of having any identity at all. Was it Gweno she had sent away, with her chaperones, to play her part in the novice’s night of examination, or had she gone herself and was Gweno left dying here? She could easily think (indeed, some days since had hoped) that she might be carried in her bed to the abbey, borne on the shoulders of the brothers in the folds of her soft cortège, to observe the dedication, the humiliation, the drenching, the sermon, the processsion with the witnesses to the chamber.

The sermon in particular she would have dearly loved to hear, not for its theme (which by tradition concerned some aspect of the efficacy of the Saint) nor for its truth alone, but for the truth as understood by her friend the Abbot, so solemn and shy in his dealings with the world as she had lived it, but possessing a wisdom which she craved, and a nature which she half knew she loved.

The whisperings from the dairy below, the muffled din of crockery, the slight scrape and jar of benches as the harvest girls finished their supper—these and other more distant sounds of the farm were converted in her mind to the sounds of the congregated brothers in the abbey. She imagined the Abbot ascending the pulpit, his lips slightly compressed in concentration, the beard mingled with the dark folds of his habit, his hands reaching to grip the rim of the stone pulpit, and her heart suddenly fluttered and lurched in a full knowledge of what she was leaving and what in her full life she had most lacked.

To the dark and silent room she voiced her last words, a rebuke to the emptiness about her, a challenge to the ceremonies that at the same moment were elsewhere taking place:

‘We have failed to make the little bird fly!’

Her mouth stayed open, a thread of moisture between the lips. In its absolute stillness her face seemed smaller, harder, more beautiful, like a sudden relic of itself, almost lifesize. It was as though the curtain of motion and colour had been momentarily lifted so that the reality behind it could be appraised, and the mechanism, though found to be irreversible, was a wonder for ever to the hushed audience of surrounding objects. And so the Abbot began his sermon.

Brothers, I show you here a mushroom by which you shall learn about flying. And in my other hand is my text from Ezekiel xiii.20: ‘Wherefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against your pillows! Be mindful of our brother who is brought before us in the image of the blessed Lleuddad, bearing the pains and scourging of the Lord. Hold him in your eyes and hear my words.

The mushroom is falsely named, you will say, for in it there is not much room, but little room. Yet I say there is
multum in parvo,
much room in little. In the narrow beams of this soft room there is a savour; as in the leaves of this holy book there is a Saviour, whom we may also breathe in at our nostrils and make much room for in our souls. And our souls are like the mushrooms of the fields,
multum in parvo,
an infinity of God’s insufflation in a small rotundity of skull, where little savour is not less than all the savour there is; for the Saviour once sniffed is the true savour by which we distinguish life from the corruption about it.

Which of us can distinguish the savour of life from the savour of corruption? Brothers, the stink of the deathbed is sweet with the memories of a life that folds its wings; the savour of the fungus survives the rot of the stump or dunghill. Wherefore we gather in the fields these buds of the earth which like miracles appear, white with folded wings. However, these wings are not folded up, but to be unfolded as we are to be unfolded. From the soil the life thrusts upwards to the heavens; the soil itself thrusts, as souls thrust. The mushroom, bred of no seed, is soil only; the soul is only soil, and man is corruptible dust, though full of seed.

If a man is broken on the wind so that the pouch of his seed breaks, and if the air carries his image, it is no great matter. What is this, brothers, do you call it a motive? I call it merely wind and air, the idle movement of nothing, like water stirred by the hand. And all that is stirred must settle in time.

Therefore the desire to fly is a false desire of parting from the earth, our soil and nature, and the bed of our corruption. As the prophet cried: ‘Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature to hunt souls!’ So the prophet shunned women, and hid his seed, so as not to hunt souls, for his soul’s growing was the soil’s growing that puts up the saviour in a little room that is self-bred of the soil. ‘Wherefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against your pillows, wherewith ye there hunt the souls to make them fly, and I will tear them from your arms, and will let the souls go, even the souls that ye hunt to make them fly!

A man cannot put himself above the soil of his gemination and generation, no more than can a stone. Brothers, if you say a flower flies, I say it flies only on its root. If you say a birdflies, I say it flies only on its root, which is the foot with which it rests on the earth. The mountain lays its head in weariness, and the bird must tumble; bones return to the soil; and man is dust.

Brothers, remember the story of Lleuddad and the bird which flew above the island when the island was a stone. The Saint was weak with thirst and likely to die, and he looked on the bird which soared above him, drinking up the clouds, and he wished to be a bird. But while he wished to be a bird the island was dry, for the bird flew out of reach and drank up the clouds. Then Lleuddad fell back on the parched earth to die, and no longer wished to be a bird; whereupon the bird straightway fell to the ground, and where it fell broke the ground and a spring bubbled up out of the ground which the blessed Lleuddad drank and was saved.

What is the temptation that every monk must put behind him? It is the temptation to forget that he is dust. It is the temptation to fly.

Remember that spending with women is a struggle from roots, an attempt to fly. A man exalted of woman is a man who tries to fly. Free of the soil, the millions swam; lip touches lip, restlessly seeking rest. Over the soil they move, finger to finger. Touch mysteriously propels them, endlessly, as though the soil does not wait.

Remember that spending with women is a struggle from roots, an an attempt to fly. A man who uses the grape is a man who tries to fly. There are shadows cast by no fire, and meaningless laughter, and the room is not still.