Flying to Nowhere: A Tale Read online

  He turned several pages, but found nothing further to prompt his cogitations.

  ‘From thence,’ he mused, returning the book to the shelf and scratching his nose, ‘they take their course towards the different muscles of our body, partly dependently, partly independently on the soul. As indeed the great author of nature has ordered it, with reference to the end he proposed to himself in the production of mankind.’

  He must examine this gland again, he decided.

  Before leaving his library he happened to place his hand against the rear wall, the only surface that was not filled with books. Usually a stone surface of this sort, in a room at this level, was cool and damp. But this was warm to his touch, like an oven at the very end of a baking day when the cinders could be raked out. And it was dry.

  The Abbot was surprised at such an effect of the weather. It was extraordinarily hot. Hotter than he had ever known it in his life. But to dry out a cellar! It was unheard-of.

  Yet the library was not in fact dry. Indeed it seemed even more humid than usual. The air settled at the base of the Abbot’s throat, heavy and irritant, as if it knew it was not of the quality to be safely admitted to the delicate palace of the lung. If he put a finger into the folds of his habit to press the hollow between his collarbones, he could feel the labour of his respiration like a pulse, and the dampness of the hot air made him wheeze like an old door.

  Then he noticed where the dampness was coming from. Along the crevices between the lowest course of stones, knee-high, that supported the wall there trickled a constant ooze of viscous liquid. It glistened on the lower part of the wall and was sticky beneath his sandals.

  He put a finger to it and cautiously touched the finger with his tongue. A dull, stony taste, not saline, but heavy. It was like some liquid that he knew, but he could not think what it was.

  He was concerned for the state of his books but was distracted by a fit of coughing, and left hastily. There was too much to think about: the need for further dissection; the preparation of the senior novice for his forthcoming night of examination; the pacification of Vane; the remainder of his new sermon, and many other duties.

  He did not hear of Mrs Ffedderbompau’s accident until later.

  9

  ‘How much further?’ growled Vane to the novice. His donkey stumbled frequently on the stony incline, and the jolting pained him. He had left behind his hat on account of the heat and now wished he were wearing it for the same reason.

  The novice was the same one who had led the party from the boat two days before. He had said nothing then, and said nothing now. Vane watched his cowled figure mounting steadily ahead of him with increased displeasure. The only response he gave to Vane’s question was to raise his arm and point ahead. He hardly seemed to be affected by the heat.

  ‘Whereas I,’ thought Vane to himself, ‘might very well have been poisoned, I feel so ill.’

  Geoffrey, wandering off the path and scrambling among the rocks and bushes, seemed to keep up with them without effort. He stooped every now and again to pick something, and presently came up to Vane with a handful of berries.

  Vane shook his head. He was in no mood to eat anything, having eaten enormously that morning of a plate of meat produced in sly triumph by the Manciple personally. It was dark, sweet meat, three slices of it in a wooden dish, and Vane had wolfed it down as if he had not eaten for a fortnight. Now it lay uneasily on his stomach, like an animal twitching in a nightmare.

  ‘Isn’t the well over in that direction?’ muttered Vane. ‘I thought it was directly above the abbey? The abbey was built just below it, deliberately.’

  ‘We are going to the cemetery first, sir,’ said Geoffrey, with a purple mouth. ‘The Abbot said we should go first to the cemetery.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Vane.

  The cemetery was situated over the mountain, in the centre of the island, as though to secure the graves as far as possible from the danger of slipping into the sea and floating away. Or perhaps it was to ensure that the final resting-place of the pilgrims was in as elevated a position as possible to give them a dramatic advantage at the blast of the last trumpet call.

  When they arrived, Vane held up his silver cross and blessed the place, which was a grassy mound cleared of bracken and thorn and ringed with a wall of stone. The grass itself was undisturbed, thin, dry and rusty, clustered on the graves. The stones were simple, and their inscriptions economically though neatly carved.

