Finding Camlann (17 page)

The next speaker is a nervous young postgraduate from Healey’s group at Cambridge. Her physical analysis of the Devil’s Barrow site is dry but worthy stuff, a careful exposition of the painstaking scientific practice of field archaeology. She accompanies her presentation with numerous line drawings and site maps, the occasional photograph of muddied, besweatered archaeologists and lank-haired students unearthing mud-encrusted skulls and femurs. There is a sense in the room of moving past the earlier theatrics, of buckling down to the important work.

But now there is a second interruption, enough to stop Healey’s student in her tracks. The double doors at the back of the ballroom are thrown loudly open, and there is a general turning of heads to watch the measured, almost regal entrance of a tall, striking man with greying hair to his shoulders. He stands there for a moment, scanning the rows of seats, apparently oblivious to the many eyes that are on him. To Donald he seems vaguely familiar, though he cannot quite place him. Certainly he does not have the look of an archaeologist.

Julia’s intake of breath is unmistakable. ‘It’s my husband,’ she says, quietly, as the newcomer’s plaintive gaze falls on her. ‘I’m so sorry, but I’ll have to go.’ With this, she gets up and hurries along the aisle. She goes outside with Hugh Mortimer, the doors slamming shut behind them.

OUTSIDE IN THE
bright Tintagel sunlight, Julia sees that Hugh’s eyes are bloodshot, the grey coming through strongly in the stubble on his chin.

‘Something’s happened,’ he says. ‘I had to come and tell you.’ He puts a gentle hand on each shoulder, looks her in the eye. A co [thed tellld empty space opens up inside her. ‘Your father passed away in his sleep last night. There was a call early this morning, from Dyffryn. I promised your mother I would try to catch up with you.’

For a small, strange moment, Julia’s thoughts go back to Donald, left alone in the symposium and oblivious to this new calamity. She wants to go back in and say something to him, but it seems impossible. Their wonderful, romantic, bookish conversations belong to a separate, more carefree world, a place that only ever had a real existence in her imagination. Here in front of her now is her husband bringing back the authentic reality of life, and of death, the full crushing weight of it. ‘Can we go there straight away, please?’ she says. ‘I need to be with my mother.’

FINALLY THE BREAK
arrives, tea and coffee and digestive biscuits served out in the hotel lobby. Julia has not returned, but Lucy is there at the coffee urn, holding forth to a group of three bemused but politely attentive archaeologists from Durham University. Donald walks straight past her, heads for the front door of the hotel.

‘Not so fast, Dr. Gladstone.’

‘Lucy, not now, please.’

Her gleaming leaf-patterned dress hugs the long, slim contours of her body. She has carried a handful of biscuits away with her from the table, and now offers one to Donald. ‘Here, take it. I think your blood sugar needs a boost.’

‘Really, I don’t want it. And by the way, I don’t feel like having an argument with you today.’

‘Why should we argue, sweetness? I was just a little curious about the dramatic exit this morning. Who was she, anyway? She seemed quite fond of you.’

This conversation is anathema to Donald, but to avoid the question will only make matters worse. ‘Her name is Julia Llewellyn. She works at the OED.’

‘I wasn’t aware they were hiring archaeologists there. Or has she discovered a new interest in the subject? How very interdisciplinary of her.’ Lucy smiles at him in her demure, infuriating way. ‘Was that Julia’s husband who came crashing in? I thought he was rather good-looking.’

‘Leave it alone, would you, please?’

‘OK, I’ll make a bargain with you,’ Lucy says. The smile has gone, and there is a hint of ice in her voice. ‘I’ll refrain from commenting on your sordid little affair, but only if you promise
not to stand up in public and attack my credibility.’

In her usual unerring way, she has succeeded in finding the right buttons to push. Donald speaks to her now in a low, fierce voice. ‘Just because you assert something over and over again, Lucy, it doesn’t become any more true. Is it too much to hope that you will ever understand the difference between real, scientific archaeology and the telling of stories?’

