Earth and Air (2 page)

The friendship that followed was not as unlikely on his part as it may seem. There were perhaps half a dozen people in the world, none of them among his colleagues at the university, capable of talking to Doctor Tharlsen on equal terms about the Frählig MS. As for the students, he felt with some justice that he would be wasting both his time and theirs if he had bothered them with it. It took him a while to be persuaded that this was not also the case with Mari, but once he realised that her interest was more than passing, his life changed. His energies for the task, jaded by long isolation, returned. Fresh insights came to him, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in the course of explaining some current problem to her, and more than once stimulated by a suggestion of hers. No doubt this rejuvenation owed something to the fact that she was an attractive young woman, but he continued, despite her protestations, to insist that his housekeeper was always at least in earshot when she came to his rooms.

Mari's side of the relationship is harder to account for, since the true attraction for her was not to Doctor Tharlsen, though she both liked and admired him, but to the Frählig MS itself. Finding in a textbook a footnote reference to one of the riddles, she had felt an intense and instant impulse to know more. The more she learnt, the stronger her feeling became that the book somehow
spoke
to her. She never saw the object itself. That was in a library attached to Yale University. Doctor Tharlsen had studied it there several times over the years, but at home had to work from facsimiles. Confronted even with these ghosts of the real thing Mari felt an excited reverence, while at the same time being appalled by the difficulties it presented.

From the first it was obvious to her that these would be enormously eased by the use of a computer. Doctor Tharlsen knew this in his heart, but had persuaded himself that he was too old to learn to use one. He had a tiresome liver complaint. He doubted that he had many more years to live, and felt he couldn't spare the time to become proficient enough to make real use of the promised advantages, and even then there would be the enormous labour of putting onto the system the mass of material he had so far accumulated. Two years at least, he told himself. No, he must plod on.

“I'll do it for you,” Mari told him. “Of course I'll get some things wrong, but I don't think it'll be too bad.”

“No, I can't accept that. It would interfere too much with the rest of your work.”

“This is more important.”

“No, I really can't accept it, Miss Gellers.”

“Please, Doctor Tharlsen.”

(Doctor Tharlsen maintained a formal relationship with his students, and Mari had guessed early on that he would be embarrassed by anything that suggested his friendship with her was other than straightforwardly professional.)

As a compromise he agreed that she might stay on at the university through the summer vacation and make a start on the work to see how it went. He spent the first three weeks at Yale, where the library had recently installed a new fluoroscopic technique, combined with computerised image enhancement, to extract meaningful characters from damaged documents, and were eager to try it out on the Frählig MS. By the time he returned Mari had the legible parts of the
Gelfunsaga
on disc, including a whole series of extensions of lines revealed by the fluoroscope—on Mari's suggestion he had asked an assistant at the library to email these to her. By the end of the vacation Doctor Tharlsen was himself online and exchanging email with distant colleagues.

A word about the
Gelfunsaga
. This is the longest, most exciting, and at the same time most tantalising portion of the whole MS. Like Snorri's later
Prose Edda
, it appears to be a prose recension of a much older verse legend, from which it occasionally quotes a few lines. The story it seems to tell is referred to nowhere else in the literature. It would clearly be of interest to the general reader, as well as to scholars. Unfortunately it is the last item in the MS, and so the most extensively damaged, less than half of any line being legible. And its being largely in prose inhibits reconstruction, for two reasons: the alliterative verse line of, for instance, the riddles obeys rules almost as strict as the rhymed and scanned lines of later European poetry, and these usefully limit the possibilities for supplying missing words and phrases; and then the copyist, though he had written the Norse verse sections out to fill every line and had translated them into prose, had marked the line endings on both sheets with a slash, thus relating them clearly to each other. Sometimes one half of the meaning could be read in each language. There was no such guide for the prose of the
Gelfunsaga
, and the copyist cannot have recognised the brief verse sections as such, and so failed to mark them.

