The Fish Ladder (9 page)

A tree grows on the island – an extraordinary tree – seeded, it is said, from the pip of Merlin’s apple. The apple that he discarded as he turned away from a wicked enchantress; growing hard, his power drawn from him, he was turned to stone by her, and only his bones remained. The bones are said to lie inside a cave and a child could reach for them, could feel for Merlin’s bones, if only they knew where to look.

In our garden, pushed into the hedge, there is another tree, although it’s more like a bush, being round like a spider’s nest with no obvious trunk, just spindles of leaf-covered wands which in late summer are studded with lemony, pink-striped fruit. Our tree was propagated by a local horticulturist from this one twisted parent, the oldest apple in Europe, the oldest apple in the world, which has evolved beyond recognition into a clattering wooden net, as vigorous as a vine, braced against the thin soil and burnt salt winds of the island. Twenty thousand saints are buried alongside Merlin, and possibly also King Arthur, for Geoffrey of Monmouth maintained that it was Avalon, after
afal lon
, meaning lane of apples in Welsh.

But our business was not with the saints, or with the apples, or with the king and the wizard and his bones. We had come to the headland, to Anelog, and we were searching for St Mary’s Well.

When Evie and I arrived we found everything enclosed, improbably, given the June day, in mist. The road was discernible, although only just, and when it ran to grass I stopped the car. There was nothing to see – no hill, no apron of land, no island. Cool and white, we inhabited a cloud; it was a curiously muted world. We left the car and began to walk in the direction of the cliffs. Our eyelashes and hair filled with beads of moisture that ran down our faces like tears, both delighting, and frightening, Evie. She was sure that a space had opened in the mist around us, and that this space was following us, which unnerved her. I tried to explain the idea of visibility, the idea of cloud density, and that we were able to see a little way ahead, and also a little way behind, but she could not comprehend it. Why were we able to see where we were going but not where we had come from?

‘How do you know where we are?’ she asked.

At first we had followed a drystone wall but after a while that came to an end. I heard the muffled sound of the stream that ran to the zawn, to the place in the cliffs where we might climb down to the well, though I could not see it. By moving fractionally to our left we would meet the mantle of heather and gorse that covered the hill, and this would also suffice as a guide, so I pointed it out to her.

The gorse and heather brought us almost to the edge of the zawn. It seemed to be an impenetrable chasm and Evie’s eyes were wide with wonder. She had remembered an incident with a football the summer before, when her cousin Connor had kicked it over the cliff.

‘You mustn’t bring the other children here. It isn’t safe, do you understand?’

‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ she said, as though I had just told her I had robbed a bank. She could not believe she was going to climb down into the place where Connor had kicked his ball, and I had declared it lost.

At the edge of the cliff a pocket opened in the mist or, as was more likely, we were below it. Rising air currents from the sea maintained the space. We followed the trickle of water, which we had found again, and the path, which sloped steeply down. Below the cliff edge there was a moss-filled gully, skittering to stones, before the way ran to nothing over red and yellow rock. It looked, at first glance, as if there was no safe way down, a sheer drop into the sea. But by scrambling carefully sideways we were able to pick out handholds cut into the rock and reach the base. A narrow cleft led deep into the cliff face. We had to brace our feet on either side of it, because the sea rushed in beneath us, making bridges of our legs. At the end of this passage, almost inconsequential, and revealed by the ebbing tide, was a pool. A rope of water fed the pool from above and about this flow, by an odd trick of the light, the rainbow colours of the spectrum were gathered. The pool itself, the sacred well, was no bigger than an upturned hat.

St Mary’s Well is known locally as Ffynnon Fawr which means the big well. It is said to have been consecrated by Mary herself when she visited the headland, presumably in the Dark Ages, because that’s when all the indeterminate and exciting things seem to have happened. It is said to have been the last watering place for the medieval pilgrims before they made their way, or attempted to make their way, to the island, because for a long time three trips to the island netted the same number of indulgences as one return pilgrimage to Rome. This may all be true, although there are many other springs along the coast and it is much easier to launch a boat from the long sandy beach two miles away, in the village of Aberdaron. One of the reasons the well was deemed to be special – which sufficed as a miracle in the eyes of the medieval pilgrims – was because its salt water would turn, at certain times, to fresh. The poet R. S. Thomas, who was the Vicar at Aberdaron, described it in his poem ‘Ffynnon Fair’:

They did not divine it, but

bequeathed it to us:

clear water, brackish at times,

complicated by the white frosts

of the sea, but thawing quickly.

The transformation is in fact no more than a conjuror’s trick, a natural sleight of hand. The salt water of the pool, left full by the departing tide, is slowly displaced by spring water. Yet local legend has it that if you fill your mouth with well water, climb back up the cliff, and run three times around the ruins of St Mary’s Church – and can do this without swallowing a drop – then your dreams, your wishes, will come true.

