Those picnics had made his wife happy. But making her happy had been a long way behind making money in his list of priorities and most of the time she had spent at the mill house had been endured by her alone, he being on trips and their only child away at boarding school.
His business life had been one long litany of money-shots, no-brainers, done deals and fire sales and ball-breakers. He’d been so fluent in the language of boardroom machismo he’d forgotten how to communicate in any other way. Profit subsumed everything. Claret on the carpet, suppliers manacled by contract clauses, partners in enterprise permanently yoked to a junior role. Everywhere he looked he was looking only for the bottom line of a balance sheet.
It had taken the cancer to stop that.
First had come the ominous suspicion that something was wrong with his throat. He’d had trouble swallowing. His tongue had felt numb. His mouth no longer told him accurately whether a drink was hot or cold. The timbre of his voice changed. It roughened. There was a sense in which his speech came to feel somehow blurred. And he was tired. For the first time in his life, he felt bone-weary and the weariness was constant.
He’d had an operation almost as soon as the diagnosis was confirmed, in New York eleven months ago. That had been kept secret from everyone. No one knew; not Francesca and certainly no one who worked for him. It was an absence of only a couple of days from his email and Twitter accounts. His retreats, his stints in rehab and his trips to remote places were so much a feature of his life that no one thought to become suspicious.
The surgery was a success. They got the whole of the growth out of him, every cancerous cell. Six months later came the all-clear. And then in February the symptoms started to re-establish themselves and he was soberly told that this time surgery was not an option. There was nowhere left to cut. Another invasive procedure would kill him. Chemo was a balance between the time it bought you and the havoc it wreaked on the quality of your remaining life. His prognosis was bleak, his case hopeless and his prospects terminal.
Saul swallowed with effort, gathered his blanket around him and thought about the picture he looked at – the narrative of it, the guy in the steel suit who had come out on top in the rumble with the creature his broadsword had decapitated. Recently decapitated, the gore still dripped from the creature’s severed neck. The blow hadn’t been delivered in death to secure a trophy. It had been the fatal last act of the fight.
How accurate was the depiction? Saul thought that in all the important particulars it was probably truthful enough. The guy wouldn’t have been dressed like that, though. The guy detailed in stained glass looked like one of Arthur’s Round Table dudes in a picture by Millais or Holman-Hunt. Saul was familiar with the style because he owned a bunch of those paintings himself. The courtly medieval world of the Pre-Raphaelite school was romantic and seductive. In this particular instance, chronology made it no more than a glamorous lie.
Warriors had dressed like the stained-glass dude in the time of the window’s creation and the artisan who made it had figured on rendering what he knew from life. The real event had taken place 300 years earlier, and though the human protagonist had certainly been of noble birth and martial inclination, he would have been dressed differently. Saul figured animal skins and jewelled broaches and probably more facial hair than on a self-respecting member of the Grateful Dead.
No chivalric code to observe, that far back in history. No notion of courtly love. That came later with the French, their manners and their madrigals and wimpled damsels prone to bouts of distress. This guy had been different from all that. No grail quest to distract him from his mission. That was for damn sure.
Armed differently too, probably, Saul figured. He thought a round wooden shield and maybe a double-bladed battleaxe rather than a sword. The guy would have been expert in the use of arms, lethal in combat and colossally strong. He’d have been completely determined. And he’d have been quite unbelievably fucking courageous.
He’d been hand-picked, obviously. But the guy had known what he was up against, hadn’t he? He’d have heard the stories from the cradle. He’d been an inhabitant of a different universe, one in which the few certainties were absolute and much was quite simply unknowable. You steered clear of the edge of the world and you kept the darkness at bay unless it was deemed your duty, as it had been his, to deliberately venture into it.
Duty was probably wrong. Calling was more like it and the word he would have used in his lost language would probably most have resembled destiny among modern English words in meaning.
Brother, brother, brother,
Saul mused. His phone beeped in his pocket. Probably Sam trying to find out where he was and what he was up to. Sam hadn’t had his Saul fix that morning and it was his employer’s belief that he had become as addicted to the presence of his boss as he’d once been to cocaine.
