Arcadia (8 page)

The darkness of an English autumn was falling; summer had put up a reasonable struggle this year, but was now surrendering to the inevitable. Outside there was the chill of night already tinged with the more serious cold of winter; it was the time of day and year when all good people pull the curtains shut and block out the world until morning comes again. A moment of comfort and tea, and of little sponge cakes which were his evening treat on a Saturday, made for him especially by Mrs Morris, who had for some reason taken on the task a few years ago.

In truth, he did not care for the damp fingers of sponge with their thin layer of strawberry jam in the middle. They made Mrs Morris happy, though, and she would be hurt if he did not eat them. So he would sip his tea in the battered armchair by the fire, and only occasionally give way to temptation and hide the cakes under the settee until she had gone home and he could safely throw them away.

He was mildly surprised by what he had written so far; it certainly had not been his intention to stray into mystical
meanderings, at least not so early on. He had put in a vision, and that smacked of religion. While he knew he would have to grapple with beliefs at some stage he didn’t want it taking over a major part of his narrative.

He realised where it had come from. Rosie had asked – with a strange intensity, as though it was important – about apparitions, and the girl’s question had made him reflect on the question, especially as he had already jotted down a passage about a vision to establish the idea of the scholars as authority figures. All societies held supernatural beliefs, but the nature of the apparitions told you a great deal about the people who saw them. A mechanical society feared mechanical things, a spiritual society feared spiritual things. The beliefs of Anterwold would have to be sculpted carefully.

Rosie, bless her, was still – just – in that innocent state which found room in her imagination for ghosts and fairies. It wouldn’t last long, no doubt. Soon she would be worrying about her clothes and boyfriends. Indeed, there were alarming signs of that already.

He liked the girl, who had such great spirit and such drab parents. Rosie had introduced them when they met on the street once. Her mother was a silly, fussy woman; her father dull and conventional. How on earth they had produced a girl like her was quite beyond him. He could only assume there had been some mix-up in the hospital where she was born, and they had come home with the wrong infant. They all look pretty much the same at that age, so he understood. A mistake could easily have been made.

The Wilsons lived in the next street, across one of those invisible but powerful divides which criss-cross most English towns. Lytten owned a shabby Victorian house which had a small front garden in a street with trees lining the pavement. Rosie’s family was in a shabby Victorian house with neither. One street was the preserve of academics, lawyers and men of business; the other was inhabited by shopkeepers and bank clerks. Neither would ever dream of crossing over into the other’s territory to live. It
wasn’t done, and England was a place where what wasn’t done had a force greater than any statute.

Every now and then a group of boys would pass Lytten’s house on their way to the parks to play football and, on one occasion, Rosie’s utterly uninteresting elder brother had kicked a ball into his garden. He had been too afraid to come himself and Rosie had been sent to get it back. Lytten handed it over gravely and they had talked for some time about the weather, purely for the pleasure in making the boys wait.

They greeted each other in the street a few days later and talked again; she saw Professor Jenkins stretched out by an open window – a rare concession on his part to fresh air – and stroked him. He warned her that the cat could get nasty, but Jenkins had stood up and become almost flirtatious. Gradually she took to dropping in and, bit by bit, they became as good friends as a fifteen-year-old girl and a fifty-year-old man with little in common can become. Rosie took charge of Jenkins periodically, and Lytten slipped her a little money by way of thanks. He knew she got no pocket money.

He had given his apparition her coat and face. She was a pretty girl, and her face could be that of a fairy, had it not been for the ridiculous way she had cut her hair. Dreadful coat, though. Red plastic and shiny. Adolescent fashion.

*

Lytten’s speciality was Sir Philip Sidney, favourite of Queen Elizabeth, courtier, scholar, poet and man of action. Indeed, he died fighting the Spanish in 1586. A romantic figure; dashing, handsome, well connected, even if his abilities were never as great as he imagined. He desired a fine role in the government but Elizabeth, wise old bird that she was, kept him at arm’s length. The great queen was highly suspicious of extravagance from anyone but herself.

