Finding Camlann (9 page)

To make of him a new Arthur
. It strikes Julia now with great force, as she thinks back to the Oxford days when Caradoc Bowen had his eye so much on Hugh, that these words took on a very personal meaning for Bowen. It was Hugh who bore the mark of greatness, who was to carry the flame of Welsh nationalism in modern times, to act the part of Glyn D
ŵ
r to Bowen’s Siôn Cent, prophet of a great new rebellion. For the first time, she begins to comprehend the powerful forces that were at play during her early relationship with Hugh.

As the evening wears on, she sits alone in the silent house, sketching an elaborate abstract design on the back of Bowen’s article, a chaotic vision of overlapping circles. By now, her head is throbbing, her eyes smarting with fatigue. She wants nothing more than to curl up in bed and sleep, but she decides instead that she will wait for Hugh to return, try to talk to him about his past with Caradoc Bowen.

It is after ten o’clock by the time he walks in. He seems tired and a little drawn, though surprisingly mellow. ‘Thanks for waiting up,’ he says, taking her by the hand, and for a moment she imagines he is going to kiss her. Instead he releases his grip, takes a whisky bottle from the cabinet and pours himself a generous measure. It has become a familiar evening ritual.

‘How did it go today?’ Julia says. At her suggestion, he has been over to the Merton College library to look up the original estate records relating to the Leicestershire landholdings. She wants to ask why he is back so late, but does not.

Hugh sits down at the table, takes the cork off the rim of the half-empty wine bottle. ‘I found what I needed,’ he says. ‘Do you want some more of this?’

‘Yes, why not?’ Looking at her husband now, as he refills her glass almost to the brim, Julia finds herself removing the years from his face, searching for the old Hugh beneath the lean, careworn features, looking for the irresistible young firebrand Cng om she knew in her youth. His glance in return is quizzical, amused.

‘Can we talk?’ she says.

‘Of course, what’s on your mind?’ Hugh is placid still, though there is a hint of wariness now in his voice.

‘I found this at the Bodleian the other day.’ She turns over the journal article, pushes it towards him.

Now there is a small, tense silence as Hugh flips the pages. ‘You just happened to come across it?’ he says.

‘When you mentioned Bowen’s battle-poem the other night, I remembered it from a lecture of his we once went to, a long time ago. I was curious, that’s all.’

Hugh frowns slightly, sits back in his chair. ‘Do you remember what he was like, Julia, the extraordinary grandiosity of the man? He imagined himself as some kind of prophet, a Merlin for our modern times. That’s why he was so obsessed with Siôn Cent and the Song of Lailoken.’

Julia has been reflexively twisting the stem of her wine glass; now she stops herself, pushes the glass to one side. There are questions she desperately wants to ask, but she lets him keep talking.

‘Caradoc Bowen thought the poem would show us the way, that we could go striding out into the Welsh wilderness and discover the valley where Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r went into hiding at the end of his life, the place where he was last seen on earth. Bowen was convinced he would find some essential spirit of Glyn D
ŵ
r still lingering there. We spent long days tramping through the mountains, looking for the crooked vale where the three rivers fall, but we never did find it.’

Hugh reaches for the whisky bottle, refills his glass to the same level, drinks some of it down. ‘Then one day he asked me to come and see him at the college. I remember he looked terrible, as if he had not slept at all. He said he had dreamed of drowning in a torrent of water, and then in the morning there was a phone call from someone he knew in Whitehall, telling him about the plans for the Cwmhir dam. It hit him hard, because he had always felt a special kinship with that valley, almost as if he had lived there in some former life. He said we must abandon the idea of looking for missing fragments of the old Wales. We should devote our energies to what could still be saved. As far as he was concerned, the greatest possible English crime was the drowning of the valleys.’

Julia speaks gently to him now. ‘I suppose he wanted you to see it the same way.’

‘He knew I was angry enough about it.’ Hugh focuses on the last of his whisky, avoids Julia’s gaze. ‘I didn’t need much persuasion.’