  While Vane moved among the rows, consulting his list, the novice stood by the little gate with his arms folded. Geoffrey took the donkey in search of water, but there was only one stream and that was dry, barely a smudge of darker earth streaking the scorched and crumbling heather.

  The novice had learned, in a short space of time, that Vane was a person whom it was impossible to admire. He did not feel obliged to play any part in the checking of the graves, and took instead the opportunity to meditate.

  He thought of a dream that he had had recently and which still remained vivid. The Abbot had appeared before him silently, while he was alone in his cell. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, and really he knew that the Abbot was long dead. He was not frightened by this, but accepted the mystery calmly as though the appearance was long-awaited and the Abbot had something important to tell him, some final piece of instruction to impart before his night of examination. There was great joy in the Abbot’s damaged features. Some ordeal of his own had been overcome. He had been too timid to touch the Abbot’s shoulder, though tenderly reaching for the crusts and pelt, the skin lifting in hardening slices of sores and gristle. His words were gentle: ‘What is it?’ The Abbot’s almost unspoken answer was forceful, broad, deep, carrying the emotion of the encounter before it like a river in flood: ‘Earth.’ It was like the bestowing of a prize, a complete confrontation of the mystery, of origins, fortune, matter and destiny.

  The novice remembered the answer as he watched Vane stooping above the last of the pilgrims, tucked up comfortably into the mountain, but it was his own question that lingered. ‘What is it?’ What was the ‘it’? He knew that it was the question that lent the dream its significance.

  And it was the embodiment of questioning in the ordered yet irritable motions of the sweating Vane that prompted the novice’s ensuing meditation: ‘It is quite elsewhere,’ he thought, ‘that the quantity of our devotion is measured, and we have no say in the matter. Meanwhile the censor continues to interrogate a dormitory of corpses.’

  On their way to the well, Vane’s mood changed. He became grim, confident, mildly exuberant.

  ‘Three out of twenty-six,’ he said, rocking steadily with the motion of the donkey as they walked along the gulf between the mountains.

  Geoffrey was leading the animal. He looked back at Vane, as if to indicate a response. It would have been presumptuous of him to speak, but he knew well how to act as a conversational sounding-board.

  ‘Only three graves of those I came to find,’ said Vane. ‘Twenty-three pilgrims are still unaccounted for.’

  Geoffrey stroked the donkey’s ears, which twitched together like a pair of warm shears.

  ‘And the newest of the graves is a year old,’ said Vane. ‘Your sexton is out of work, eh, brother?’

  The novice did not look back, and Vane gave a short laugh which turned into a belch. A shadow of nausea passed across his face, and he kept silent again till they came to the well.

  The well filled a stone trough the size of three four-poster beds, and was roofed over. At one of the narrower ends, where light fell on it from the doorway, the water ran out over a small spout into a channel at the base of the trough where it flowed back into the darkness of the well-house.

  The thread of water was almost motionless in its falling, except for a slight twist that blurred its smoothness, moving down the thin flow at a gentle pace like a hand idly stroking a lock of hair. It glittered in the shaft of the sun, and made a small sucking watery sound where it touched th
e stone and trickled away.

  Vane slid off the donkey and ran up to the water, drinking noisily from his cupped hands. The novice merely dipped his finger to the wet stone and touched his forehead with it, and Geoffrey did the same. He was thirsty enough to follow Vane’s example, but a sense of deference to their guide held him back. This ceremonious approach to the holy well didn’t preclude later drinking, he felt.

  Vane took little notice of what the others were doing, but entered the well-house. He had taken a small phial from his pocket, and now he filled this from the trough and sealed it with wax paper. He had been instructed to do this by the Bishop, but whether it was as a piece of evidence to be investigated, or whether it was for the Bishop’s own use, he could hardly say.

