Finding Camlann (13 page)

IT IS A
brisk November morning, the air clear and sharp with an edge of early frost, the lushness now fading from the landscape as the hills and pastures take on the muted shades of approaching winter. Coaxing the Morris up the steep and twisting lanes, Donald drives carelessly on, his thoughts drifting back to his new theory about Geoffrey of Monmouth and Siôn Cent. Two days have passed since he awoke in the small hours at home in Iffley, convinced that he had found a way to solve one of the greatest riddles of Arthurian scholarship. Since then, he has hardly dared think about it, fearing that it will not seem quite such a good idea as it did in the first flush of discovery.

His proposition is that the ‘ancient book written in the British language’, which Geoffrey claimed was brought to him from Wales by his friend Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, was not merely the product of a lively imagination. It was a real thing, and it drew on the same tradition, perhaps even the same original source, as the book of Cyndeyrn cited by Siôn Cent as his inspiration for the Song of Lailoken.

Caradoc Bowen would tell it differently. He would say that neither of these books ever had a tangible existence. His masterly analysis of the Song of Lailoken leaves little room for doubt that Siôn Cent was the original author of the poem, that he constructed it with exquisite care to meet his own purpose of exalting the memory of Glyn D
ŵ
r. The book of Cyndeyrn was nothing more than a clever fiction, a ploy to legitimise his master’s claim to a predestined kind of greatness, to guarantee his seat in the Welsh heroic pantheon. To claim that these books were connected in some way is to suggest only that Siôn’s invented source was inspired by Geoffrey’s earlier fabrication.

In any case, Donald resolves to keep his ideas to himself until he has found some more convincing evidence. Meanwhile, he tries to concentrate on not getting lost in the Somerset hills. A road closure has diverted him to an unfamiliar route, requiring him to navigate by a sort of dead reckoning based on half-recognised landmarks and the position of the sun. By now he has reached the meeting point of the three minor roads that climb up from the valley of the River Yeo to the top of the northern Mendip escarpment. To his right is the Castle of Comfort Inn, a haven since the seventeenth century for travellers crossing the hills to the cathedral city of Wells. A left turn at the next junction will put him on the track of the Roman road connecting the old lead mines with Sorviodunum and Venta, Old Sarum and modern Winchester, to the east. He makes the turn, skirting the northern edge of the Stockhill forest, an artificial plantation whose evergreen ranks stand in stark contrast to the sparse Mendip landscape. The road takes a kink to the right at Red Quarr Farm, then runs in a perfectly straight line for several miles across the high rugged farmland.

With the open road empty ahead of him, Donald crashes through the gears, accelerating the Morris to sixty across this solitary plateau. He brings the car shuddering to a halt in Green Ore, a blank and austere village w Sere was thhose name recalls a lost way of life now preserved only in the warren of lead miners’ tunnels reputed to lie undisturbed beneath the fields. A left turn brings him on to the main road from Wells to Midsomer Norton, dipping to the north-east over Nedge Hill and down into the Chew Valley.

Just beyond Chewton Mendip, he follows a narrow lane for half a mile, then turns on to a gravel drive that leads to a grey stone house. It is an angular Victorian building with tall symmetrical windows in need of paint, a slate roof with several broken tiles, a front wall riotously overgrown with ivy.
Grendel’s Lair
carved into a wooden nameplate above the door announces the name that Donald’s father gave to the house, in a rare attack of whimsy, when he first moved here from the outer London suburbs.

Donald hears the door opening as he gets out of the car. ‘Hello, Dad. Sorry I’m late.’

‘I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. Traffic not so good today?’ James Gladstone is tall and slightly stooped, with a long, pale face and thinning grey hair combed neatly to one side. His voice has something of wartime Britain in it, John Mills in
We Dive at Dawn
. ‘Well, get yourself in out of the cold. I’ll put the kettle on.’