He compensated for this by writing (or at least starting – he
never quite finished anything) the greatest romance in the English language. Almost no one has even heard of it now, which is a pity, because if modern sensibilities are suspended – if you do not care about plot, action, events, morality, structure or pace, if you are not bothered by absurd coincidence or unlikely motivations, if irrelevant digressions of immense length do not weary you – then his
Arcadia
has many fine qualities. His characters do not do much, it must be admitted; the only event of any real note in the entire book is a seduction, but Sidney cut this out in a later rewriting for fear of being considered vulgar.

What is left is a rudimentary plot of such absurdity it is best ignored – aristocrats dressed up as peasants when they are not disguising themselves as women, falling in love with other peasants who are also aristocrats in disguise for reasons which really don’t matter too much. Many of Shakespeare’s plots are similar, if a little shorter.

Besides, for Sidney the plot is only a vehicle for talk. Rather than doing anything, the characters talk in language which is so beautiful that it is difficult to resist. The words create an imaginary landscape of perfection, a soft dream of warm evenings with chuckling streams and dappled sunlight playing through the leaves of a forest.

Death and threat are there, but only to highlight the perfection of the present. Others have created a similar effect – the scene in
Le Grand Meaulnes
, where Meaulnes wanders into a Watteauesque party and goes in a daze around an elegant estate, full of beautiful women in silk and men in Pierrot costume. The Venice Carnevale, when all reality is suspended and dreams take over the entire city. All these images and impressions had lodged in Lytten’s youthful mind, a hidden refuge from the reality of a grey industrial land, full of strife and surrounded by the darkening clouds of another war.

Lytten never allowed his imaginings to overwhelm reality. Sidney was a man he studied; Meaulnes a character in a book; Venice a city he visited. Still, over the years, his recollections and
studies slowly reorganised themselves in his mind to the point where the land of Anterwold began to take shape, particularly the domain of Willdon, which was the central point from which the whole story emerged, just as Sidney’s world emerged from his sister’s possessions as Countess of Pembroke.

7

Until the soldier – the same one who had shown him kindness – pulled back the covering and gestured to him, Jay travelled in near darkness. Not a single person had so much as said a word to him. Competing emotions had beset him throughout the journey. Fear, of course. Boredom. Resentment. Finally, a burning, desperate curiosity. Just on the other side of the canvas were wonders such as he had never seen before. Forests, woods, houses, mountains – who knew what was there to be looked at? He tried to pull up a piece of the covering so he could see out, but it was too thick and strong. He dreamed of a daring escape, but it was pointless even to try.

Then he emerged into the fading light of an early evening, with a fresh wind in contrast to the smelly, sweltering heat of the wagon, which he had endured in glum silence.

‘Come and sit by me, and keep your mouth shut,’ the soldier said. Jay hurried to obey in case he changed his mind, and squeezed himself down besides the man’s impressive bulk. He looked around and gasped. Not in astonishment or wonder, but in surprise. There was nothing much to see that was very different from his home.

‘Where are we?’ he began.

The soldier shook his head. ‘I said shut up. It means be quiet. Keep your mouth closed. Say nothing. Silence. Do you understand?’

Jay nodded.

‘I will talk. You will not. Agreed?’

Jay nodded again.

‘That’s good. Because there is not much time. We will arrive
in an hour or so. Are you frightened?’

Jay opened his mouth to speak, saw the look on the soldier’s face, then nodded for a third time.

‘Do you know what is going to happen to you?’

He shook his head.

‘Thought not. It seems a shame to be scared for no reason. So I’ll tell you what I’ve heard. Okay?’

Another nod.

The soldier grunted. ‘You see? You can do it when you try. Right then. You are going to Ossenfud to be a student.’

Jay looked at him curiously.

‘You don’t even know what that is? Very well. A student is someone who learns. What you learn depends on your teacher, but it takes years and years, and the best become Storytellers.’

Jay could no longer contain himself. ‘A Storyteller! Me?’

