Summon the Bright Water (7 page)

The map showed me that Little Drybrook was a hamlet safely far from Broom Lodge, which could be reached by forest tracks. I arrived early to reconnoitre the surroundings and waited just off the roadside. His battered car was unmistakable.

‘Ah! Glad to see you. Fixed up? Better be! Rain tonight,’ he said as soon as I stopped the car.

‘I can keep it out.’

‘Used to open-air life? Not all books?’

‘Not all books. Camels, donkeys, canoes – you name it. I’ve travelled by it.’

‘Middle East?’

‘Middle East.’

‘Colder up here.’

‘Colder in Greenland.’

‘Been there too?’

His voice sounded regretful when, finding myself slipping into his staccato speech, I spoke of the extreme climates I had known. Since he had been just too young for the war he may have seen little active service. Possibly the unexciting existence of a regular soldier had unhinged a too contemplative mind and inclined him towards dreams of a past in which war for the sake of Christianity was the normal spice of life. He’d have done better to choose the Crusades, but I suppose the very dubious Arthur gave more scope for imagination.

‘Good man! Thought you’d manage! But you’ll need a blanket.’

He handed over a splendid carriage rug dating from the time when there were no car heaters and told me to take it with me when I left.

‘Jump in! Short run into the Forest where we won’t be interrupted.’

He had found an idyllic spot between the armchair roots of a noble oak where he opened his picnic basket. It had a luxurious air of the eighteen-nineties about it and had belonged, he told me, to his grandfather. Gin, whisky, white Burgundy, strawberries and half a cold Severn salmon appeared, each from its proper compartment.

‘Couldn’t swipe anything from Broom Lodge,’ he said, ‘so I got it in Lydney and hung about till the chap had cooked it for me. Ought to know how. Catches them.’

While we were eating I encouraged him to talk of his religion. He was as sure of immortality as any pious Christian but considered that Marrin’s belief in reincarnation was an unnecessary theory. I ventured to bring up the question of Arthur’s battles, in which he himself seemed to be personally involved; then he only choked on his salmon and raised an emotional, hot-gospeller’s voice to declare that the past was always the present.

‘What’s the past? Only a string of presents one after another. No such thing as time, Simeon says. He’s quite right there. So the past is always the present if you can recognise it. That’s the difficulty: to recognise the fourth dimension when you’re in it. Could draw a diagram if I were a mathematician.’

Having cordially accepted the string-of-presents theory as expounded by Major Quixote – there’s a flaw in it somewhere, but it does account for visions of the past – I started on the strawberries and asked him how much he knew of Marrin’s movements.

‘Too busy to leave the place in the day much unless he’s off to London to sell his trinkets, but he does go out at night when the tide serves his purpose. Meditating under water they say.’

‘And if I want to leave a message for you, how shall I do it?’

He asked if I was sure that I could find again the ragged stump of the sapling which he had cut. Yes, I was sure.

‘Then bury your note alongside and put a stick to mark it. I’ll do the same.’

It was now twilight. I thanked him warmly and got up to go.

‘Any trouble with alcohol?’ he asked.

‘No trouble.’

‘Good! Take the whisky bottle.’

I thanked him warmly and left, but did not go home. First I watched the major drive away; he was shaking his head and talking to himself when he got into the car, perhaps in sadness at the criminality of his enigmatic friend. Then I set out on foot for Broom Lodge. I reckoned that if there was anything at all in this meditation over the flowing tide, Marrin, after last night, would have a good deal to meditate about and might get down to it straightaway.

It was nearly dark when I arrived, so that I was perfectly safe in the garden on the open front of the house. Lights were on in the hall for those who preferred earnest discussion to bed; lights were going off upstairs as craftsmen and farm hands who would be up early settled down to sleep. It occurred to me that if Simeon Marrin wished to give his disappearances an air of spiritual mystery he would slip away at the back into the shadows of the trees rather than walk out of the front door like ordinary humanity; so I made a circuit into the woodland at the back and waited.

