Almost Insentient, Almost Divine Page 7

  The beginning of Lent term came as a relief, for George and—no doubt—his parents. He was back at Dunrobin and had managed to get the bed by the window again (although, as ever, there had been no competition for the draughty bunk). Tom Whittaker wanted the bunk above him again and soon it felt as though his few weeks at home had been as much a myth as Father Christmas.

  It was towards the end of the first week, during which lessons had been replaced by daydreaming, that the figure reappeared, at dawn one Saturday morning. The light erupted towards the Northern side of the parterre nearest the castle, and the figure strode from it, right up to the steps, the bird flying about the edges of wood.

  The man pointed up at him and George heard the room echo with words again, but this time he could not understand them, “mi-fhein… thu-fhein… mi-fhein… thu-fhein… mi-fhein… thu-fhein…”

  Over and over again he heard them, to the point where, although he did not understand them, they still took on the horrible strangeness of language at the limits of disintegration.

  He had to get outside and see the man.

  He’d heard a rumour that there was a window in the larder that was always open, but nobody had ever checked because you could be expelled just for going in there, let alone going outside. But George, who was never normally disobedient, was impelled now by other demands—the last thing he wanted was to steal food from the school; he just wanted to get outside and find out what was happening.

  The window wasn’t open, but it wasn’t locked either, so, after standing on a couple of boxes of tinned carrots George managed to open it and crawl out onto the upper terrace. It opened onto some steps that led up outside the headmaster’s office. At this time of night, there was nobody around and so, in the half-light offered by the waning moon, George was able to creep down to the gardens.

  The man was gone, but the light was not. George headed across to the tall hedges of the Northern parterre as stealthily as he could—always looking back up at the many windows in the castle, all of which were—thankfully!—dark. He could see the blue-grey light and prayed it would not vanish after he had risked so much to reach it—his father would kill him if he got expelled!

  The hedges walled a trimmed lawn, with a patterned sequence of smaller box hedges within. To enter you had to go through an arched hedge, that was the pride of the head-gardener. It was at the end of this twenty foot arch that the light appeared. It filled the opening at the other end and looked like one of those portals to another galaxy that George had seen in his Eagle comics. It had a shimmering blue colour that seemed at one moment like water and at the next like some kind of mist. He felt as frightened as thrilled.

  Before he had much chance to contemplate the light further though the man appeared from inside it and the light was gone. Rather than the confident stride forwards he had adopted before it was as though the man were drunk, or injured. He lurched backwards, stumbling and flailing. As he staggered back onto the lawn the moonlight caught him, and his bird leapt from his arm into the skies. George could hear the jingle of the bells on its talons and saw the stream of its leather jesses.

  The man sounded as though he was choking as he gurgled out those strange words, “mi-fhein… thu-fhein.”

  He held out his hand to George and, just as he fell backwards over one of the low hedges he murmured, “Such a sad, and lonely place…”

  George rushed over to him as he beckoned to the boy, “mi-fhein… thu-fhein.”

  George held out his hand and the man reached for him as though he were blind, his fingers, dirty with mud and blood, shaking violently as he did so.

  “Oh, Lord,” the man said, with a smile of exhausted delight, his eyes sunken and distant, “the things that I have seen—what worlds there are, and what things reside within them.”

  He clasped George’s hand with a great exhalation of breath. The man’s whole body seemed to go grey, as though lit by a gentle inner light; and then he crumbled into an ashen heap upon the grass.

  From behind the neatly trimmed hedges George heard a screech. A shadowy shape flew at him, the nascent glow of the morning sun behind it. His cheeks were furrowed by sharp talons, as fresh snow yields beneath the harrow.

  His eyes lay plucked on the glistening, frosty lawn, a dark ashen shape of a bird beside them, and—until the boys, and their masters, found him—he dreamt of other truths, and other histories; his imagination probing realities undreamt of by those who saw only the sad and lonely place about them. He was enthralled by visions of realms vibrant with other-worldly iridescences and astonishing alien colours, alive with peoples and creatures wild and noble, savage and serene; lands that would steal you away from this world whether you had eyes or not. And from that moment on George Mills was lost to us, a traveller in other places, as gently ominous and aberrant as they were violently wonderful and enchanting.

  Mr Egare

  As is commonplace with accounts such as these I offer some fragments of a discovered journal. I provide no further narrative. It is, for me (and perhaps for you too), simply a curiosity; a gem of a life, with—one hopes—a kernel of a deeper truth. And your belief in its veracity is of no consequence, either to me, or to the wider state of the world. Things such as this have always fascinated me (as they do many people, no doubt); life’s marginalia and the detritus of the mind as it passes through its phases of deliberation, doubt, and ultimately that faint, sad hope that the relentless darkness might be vanquished by the statement of simple facts and the record, on the hardness of the page (scarred with black ink as desperate as the shedding of dark blood), of details which, though every day, echo through the heart of everyman—bringing solace and fear in equal measure. Therefore I provide a document, or rather the remains of such, found amidst a box of 1930s children’s annuals that I purchased recently at an auction. It was discovered in torn fragments folded inside a solicitor’s letter itself stuffed inside the sturdy binding of a large leather invoice ledger (whose own pages had been removed). I have assembled, as best I can, the legible elements. The title above offers nothing more than a sense I have that the real protagonist here is the quietest of all, as is often the case in all of life’s secret workings. DPW - March 2013.