We looked down at the pool. I hadn’t told Evie about the wish. The skeleton of a seagull, the odd feather clinging to its fanned and broken wing, pointed to the well. I thought about Allardyce, the rotted human compass in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, its bony arm pointing dramatically, if no longer accurately, to the place where Flint’s treasure might be found. A traveller called, appropriately, Ieuan Lleyn, who visited the Llŷn Peninsula in 1799, described entering ‘St Mary’s cave, in which is a well dedicated to Mary, and many other papal relics, such as the hooves of Mary’s horse and the likes. As the place was steep and scary I tried to come up . . . as fast as my hands and feet, nay even my teeth would take me!’ My own eyes were becoming accustomed to the milky half-light in the narrow space beneath the pulsing ceiling of mist. We were in a natural chapel whose walls of black stone rose sheer behind the pool. I made out what at first appeared to be a skull, but in its perfect roundness turned out to be a fishing float, one of the small buoys used to mark the lobster pots. There were bits of bone and driftwood, a plastic gallon container and a nylon orange net; all wedged deeply between tall wet splinters of rock. The rope of water, with its fans of gathered rainbows, spilt down into the pool. Any papal relics intended to remain here would have needed fixing in place with iron pins drilled into the rock, as securely as any mooring, if they were to withstand the twice daily onslaught of the sea which must entirely flood the passage. It seemed more likely that Lleyn had found the remains of an animal that had slipped over the cliff. Sheep droppings were visible on the ledge above our heads, over which the spring water splashed, the dark turds kept moist upon cushions of bright green moss and interspersed with tufts of wool. I had no desire to hold this water in my mouth, or anywhere else, my anxiety over hygiene interfering significantly with my capacity for wonder. I glanced around us. I felt certain that this couldn’t be the right well. But if we were in the wrong place, so too had Ieuan Lleyn been, when he came here in 1799.

Evie, recognising by some unspoiled instinct holy water when she saw it, dipped her fingers into the triangular pool and dabbed her forehead with it, the water trickling down her nose, and this felt like a happy compromise, for although I seemed unable to free myself from a pervasive anxiety, almost nausea, I was relieved of the necessity of having to share it with her.

As we turned to begin the rocky climb back I was caught by a memory, raw as the day it retrieved. A spring afternoon in Barcelona. Three months earlier. Returning from the clinic. There had barely been time to collect Rupert from his office, for him to drive me home, and then for him to collect Evie from school. I had been adamant that I did not want to see anyone.

I’d heard them first, outside the front door. Green parrots were squabbling in the palm tree on the other side of the road. I couldn’t make out what Rupert and Evie were saying above the parrots’ squeaky-toy din. I had no idea what to expect, no idea what he had told her. When the door opened Evie spilled in with the sunlight, her face half full of wonder.

‘Can I see the picture, Mummy? Of the baby?’

I could not believe he had not told her. I was absolutely unprepared for this, particular, moment. ‘There is no picture, my darling. You see, the baby’s died.’ Her face. His half-turned body. Not looking at me; looking instead at the keys in his hand, the edge of his anger, the heat of his shame. I could not believe what we were doing.

‘Where is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s here.’ My fingers touched my swollen belly.

‘And it’s died?’

‘That’s right.’ She paused, still assimilating. ‘Does this mean I’m not going to have a baby brother or sister?’ I had tried to think of a decent lie, a euphemism, something that would make it all right. I was unprepared, defenceless before the truth. We all were.

It was dark in the hall after the door had closed.

‘Can I watch TV?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’ Evie slipped past and I could not be bothered even to recriminate. The damage, for what it was worth, was done.

I tried to fold the memory, reduce it. But it clung to me, sticky, insistent.

We made our way out of the channel on stepping stones while seawater funnelled beneath us. The waves hissed and foamed like the froth that slips over the rim of a beer glass. It was a cushioned world, opaque as cataracts, and the mist, when we reached it, was as dense as before. We pulled ourselves up the rocks towards the path. I followed Evie, remaining behind her in case she slipped. I pointed out handholds to her across the red and yellow stone, and helped her to place her feet in footholds, until I heard the crunch of little stones beneath her shoes and knew she had regained the path. I heard a sibilant trickle, a mischievous chatter as the stream spattered over gravel, and the white cloud once again pressed around us. The only colour was in the bright moss, visible once more at our feet.

Evie was delighted as the stream became apparent and then dumbfounded as it disappeared again. I pointed out to her the path, made plain by thick vegetation, of watercress, thistles, spiky marsh grass and sphagnum moss that indicated the water’s journey. She listened: the mist was thicker and whiter now; the silence seemed to stop up our mouths. And then a sound, quiet as an indrawn breath. The water. She didn’t want to talk. She was intent, like a spaniel, following a scent.

And then she saw it.

A round pool, a bowl of clear water, as wide as her arm’s length, as deep as her knees. At first it appeared still and we saw fine sandy gravel on the bottom, the occasional green weed. Tightly coiled water snails, small as seeds, bright as jewels, encrusted the straight walls and heaped against the stems of weeds. Somewhere below the surface where the spring fed the well these images bent, the refraction attesting to the pulsed movement. Around the pool were signs of pilgrimage. Flat stones marked its edge and at one point they were drawn into a lip, the run-off that formed the stream. The grass around the well was flattened, muddied by many feet, and the stones had been grouted in to keep them stable. On either side were long sticks where someone had lifted green algae from the surface, and this was now browning in the air. Evie noticed and peered for more pea-green discs. She tried to pull a young fern, to act as a scoop, but the fronds came off in her hand, leaving the stem bent, but still attached.

‘Will you help me, Mummy?’

There was a bluff, hardly that, a winged mound behind the water, where we counted pink saxifrage, primroses – no longer flowering – a yellow flower – tormentil – and purple foxgloves, whose tall rods screened the well. Beyond the bluff the heather and gorse and new ferns led back towards the drystone wall where we had begun our journey. I told Evie about the legend – the running round the church, the wishes. A veil seemed to pass across her eyes. The white mist pressed closely all around us, and I saw that she had no need for the miracle. All she wanted, she had before her. She took her water bottle, emptied it out, and then filled it from the silent well. She studied the contents, held them up, and asked me to reaffix the lid. Then, suddenly a child again, she put out her hand for me to hold, and we left.

I no longer knew what to wish for.

Health and happiness, I think. Nothing more.

Notes on
Ffynnon Fawr