Finding Camlann (5 page)

Hugh is stretched out in a leather armchair in the corner, reading from a battered history journal. He looks up, smiles at his sister with what seems a sincere enthusiasm. ‘I’ve been reading about one of our Mortimer ancestors,’ he says.

‘Some rapacious Norman knight, I exrn knight,pect,’ Ruth says. There is something caustic in her voice. ‘Don’t forget, I’m not especially proud of our illustrious family history.’

Hugh lifts his hand in a gesture of frustration, then drops it with a barely audible sigh, offers a small conciliatory smile. ‘Don’t get worked up, Ruth. It’s not worth it.’

Julia is irritated to see that he is still a little frightened of his sister. As their desultory exchange continues, she finds herself studying the family tree on the wall beside her. It is a minor work of art, a vanity piece commissioned by Hugh’s father when he began what was to have been his grand retirement project, a genealogical treatise on the ancient Mortimer family. Robert Mortimer, who ended his military career as a lieutenant colonel in the Shropshire Light Infantry, was an avid horseman and a heavy drinker of vintage port. He was killed along with Hugh’s mother, Sarah Mortimer, when the car he was driving soon after finishing half a bottle of a 1963 Colheita went through a guard-rail in the Malvern hills. At twenty years old, Hugh inherited the family estates and also the task of bringing to a conclusion the voluminous
History of the Mortimer Family of the Welsh March
.

At the left-hand edge of the frame, in an ornate typeface, are the words ‘Wales’ and ‘England’, from which two genealogical branches advance to meet somewhere in the middle, then split again into two new branches that continue to the right-hand edge. The first name listed on the Welsh branch is Coel Hen, Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, who died c. 800
AD
. The English line, meanwhile, begins with the Saxon Ecgbert, King of Wessex (died 839
AD
). The two lines meet in the year 1402, with the marriage of Sir Edmund Mortimer, a great-grandson of Edward III, to Catrin, daughter of Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r, Prince of Wales. Seeing Glyn D
ŵ
r’s name there reminds Julia of her conversation with Donald, her small ill-tempered tirade against the English theft of the Welsh heroic tradition. She regrets it now, wonders just how strange and intense he must think her.

The upper right-hand branch of the family tree meanwhile continues through the dynasty of John of Gaunt, then the Tudors, the Stuarts, the House of Orange, the House of Hanover, and the Saxe Coburgs, with the modern Windsors at the farthest edge. The lower right-hand branch consists of a single unbroken line of Mortimers, father to son, from 1402 to the present day. It ends with Hugh Edmund, the only son of the late Robert and Sarah Mortimer, with Ruth Alice Mortimer, the product of Robert’s first, short-lived marriage to a distant cousin, awkwardly attached by a faint dotted line.

‘How many years has it been?’ Ruth is saying, referring to Hugh’s work on the family history. ‘Seventeen? Eighteen?’ She speaks in an ambiguous tone, almost light-hearted, though there is a trace of venom in it. ‘I think it’s time to move on—don’t you agree, Julia?’

This is a common and insidious device of Ruth’s, to turn her frustration with Hugh back on to Julia, whom she has always considered an unwelcome addition to the family. As Julia stands there under her sister-in-law’s condescending gaze, the idea of spending any more time in her presence seems out of the question.

‘I think I’d better leave you to it,’ she says. ‘I’ve remembered something I need to finish off at work.’

She is on her way to the back door before they hebefore have a chance to react. She takes her bicycle out of the shed, wheels it down the path and out through the back gate behind her studio. Pedalling hard, she tries to blank out all conscious thought, lets the cool air wash over her as she makes her way along the familiar leafy avenues to the more crowded, urban streets of Jericho, then Great Clarendon Street and the home of the Oxford English Dictionary. She locks up her bicycle in its allotted space just inside the gate, blowing on her hands to take away the chill of the handlebars as she climbs the steps to the door.

‘Morning, Miss Llewellyn.’ Colin, the security guard, whose reddened drinker’s face is in perfect counterpoint to his turbulent crop of white hair, gives every appearance of having only recently returned from the pub. ‘Running a bit late today, are we?’

‘Mondays,’ Julia says, with a smile. ‘I really hate them.’