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
That was nothing to do with Marvin or Aretha or even the Dead, was it? It was the title of an album by Van the Man. It wasn’t a Van Morrison classic up there with
Astral Weeks
or
Moondance
; it was a run-of-the-mill collection, a motley assemblage of songs and was not what had prompted Saul Abercrombie, still staring at stained glass, to ask the rhetorical question anyway.
What had prompted it was the resemblance between the warrior in the depiction embedded up there in the wall and his tree man, Tom Curtis. It wasn’t just passing. You wouldn’t really do it justice by describing it as strong. Uncanny was what it was and because he didn’t really believe in coincidence, despite the warmth of his picnic blanket and the intimate summer memories it evoked, he shivered and felt goose-flesh momentarily coarsen his skin.
Curtis was Welsh. The guy rendered up there in stained glass hadn’t been. He’d come from the West of England, from Cornwall, which had been a Celtic kingdom once with its own tongue. But he’d been an English speaker, or so the place names in what was now the Abercrombie domain suggested.
He’d come in answer to a magician’s plea and the land had been his reward for what he’d accomplished once he got there. What spells and brews concocted in cauldrons had failed to do he’d done with his sword or, more likely, Saul reminded himself, the whetted edge of his battleaxe. That was the legend. That was what Curtis would be told. But he wouldn’t be told the whole of it.
Saul chuckled, a choked sound from his afflicted throat in the stony acoustics of the space surrounding him. He had amused himself, momentarily, with the thought of how Curtis would react if he told him the whole of it. He knew himself to be desperate. He thought that if he confided all he hoped for from what he intended to have done there, his tree man would consider him not just desperate but clinically insane.
Pete Mariner raised the unsteady hand containing his glass in a wobbly toast to good fortune. The stuff filling the glass was cider made exclusively from apples gathered from an orchard on Jersey that owed its continuing existence to the expertise of his friends and sometimes colleagues, Tom Curtis and Dora Straub.
It was only eleven o’clock in the morning. But Pete had woken far from sober at ten after the herculean bender of the previous day and had needed to defer the inevitable hangover because, just then, he didn’t think he possessed the fortitude to face it.
He would sober up. He would have to, wouldn’t he? He had a living to earn and a job in prospect that was a professional challenge to equal anything he’d ever accomplished in his entire adult life. The respect of Tom Curtis – the approval of Tom Curtis – was a quality intrinsic to his own self-respect when it came to what he earned his living doing.
And there was Dora. Ah, yes, there was Dora, Pete thought, gagging as his system rebelled against the toxic assault of mature cider drunk so early in the day, and he was obliged to swallow back puke just to show it who was boss.
He was in love with Dora. He thought that he might even be hopelessly in love with her, but that seemed to be an unduly pessimistic analysis as drunk as he was. He was tipsily buoyant, so he wouldn’t have it that the love was hopeless until the cold light of sobriety forced him to confront that stark prospect.
Right now, he thought his prospects really rather fine. The deal Tom had offered him was generous. The job sounded not just challenging but in some almost mythic capacity, fabulous. It would present him with the close proximity of Dora in a way no one could possibly interpret as creepy or perverse. And events would have the opportunity to take whatever course they would consequently. What could possibly go wrong?
Pete took another celebratory chug of cider. This time the swallow reflex didn’t work its previous magic and he barfed about eight hours’ worth of stale booze out over his living-room carpet. He thought he heard it fizz as it settled into the worn pile, but realized that was probably just his ears singing with relieved pressure after lightening his body’s poisonous load.
He knew his limitations. He knew them really well because he had tested them so often. The problem was that he had no respect for them. And they, frankly, had no respect for him.
It took him an hour with a towel, a bucket of hot water and the best part of a bottle of Dettol to clear up the mess and, when he’d done so, he could still smell a faint sour residue under the disinfectant.