  …and so I continued with the application of the oils, finding that the jacket responded well to treatment (although, as ever, he was reluctant to offer any assistance in the removal of the garment). But what a delightful enigma he is.

  11th October 1962

  A rare day today—a visitor. Mrs Field came around about four o’clock for some tea. Her husband passed away in August and I had been meaning to have her visit. I do not think she will welcome the solitude in quite the same manner that I have. Of course, Mr Egare was in the garden in the deckchair I put out for him. He sits there until late and Mrs Field was quite startled when she caught a glimpse of him from the sitting room windows. I decided not to discuss him any further. My guests are my own business. What little conversation there was, beyond common banalities centred upon the issue of her husband’s diaries (a foreign diplomat for many years until he married Grace, already widowed twice, in his late fifties). She said they made for quite a read and wondered if I advised seeking a publisher for them. I said the topic was entirely beyond me and I recommended some professional advice. I offered her a contact from Daniel’s address book—Dr George Davies, who had worked for some years for a publisher in London. She was most grateful. I chatted a little about the merits of a diary and cited my own little enterprise herein. She seemed a little taken aback—perhaps she thinks the pursuit a little peculiar for women such as ourselves, women that she has, on many an occasion, classed as “the invisible’; a term she deploys with a satisfied martyrdom that I find quite repellent. Thankfully she was gone by five o’clock and I could share the crispness of the evening on the patio with Mr Egare.

  It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1959—six months after Nigel had passed away—that the thought occurred to me that I might perhaps
try to record a little of my life in a journal. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing a costume in life; playing the parts expected of me and regurgitating the same lines I had delivered for years, in a tired voice that had long since ceased to be my own. It was not until after Daniel’s death, late the following summer—and the consequent arrival of Mr Egare, on a beautiful, warm, September afternoon that same year—that I considered the world’s deeper masquerades, and the delight one may take in them; these incidents—tragic and redemptive—were the real seeds of these few pages. They are not a memoir really, simply a collection of my thoughts over these years as I have become more accepting of things; a simpler, and I hope, a more honest person.

  With this honesty in mind I will record my thoughts of Daniel. He was a selfish man; none that had encountered him, even for the briefest time, would disagree. This selfishness was not limited to the common issues of finance and personal gratification—tendencies prevalent in far too many of us for any real accusations other than by the most abstemious and charitable (and even then these souls are often plagued by other sins; complacency and pride, and perhaps more severe deficiencies). No, Daniel was a man of darker and more visionary qualities. Had I not been his mother I might myself have fallen under his spell, for he was the most charismatic of men. And if he were not my son I too might, for a time, have considered him something of a genius; for the world was to him always of one aspect—his own, and always shimmered with a reflective radiance.

  I would not wish to be considered cruel by one reading this in years to come. I must explain myself clearly. Daniel was a beautiful child, a cherub. He was our only one you see. Nigel had all but given up on children and then one day he appeared. I was nearly forty, which in those days was considered very late indeed. I know how much I doted on him, and no doubt had a hand in spoiling him; and by spoil, I really mean ruin; deep and utter…

  …fight it has been with the lawyers—eighteen months of misery! Helen just simply would not let Daniel’s possessions go. I notice though that she was not so keen to take on the debts relating to his estate. I shall be lucky if there is enough to honour his outstanding obligations.

  3rd April 1963

  I waited for Mr Egare to appear all week, as I flitted at finalising Daniel’s financial affairs. He did not. I have resolved to give Helen a three hundred pound annuity, mostly to help with the girls’ upkeep. It is not much, but the best I can achieve (the girls will have the house when I am gone, after all). This is mostly coming from my own pocket, for there is little enough remaining from Daniel’s estate to keep some church mice. I have also selected three items to keep; a tie-pin that Nigel bought him for Christmas 1958, the pewter tankard we got him for his twenty-first, and that bureau that had caused such terrible upset, but which had clearly been dear to him. I’m sure some people would find it beautiful. I do not. There is something gaudy and overwrought about it (as often I find with oriental pieces). There are decorative panels upon it that, each on their own, would be quite striking. However, together they make for a busy and irritating piece of furniture. I am no expert with these things but most are ivory, or bone, and are skilfully rendered with scenes of both daily life and also mystical imagery of dragons and birds, the latter of particular interest for wherever they appear they are inlaid with a sparling metallic filigree, or mother of pearl wings. The figures I find less appealing, as their purposes are often difficult to discern. In one a group of labourers appear gathered around a crouched figure with their staves at the ready to beat him; in another a long line of curiously dressed women seem to follow the banks of a tempestuous river until they are consumed by it as it finds the sea. In idle moments sitting here I find myself tracing the outlines of the carvings with my fingers, and something in their precision seems oddly inhuman—or perhaps more properly put, all too human; their artifice seems somehow super-real. Ivory has something about it that I find mal…

  …and inside I found the little book that had got Daniel so excited. What a silly thing it is. There is some ludicrous story followed by a number of short observations and anecdotal ramblings (in many hands over many years), that seems to consider itself evidence of some vague diabolism. I am surprised that even someone as credulous as Daniel could take such a thing seriously. I believe it is some kind of joke (even though somewhat vulgar).