A distillation of bittersweet memories runs through Donald’s head as he kicks the gravel off his shoes and steps into the chilly front hall. It was only after a long and difficult campaign with his older brother Alec that their father was persuaded to accept an offer of early retirement from the civil service and move back to his native Somerset from the family home in Surrey, where he had lived on carelessly for several years after their mother’s untimely death. For James Gladstone, the loss of his wife was a shattering blow that entirely destroyed his enthusiasm for his career with the Geological Survey, where the two of them had met and worked together for twenty-five years. Donald was only thirteen when it happened, and still from time to time he is haunted by a vision from his youth, of his mother lying there in silence, the fire burning low in the grate, the heavy blue wallpaper with its exotic Japanese flora and fauna, the old carriage clock on the mantelpiece. He will never forget the expression on her face, no longer of fear but of sad acceptance, her faint smile meant for his encouragement but in fact only drawing his attention to the dreadful, slowing tick-tick-tick of the clock.

Alec was travelling abroad at the time, away on his summer break from university, leaving Donald to hold everything together as best he could. It was in those difficult weeks that he began to forge a new and unexpected bond of affection and common interest with his aloof and distant father. It was at that time, too, that he first became the beneficiary of James Gladstone’s boundless knowledge of the British landscape. Beginning a tradition that has continued on and off over the years, they would head out together on a Saturday or Sunday, tramping across the fields and through the deciduous woodlands of the Surrey hills. It was on those walks that he learned the meaning of hedges and banks and barrows and ditches, the many-layered tracings of humans on the primal environment.

‘Shall I go on through to the study?’ Donald says.

‘Yes, why don’t you? I’ll join you in a moment. If it’s cold in there, you might like to get the fire going.’

James Gladstone’s study is a long bright room at the back of the house, a comfortable, disorderly space strewn with half-read newspapers and library books. To the left, two formal armchairs and a settee upholstered in pale green face an ornate V Se a with haictorian fireplace. A vintage typewriter stands on a burnished old walnut desk in the corner. At the rear, tall windows look out on a rambling garden planted with rosebushes and apple trees, leaf-strewn grass running down and merging into the farmers’ fields that rise gently at first and then more steeply towards the Mendip escarpment. A bird table near the front of the lawn is visited sporadically by chaffinches, robins, and sparrows, the occasional dunnock and greenfinch.

Donald crumples up several sheets from yesterday’s
Times
and sets them in the empty grate. Taking rough kindling from a brass container next to the hearth, he builds up from twigs to sticks to thicker cut branches, finally to the quarter-split oak logs from the cast-iron rack in the corner, then touches a lighted match to the newspaper. With the fire well set, he sits down in the nearest armchair, takes up a geological magazine and flicks idly through it, soon finds himself wrapped up in a familiar sensation of comfort and peace.

His father returns with the loaded tea tray. ‘Have a ginger biscuit, won’t you?’ he says. ‘They’re rather good. Audrey Jenkins brought them over, though of course your mother wouldn’t have approved.’

Donald wonders for a moment whether he is referring to the ginger biscuits—a famous dislike of Elizabeth Gladstone’s—or to the role of Mrs. Jenkins of Priory Farm. He has an unexpected and faintly unsettling vision of an austere affair being conducted in secret, wonders what his mother would have thought of that. ‘Not for me, thanks,’ he says.

With the faintest of sighs, James Gladstone picks up the blue and white floral teapot with both hands, frowning with concentration as he pours. The sound is strangely pleasing, a thin mezzo-soprano tinkling that deepens, as the cup begins to fill, into a more substantial tenor gurgle.

‘Sugar?’

‘No thanks. You ought to know by now.’ Donald reaches into his briefcase, takes out a small green booklet. ‘I’ve brought you a copy of the archaeological survey you asked for. It’s quite detailed on the surface markers of the Roman mine workings.’

While his father skims through the report, making occasional vague noises of assent and disapproval, Donald leans back in his chair and gazes into the mesmerising world of crackling orange and yellow, willing the flames to greater heights. At length his father closes the booklet, puts it down next to the tea tray. ‘There are some useful observations,’ he says, ‘but still I don’t feel that we’re getting to the heart of the matter. We won’t really know what’s down there until we dig for it.’

‘We’ve had that conversation before, Dad—’

‘I know, I know, there’s no need to say it. One can’t dig up the whole country merely to please an amateur enthusiast like me.’

