The Courtesy of Death (21 page)

Was it this to which Aviston-Tresco looked forward? Well, no. I cannot believe that he primitively wanted happy hunting grounds. Then what parallel, in his own terms, did he foresee? Some sort
of unity with all other animals, I suppose, within which his own individuality could be expressed. I can go a bit of the way with him. We are all uneasily aware that man is on his way to the
ant-heap community, and that he knew more of the true business of living when he was old and diseased at forty. We are too fascinated by the actual time we remain alive. Their life of forty years
held just as much in it as ours of eighty, just as a year at ten is twice the length of a year at twenty.

‘What the hell shall I do now?’ I silently asked them. ‘Here I am with enough food to keep me fit for two or three days and allow me to work for a week longer. What would you
have done with only your horn and bone and flints and bits of wood? You obviously thought of life and death as a kind of continuity, but I take it you didn’t give up until some other
carnivore was asking you for forgiveness.’

Their answer was not very satisfactory. They were no more mystical than boy scouts. They suggested that I had steel tools and the knowledge to use them: in fact that I was about on a technical
level with Arthur.

Arthur. His name incongruously came into my head because I was staring at him. Subliminal advertising.

At the back of a recess to the left of the overhang I made out a scratched engraving of four women—the exaggerated spear-heads of their breasts establishing sex—sitting upon a line
broken by the conventional curves of water. No doubt about that. One cannot mistake that the deer of Lascaux are swimming. With the women was one recumbent man, dead or sleeping, wearing the head
of a horse. Who was he and why was he being ferried in canoe or dug-out across the Lake of Avalon? Can a folk memory from the palaeolithic still exist as a fairy story?

An important discovery? My mind, stunned and taking refuge in the only companionship there was, thought so at the time. Now I doubt it. One might as well say the man with the horse head was the
origin of the chess knight, which is manifest nonsense. No, I had merely joined the club of Glastonbury eccentrics. I have probably been nearer to them, all along, than I ever suspected.

But the Arthur/steel association stuck. Though nothing except explosives or millions of years of flowing water was going to be much good against the limestone of the Mendips, there must be other
objectives if I applied a bit more imagination to the search for them.

When Fosworthy and I had been alone, we accepted the impossibility of either reaching or lifting the hatch and tried to find another way out. Afterwards, when I was alone, the right game was to
keep hysteria under control and wait for the hatch to be opened. But now, at last, led on by my little friends—who reminded me that tools are tools—I saw that my best bet was to tackle
the work of man. I had not been at all successful in tackling the work of nature, whether it was rock or the human minds of Undine and Aviston-Tresco.

I turned away from the hunters by the once warm waters of Avalon and set off to the hatch with all the lights I could collect. If Jedder had bedded the brick frame of the hatch into surrounding
rock, I was done; if he hadn’t, there was a hope. But it was hard to find out what method of construction he had in fact used, since there was no ladder from which to inspect it. What was
left of the companion ladder was firmly cemented in place and useless anyway. Only the outer handrail was intact.

The shaft was smoothly lined with brick. Fosworthy and I had already found that it was impossible to climb to the top by piling up bits and pieces, and I was now clean out of wood in useful
lengths, having sawed it all up for my fire. As a last resort I could knock out the shores and props from the gallery, but I did not much care for that. The roof, as it was, had a tendency to spew
bits of itself out.

I went back to the winch to fetch the pick and cold chisels. Then I started to test Jedder’s mortar. No trouble there! He had been using as much material as possible from the cave itself,
and his sand was full of clay. Even so, it was a long, tedious job to knock out the bottom course of bricks, especially since I needed them and did not wish to break more than I had to.

By five in the morning—if there had been any morning—I had removed six courses and piled the unbroken bricks at the entrance to the gallery. By then my back was aching and hands
beginning to blister, so I knocked off and ate a can of bully and a raw onion. I was thankful that I had packed a small store of food, though expecting to use it in the open, if at all. At the
bottom of my knapsack was the clothes brush. How ingenious Aviston-Tresco had been! The suggestion of the clothes brush, which he knew I was never going to need, was a wonderful confidence
trick.