A little before midnight, eight persons left the house and took the forest track into the darkness. I could tell by his height that one of them was Marrin, carrying a box. Another appeared to be carrying a trumpet. When they had passed, I followed. I had no experience of this sort of prowling, but it seemed simple enough so long as the pursued made enough noise, however slight, to cover the sound of the pursuer. Of that there was little, for I kept to the soft grass in the middle of the ride and was ultra-careful where I stepped.

It was soon plain that their destination was not the river but somewhere deep in the Forest. They stopped in an open space between the oaks where the young green bracken was thick over the brown mat of last year’s fronds. Marrin used a powerful flashlight to satisfy himself that there was no one in the immediate neighbourhood, but omitted to search behind tree trunks. It looked as if an open-air ceremony was about to begin. That did not surprise me. I had thought all along that the commune was very secular – plenty of casual discussions and meetings but, apart from the hours of meditation, no set ritual. I had expected from that druidical inner circle robes, invocations and other impressive mumbo-jumbo.

Now I got it, and in that setting it was indeed impressive. The trumpet was not a trumpet but the torch of old times. When stuck in the ground and lit, it threw a steady, smoky red light over the proceedings, allowing me to see that Marrin was clothed in a long blue robe. He opened the casket which I had seen in the laboratory and took out the golden cauldron, lifting it high above his head by the two handles with the gesture of a priest. Its weight was obvious, and I was again convinced by its triumphant simplicity that it was ancient. While one of his seven tonsured acolytes chanted in a low voice some language that I think was old Welsh – as near as one could get to the vernacular in which British seamen and miners would have prayed to Nodens if they had no Latin – Marrin passed the cauldron to another. A third who carried a covered pot lifted the lid and poured the contents into the cauldron. A strong, intoxicating scent of herbs and honey came downwind to me. Meanwhile the remaining four stamped out a circle in the bracken with Marrin in the centre. When it was complete, one of them passed the cauldron back to Marrin across the circumference.

The object of the rite, so far as I could guess (and since the language of gestures is universal one tends to guess right), was to propitiate or help the spirits of the dead. I don’t wonder that Marrin had called a conclave of adepts. I’m going to need quite a lot of propitiation. He did not of course mention my name. To him alone the ceremony had special meaning.

The seven adepts appeared to see and to bless some sort of apparition in the air above the bowl. The curious thing is that I saw it myself: a diaphanous, moving figure like a pencil of mist rising from the ground. My brain of course was affected by the brew in the bowl and mistranslating the message from the eyes. I have no doubt that Marrin saw it too. He was not play-acting this time. He believed so absolutely in himself and his rite that he created the illusion for the rest of us, perhaps by telepathy and the hypnotic effect of the drug. Proof that it was illusion? First, that I wasn’t dead at all and only he thought I was. Second, that all the codswallop of solemnities could produce the desired effect on a profane, sceptical outsider, unclean ritually and in fact.

They spent about half an hour on the In Memoriam service and returned to Broom Lodge as secretly as they had set out. I followed, in order to see what door they used in case it ever came in handy, and then walked home to my den – myself feeling a ghost wandering among trees and tracks, for on the way I did not pass man or sheep, partly due to the late hour and a slight drizzle which had started.

Tucked up in my outside lavatory with the major’s rug over me and a good swig of his whisky inside me, I thought over the curious scene. Was such liturgy at the heart of Broom Lodge? I thought not. It was confined to the druidical drop-outs – a vulgar nickname of mine, considering the woodland features of the ceremony handed down from pagan and poetical Britons. I knew the names of four of them: the chanter, Evans, a sulky fellow who strutted like a hierarch which Marrin never did; Raeburn, who had poured the brew into the cauldron, an excellent craftsman with a sense of humour in daily life; Ballard, the curate-looking chap who had been digging up tulips when I first arrived; and Carver, a compact little holy man who had passed the cauldron to Marrin.

Evidently it was such a rite as this which the major suspected and considered a blasphemous misuse of the cauldron, far worse than the half-pagan heresies somehow related to the mysteries of metals. Transmutation I did not believe, but those herbs, of which the heavy scent flowed off under the branches further than the smoke of the torch, suggested that Marrin was a devoted student of ancestral pharmacy and that the laboratory itself was no pretence.

