Flying to Nowhere: A Tale (10 page)

‘She has died, you say?’

Tetty repeated the news: her mistress was now wrapped in a sheet and awaited burial (which in this weather, thought, Geoffrey, had better not be long delayed). The Abbot reflected again upon this information, looking at the letter as though it were a preliminary token of prompt resurrection, a chance error or dropped clause in the legal bond of death, a feather from an angel. When Geoffrey asked him about Vane, it was his turn to look uncomprehending. The man had ceased to behave with the due deference of a guest; why should he continue to be bothered with the duties of a host? If Vane chose to dismantle the skirts of his house and then get stuck, that was his own affair. He had opened the sacred veins of the island which were now quickly wasting their precious power. If he drowned in these waters it was more than he deserved to be simultaneously revived by them.

‘He was concerned about the pilgrims,’ continued the Abbot. ‘Now, by his mining, he has possibly saved them.’

And as if to illustrate this obscure and accidental process of renewal, he worked the block and tackle which hung over the dissecting pit; bringing into view, tethered at the end of the chain, a green foot and its attached leg, raised dripping at an angle like a dancer’s.

‘Some of these bodies must be very old,’ said the Abbot. ‘Perhaps they are too old to be brought to life again.’

As an illustration of this rational observation, the foot and shin bone slipped out of the soft sheath of the leg like a piece of over-stewed chicken, and swung gently from the chain.

‘But if she were to be brought here quickly,’ he added, ‘something might be done.’

There was no one to hear these words, for Tetty had run out of the chamber, Geoffrey closely following. He was now convinced that he would get no help from the Abbot. It seemed that it was his master’s fate to be ceremoniously dismembered in due course, in the furtherance of some ritual. So be it.

He found Tetty white-faced in the corridor, with one hand steadied against the wall.

‘He is stealing the bodies, after all,’ she whispered.

‘It seems so,’ said Geoffrey, ‘but they must be carried naturally by the waters down to his house.’

‘And is that at all holy?’ asked Tetty.

‘The Abbot is a troubled man,’ replied Geoffrey. ‘And that is not holy.’

They could not find the way out of the Abbot’s house, and after a while decided to sleep where they were, on the floor, until morning. When they could see better they might the more easily take their bearings, and Geoffrey was sure that by keeping to the outside rooms and noting the position of the sun, they would eventually find the door. They slept badly, in fear of the Abbot, but they saw no more of him.

They had been woken at first light by the screams of the novice which reached them from the distant chamber of his ordeal. Drowsy, they were unsure of what it was they had heard. It was a sound out of nature, at once piercing and furtive, relating only to the lost darkness and only heralding its own indignity.

‘That was neither owl nor cock,’ said Geoffrey.

Tetty said nothing, but took his hand tightly as if the shocking sound had been the announcement of his own suffering. Using his method, with the added precaution of opening all the doors they passed so that they should not pass them twice, they managed after about quarter of an hour to make their escape.

The girls in the last hay field were stooping and tying the fallen swatches of dried grasses and propping the bundles into squat sweet-smelling tents. The fully exposed stubble had now been baked by the sun into a remorseless carpet of spines and quills, which pierced their bare feet as though the cut field had steeled itself against further assault. The work would be done before the morning grew too hot. Then there were dairy tasks, and the preparation of the girls’ clothes for the funeral.

Tetty had collected her belongings from the farm and almost no one had seen what she was doing, because the younger girls were all waiting with awe and suppressed excitement for the return of Gweno. She had taken Blodwen aside and told her what she was doing. ‘Now Blodwen, don’t cry,’ she had said, touching the girl’s nose. ‘You may bring the cows home from now on. And don’t forget to turn the cheeses.’ Then she joined Geoffrey in the orchard, where they picked a few apples before making their way to the harbour. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘Anywhere,’ said Tetty.

‘Anywhere is nowhere,’ he replied. ‘And how do we know that the boatman will come?’