I forced myself to rest, awake or not, for six hours. Sleep was less easy than during my first imprisonment. Then I wanted to get away from pain and terror; now, I was only suffering from an
unaccustomed form of exercise. I was also conscious of the stench—partly of blood, partly of my rank former self—which my bed of sheepskins gave out when they were warmed up by my body.
It reminded me that in envying the freedom of the hunters I was inclined to forget their living conditions. But we are fussy. It is said that we should be revolted by the stinking of even the
eighteenth century.

When I resumed my task, it was much easier. I could now swing a pick at the level of my knees, get the point behind the bricks and often detach several at a time. As soon as I was working above
the height of my head, I built a platform of sound bricks to stand on. Shifting the platform round the shaft began to take more time than the actual demolition, but that went fast—sometimes
too fast at points where Jedder had not properly bonded his brickwork into the rubble of the shaft. When the whistle blew for supper, I was working twelve feet from the ground with eight or nine
more to go.

Twenty-four hours had passed since I entered the cave with Aviston-Tresco. I was cautiously pleased with my progress, though aware that the next shifts were going to be far more complicated and
dangerous. I had to make a sort of steep staircase out of the loose bricks; since there were not enough, the structure was too narrow and horribly unstable. Swinging a pick was impossible. Even
using a hammer and cold chisel was alarming. I never felt secure on my teetering staircase unless I had one hand on the wall of the shaft. An uncontrollable fall in a shower of bricks was a nasty
prospect when I could not afford a sprain, let alone a fracture.

However, I could now examine the underside of the hatch. Its frame was not let into rock or concrete; it simply stood on the top course of bricks. Under that were left some twelve more courses,
completely unsupported. With all the weight of hay on top of the hatch, the brickwork might at any time come down with a wallop, dropping the hatch on me while I was chipping away underneath. I was
none too happy, either, about the exposed rubble through which the shaft had been dug. There was a sizeable trickle of water in one place, and in another threatening little showers of pebbles and
earth.

Some sort of scaffolding was essential, which would allow me to get both hands to the job and also check the falling hatch while I jumped for my life. But I could not see what to use nor how to
support it. So I opened my last can of food, took a generous shot of whisky to help imagination and slept on the problem.

The solution was fairly clear in the morning—which turned out to be midday by my watch. Working down from the top, I changed my staircase into a pillar. Opposite, I built another pillar as
high as I could reach. I sawed off the handrail of the companion ladder and cut it to fit the diameter of the shaft. My difficulty then was to build up the second pillar to the height of the first
and hoist the beam up to rest on the pair of them. I felt hopeful that the pillars would hold once my weight was on the cross beam.

Meanwhile, hold they would not. When the top of the second pillar was beyond my reach, I carried on building by balancing single bricks on the end of a last piece of two by four timber, holding
it up like a caber-tosser and sliding them into position. Twice the whole stack fell down. And when at last I had finished it I could not get my beam up.

The only possible method was to hoist it up by means of a hook driven into the wood of the hatch, but there was nothing at all in Jedder’s stores which would serve or could be bent to
serve; nor had he got a drill. I cursed blind and sat on my knapsack, in which nothing remained except the damned clothes brush, some biscuits and the revolver. But that was it! There was my hook
and there was my drill.

I dismantled the two pillars and turned them back into a stair. I fired a shot obliquely into the wood of the hatch, and hammered and twisted the barrel into the splintered hole until it was
firmly jammed. The butt, turned upwards, then formed a neat and reliable hook. It was the only use I had ever found in all my life for that large, clumsy weapon.

When I had hung a length of rope on it, I changed the stair into two pillars again. That sounds simple; but it took six blasted hours of trial and error and repeated rebuilding before I had
hoisted the handrail of the companion squarely into position on the bricks. I had just enough energy left to climb up the rope and sit on the beam, not caring greatly whether the whole crazy
structure collapsed or not.