It is crystal-clear in her memory, a warm afternoon in late June, not long after they were married and still in the idealistic days when they imagined they might take up farming for a living, make a go of things together at Ty Faenor. She is up on the hillside above Dyffryn sketching with Dai when Hugh arrives at the farmhouse. He talks first to her father down at the gate, then walks up through the fields to meet her. From the look on his face, the first thought she has is that somebody has died. What he tells her instead is the news he has just heard from Caradoc Bowen, that the British government is planning to dam the valley of Cwmhir and turn it into a reservoir to supply the city of Birmingham. The rising waters will drown not only a sacred piece of Wales, including the remains of Cwmhir Abbey and the grave of Llywelyn the Great, but also a large part Ca lnd the graof the Mortimer family estate and the manor house at Ty Faenor. He is more emotional than she has ever seen him. He owes it to his grandfather’s memory, he says, to make sure the dam does not get built.

‘My father had cut a deal with the government years before, when the idea was first proposed by his Tory friends in the inner circles.’ Hugh’s tone is bitter, though the fire has gone from his voice. ‘As far as he was concerned, Ty Faenor was more trouble than it was worth. After my grandfather died, he was free to do as he pleased.’

The contours of this story are familiar enough to Julia, though she has never heard him speak so openly about it before. She is acutely aware of moving into dangerous territory, but there is one question she needs to ask. ‘So what really happened that autumn, Hugh? Was Caradoc Bowen somehow involved in the explosion at the engineering office?’

He rubs his eyes, runs a hand across his forehead and through his hair. She notices that it has grown longer, almost down to his shoulders. ‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I’d rather not talk about it any more.’

It is there again, the dark impenetrable wall. She wants to hammer her fists against it. Instead she tries to probe a little, find a place to get her fingernails inside. ‘It must have been hard for you, not wanting to disappoint him.’

‘What makes you say that?’ The change in Hugh’s voice is slight, but devastating. ‘What makes you think I would care if he was disappointed in me?’

Now Julia cannot stop herself; she can feel a small crack opening up beneath her grip. ‘You must have known he was a little bit infatuated with you.’

Hugh laughs, a harsh, contemptuous sound. ‘He found me useful, that’s all. I don’t think you ever really understood that.’

Julia stands up, disorientated. ‘Do you know how patronising that sounds?’ She walks away a few paces, turns to face him with her back to the refrigerator door. ‘I think you were completely in Caradoc Bowen’s shadow in those days. He had ambitions for you that you couldn’t possibly fulfil.’

Hugh reaches for his glass. Finding that it is empty, he sets it back down too hard, cracking the rim. ‘You’re quite right, Julia. It’s not so easy to meet other people’s expectations.’

He has a tight grip on himself, but Julia can hear the anger in his voice, and a kind of contempt, too. ‘I’m just trying to talk to you,’ she says, quietly.

‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing left to talk about.’ As Hugh strides out of the room, blood is running down his hand from where the glass has cut him.

DONALD SILENTLY REPEATS
a familiar phrase to himself, the advice once offered to him by the gruff, Viking-bearded Yorkshireman who was in charge of the first archaeological dig he ever attended.
Imagine you’re Leonardo, painting the Mona Lisa . . . your first duty is not to ruin that perfect smile
. This is a lesson that has been well learned; and so it is with the lightest and most patient of brushstrokes that he resumes his dusting of the dried, encrusted mud from the surface of the small rounded object that is emerging from the floor of the trench.

‘Buried treasure?’ Donald’s assistant, Tim Csis18;BurieWatson, is crouched down next to him.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’ But it is with a growing sense of excitement that Donald frees up a small patch of heavily tarnished metal, begins to detect the smooth curves that indicate a high degree of craftsmanship: the trademark, perhaps, of a skilled worker in iron or bronze.

‘Steady now,’ Tim says, in his irreverent way. ‘There’s no hurry. We’ve a long empty morning ahead of us.’