‘You said that he was expected today.’

‘Yes, but what if he does not come?’

‘We could swim across.’

‘Never.’

The haymakers watched them as they passed, with a silence belonging to neither wonder nor envy. Birds above the island wounded the sky with their small rusty strokes of sound, and the high sun in a cloudless sky lit its hills like the limbs of a lazy beast stretching in the warm flood of the sea as though nothing could move it, ever.

The island had seen many arrivals since the days of its first settlement, but it did not let men go willingly. How much easier it is to be a pilgrim of the spirit than to be a pilgrim of the flesh. The one, with nothing to lose and everything to gain; the other with everything to lose. The sublimest caution arises from the discovery and pursuit of the commonplace, for when that proves to be a false haven then all anchorage is lost. But even when true, it is an insecure base for further exploration.

The boatman did not come that day, and Geoffrey and Tetty ate bread in the shade of a gorse bush. They knew that the longer they waited the more they would recognise the power of the dead to keep them from making a new life. At the end of the afternoon the Manciple appeared on the cliff edge a hundred yards away. When he ostentatiously urinated into the sea, they knew that he had seen them; and it seemed that their chances of leaving the island were as slender as his will could make them.

As the sun began to decline, sheep left shade to look for water. The heat was now unfocused and diffused. The cows stood in the hidden reefs of clay beneath the foam of the beach, half-unwilling, half-unable to move, lashing idly at bullying crowds of flies with their tails.

The island prepared for obsequies, but not all the bodies could be found. Vane’s last puzzle about the absence of ordained brothers was answered for him by the inquisitive knife, though he was in no position to appreciate this reply. The brain, theoretically projected on to a plane, would be surface enough for crabbed speculation, a grid of prophecies— but the organ was shrivelled and loose, like a waterlogged bladder.

The Abbot was splashing now, the viscosity of the microscopically animated well-water gluing the hem of his robe to his ankles as he somnambulated to his library, carrying his letter from Mrs Ffedderbompau. He had taken off his sandals at the first sign of their independent movement against the soles of his feet. He feared what he might find there, feared the process of animation induced by the miraculous spring, feared the active weight and muscle of the words and bindings of his once-still books. It must be the curing of the leather, he argued, that rendered it capable of returning to its former shape. The half-decay of the corpses took them beyond the scope of such metamorphosis. Now, if he were able to have her body tanned!

Some thought of consulting the Egyptian authorities had brought him to the dangerous level of the library, where he had to struggle through the sprouting thicket of the beams, bending aside the sappy branches that sprouted from the panels of the door. Too late? What had happened to all that inscribed wisdom? Was it wasted on the fetid air in the vanishing shape of bellowing and the breath of beasts? Or had the vellum rumination already passed its cud of knowledge from the ultimate tract? Would he, if he could gain access to the library, merely slither upon a useless excrement of instruction and philosophy?

He stood with his hand upon the knotted bark of the library door in despair as it thudded against his palm with the weight of the huddled herds inside. The living books seemed to have sensed his presence: the bellowing increased as they jostled on the other side of the strained wood, and the ring of hooves on the flooded stone blended with a fresh trumpeting of panic and rebellion. Too late!

Words were indeed more enduring than the body. Mrs Ffedderbompau’s letter had fallen from his fingers as he had battled with the foliage, and had lain for a few minutes in the warm well water. Now small shoots of reeds pushed up from the paper, and hair-like roots wriggled to seek the lodging of cracks in the stone. Gall and insect ichor trickled down the fronds, and from the bubbling seal came a sweet stench of wax and a buzzing murmur. The Abbot stooped in sudden love to this miniature landscape which spread like a riverbank by his feet. Shapes were busy in the rushes, crawling up towards the swelling heads of seed. Mrs Ffedderbompau’s last words were in his head, like a drowsy charm; and on the edge of his hearing, louder than the stampede of his library, though reduced and distant, rose for an endless moment the purposeful clamour of tiny wings.