To the River (10 page)

I leaned back and watched the cloud come. It could have crossed oceans, though it seemed more likely that it had risen from the neighbouring field, where coppery dock and nettle grew tangled amid the grasses. Didn’t Plato think there was a wind that could impregnate horses? It couldn’t have been more fertile than this generative swarm, twelve feet long and a yard wide, that rolled towards the waiting flowers.

That night I stayed at The Griffin in Fletching, a village that once specialised in the making of arrowheads; indeed, it was where almost all the English arrows in the Battle of Agincourt were cut. In the thirteenth century the manor belonged to Simon de Montfort, though he visited it rarely, and in 1264 his soldiers stopped here on their journey from London to Lewes, where the first great battle of the Barons’War was fought. Local legend has it that the barons spent the preceding night in vigil in the little church, though as with many stories handed down in villages it does not quite align with the historical record.

The Griffin was old too, and prided itself on its food. I arrived too early for dinner, and so drowsed for an hour in a tiny, sloping bedroom, the light seeping in through ill-fitting blinds. I got up at seven and went to the garden with a gin in my hand. It was Midsummer Night, and the whole country was basking, the sun streaming through the oaks and turning the grasses to flames. Near where I sat, a woman was talking and her voice carried across the lawn.

That fucking cunt
, she said.
Is that the fucking cunt, is that the fucking cunt that gave that girl the acid
?

I looked over. She was sitting a few tables away, a tall deeply tanned woman with an elegant neck and long, slender legs. She was drunk. The alcohol had loosened her, though her voice must always have been loud. Her friend was smaller and chubbier, with a child’s messy hair and frilly skirt. There was a dog with them, a pug in a diamante harness.

I hate Brighton
, the first woman said.
No one ever forgets anything
.

Her friend was preoccupied with the dog.
Smuggles! Smuggles!
she shouted. And then they began to talk together, their voices overlapping. There was no one in the garden who could not hear them. One by one the other tables fell silent, as they might in the presence of royalty or death.

I took the morning-after pill three times last year. You might have triplets! I might have quadruplets! He slammed me up against the bar – girls can always look after themselves – he slammed me up against the bar and he said – Smuggles! Smuggles! – he said if you ever talk to me about coke – he was going out with that girl – but I wouldn’t have! He said if you ever, but I never, I wouldn’t have. I said I’ve never asked you for coke. That fucking cunt, that fucking cunt. No one forgets, no one ever forgets what you’ve done.

Two men joined them and then they were four. They moved tables and upturned ashtrays, mislaid dog leads and sunglasses. ‘The Church has decided nothing on this subject,’ says the Catholic Encyclopaedia; ‘hence we may say hell is a definite place; but where it is, we do not know.’
Other people
, answered Sartre. And three centuries earlier, Shakespeare: ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’ You can’t escape, however far you travel. After supper I walked out into the churchyard where Edward Gibbon was buried, who wrote
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and died nearby of peritonitis after an operation to drain the massive inflammation of his testicles went wrong and poisoned his blood. In my head the woman’s voice translated:
he had fucking big bollocks
. It was an English voice and it had been going on forever: parochial and incensed, intent on cutting everything down to size. Meanwhile, the swallows were screaming the sky into tatters. I sat on a bench and watched them drop, wings akimbo, shrieking as they fell. How strangely we spend our lives: mapping the architecture of Hades or the ornamentation of a pollen grain.
No one ever forgets anything
. It’s all piled up here somewhere, on the surface or under the ground. It never stops, that’s the trouble. It keeps on coming, like that golden wind, breeding from out of its own ruin.

I lay awake for a long time that night, almost stifling. It was Midsummer Eve, bang on, when the wall between worlds is said to grow thin. Hell and Hades, Dis, the courts and palaces of the
sidhe
that exist beneath barrows: all these places seemed very close, perhaps just outside the hot little room.