By this time I felt that I would rather be squashed than climb down again, probably bringing a pillar with me. So I knocked out the last courses with hammer and chisel, leaving the frame
supported on only eight bricks. Three of them stayed where they were by the magic of inanimate bodies. Five on the other side were cemented—pretty well for Jedder—to a solid paving
stone on the floor of the barn.

It looked as if I might now have a future provided that I got out from under quick. I slid down—half a pillar and the beam came down as well—and removed knapsack and tools into the
comparative safety of the gallery. My watch surprised me. It was already afternoon in the outside world. As I thought it unwise to attempt the break-out when there might be people within earshot, I
ate my biscuits and rested.

I could only doze uneasily, while obsessed by all the incalculable ways in which hatch, shaft and barn floor could collapse, as well as by the awkward evidence I was leaving behind: bloodstains,
fingerprints, mess and a couple of bodies. I was sure that Aviston-Tresco had told the truth and really left a suicide note since his whole objective was to end once and for all the sequence of
events which had started with his imprisonment of Fosworthy. When his body was found, analysis would show he had poisoned himself. But why hadn’t he drowned himself in the Parrett as he said
he was going to? And who lowered him, alive or dead, down that hole?

Well, the question marks had to be left, but I could ensure that there would never be easy answers. I suddenly realised that with a bit of luck I could close the entrance so convincingly that no
trace of it would remain. If at some future date an unknown pot-holer found his way into the cave by a new route, he could work out the tragedy for himself. Digging to see where the wires led
beyond the companion ladder, he would come upon Fosworthy’s body. Then, or perhaps earlier, what remained of Aviston-Tresco would be discovered. Coroner and police could spend months trying
to work that mystery out. Nothing fitted, but there was no suggestion of murder, no third person concerned. Fosworthy had apparently been overwhelmed by a landslide as he tried to get help.

So I left the winch where it was with the rope hanging down and I carried Fosworthy’s body into the gallery. I knew that he would have forgiven this. He was always so anxious to protect
me. ‘A mere envelope,’ he would have said. ‘If you consider, my dear Yarrow, that it may relieve you from the grave embarrassments for which I was inadvertently responsible, it is
entirely at your disposal.’

The next task was admittedly chancy; but every stress and strain of that gallery was familiar to me and I knew what I was doing. I began to knock out the props, starting from the top of the
companion. The result was instant and spectacular. Access to the cave was already closed. Working backwards towards the shaft, I slammed out some more of the shoring over Fosworthy’s body.
When I had prised loose a boulder in the roof, I jumped back to wait for the crash.

It worked. The gallery had ceased to exist except for some twelve feet at the entrance to the shaft, and Fosworthy’s body was buried. But while the dust was settling and I was shining my
torch on the yellow wall which faced me, there was a roar like the end of the world behind.

At first I thought that I, too, was buried. My feet were knocked from under me and I felt drowned in dust and debris. But when my torch could show anything, it showed that the joists above me
were still intact. What had happened was that the waves of my minor earthquake had brought down the hatch, with the hay and half the shaft as well.

I was caught in my bit of crumbling tunnel. I accepted dully that it might be anything from five minutes to a day or two days before I could dig myself out. By God, that vile hell-hole had
trained me in patience!

Clearance of the entrance with pick and hands was very slow, since bricks, debris and hay bales had to be stacked in the gallery. Calculation on the back of an envelope showed that there must be
more solid matter in the shaft than would fit into my twelve feet of space. However, I did at last arrive at a sort of working face, though there was very little room to work at it.

The whole mass settled as I drove my sap into the bottom and I could now see that it was composed of solid cubes—the bales—with loose rubble and brick between them. This pattern
allowed some air to come through. I had been wondering for some hours why I was not gasping for breath. Jedder’s binder twine must have been exceptional stuff or else he specially tied these
bales to resist frequent lifting. Few of the bales had split open.