‘I said the best. Storytellers need years of discipline and immense knowledge and intelligence. They must commit everything to memory and be able to summon it all as required. They are the custodians of the past and the shapers of the future. Does that sound like you?’

Jay shook his head.

‘Precisely. You may become a keeper of accounts, or something like that. Lower, but still important. That’s more like it. The thing is, you were chosen. By that Storyteller himself. Henary, his name is. That’s very unusual.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s not how it’s done, usually. As the Visitors and Storytellers go around the country, they keep an eye open for people. Young, trainable. Generally they are recommended. Someone exceptionally smart. They’ll be noticed by a mayor or a chief. They’ll be questioned, tested. Then chosen. That’s not the way it was with you. Something you must have said or done – and don’t ask me what, because I would have just given you a good thrashing and sent you back to your mother – must have persuaded Henary that you were just such a kid.’

‘But I can’t do anything. I know a bit about blacksmithing.’

‘You will be taught. Don’t think it will be fun. Long hours, hard work, sitting at a desk all day every day. You’ll wish you were back in the fields. Most people couldn’t stand it. I certainly couldn’t. You can have the power and the glory if you have to become a wizened, half-blind creature with a bent back to get it. Not for me.’

‘Who are you? I’m sorry, but I really don’t know much.’

‘Just a soldier. I come from Willdon, about three days’ march from here. Every settlement sends soldiers to act as guards to the scholars, for a while. I’ll be done soon, and then I’ll go back to work in the forests again. It’s too complicated to explain. You’ll know in due course. You’ll know more than me, and I’ll be asking you questions.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘I doubt you’ll answer.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you don’t. You people.’

You people. Jay found it confusing. Until three days ago, someone like the soldier sitting beside him would have been impossibly grand and powerful. Someone Jay would naturally have addressed as ‘sir’, with a bow. Yet here he was, talking almost as though they were equals. Already he could feel an even greater change; but what it meant his young mind could not begin to grasp.

‘I’ll answer you. What’s your name?’

‘Callan. Son of Perel.’

‘Callan Perelson, then. When we meet, whoever I become, you will be my friend, and I will answer your questions.’

Callan looked touched by this naivety. ‘Thank you. You will forgive me if I say I don’t believe you.’

‘No,’ said Jay a little sadly. ‘No, I won’t forgive you.’

*

Jay had never seen a town before, and the city of Ossenfud, where the scholars lived, was fairly large. About six thousand souls lived there most of the year, although this number fluctuated according to the seasons. It was settled on a river, and was approached by four roads, one coming from each of the points of the compass. Unusually, outlying buildings were scattered along these roads, up to a mile away from the city proper.

So many houses, so many people, the clattering of the cart over roads paved with stones, everything made Jay tremble with excitement. Even more alarming was when they stopped outside a vast building of unimaginable magnificence.

‘Here we are, then,’ Callan said cheerfully. ‘Home, sweet home. East College, where Scholar Henary is, and where you will be until either you are finished or they throw you out.’

He eased himself down to the ground and waited. ‘If you think I’m going to carry your bag for you, you’re mistaken,’ he called up.

Jay searched for the pathetic little sack which contained everything he owned in the world: two shirts, two pairs of trousers, one pair of clogs and one pair of shoes, his pride and joy. Also a piece of carved wood his uncle had once given him. Nothing else. At least the bag was light.

Then he, too, jumped down and found that Callan was talking to a young man who had stopped to watch. Jay wondered whether it was good manners to go up and join them, and decided to play safe. He listened intently, nonetheless.

‘I’m surprised to see you here,’ Callan was saying.

‘Oh, domain business. Someone had to come and I offered. A little change, you know.’ He pointed at Jay. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Henary found him. Asked me to deliver him here.’

The young man crooked his finger, so Jay obediently approached.

‘A find by Scholar Henary? You are a lucky boy. I hope you realise that?’

He was a tall and finely dressed young man, perhaps ten years or so older than Jay was, but decades away in manner and self-possession. Jay noticed that he talked to the grizzled soldier with familiarity, even amusement, as though he was doing him some sort of favour. Jay was now even more confused.