I have somewhere a map of hell that, in the manner of an anatomical drawing, shows its subject in both a transverse and a sagittal plane. In the first, hell is a labyrinth wound about with rivers: first Acheron, where the ferryman crosses; then the terrible Styx, which bubbles its way through a stinking marsh; and lastly Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which runs through the interior of the earth and up to Paradise. In the second drawing, hell is seen as a series of steps. They begin as the shallow declivities where the lesser sinners roam, and then they shelve abruptly, as a shingle beach does, into the realm that is known as the Pit. The great city of hell is situated at the edge of this pit, encircled by the Styx. Beneath it, in that vast hollow at the earth’s core, is the body of Satan, encased in ice.

According to Dorothy L. Sayers, who translated the edition of the
Inferno
in which these maps are found, the centre of Dante’s world coincides exactly with Satan’s navel. The chasm in which Satan stands was formed when he was thrown from Paradise at the culmination of the war in heaven, plummeting at speed into our own circling planet; an event that in its horror caused a rearrangement of the world’s geography. The landmass of the southern hemisphere rushed back in disgust, taking up a new station in the north; the sea flooded in to fill the gap, and Mount Purgatory was created as a small island from the displaced matter at the earth’s core.

Some elements of Dante’s cosmology reflect the beliefs of his time; others are a matter of his own invention. In the fourteenth century, many geographers believed that all the world’s land was in the northern hemisphere, and that the rest of the globe was sunk beneath the sea. But the idea that Mount Purgatory existed as an island in the southern hemisphere: this seems unique to Dante, who placed the Garden of Eden at its peak, with the celestial state of Heaven floating above it.

Dante situated Mount Purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem, which would put it in the South Pacific, 1,010 miles south-west by west from the nearest inhabited land, Adamstown in the Pitcairn Islands. Curiously enough, one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the world, the Macdonald Seamount, is only a couple of hundred miles from Dante’s site, a tiny distance in that vast ocean. The volcano, which was not discovered until 1967, is almost two and a half miles high, its summit rising to just beneath the water’s surface. Macdonald’s periodic eruptions have at least twice been witnessed: by the
RV Melville
on 11 October 1986, and by the
NO Le Suroit
and the diving saucer
Cynara
in Janaury 1989.

The findings of these two ships chart a submarine world of lava lakes and sulphide chimneys not dissimilar to the landscape that Dante and his guide so laboriously travel through. The mountain’s slopes are covered in a dense scree of lapilli, pillow lava and volcanic bombs in the shape of loaves and cauliflowers, testament to the furious upheavals that take place beneath the ocean’s surface. There is a fissure on the volcano’s eastern flank, and the seawater there is opaque and shimmering from the superheated gas that seeps continually free. It’s not hard to see why the interior of the earth might be thought to boil, but to imagine that as our final resting place: why?

As to the location of Paradise, it’s to be found on a bank on the path to Sharpsbridge in the merry month of June. I left the Griffin early, after a pain au chocolat and a bowl of prunes. It was the top of the morning, the very cream, and I skimmed it off and crouched in the cornfield, gulping it down. The clouds were coming over from the west like zeppelins, casting ballooning shadows across the metallic blue-green of the wheat. The field ended in a double ditch, and from it grew a mass of flowers in a profusion of colours and forms, such as is seen trimming the edges of medieval manuscripts. Black medick, I counted, buttercup, horsetail, ribwort plantain, hedge woundwort, musk mallow and curled dock, the clustered seeds a rusty brown. Wild rose, dandelion, the red and white deadnettle, blackberry, smooth hawksbeard and purple-crowned knapweed. Interspersed with these were smaller, more delicate flowers: cut-leaved cranesbill, birdsfoot trefoil, slender speedwell, St John’s wort, heath bedstraw, tufted vetch and, weaving in and out of the rest, field bindweed, its flowers striped cups of sherbet-pink and white. The stem of the knapweed was covered in blackfly, and a spider trap shaped like a dodecahedron had annexed a few pale purple flowers of vetch inside swathes of tight-woven web.