But the energy and focus required by this distasteful task sobered him somewhat, as did confronting the pretty squalid nature of his domestic crime. There was the lad-mag lifestyle of carefree hedonism he was a good decade and a half too old for. And there was the slippery slope that led to a bed on a public ward and a sign around your neck saying Nil by Mouth.
It was just after noon when he slid back into bed. His bed had not even grown completely cold from its earlier occupation. He closed his eyes and mercifully the dark world doing so invited did not spin giddily. Just for an instant he imagined what it would be like to have Dora Straub, slender and perfumed, stretched out on the mattress next to him.
It wouldn’t do at all. His breath stank of stale booze. His tooth enamel felt dry under his furry tongue from the acid in the puke. He knew he was sweating liquor from every overworked pore. But he had time, thankfully, before the real encounter with Dora came, and when it did he would be bright-eyed and spruced-up and entirely sober.
Pete remembered the dream, then. More accurately, he remembered remembering the dream before, the way you did when they were recurrent, or you just imagined they were in the haunting manner dreams had because they were so elusive and insubstantial in their basic character.
In the dream he was being pursued. The pursuit was deadly and, when he remembered the substance of the dream, he remembered with surprise that he always endured it in a state of sleeping terror.
He had been pursued on a couple of occasions through forest. That had happened to him in life. The first time had been on the edge of the African veldt when he had become briefly the prey of a leopard. But this leopard had been a bit timid and half-hearted, and had lost interest in a confrontation in a clearing when it had seen the size of its prospective kill and factored in the work necessary.
The second occasion was more serious. He’d been working for a Russian billionaire restoring a depleted forest of conifers around his dacha eighty miles north of Moscow. Pete had been clearing dead and dying trees with a chainsaw one chilly April morning. But the noise was insistent and the weather wasn’t chilly enough, because his industry woke a brown bear from hibernation and the bear came-to very grumpily.
Pete fled, literally, for his life. He could hear the bear gaining on him, careening through undergrowth, the growl of its breath and its paws scampering on the ground getting louder all the time. He could almost feel the heat of its breath on his neck as he ran and it closed the distance.
He scaled a tree. He reckoned later he climbed it faster than he’d ever climbed anything in his life. Inspired by fear, fuelled by raw adrenaline, he stopped forty feet up only because he ran out of branches and stood gripping the tree’s swaying, resin-sticky summit in the embrace of both his trembling arms.
The bear shook the base of the tree. But it didn’t climb up there after him. It was a large and intelligent creature and, even drowsy and irritated as it was, must have known that the branches of the tree would not support its weight.
With his feet scissored high up on the swaying trunk, Pete fumbled his short-wave radio out from his jeans pocket; it squelched into life and he summoned help in his feeble Russian. A guy riding shotgun in a Range Rover scared the bear away with a few blasts skywards from his pump-action twelve-bore and they all laughed about it good-naturedly afterwards for days.
This dream of pursuit he was having now wasn’t like that, though. It wasn’t anti-climactic, like his encounter with the leopard on the veldt. It didn’t have the Carry-On comic quality of his encounter in a Russian pine forest with an irritated bear. It was far more ominous than that. It was somehow vastly more despairing in the mood it inflicted. Escape from it seemed a hopeless enterprise.
There was terror. But it was not of the galvanic sort that gives a fugitive his nimble energy. It was an enveloping sort of terror. It consumed the will and made flight a sluggish and futile notion.
And there was the pursuer. Pete could not see his pursuer in this dream he vaguely remembered and even more vaguely suspected he might have had before and might be having, come to that, quite regularly. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t even warm-blooded. It was cold-eyed and reptilian and it was sickeningly quick, possessed of a savagery that didn’t seem to be of the modern world. It seemed ancient. It was primeval.
He settled, his mind void, his abused body giving vent to a fart and a belch almost simultaneously, thinking of nothing, pursued by nothing he dreamed of, followed, if by anything, only by the fate or destiny of which Pete Mariner did not yet have any compelling cause to think might actually be his.