  19th April 1963

  He is here! Mr Egare arrived last night at nearly midnight! He is silent, as ever. I know what Daniel would think of him; he’d have called him a “vagrant” or a “bum”. The irony always was that for all his supposed radical politics he was, in many ways, more conservative than his father. He would have seen Mr Egare as a threat to his own access to the family purse. At least, whatever one might think of his political views, Nigel was concerned for social welfare; it almost choked him to say it, but he took great pleasure in Bevan’s health service, and our splendid social advances.

  Neither Nigel, nor Daniel, solicited my own thoughts on any matter of significance, it must be noted. Poor Mr Egare, as I sit with him in the garden, taking tea or enjoying a glass of sherry in the dusk, I ramble out all of my thoughts, stifled these many…

  …during that excited telephone call. Daniel had jabbered at me as soon as I had answered, “I’ve found it, Mummy (he only called me mummy when he wanted money), the bureau! The bureau owned by Machen’s very own Mr Clarke. It’s in an auction house in Llanelli. The guide price is twenty pounds, but I see the damned dealers are already sniffing about. I think, realistically, it’ll go for thirty—let’s say forty, just to be certain. And, you’ll never guess (here he took on a desperation and delight I had never heard before from him), they don’t even know—it’s got the Memoirs inside! Can you believe it; inside the well—nobody’s noticed, mother! Nobody has even noticed! Mr Clarke’s very own Memoirs!” Of course, I now know how ridiculous those memoirs were, but I still find myself thinking of them, and something in their seriousness troubles me. How anyone could have been so consumed by hocus-pocus such as that is quite beyond me. But, sadly, it was just such mystical nonsense that so enthralled poor Daniel.

  Our surname is Clarke (or I should say, my husband’s—these are, after all, liberated times, as so many now say; and why, indeed, not!). My maiden name (how quaint a term!) was Vaughan. Daniel held much store in what he called “correspondences”; these were, apparently, coincidences that pointed to what he further obscured with the term “significant mysteries”. It was this pseudo-spiritual blather that Nigel found so frustrating and resulted in their growing estrangement. So it seemed that Daniel had configured some deeper meaning from those obscure writers he so adored. I would have to fund the resulting revelations—until the next one came along—and all this without even the briefest visit at Easter.

  It is upsetting to recall it all now, especially sitting at the damned bureau itself. I had written Daniel a cheque. He didn’t tell me how much the thing cost in the end, but I certainly did not have any of the money returned from whatever might have been left. When Nigel did the books later that month we had a ferocious row about it. He called Daniel terrible names to me; he was ashamed to call him his son. I cried. Nigel died later that week. I hid the accounts ledger in the attic along with many of Daniel’s things and settled into widowhood—a condition that, at first, was unpleasant but one that I soon realised was merely strange, and one I have now come to enjoy—if that is the right word.

  Perhaps I made the wrong choice in keeping this piece of furniture, for it is ever in my sight, and frequently in my mind. At least with the other things I can put them away until I wish to remember. This just sits here with a stubborn sense of wrongness about it. By that I do not mean where it came from at all but rather how it came to be mine. It comes in the wrong direction. One should not inherit from one’s children; the clock is running backwards and the earth shudders.

  I have just returned to the page.

  The most peculiar thing just happened. As I was writing this entry the room filled wi
th that beautiful fragrance of the spring meadows and the dusty scent of harvest hay that reminds me so much of Mr Egare. I feel enlivened and flush with the wonderful tingle that one has from a long walk on a frosty winter’s day. I feel girlish and ridiculous writing this but I yearn for his return. But it will be months yet, and there is still so much to prepare for him. I have decided that this year I will make the house more amenable to his outdoor lifestyle. How little the dining room is used these days, and to be honest I am so sick of the tittle-tattle that has resounded against its walls all of these years, it will be a relief to open the doors onto the patio and leave the place to get some fresh air. How little we understand what these bricks, plaster and wooden floors do to hinder the…

  …all of the birds, and the small hedgerow creatures, even the plants and the soft ferns aching with that great wholeness that seems so abhorrent to most now that do not work with the land. Yes, it was this intense craving in the land and its agents that marked the great day—and how we all celebrated his homecoming! It is this pleasure in communion that is true ecstasy!

  29th March 1964—Nigel would have been 82 today!