‘I’m right with you there, miss. There’s always Tuesday, of course.’ Colin chuckles quietly at this, waves her through the inner door. ‘On you go, now.’

The dictionary’s offices are tucked away in the corner of a modern addition to the mostly Georgian edifice that houses the larger Oxford University Press. Julia walks through to an open-plan space whose near-silence is disturbed only by the faintest of murmured conversations, the aggregated whisperings of pages turning, papers shuffling, pencils annotating in margins. As she heads for her desk, she glances across the room at her friend Otto Zeiss. Otto is a rounded, jovial man of about sixty, a specialist on Indo-European languages who moonlights at the OED three days per week. For now, she is glad to see from the glazed expression on his face that he is off on some far-away train of eastern thought, travelling through an exotic world of Sanskrit and Tocharian B.

Stacked neatly on Julia’s chair is a new batch of word-slips sent in by the dictionary’s network of readers around the globe. These tiny bibliographic infusions are its lifeblood, its arterial connection to fourteen centuries of English literature. It is easy and calming work to go through them, and Julia is glad of it this morning. First she organises the slips alphabetically, then scans them for obvious ambiguities that will need to be resolved later, and finally begins the much slower and more painstaking process of cross-referencing to the dictionary itself. From time to time she sets aside a usage that particularly catches her attention, to be shared later with colleagues.

Belomancy
. 1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. 272 A like way of Belomancy or Divination by Arrowes hath beene in request.

Snippets
. 1664 BUTLER Hud. II. iii. 824 Witches Simpling, and on Gibbets Cutting from Malefactors snippets.

Sorryish
. 1793 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 330 You would be sorryish to hear, that poor Moll Cobb is gone to her long home.

In this way, word by word, the morning hours tick comfortably by. Just before noon, her telephone rings, a familiar voice on the line. ‘Julia? This is Donald Gladstone. I hope you don’t mind—’

‘Of course I don’t mind.’ Her reply is more terse than she intended, though this has the useful effect of disguising just how glad she is that he has called. ‘What’s new in the world of archaeology?’

‘The usual stuff, I t sal stufsuppose—holes being dug, reports being written and filed away.’

Julia has a vision of Donald buried somewhere deep in an underground maze, surrounded by great towers of worthy paperwork ready to collapse on top of him. ‘How romantic you make it sound.’

‘I don’t mind it at all, really. But listen,’ Donald says, more animated now, ‘I was just reading something that made me think of you, and how you challenged all my narrow-minded English assumptions on our walk up Solsbury Hill. I was wondering if we might meet up somewhere to continue that conversation.’

‘I’d like that,’ Julia says, the words coming too easily. She forces herself to stop and think. If it is the wrong thing to do, it should be harder to say yes. ‘Do you mind if I ring you back tomorrow? We can make a proper plan then.’

At lunchtime, she declines Otto’s offer of a sandwich in the canteen, keeps on working for an hour or more. By mid-afternoon, there is a dull throbbing pain in her right temple. Thinking to clear her head, she steps outside into fitful autumn sunshine with gusts of winds swirling up the yellowed leaves from the sycamore trees in the park across the road. She turns to the right on Walton Street, cuts through to St. Giles, then makes her way down into the medieval heart of Oxford. The streets are filled with a busy traffic of dour-faced pedestrians, students on rattling bicycles, a legion of raucous buses. High above, the declining autumn sun catching the uppermost ramparts of the old college buildings bathes them in a soft, rose-coloured light.

Julia crosses Broad Street to the music shop on the corner, wonders about going inside, instead continues along Turl Street to the neo-gothic archway and heavy wooden gates that mark the entrance to Jesus College. It is years since she has been here, but the porter seems to recognise her, waves her cheerfully through as if she last came this way the day before yesterday.

It was here in the springtime of her first year at Oxford that she sat down next to Hugh Mortimer at a seminar on medieval Welsh poetry given by Hugh’s academic mentor, Caradoc Bowen, the long-time Professor of Celtic Studies at Jesus. She had first met Hugh back home in Wales, a few months before her sixteenth birthday. He was staying with his grandfather, Sir Charles Mortimer, who lived at Ty Faenor just a few miles along the valley from Dyffryn Farm, and he seemed the most mysterious and intriguing person she had ever come across. At the time she could do no more than worship him from afar, weaving her own secret stories of how they would fall in love, run away together into the mountains and never come back. Now, at eighteen, ambitious, poised, confident in her half-formed opinions, she was determined to make him her own.