  There was a strange smell in the well-house, sweet beyond the mustiness of the confined space or the earthy taste of the holy seeping. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, Vane could make out the shape of a man in the water, half in and half out, his arms hooked back over the sides of the trough like a swimmer resting. The position looked so natural that Vane at first expected him to make some greeting, or a comment on the temperature of the water. But although the man’s eyes were half open, he was clearly dead. Something brown dribbled from a corner of his mouth and drifted stickily at an angle from his chin to the water, like a fisherman’s line.

  Vane ran out of the well-house, his gorge heaving. While Geoffrey and the novice went in to see what he had found, marvelling at his inarticulate murmurs and gesticulating, he bent over with one hand on his knee and vomited on to the grass.

  It was not the seeing of the dead, for Vane had seen many, nor was it the unexpectedness. Rather it was the thought of consuming the death-fluids of the unfortunate pilgrim: his stomach, in which the morning’s meat already maintained its shape, long after it should have decomposed, rebelled at the thought of combining them. And now all that he had eaten that day lay warm on the dry grass outside the well-house.

  Feeling better, he stared in curiosity at the patch of vomit. He had heard of wells that effected great cures: wounds of impossible severity were healed, even the dead brought back to life. Why shouldn’t the holy water he had swallowed have some effect upon the gobbets of flesh that lay before him?

  He did not admit to himself the suspicion that the Manciple had fed him his own horse, but if he imagined the half-digested fragments miraculously regaining some of the vital force that once animated them, it was as horse that he imagined it. Their only resurrection, however, was from his own stomach: their small stirrings before him were due to nothing more than gravity and the elasticity of the grass they lay on.

  In the well-house, Geoffrey and the novice were trying to pull the corpse out of the water.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Vane, who could not at that moment face the problem of the removal of the body.

  They each let go of the arms they were holding, and the dead pilgrim fell forward into the water. In this new position the body became half submerged, floating face down with arms extended, as though it were searching for something in the water.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Vane once more. ‘I’d like the Abbot to see this.’

  Rags attached to a thorn bush growing near the well-house hung dry and stiff from the branches, tokens of wounds long unwrapped in hope of cure. Where those wounds were now, and whether wrapped once more, was as uncertain as the cause of the man’s death; and yet the hope that had brought them and him to the island was as undeniable as the horseness of horse, and who could say when hope first fades?

  The path back to the abbey fell at a steady gradient, with the directness of an instruction on a diagram. Vane reflected that it would have been easier to have ascended by this route, which had obviously been marked out for frequent traffic, perhaps for the smooth piping of the water. The Abbot should go up in a cart and bring the corpse down, and then he would have some explaining to do.

  10

  ‘And what were you doing in the tree in the first place?’ asked the Abbot.

  ‘Picking apples,’ smiled Mrs Ffedderbompau.

  ‘A great woman of your age should not sit in trees,’ said the Abbot.

  He was sitting by her bed with his hands on his knees. On his face was such a helpless expression of concern that she could not stop herself from reaching out and clasping one of his hands with her own.

  But even at that moment of meaningful touching, so potent for him that he imagined the feeling reversing itself like an echo and bestowing upon the sufferer an image of its infinite grace, the pain darkened her face. Then he knew that the barrier between them remained, no more forbidding than any like it at the boundaries of skin, but a barrier nonetheless.

  Within the applied study of her pain she offered notions that might please him.

  ‘We have had much to do with apples that has brought us to grief,’ she said.

  He made a deprecatory gesture.

  ‘As for trees,’ he said, lifting her hand and returning it to the pasture of its counterpane. ‘When the fruit defeats us, there are always garlands.’

  She raised her eyes in pleased expectation of an explanation.

  ‘I was thinking of Apollo,’ he said, ‘the pagan god of poetry and healing.’

  ‘Ah,’ breathed Mrs Ffedderbompau from the depth of her pillows, ‘was he not the gentleman who chased his lady into a tree?’

  ‘Love eluded him,’ said the Abbot, ‘but the laurel conferred the greater prize.’

  ‘We must hope so,’ she replied, ‘but what did the lady think?’

  ‘It is not recorded.’

