In Another Country (18 page)

Jay rose abruptly, walked across to the far wall, passed between two very black and shapely yews, tried the little gate, found it locked, stepped back and looked up at the window that had been Caradoc's. After a while he returned and stood with his hands in his pockets looking down on Daniel. His hair was a tousled mop, boyish, but more grey than black. I don't mind about the intrusion, he said. But I do mind about the beds. On several counts. However, what's done is done and what's not done is not done. As to that night, I forgave you long before you left. What good was it doing me staring through the window at the pair of you on the wall? Does she still sing, by the way?

Yes, she still sings. I couldn't judge that night what the matter was, between you and Caradoc or in you yourself. But he was very courteous, as always. He gave us sambuca, do you remember?

All that palaver. The thin glass, the floating of the coffee beans, the setting fire to the spirit, the aroma, the bitter taste.

It was a wonder to Merryn. She's never forgotten it. The ceremony of it, the little dancing flames, she called him courtly lover and magician in one person.

Well, when you turned up like strays out of Arden I was on the run from the asylum, and Caradoc, while we were listening to Farantouri, was debating what to do with me.

And why had they locked you up?

Because I was mad. The College was going to send me down and I think that would have been the end of me, all the struggle my mother and father had to get me there, I'd have jumped under a train rather than go home that way and have to look them in the face. But after some discussion the College deemed me mad and had me locked away.

Were you mad?

Well, a bit like you or not at all like you, I had a passion for climbing: cranes and scaffolding, but trees best of all. How I loved climbing trees! Caradoc said I was like the baron in Calvino's story,
Il barone rampante
, and he bought me a copy and indeed I was, somewhat. My favourite tree was the beech in the College garden. Was there ever a tree like that before or since? I went back earlier today, just before that frightful service, and would you believe it, there is no tree
—
all gone, and only a ring on the lawn, a vast ring which was the shadow of its bulk, like the mark of a fort or camp as seen from the air in a drought when the present becomes transparent and you can see what was. I got up there most nights, doing nobody any harm. And I never hurt the tree, I loved it more than people, oh by far! Vast copper beech with long extending soughing and swaying limbs. Copper-black on a hot day, a heavy blackness, copper-red when you got to know the heart of it. Even in daylight there was always an opening on darkness for me in that garden and a darkening of the darkness in the night. And that is where I loved to be. High up, where the foliage broke like a sea monster surfacing and it was dappled with moon and stars. Doing no harm, not to man nor beast nor any living thing. Certainly not to the tree. But somebody must have betrayed me. And one night the Dean, damned time-server, damned slave in a living hell of his own making, stood there on the lawn with a flashlamp and a couple of porters, calling me in his castrated drawl to come down at once. Of course, I stayed where I was. That night, all the following day, all the following night. Then the Dean lost patience. He said he was fetching the police and the fire brigade. And I was tired and sadder than I'd ever been in my life before, sad as the tree was copious and dark, sad as its copper black was heavy, I was sad through and through, I had no heart for it anymore. And I leaned down till I could see his white face looking up, his pasty face, his hateful, chinless, spineless, gutless, feckless, witless, ugly mug looking up at me, and I said: Fuck off, Dean, fuck off. Absent thee from this pleasant place a while and I'll climb slowly down. But stand there five minutes longer and I'll jump. And off he toddled. He was out of his depth. I heard he wanted me sent down, mad or not, madness was no excuse for rudeness, so he said. But kinder counsels prevailed and I was transported to the nuthouse.

And that night you escaped?

It was child's play. Walls you and Merryn would have scaled in a twinkling and run along the copings of like squirrels. I was frightened. They were eyeing me up for ECT. They were saying I was a suitable case for treatment. So that evening I went through a toilet window and into the grounds and over a wall into some decent citizen's back garden and out past his bicycle and his coal bunker into the parks, for Caradoc's.