The story, as far as it can be made out, has affinities with the first two episodes of
Beowulf.
The hero, Gelfun, to rid the neighbourhood from the depredations of a monster (who may or may not be the troll twice referred to in the surviving portions of the text—the Latin uses the word
monstrum
throughout, but at one point adds the epithet
sol timens,
presumably the copyist's attempt at
sunfearer
), goes to the underwater lair of the beast, using a hollow reed(?) to breathe through. His weapons are useless to him, since the creature's limbs are made of rock. (This is one of the passages where the Latin and Norse complement each other enough to make the gist fairly clear.) Gelfun then wrestles with it, apparently inconclusively (the text is once more very obscure), and there is then an exchange of oaths. But he seems to have won the contest, because he takes a treasure of amber from the cave, and then puts the monster onto a ship and dispatches it to sea. The final section is the most seriously damaged part of the manuscript. It seems to have little relation to what went earlier, but apparently deals with Gelfun's choice of an heir.

Because of its near intractability Doctor Tharlsen had kept the
Gelfunsaga
till last. At the time Mari came into his life he was about to start serious work on it.

All this occurred in the summer of Mari's second year at University. For the last fortnight of that long vacation she joined her family at their holiday home on one of the northern fjords. There, disruptingly, she fell in love.

Fell,
for once, is the right word. The event was as unforeseen and overwhelming as the collapse of a cliff face, altering the whole landscape of her life. She had, of course, had a few tentative involvements with fellow students during the last two years, trial runs, as much to explore her own emotional responses as the physical sensations, and had found, even when the sensations had been enjoyable enough, that the event had left her dissatisfied. She was, she came to realise, one of those people who need to commit themselves, heart and soul as well as body, to anything of importance they undertake. Before she could love, she must choose, choose with her whole being, for all of her life.

She had expected, or at least hoped, to do so as she did most things, deliberately, to find a man of her own age whom she liked, get to know and admire him, while he did the same with her, and then, as it were, build their lifelong love together step by step, much as she had watched her parents and elder siblings building the house on the fjord together. The last thing she had looked for was a cliff-fall.

Dick Vesey was an Englishman, like her father a hydroelectric engineer. They had met at a conference and liked each other, and since Dick's main interest outside his work was fishing, Mari's father had invited him to the fjord for the late salmon run. He was twelve years older than Mari, with her sort of build, slight and active, but his face was different, the skull squarish, and the features moulded in definite angular planes. (One night on their honeymoon, tracing those planes with her fingertips, she wondered aloud whether his parents had conceived him in a bed with a Braque painting on the wall above it. “Far from it,” he answered. “It was on open moorland during a cycling trip in the Cheviots, I believe. They didn't intend it to happen. She was married to another man, and didn't want to divorce him.”) The effect was to give him a misleadingly merry look, almost droll. In fact he laughed seldom and spoke little. His humour when he chose to deploy it was dry and understated, but quirky, poised between the gnomic and the surreal. Occasionally he produced a remark that might have come straight out of the riddles. He was an excellent and attentive listener. When Mari told him about her work with Doctor Tharlsen, though he had no knowledge of the languages involved, he not only grasped the difficulties but, as her family never in their heart of hearts had done, accepted the importance of the work. She used her laptop to show him some examples of what she was doing. It was while they were sitting together gazing at a laptop screen filled with fragmentary lines of runes that Mari realised what had happened to her.

Later she came to feel that the occasion had not been random, as it had seemed at the time, but utterly appropriate, almost willed. She had fallen for Dick because something about him spoke to her, just as the Frählig MS had, but even more urgently and insistently. The same, he said later, had happened to him, but since each felt there wasn't the slightest chance of the other returning feelings so irrational, they had managed to conceal it from each other.

But not, it turned out, from anyone else. As they waved his car away and watched it vanish behind the pines Mari's father said to her, “Well, when does he propose?” and the rest of the family—ten, including a brother and sister-in-law—bellowed with cheerful northern laughter.