A matter of miles, and the whole landscape had changed, the woods and pastures replaced with cattle and crops, the sandstone ridges with the smoother land that precedes the Downs. It took me a full hour to walk a few yards, so absorbing was this new world. The wheat on either side of the chalk track was at different stages of ripeness: on the west clenched and blue and on the east a fuzzy gold-green that was full of larks. I sat on a concrete block where a footpath sign had fallen and gathered an ear to chew. The grains when I cracked them were milky, though those I plucked later had the taste of risen dough.

The larks were all about me, invisible and uproarious, carolling out the untranslatable song they are said to sing at the gate to heaven. I’d found an owl pellet the size of a greengage on the block, and I turned it now on my knee. It was full of tiny fragments of bone that looked at first like husks of corn, and the carapaces of beetles, which shone blackly and powdered my fingers with a glittering dust.

It was a day of uplift. Everything was rising or poised to rise, the mating dragonflies crashing through the air, the meadow browns clipping sedately by. On the other side of the valley there was a small plane parked in a field and as I got closer I could make out the airstrip that had been built about it. White arrows were rollered onto the mown grass and flaking whitewashed tyres were stacked in threes to hold the bulbs of the landing lights. The plane was cherry-red and white, the legend G-AYYT above its wing. I imagined it looping back from Paris, crossing first the blue English Channel and then the second home sea of the wheat.

The wheat was preoccupying me. It had here reached another stage, the long greenish hairs unfurling and turning it into an ocean of grass, in which the wind moved as it will across water, folding the pile first back, now forth. The wind worked across it and so did the light, and I could not at first piece together how the trick was mastered. The stalks here, on this sloped field, were almost blue, a blue that increased from the boot upward like a flush, though later in the month they would grow gilded and then bleach daily until they were almost drained of colour, becoming the common straw that was once used to roof most of England and is still required by law for repairing the thatch of some listed buildings. The heads of the wheat were golden; the hairs that are known as the beard a watery greenish gold that became bronze towards the tip. When the wind flattened the heads – ah, that was it! – they caught the light, which rippled and rushed down the hill in little ebbs and flurries. ‘The grain,’ explains a Roman treatise on farming, ‘is that solid interior part of the spike, the glume is its hull and the beard those long thin needles that grow out of the glume. Thus as the glume is the pontifical robe of the grain, the beard is its apex.’

The wind had risen and was turning the ash leaves white side out, so that they flashed when the sun flooded by. Between Barkham Manor and Sharpsbridge I walked accompanied by the chink of a wren and a fleet of electric blue dragonflies the size of kitchen matches. I set about stalking one, bigger than the rest, but couldn’t get within six feet of it, though I tried first to tiptoe and then to swoop. Its body was the milky blue of weathered plastic, those windblown scraps you find in hedges or caught around gateposts.

Sharpsbridge itself was stubbornly unfamiliar. I’d stayed here four years ago, in a house that was being rented by the son of a famous artist. It was another sweltering summer and we walked one night for miles, accompanied by the hum of pylons and the sound of a flute spilling from an open window and into the stubbled fields. I slept in an oast house away from the others, in an empty circular room, and above my head the sky through the cowl had been sown with fistfuls of stars. But the house, which was ugly, seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps my bearings had got askew. I kept remembering odd details: a garden full of raspberry canes, a wagon by the pond that had been left to rot beneath a swarm of tiny roses.

I was getting anyway into one of those trances that come from walking far, when the feet and the blood seem to collide and harmonise. Funnily enough, Kenneth Grahame and Virginia Woolf both wrote in praise of these uncanny states, which they thought closely allied to the inspiration writing requires. ‘Nature’s particular gift to the walker,’ Grahame explained in a late essay, ‘through the semi-mechanical act of walking – a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree – is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe – certainly creative and supra-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as it were talking to you, while you are talking back to it.’ As for Woolf, she wrote dreamily of
chattering
her books on the crest of the Downs, the words pouring from her as she strode, half-delirious, in the noonday sun. She compared it to swimming or ‘flying through the air; the current of sensations & ideas; & the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour: all this is churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness. Its true I often painted the brightest pictures on this sheet: & often talked out loud.’