‘Like your tales of King Arthur, for example?’

Donald does not respond to this, merely walks away from her, the anger coiled tightly inside him as he heads out of the hotel and on along the path that leads back to Tintagel village.

Dyffryn Farm

A
ND SO THEY
leave Tintagel in a convoy of two, driving on and on through the late morning and the afternoon to the early autumn sunset. They stop only once, at a roadside transport cafe near Monmouth where Hugh buys sandwiches and coffee for them both, does his best to make some kind of considerate conversation. Julia wraps both hands around her coffee mug, smiles weakly at him, says little in return. She finds herself counting the days since she last spoke to her father: twenty-five, almost a month since she heard his voice, and she will never hear it again. This is the thought that rises to the raw surface of her mind.

From Hereford, they head west and north in the gathering darkness to the border of Radnorshire and on across the endless Welsh hinterland. Staring blankly through the windscreen at the big square rear lights of the Land Rover, Julia occupies herself entirely with the mechanics of driving, tries to hold all else at bay. It is close to six o’clock by the time they reach the edge of Rhayader. They leave the main road and wind their way up into rain-bound hills making arcs of deeper blackness in the encircling sky. As they turn on to Cyncoed Lane and climb the lower slopes of Moel Hywel, Julia looks up instinctively to see the lights of Dyffryn Farm glowing faintly on the hillside above.

Cath Llewellyn is waiting for them at the front door, a lonely silhouette against the brightness that falls from the storm-lamp fixed high on the wall above. ‘In you come, now, out of the rain,’ she says, ushering them firmly inside with a show of normality, her courage showing through her red-rimmed eyes and the deeply drawn lines of her face. ‘Will you have something to eat? There’s hot soup on the stove.’ For a strange, disturbing moment, Julia sees Dai standing there behind her mother in the shadows.

Hugh lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘Is there something I can do? Or shall I go on to Ty Faenor for now?’

‘Yes, please do that.’ She feels a small surge of relief and gratitude. ‘You’ll come back tomorrow morning?’

After he has driven away, she follows her mother mutely into the kitchen. Since she was a small child, this is where they have always held their important conversations. It is a long, low room dominated by a table and chairs of darkened oak along the centre. At the far end, the family china is arrayed in a tall Welsh dresser, a wedding gift to Julia’s great-grandmother. There is a collection of old-fashioned kitchen implements, heavy pots and pans, long-handled ladles and spoons, all hanging on tarnished brass hooks from the walls. A cast-iron stove set into the old original fireplace makes a great radius of warmth stretching to all but the farthest corners, doing battle with the relentless cool draughts that come creeping in past the curtains and around the edges of the door.

Julia takes all this in at a glance, all the aching familiarity of it. There is something new here as well, an unaccustomed sense of emptiness. Usually when she steps into this room she feels a reassuring essence of her forebears, the vital spirit of the Llewellyn family matriarchs who have ruled over it since Georgian times, but they are absent today. The house itself seems lost in mourning.

‘Well now,’ Cath Llewellyn says, taking Julia’s hands in her own. ‘Let me have a look at you, love.’

Julia’s resolve is undone not so much by the sound of her mother’s voice as by something that happens to catch her eye, her father’s latest pencil sketch half-finished on his favourite chair in the corner, his tattered old fleece-lined slippers laid out ready on the fl cady201oor beneath. The despair wells up in her chest, tears coming now in great shuddering waves as she gives herself up to her mother’s embrace.

In time, the intensity of it subsides. Cath Llewellyn guides Julia firmly to a chair, reaches up to a high shelf for the Bristol sherry. ‘Your father won’t have wanted to see us moping about,’ she says. ‘This was supposed to be for Christmas, but there’s no sense saving it now.’