They became engaged by email. She visited him in Scotland over the New Year, staying in a hotel near Dumfries because he had no home of his own but lodged wherever his current work happened to be. Nor was there any family for her to meet. His mother had returned to her husband soon after he was born, the husband making it a condition that she didn't bring the baby, so his father had brought him up, marrying when he was five, but had had no more children, and had then emigrated to Canada with Dick's stepmother when Dick was a student. Dick was now between jobs, and the reason he had chosen Dumfries was that it would allow them to look for a house within easy reach of his next one, which involved the installation of a small hydroelectric plant in the hills above the town. They narrowed the field down drastically by telling the agents that the property must have fishing rights attached. They found nothing they liked.

The failure didn't seem to matter. They spent their eight days together in a state too deep and broad and solid-seeming to be called excitement, too electric with the passing seconds to be called just happiness or contentment. Kissing Dick good-bye at the barrier, turning away, walking through the passport check, Mari felt as if she were putting herself into a coma until she next saw him, able to move, talk, eat, think, but no longer to feel as she had felt while with him, technically alive only.

Superstitiously, Mari hadn't told Doctor Tharlsen of her engagement before her visit to Scotland. Though emotionally certain what she wanted, the sheer irrational force of it seemed to put her into a realm where there are powers that must not be taken for granted, or they will suddenly withhold what they had seemed to give. She and Doctor Tharlsen had assumed that she would be staying on after completing her degree, to work for a Ph.D. on some aspect of the Frählig MS, and thus continue to help him. Why bother him with the unsettling news before it became a certainty in the rational, bread-and-butter world?

Outwardly he took it well, congratulated her, grasped her hands and kissed her gently on the forehead. Without thought she released her hands and hugged him, as she and her family had hugged each other when she had told them the same news. After a few seconds he eased himself from her grasp and sat down. His mouth worked painfully for a moment or two, but he controlled it.

“I am happy for you,” he managed to say. “Very happy. All this”—he shrugged towards his littered desk—“is nothing beside it.”

Mari dropped to her knees and took his hands again.

“Oh no!” said Mari. “No, please! If I thought marrying Dick meant I couldn't go on helping you, I . . . I don't know what I'd have done.”

This, she realised with a shock, was literally true. Her love for Dick filled and suffused her world. It was the light she saw by, the smell of the air she breathed. But so, more gently, odourless as oxygen, a waveband beyond the visible spectrum, did the Frählig MS. Without either one of them, she would become someone else. Someone less. Moreover, though there was no logical or causal connection between them, through her, inexplicably but certainly, they were interconnected.

“You've got to finish it,” she said. “You're nearly there. It's just the
Gelfunsaga
now.”

He drew a large yellow handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and smiled at her.

“Yes,” he said in his usual voice. “We will finish it. Between us. And you will take your children into your lap and read them our
Gelfunsaga.
”

Dick found their house. It had been a ghillie's cottage, but had fallen into ruin. New owners of the estate had started to do it up for holiday lets, but had overstretched themselves and their bank had called in its loans. It wasn't actually on the market, but Dick had spotted it, fishing, asked about it, and found that the receivers of the estate, to get a minor problem off their hands, would let him have a three-year lease provided he completed the repairs and refurbishment. Mari dropped everything to fly over and see it, and having done so couldn't then imagine wanting to live anywhere else.

She brought photographs to show Doctor Tharlsen. Though they continued to address each other as formally as before, something had happened between them since she'd told him she was marrying Dick, an unspoken acknowledgement that they were now more than colleagues in the Frählig enterprise. They were friends. Mari guessed it was a relationship unfamiliar to him, and she was careful not to strain it, but he seemed positively to like to hear something of her life and interests outside their work, and they'd fallen into the habit of chatting for a few minutes before they began.

“That's what you see when you come out of the door,” she said. “The river's fuller than usual, Dick says, because of the snow melt, though it's nothing like we get here, but there's always plenty of water in it. They've had terrible fishing seasons in a lot of the Scottish rivers for the last few years—hardly any water at all , but this one's fed by several tarns up in the hills—they're using some of them for the plant Dick's building. The fishing isn't all that good, actually, not enough pools and spawning grounds, which is why he could afford a day on it in the first place. And he's not going to get a lot more days like that, poor thing, till we've finished doing up the house. The receivers are being very tough about that, and it'll take every penny we've got.”