 

The graveyard was a warm place still, and lively. The two men in their suits were, with the yew trees, by far the darkest presences. Here and there, sitting against, lying upon, strolling among the tombs were the College's current generation of students, reading, dozing, talking animatedly. A couple quite speechlessly absorbed in one another; a young woman with an open notebook looking round at everyone else, at Jay and Daniel in particular perhaps.

Remembering the Dean, Jay continued, reminds me how much less I liked Caradoc when I saw him with his colleagues. He took me into dinner once or twice, I don't quite know why. Perhaps he thought I should witness these things. Perhaps he was testing me. If so, I don't know whether I passed or failed. I suffered, he must have seen that. I wished he would be more different, I wished some original local tone would surface in his voice, against their voices. But no, he fitted, his speech was theirs, his subjects and opinions were only theirs. And I watched
—
then as much as now
—
and my view was that they didn't quite believe him, they suspected him of dissembling, I even thought they must be leading him on, to see how well or badly he would do. And two or three times, until I told him I couldn't bear it, he took me along to watch him playing his part.

I went on a pilgrimage to Bardsey once. I thought it might help. I went on foot, I set off from here. And coming to the Lleyn, that pushes out into the sea like Italy, I saw I was very near Carmel, where he was born and grew up, and I made the little detour, to understand him better. Terrace houses, many ruinous, many for sale. The mines long abandoned, the sunlight slanting on the wet slate heaps, like the glances you see off a crow's wings. The chapels too grand for the few surviving streets. And looking back, the mountains. Did you ever see Caradoc's climbing books? Shelves of them. Did he ever describe to you Joe Brown's routes up Clogwyn? He was like a boy, a hero-worshipper, swearing he would do such things himself when he was a man.

By then I knew about Gino and had begun my researches, to try to find out more. And I had decided that Caradoc loved him especially because of his family, the hardship, the determination to fight back by intelligence and education, his loyalty, his passionate desire to help. And that during the talk at High Table and in the Common Room Caradoc must perhaps be saying to himself, It's all right, I have to do this, I'll get by, I'll get through, it's not for much longer and I'll load up my car with my books and my presents and head off out of this place, all that long way south.

You know more than I do, said Daniel.

I found out, said Jay. From Caradoc some things: about the Mafia, the bandits, the fear; about Gino's work with the Communists, his classes for children, the demonstrations, the fights. I found a photograph of a Communist Party march, Gino and Caradoc together under the banner in a crowd of men wearing caps, Caradoc in his suit and without a tie. He worshipped Dolci. That was a life, he said, a life you wouldn't mind people looking at. But I got little out of Caradoc about his own generosity: his arrangements, his regular payments, really his funding of Gino in the struggle. I had to go elsewhere for that. I went down there once. Not with him, on my own. I was on the edge anyway, out on the borders, and I think now that gave me a sort of innocence and perhaps protected me. For a while I think I was almost a Fool, with the privileges of that office. Terrible those villages under Etna, so ruinous and fearful. I'd arrive and see no one and knew that everyone was seeing me. I stood in that little cemetery Lucia wanted him home in. There were anemones and much of the bulk of Etna was white with snow. I'm glad she never saw our crematorium. I hope no one told her he dropped dead on the street.

Again he stood up, and did a tour among the graves. He looked odd and ill-dressed, his suit hung on him slackly, as if he had worn it for years and lost weight in it. Daniel surveyed the young men and women, looking for the types, the recurrent patterns of being young. The church was built in the twelfth century, the oldest surviving graves are of the late seventeenth, there are a couple of memorial trees in the far corner, for the first deaths from AIDS. The yews are as shapely as steady flames.

Jay came back, sat down again, stared up at the overlooking window and said: That night before you two arrived Caradoc had been persuading me not to kill myself. I know for certain that he did this with others too. I was round there one night, very late, when he got a phone call and said he must go and I could sleep on the sofa if I wished, he wouldn't be back. And I learned later it was a boy on the top floor in a big house up the Woodstock Road, on the window ledge with a razor
—
and Caradoc talked him in again, and out of the idea.