During their first evenings together in Oxford, Hugh explained to her about his branch of the Mortimer family, a deep-rooted aristocratic dynasty with a long history in the border country between England and Wales. She remembers one night with a special clarity, sitting outside shivering faintly on a cool May evening at the Turf Tavern as Hugh described the happy Welsh summers of his childhood. He would be packed off every August to stay with Sir Charles, an intensely serious but kindly man who in his later years had come to value the Mortimer family manor of Ty Faenor above all else. His death when Hugh was seventeen precipitated a bitter conflict with Hugh’s father, Robert, who had always favoured the expansive family estate at Melverley in Shropshire over the wilder and less productive Welsh lands. From that time, Hugh rejected the prospect of the patrician life his parents intended for him, instead devoting himself to political causes that were opposed to ever Ceosed toything they stood for. He came to consider himself a true Welsh nationalist, having learned from his grandfather that he was descended not only from the Anglo-Norman Mortimers, but also from the royal Welsh dynasty of Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r.

Hugh spoke to her with a surprising intensity in those days, but had a way afterwards of laughing at himself, of shrugging off all such pretension. Beneath his confidence and easy charm, he seemed burdened by a certain world-weary nobility and sadness. For Julia, this was a heady concoction that left her in no doubt as to what she wanted.

She walks on past the dining hall, through the connecting passage to the Second Quad. The entrance to Hugh’s rooms was here, through the last door on the left and up the stone staircase to the top floor. It was all once as familiar to her as her own space at Wadham. She remembers Hugh running down these steps on the day he left Jesus College for the last time, vowing never to speak to Caradoc Bowen again.

As she walks around the perimeter of the quad, she sees eyes in the darkened windows, dozens of them all looking at her at once, the tall Dutch gables with their semi-circular pediments making haughty eyebrows that arch a little higher at every move she makes. It occurs to her that Bowen, though surely by now in his eighties, is still here somewhere: perhaps even now watching her, stern-faced, remembering how she took Hugh Mortimer away from him. She hurries on, glad to complete her circuit and escape through the gate to the anonymous, bustling safety of the Oxford streets.

The afternoon brings a merciful break from routine, an annual meeting of editorial staff from across the press. The first presenter is the OED’s Chief Editor, Peter Harington, who is to give a progress update on the new edition of the dictionary. Julia arrives early, sits in an empty row near the back of the room. In due course she is joined there by Otto Zeiss, who proceeds to entertain her with his usual trenchant asides.

Before long, Harington is standing up at the front of the room in characteristically fulsome flow. ‘For those of us who are lucky enough to have a close acquaintance with the OED,’ he says, ‘it seems a very contradictory sort of beast. Its ongoing care requires a labour simultaneously of the highest forms of human expression and of that harmless drudgery of which Samuel Johnson was the first and most distinguished exponent. Its content, meanwhile, is of serious interest to rather few, yet remains of inestimable importance to world scholarship.’

‘Und so weiter,’
Otto murmurs, his face set in a mask of solemnity. ‘He gave the same talk five years ago. And ten and fifteen years ago also. The world will come to an end, and still he is giving this talk.’

‘We are the taxonomists of a vast evolutionary structure,’ Peter Harington is saying, ‘a genetic encoding of the English language that captures with equal precision the most high-flown and the most mundane of human utterances. The work we do now will surely persist, in one form or another, for countless generations to come. It is proper that we remember this as we bend our arm to the daily lexical toil.’

There is a good deal more in this vein, followed by upbeat presentations from other divisions of the press, those concerned with the publication of scientific journals and medical textbooks and the classics of world literature. After the meeting has finished, there is an early move for the OED staff to the Old Bookbinders Arms, a Monday afternoon ritual of long standing. Today’s expedition is invested with a special significance as a celebration of the completion of the letter
C
.