The days since Donald’s meeting with Julia at the Randolph Hotel have passed in a foggy state of disappointment and frustration. He is glad to be outside again, to get his hands back in the mud, to rediscover his old satisfaction in the practical details of his trade. The two of them are in a small field on the outskirts of Amesbury in Wiltshire, close to the River Avon, part of a team that is working a small exploratory cut along the path of a proposed road-building scheme. Despite the apparently unpromising setting, this excavation is far from routine. They are digging in one of the richest archaeological landscapes in Britain, close to the site of a late Roman settlement that remained in continuous occupation through the fifth century and beyond. Just a short distance to the west lies the neolithic circle of Stonehenge.

Tim is watching closely now as the object begins to take its proper shape. ‘I hate to steal your thunder, boss, but I think I know what it is.’

Donald has reached the same quotidian conclusion. ‘It’s a brass doorknob,’ he says. ‘Circa 1850, if I had to guess.’

‘Could be a bit before that,’ Tim says. ‘Maybe late Georgian. You can see the concentric pattern with interstitial etching.’

Donald looks at him sceptically. ‘I had no idea you were such an expert.’

‘I’m really not, truth be told, but it looks an awful lot like the doorknobs in my grandma’s house in Bath.’

At lunchtime, declining Tim’s offer of the Bull and Butcher pub, Donald gets into his car for the short drive to Stonehenge. It is, as always, an equivocal experience for him to visit this most venerated of monuments, the highest temple of British archaeology. When seen from a distance across the fields, the great standing stones silhouetted against the long horizon of Salisbury Plain are a breathtaking sight, the work not of humans but of the giants who carved the primordial landscape. And yet, upon a closer approach, the modern world seems to crowd in: there are roads and car parks, foreign tourists milling from their coaches, fences to constrain them sheep-like to their proper paths across the windswept turf.

As Donald makes his way towards the stone circle, the arrival of a powerful squally shower causes the crowds to disperse, leaving him alone with just a few of the hardier enthusiasts. He surveys the inscrutable sandstone trilithons through a swirling mist of rain, tries to erase modern Britain from the scene, to imagine this great structure as it would have been when it was completed in the third millennium
BC
. Written history has left only the faintest of clues as to the original purpose of Stonehenge. According to the ancient Greek historian Hecataeus, a far northern people known as the Hyperboreans occupied a large island in the ocean facing the country of the Celts. There, in a magnificent circular temple, they worshipped the sun god.

‘You look like a fellow who knows a thing or two.’ He turns to see an older American couple standing together beneath a capacious golfing umbrella. ‘My wife and I were hopin C I h an g you might be able to help us understand something.’

Texas is Donald’s best guess, from the intonation. ‘I’ll be glad to, if I can.’

‘We were just wondering, how in the name of sweet Jesus did they get these stones here?’

‘That’s an excellent question,’ Donald says, ‘and it hasn’t been well answered. We do know that the larger stones were dragged in from about twenty miles away.’

‘Twenty miles?’

‘And the smaller bluish stones you can see inside the main ring came from the far west of Wales, more than one hundred miles away.’

‘One hundred—?’

‘We don’t really know how they got them here.’

‘Divine intervention, that’s what I’d call it. Well, be sure and let us know when y’all have it figured out.’ The Texan man bids him farewell with a crisp military salute.

As he completes his circuit of the standing stones, trudging along with his head down into the wind, boots placed methodically one in front of the other in the mud, Donald calls to mind the line from the Song of Lailoken that describes how the white serpent ‘bore the giants’ ring from farthest west’. He remembers very clearly where he has seen such a reference before. In his
Historia Regum Britanniae
, Geoffrey of Monmouth stated that a British leader named Ambrosius Aurelianus called upon the magician Merlin to bring great standing stones from the far west and set them down on Salisbury Plain. His purpose in placing such a monument there was to commemorate the burial place of the British ‘leaders and princes whom the infamous [Saxon leader] Hengist had betrayed’. Modern archaeology has proven Geoffrey’s claim to be at least partially grounded in truth, the older Stonehenge bluestones having almost certainly been quarried in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales. It may never be known whether this is merely a chance convergence with Geoffrey’s fanciful outpouring, whether he might equally have said north rather than west; but it is tempting to think that his story preserves a distant folk-memory of the time when the stones were first brought in, as if by some supernatural power, from a land beyond the setting sun.