I slept long and late, recovering from the previous two nights and such exercise as I had not taken since tracing the once-cultivated fields on the coast of Greenland. I found myself stiff but fit. The first job was to buy supplies from somewhere miles away where I had never been before. Coleford to the north and on the edge of the Forest seemed a likely spot. It turned out to be an ugly little Victorian town like most of the mining settlements, but with everything I needed. Having noticed a fire-watching tower which commanded most of the Forest, I decided against using my ruined hearth in case the plume of smoke was noticed, and bought a Primus stove and a frying pan. With eggs, butter, cheese, bread fresh from the oven, meat, green stuff and a variety of cans, plus a bottle of brandy to disguise the taste of coal in the sparkling water from the nearest stream, I returned home to my plantation.

My mind was a blank on how and where to make my next attack on Broom Lodge. According to the major, Marrin seldom left the estate during the day. Night – well, it was pointless to go out every night in the hope of something happening. The best bet was for the corpse to create some diversion, in order to walk off with that chalice and obtain an expert’s opinion.

In the reddish light of the torch the two-handled cauldron had again seemed to me of great age. Could it be, I wondered, that Marrin was passing off his own work as two thousand years old or better? Highly improbable that he could deceive the authorities at the British Museum! And if he had, we should all have heard of the extraordinary find. The papers would be full of it.

A photograph, then, from several angles. The major could probably manage that. But would photographs of the cauldron be enough to tell an expert whether the goldsmith was living or long dead? I doubted it. However, once my mind began to run on photographs a secondary object presented itself. How about some shots of the turtle? I knew a zoologist who would remember me well, though I had not seen him for some years. He would give me his opinion by return of post if I asked for it. The beast could not be so obscure that neither he nor his colleagues could fail to identify it.

At any rate it was a scheme to fill up an otherwise empty day. So I wrote a note to the major: ‘Can you secretly take some close-up photographs of the turtle in his laboratory and leave them here? I believe they may give us a line on what he is doing.’

This time I was very careful to approach Broom Lodge from the back, avoiding the paths, moving from tree to tree and ready to drop into the bracken at any moment. I had more trouble than I expected in finding the stump of the ash sapling. That done, I covered the letter with a cushion of moss and marked it with a white sliver of wood.

No one was about except a party of two men and two girls on the nearest track, walking in a dream of the Forest of Arden and prettily singing a madrigal, so I determined to have a look in daylight at the open space where my wandering spirit had received attention. That, too, took some finding, for there were many places where the oaks stood far enough apart to form a glade, though none had the beaten-down bracken between them. I doubt if I ever would have found it if not for the glimpse of another person moving across my front. I turned on to a parallel course and arrived at the outer pillars of the woodland sanctuary, on the opposite side to my position the night before.

I recognised him. It was Carver, whom I had often seen packing a primitive kiln with bricks to be fired – hard physical labour which he carried out with a set, contented smile. Those smiles were one of the most exasperating features of the tonsured, expressing the false puritanical humility of the saved. During the ceremony he appeared to have lost something, for he was now searching through and under the squashed bracken, moving methodically over the ground which he had covered the previous night.

After some twenty minutes he gave up and started back. I was curious to know what he had dropped and, as so often happens when a fresh pair of eyes take over a search, found the missing article near the circumference of the circle. It was his wrist watch, and hard to see since it was face downwards with the back encased in dark green leather. The strap was worn and half split, and the watch must have fallen from his wrist when he stretched out across the beaten circle to pass the bowl to Marrin. Obviously neither of them had noticed it, being entranced by fumes and piety.

I picked it up and would have liked to return it. After all, it had been lost in an act of kindly monkeying with my soul. But even returning it through the major would lead to far too many questions. So I decided to leave it where Carver or one of his fellows could not miss it – not difficult since I knew the path by which they went out and back. Some of the colony’s pigs were rooting and grubbing not far away, covering any noise I made and allowing me to walk normally. He at the same time must have been dreaming of enlightenment or in no hurry to return to heaving bricks, for I found that I had got ahead of him. I laid the watch in the middle of the track face upwards with a shaft of sunlight falling directly on it through the leaves, and slipped back into the bracken to see what he would do.