Donald reaches into his briefcase again. ‘There’s this, too. I found it in a second-hand bookshop.’

A smile of genuine pleasure comes to James Gladstone’s face as he takes up the first edition of Hoskins’
The Making of the English Landscape
, turns reverently through the pages. ‘This is marvellous, Donald. If there were one book I should have liked to have written, this would have been it.’

‘It’s not too late.’

‘Yes, of course it is, don’t be so silly. Now tell me, what have you been up to? Su b#x2 Gadding about the country looking for the elusive Arthur? I’ve been reading the draft you sent me.’

‘And?’ Donald’s forced smile is a poor camouflage for his genuine feeling of nervousness. His father’s approval is more important to him than he would care to admit.

‘It’s very nicely done, I should say, though there was one thought that occurred to me repeatedly as I was reading through the manuscript. Thoroughness and objectivity are doubtless of great importance in your profession, but you mustn’t allow yourself to become entirely hidebound by what history and archaeology can definitively tell you. As generations of scholars have proven beyond a doubt, that approach won’t get you any closer to the true origins of Arthur.’ James Gladstone looks meaningfully at Donald now, eyebrows raised, gently challenging him to refute this argument. ‘A thousand years from now, your clever Oxford people will still be debating the reliability of the battle-listings in the
Historia Brittonum
, still searching for the location of Mount Badon.’

‘I don’t disagree, but I think I’ve said all those things in the book.’

‘Well, almost, but not quite. We all know Arthur is a slippery sort of fellow, and you’ve tried to grab at him from almost every conceivable direction. But there’s one approach I think you haven’t quite done justice to.’

Donald is transported back a quarter of a century, to his father poring over a schoolboy essay on ancient Greece or the Roman empire, pointing out some unconscionable error of classical history or political geography. ‘What did I get wrong, Dad?’

‘Just humour me in a little thought-experiment, if you would. Let’s imagine you were the first modern human to explore the British landscape, and let’s say you happened to set eyes on a curiously shaped hilltop, one that could be seen from many miles in all directions. Think of Glastonbury Tor, if you want a real example. What would you have done?’

It is a very strange question, even by James Gladstone’s unorthodox standards. Donald sits there quietly for a while until the answer comes to him in a flash of insight. ‘I would have named it,’ he says.

‘That’s exactly right.’ Donald’s father looks approvingly at him. ‘An unusual place like that would demand a good story to explain it—a creation myth, you might say. So you would have named it, probably by invoking some great character or story drawn from the mythology of your people. You would have called it Lud’s Hill or Mabon’s Throne or something like that.’

Donald is long accustomed to his father’s oblique approach to such conversations; he will never tackle a subject head-on if an indirect line of attack can be found. ‘Where are you going with this, Dad?’

‘Well, there’s an obvious inference to be drawn. If only we could get back to the original names of things, names that are settled deep into the bones of the landscape, we would learn a great deal about our distant ancestors. I suggest you think carefully about that when you come to reconsider all the rocks and caves and mountain-tops that are named for the mythical Arthur.’

‘I’ve already discussed the toponymic evidence at some length in the book, Dad. It would be easy to over-interpret it.’

‘I am merely suggesting that you should supplement the evidence, such as it is, by using your own intellect and ima Slle"jugination. Now then, perhaps you’ll drink your tea before it gets cold, and tell me what else you’ve been up to. Or is it all about the book at the moment?’

Straight away, Donald’s thoughts turn back to Julia Llewellyn, and what the next twenty-four hours may bring. ‘I did meet someone interesting the other day.’ For a moment, he imagines he sees a new candour in his father’s gaze; but they have never discussed the women in their lives, and it seems too late for the breaking of ancient taboos. Instead he describes his meeting with Caradoc Bowen, tells his father about the Song of Lailoken and Bowen’s interpretation of the text.

James Gladstone calmly takes all of this in, cradling his cup and saucer and smiling faintly in his usual unfathomable way. ‘You may be interested to hear that I once had dealings with Professor Bowen. He wrote to us at the Survey, a long time ago now, to enquire about the prevalence of lower Devonian sandstone formations in the mountainous regions of Wales.’