What did he say to you?

That although I was free to do it, my true imperative was not to. That my responsibility was to stay alive so long as I might be useful. That although I was free to do it, I would harm other people
—
people who loved me
—
by doing it. I denied that I might be useful. I denied that anyone loved me. He said that I couldn't see clearly at present and that I had to trust somebody else's judgment until I could. He denied that nobody loved me. He denied I would never be useful. He took me in his arms and said that he for one would miss me sorely. Was that not reason enough to wait a while? I suppose you were already sitting on the wall by then. Soon afterwards I looked out and saw you. And then you arrived with your armfuls of flowers. I was weak and lachrymose and didn't want anyone but Caradoc knowing.

Merryn knew. I mean she knew you were weepy, but more that you wished no one but Caradoc to witness it. That was why she sang.

When the Farantouri came to an end there was a silence and Caradoc still hadn't decided what to do with his flowers but was standing with them in his arms rather gauchely and Merryn was sitting on the carpet with her knees up leaning back against the sofa.

My eyes were sharpened by sadness, I was weak and keen-sighted because I wanted to be persuaded not to kill myself. She had a scratch on her right leg, just below the knee, from all your climbing, I suppose, the blood had trickled down and dried in a brown line. There were seeds of some sort in her hair.

Elmseeds.

There were elmseeds in her black hair. Legs like a boychild's, scuffed sandals. Then she sang. It was like the Farantouri, I understood not a word, a different voice and a girl not much younger than me sitting there somewhere familiar in England but her singing was strange, so foreign, from long ago elsewhere. I half-thought I knew some words, but none either singly or in a phrase made any usual sense. But it was like the Farantouri, I felt its fingers clutching at my heart, but not so wistful, not tragic, it wanted something, it had energy, it was younger in spirit, it saw difficulties but no reason not to go out and fight them. And the sadness
—
there was some sadness
—
was more like an imagined possibility, what the cost would be, what your loss and regret would be, if you didn't fight bravely and win through to where you desired and believed you deserved to be. I discerned, perhaps more than you did, that Caradoc too was greatly moved. I like to think it reminded him of his own first language, that he had forgotten or suppressed. Even now I don't know what she sang. I've heard nothing like it since. What was it?

A troubadour song. Occitan, I suppose.

She knew songs like that?

Still does. And I'll tell you how. You're like me, you need icons, I give you this. She had classes with Mrs. Delanty
—
another who never published, another every pupil revered
—
and one late afternoon it wasn't going very well, they weren't concentrating, perhaps they hadn't prepared it, the class was drifting into pieces. Then Mrs. Delanty closed her book and told them quietly to close theirs. Listen, she said. And she stood up, put her arms by her sides
—
like a little girl at a party, Merryn said
—
closed her eyes, lifted up her face, and sang. A white-haired lady, her girlish beauty showing through the many years. She sang a troubadour song, though it certainly wasn't the troubadours that the failing class had been about. She sang. It was a dawn song, Merryn said: two lovers having to part after their stolen and risky night together. So Merryn learned later. When the song was finished Mrs. Delanty opened her eyes, smiled at the class, said they should go now, she would see them at the same time next week and they would carry on from where they had left off. But that evening Merryn went to Mrs. Delanty's rooms and knocked. Quite late, nobody did such a thing. Called in, closing the door behind her, she stood there. What is it, child? Mrs. Delanty asked. And Merryn answered: Please, Mrs. Delanty, will you teach me that language? I want to be able to sing that song you sang. Of course you do, said Mrs. Delanty. And of course I will. We'll make a start tomorrow evening. Are you free at 8:30?

 

Jay stood up again. Paced around. Daniel observed his agitation, then looked away, over the yew trees and the wall, to what had been Caradoc's room. Somebody was standing at the window, looking down. Daniel had no idea who he might be, no interest either, except in the idea of a person, and years later another person, looking out and down over a graveyard in which the generations strolled, sat, lolled, conversed, made love.