And so they sit together at the kitchen table, drinking sweet amontillado from chipped enamel mugs, crying and laughing in equal measure as they share their best memories of Dai. They talk on far into the night, firing up the stove with the seasoned ash-wood logs to keep it blazing brightly against the wind and rain lashing the window-panes. There is a wrenching sadness and also a kind of fierce exhilaration in the things they have to say to each other, a mother and daughter now alone in the world, meditating as they never have before on their years spent with a man who was difficult and proud but never bitter, who was as quick to anger as he was to a smile, who was unwavering in his devotion to his wife and only child.

Some time in the small hours, Julia swathes herself in blankets on the settee in the front room, falls straight away into the deepest sleep. In her dreams she is visited by scenes from her youth, of her father admonishing her gently in Welsh, telling her she must be having a nightmare, of course he is not dead. Hugh is there too, in the background, familiar but oddly distorted as if, like Dorian Gray’s picture, his features have become subtly altered since she last set eyes on him.

DONALD SPENDS THE
greater part of the long drive from Cornwall to Somerset reliving the events at Tintagel, breaking them down frame by frame, rewriting the script for himself. In his imagined world, every word, every gesture finds its perfect timing. By the time they walk out across the Trevethey bridge, Raymond Grint and his people have long since departed on their strange nocturnal expedition. Standing there above the rushing stream, Julia whispers to Donald that she has broken forever with Hugh Mortimer, that she never wants to see him again. She takes him back to her room, allows him to undress her in the dim half-light, to make love to her in a beautiful, natural consummation.

Scene two, the following morning at the symposium. As Mortimer enters the ballroom, Donald lays a restraining hand on Julia’s arm: stay where you are, I’ll go out and speak to him. There is a physical fight, perhaps, a duel of sorts (this part still needs some work); or, he defeats his opponent by weight of argument alone. In either case, Hugh Mortimer is left to limp away defeated, knowing himself to be the lesser man.

And so the miles slip by. Three hours after leaving Tintagel, Donald parks the Morris alongside a bright yellow camper van with long streaks of rust around the wheel-arches and a heavily dented roof. He climbs out of the car, stretches out his cramped limbs, stands there for a while looking up the steep grassy slope of Glastonbury Tor. Although he would find it hard to admit it to his rational self, he can feel the familiar magnetism that has drawn him back to this place again and again over the years. This surprising, dramatic outcrop rising from the Somerset plain, with its prehistoric maze of tracks and terraces and its long dark ecclesiastical history, is perhaps no more than a curious quirk of geological fate. But to many it has become a place of pilgrimage, a focus of the sacred power of Celtic Britain, the secret entrance to the otherworld: home of Gwyn ap Nydd, Lord of Annwn. Since c Ans o the twelfth century at least, the Tor has been identified with Avalon, the isle of apples,
Insula Avallonis
. There, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version of events, Arthur was taken after he fell mortally wounded on the battlefield of Camlann.

Donald begins the long ascent, settling into a satisfying cadence of evenly spaced footsteps set one above the other on the well-worn track. The day is not cold, but blustery, forcing him to lean forward into the hill against the wind that gusts across the exposed face. As he climbs higher and higher with the bright green grass all around, a feeling of calm enters in, a sense of distance from the turbulent world below. Within fifteen minutes, he has reached St. Michael’s tower, the curious, desolate, hollow structure that is the only surviving remnant of a larger chapel built at the summit of the Tor in the fourteenth century. The masons would have been in no doubt that they were doing God’s work up here, heaving up their stones with block and tackle, the foggy green world all laid out below. But the tower is a monument less to the glory of God than to that of a shrewd and ostentatious Abbot of Glastonbury, Walter Monington, who had every intention that the lonely church on the hill should become an iconic symbol of the town. Two hundred years later, Abbot Whiting atoned for all such vanities when he was put to death on this very spot by the troops of the Protestant Reformation, the same soldiers who were to lay waste to the abbey below.

Save for a few blank-faced sheep browsing on the upper slopes, the summit of the Tor is deserted. To the south-west, a finger of development stretches out along Wearyall Hill towards the town of Street, which itself can clearly be seen across the green water-meadows beside the River Brue. To the north-west, above the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, the old town spreads out in an abundance of Victorian red brick that merges gradually into the newer northern suburbs. In the far distance, a bright glint of water and an uneven grey line on the horizon hint at the Bristol Channel and, beyond, the green foothills of South Wales, former stronghold of the kings of Glamorgan.