  ‘I thought not.’

  The Abbot had no further observation to make on this subject, for it had come to seem inapposite. For whereas garlands become brittle, and are bestowed, the fruit is for the moment and to be taken. The comfort of the farm, the sense of bustle and order under the cool rafters, the appointed tasks and cheerful shared activity, these were due to the female response to the seasons and to what fittingly belonged to them. It was an absolute virtue of the sex, tested and proved in the full round of life. That other truth, belonging to gods, could not compete with it. For in the world of the farm, Daphne did not run and Eve knew only the moment when the fruit was ripe.

  The Abbot had come to Mrs Ffedderbompau as both friend and physician, his smile of greeting accompanied by an involuntary glance of diagnosis. But she had waved him to a chair.

  ‘It is inside that I am broken,’ she had said. ‘My limbs are sound, but incapable of direction, like a clockwork that is stopped.’

  ‘Can you not move?’

  ‘I am stopped from moving at the centre. The spring has snapped, here in the nest and cradle of life.’

  And she had turned to the window in tears, as though it were the apple branches, the tops of which were to be seen there, that required her. As though that laden fruit were her only deprivation.

  At intervals Tetty appeared with cool water in a wooden bowl, to bathe her forehead.

  The Abbot instructed her to gather comfrey, for a poultice, but he could not find in his heart much enthusiasm for this remedy. The reddened contents of a jordan beneath the bed were indication enough of the gravity of Mrs Ffedderbompau’s condition. Comfrey would have a struggle to cure it, and his patient understood as much.

  ‘Brother Matthew would have prescribed comfrey,’ she observed.

  ‘And you are amused to find me doing the same?’

  ‘Strangely enough, I think it is consoling. I have a great love of comfrey. And I loved Brother Matthew.’

  The Abbot felt at that moment that he was the true inheritor, not only of the defunct Brother Matthew’s role on the island, but of all the arts and failings of Apollo.

  11

  On his return he continued with his dissection. Being meticulous, he observed and made notes upon every aspect of the corpse worthy of such observation, as though chronicling the whole history and culture of a dead civilization.

  ‘A large breast. Lungs no
t fungous, but sticking to the ribs and distended with much blood. A lividness in the face, as if he had a difficulty of breathing a little before his death.’ Institutions, laws, council-chambers, all deserted as by a plague, opened to the knife.

  ‘Heart great, thick, fibrous and fat. The blood in the heart blackish and dilute.’

  Roads, fields, prisons, factories, analysed on a table from which the liquids gathered and were channelled back into the corpse-pit.

  ‘The cartilages of the sternum not bony, but flexile and soft. The viscera very sound and strong, especially the stomach.’

  Every now and then the knife had to be resharpened on an oiled stone, and while it was being sharpened the same question played in the Abbot’s head: ‘Where is the private chamber of the ruling spirit?’

  He supposed that the body was, as usual, that of a pilgrim. Perhaps it belonged to the departed soul of William Evans of Chester. Was it the last repository of all the human affection its earthly motions had warranted? Where now was the love of his dead wife for this grey, wet shape? And what had happened to the articulated flesh of the woman herself, loved in its turn?

  He thought of the two souls, disembodied, in bliss. And experienced a wave of revulsion from a notion so palpably difficult to encompass. On to the conarium!

  His investigation was interrupted by the ringing of the abbey bell, as if for divine service. It was not such an hour, he knew, and he suspected (rightly) the officious demands of Vane.

  ‘Is there no other way to reach you, except by the great bell?’ stormed Vane, when the Abbot appeared.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said the Abbot. ‘Though no one except you would think of so peremptorily demanding me.’

  Vane told him of their discovery of the dead pilgrim in the well. To the Abbot, who had only a moment before been cutting up a body that he presumed belonged to a pilgrim, such news was not sensational. But he listened with every appearance of attention and concern. The novice stood by, rapt in a contemplative silence beyond any possible division of loyalties.