Sitting with his back to the western wall of the tower, Donald tears up fistfuls of grass and throws them high into the air, watches the wispy fragments as they are picked up by the wind and swirled away towards Chalice Hill. During the long climb, he has reached a simple enough conclusion. As much as he might wish for a future with Julia Llewellyn, she is a married woman, and she has slipped beyond his reach. For now, the part of his life that holds the greater share of his hopes and dreams is his search for the origins of Arthur. Though it is perhaps no more than a timeless calming quality in the sighing of the breeze through the ruined tower and along the secret contours of the hill, an imaginary energy flowing through him from the hallowed rocks beneath, he feels the stirring of a new sense of purpose, a quiet determination to succeed.

It is getting late, and he has a small pilgrimage to complete. He makes his way back down from St. Michael’s tower and over to the northern side where he first came up, descending into deep twilight as the sun is eclipsed behind the long shoulder of the Tor. Back at the car park, a youth with a pierced eyebrow and a ragged beard is standing at the open tailgate of the yellow van, cooking up something pungent in a saucepan set on top of a small camping stove. He has an impressive tattoo on one forearm, robbie + jane entangled in an intricately wrought python, the names decorated with red roses and a grinning death’s-head skull.

‘I like the wheels, mate,’ Robbie says, nodding appreciatively at the Morris. His accent is from East Ham or the Whitechapel Road. ‘I always wanted one of them Travellers, seemed to be the rig cto itechapeht car to have, know what I mean? But Jane wanted the extra space, din’t she?’ He nods towards his female companion, who can indistinctly be seen pulling on a cigarette in the murky interior of the van.

Donald reaches for the right thing to say. ‘More room to stretch out in there, I suppose?’

Robbie laughs, a surprising high-pitched giggle. ‘Yeah, right.’ He eyes Donald contemplatively, gives the contents of the pan another stir. ‘You hungry? We made extra, in case there was a rush.’

‘No thanks. Smells good, though.’

‘Don’t know what you’re missing, mate.’

Donald climbs into the Morris, starts it on the third attempt, waves goodbye to his new-found friend as he sets off on the short drive into town. Robbie and Jane are latecomers, apparently, to the Glastonbury party. The summer season of bikers and mystics and mild-mannered devil-worshippers is long past, leaving quiet streets and a modest local population that seems almost as ordinary as any other in England. He parks in front of a small row of shops on Magdalene Street: a hairdresser, a florist, an aromatic pagan boutique. At the entrance to the abbey, he pays his fee to a distracted attendant who looks up from her Agatha Christie for as long as it takes to hand him his ticket and wave him on through the gate.

‘Half an hour till closing, sir,’ she says, her nose already back in her book.

Donald’s oldest memories of Glastonbury Abbey, a series of blurred images from his childhood, are closely tied to his mother. He can remember standing here with her at the age of four or five, pretending to pay attention as she explained to him that an old ruin is a very special thing, forever caught in its own time and place. Those words come back to him now as he strikes off across the well-kept grass of the close towards the abbey. The great angular remnants of medieval stonework seem to have grown out of the earth itself, pushed up by the same subterranean forces that raised the Tor above the plain.

The historian William of Malmesbury perhaps felt some similar sense of permanence when, as a guest here some time after 1129, he began his treatise on the history of Glastonbury. In the surviving version of William’s
De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae
, he states that the Benedictine Abbey of St. Mary at Glastonbury is the oldest church in England. There was a monastery on this site as early as the sixth century—Gildas may have spent some time there—and this in turn was established on the site of an earlier Romano-British church. The buildings as William knew them burned at the end of the twelfth century, were rebuilt, and fell rapidly into ruin after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, dismantled by the local townspeople for their finest building stone.