by Ruth Rendell
I couldn’t bring myself to read them. The titles alone were enough to repel me: Kallinarth, the Cloudling, The Quest of Kallinarth, Lord of Quephanda, The Grail-Seeker’s Guerdon and so forth. But I used somehow, without actually lying, to give Arthur the impression that I had read his latest, or I think I did. Perhaps, in fact, he saw through this, for he never enquired if I had enjoyed it or had any criticisms to make. Liz said they were ‘fun’, and sometimes – with kindly intent, I know – would refer to an incident or portion of dialogue in one of the books in Arthur’s presence. ‘As Kallinarth might have said,’ she would say, or ‘Weren’t those the flowers Kallinarth picked for Valaquen when she woke from her long sleep?’ This sort of thing only had the effect of making poor Arthur blush and look embarrassed. I believe that Arthur Kestrell was convinced in his heart that he was writing great literature, never perhaps to be recognized as such in his lifetime but for the appreciation of posterity. Liz, privately to me, used to call him the poor man’s Tolkien.
He suffered from periods of black and profound depression. When these came upon him he couldn’t write or read or even bring himself to go out on those marathon walks ranging across north London which he dearly loved when he was well. He would shut himself up in his Gothic house in that district where Highgate and Crouch End merge, and there he would hide and suffer and pace the floors, not answering the door, still less the telephone until, after five or six days or more, the mood of wretched despair had passed.
His books were never reviewed in the press. How it comes about that some authors’ work never receives the attention of the critics is a mystery, but the implication, of course, is that it is beneath their notice. This ignoring of a new publication, this bland passing over with neither a smile nor a sneer, implies that the author’s work is a mere commercially motivated repetition of his last book, a slight variation on a tried and lucrative theme, another stereotyped bubbler in a long line of profitable pot-boilers. Arthur, I believe, took it hard. Not that he told me so. But soon after Liz had scanned the papers for even a solitary line to announce a new Fastnet publication, one of these depressions of his would settle on him and he would go into hiding behind his grey, crenellated walls.
Emerging, he possessed for a while a kind of slow cheerfulness combined with a dogged attitude to life. It was always a pleasure to be with him, if for nothing else than the experience of his powerful and strange imagination whose vividness coloured those books of his, and in conversation gave an exotic slant to the observations he made and the opinions he uttered.
London, he always insisted, was a curious, glamorous and sinister city, hung on slopes and valleys in the north of the world. Did I not understand the charm it held for foreigners who thought of it with wistfulness as a grey Eldorado? I who had been born in it couldn’t see its wonders, its contrasts, its wickednesses. In summer Arthur got me to talk with him to Marx’s tomb, to the house where Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad, to the pond in the Vale of Health where Shelley sailed boats. We walked the Heath and we walked the urban woodlands and then one day, when I complained that there was nowhere left to go, Arthur told me about the track where the railway line had used to be. A long green lane, he said, like a country lane, four and a half miles of it, and smiling in his cautious way, he told me where it went. Over Northwood Road, over Stanhope Road, under Crouch End Hill, over Vicarage Road, under Crouch Hill, under Mount View, over Mount Pleasant Villas, over Stapleton Hall, under Upper Tollington Park, over Oxford Road, under Stroud Green Road, and so to the station at Finsbury Park.
‘How do you get on to it?’ I said.
‘At any of the bridges. Or at Holmesdale Road. You can get on to it from the end of my garden.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go. It’s a lovely day.’
‘There’ll be crowds of people on a Saturday,’ said Arthur. ‘The sun will be bright like fire and there’ll be hordes of wild people and their bounding dogs and their children with music machines and tinned drinks.’ This was the way Arthur talked, the words juicily or dreamily enunciated. ‘You want to go up there when it’s quiet, at twilight, at dusk, when the air is lilac and you can smell the bitter scent of the tansy.’
‘Tomorrow night then. I’ll bring Liz and we’ll call for you and you can take us up there.’
But on the following night when we called at Arthur’s house and stood under the stone archway of the porch and rang his bell, there was no answer. I stepped back and looked up at the narrow latticed windows, shaped like inverted shields. This was something which, in these circumstances, I had never done before. Arthur’s face looked back at me, blurred and made vague by the dark, diamond-paned glass, but unmistakably his small wizened face, pale and with its short, sparse beard. It is a disconcerting thing to be looked at like this by a dear friend who returns your smile and your mouthed greeting with a dead, blank and unrecognizing stare. I suppose I knew then that poor Arthur wasn’t quite sane any more. Certainly Liz and I both knew that he had entered one of his depressions and that it was useless to expect him to let us in.
We went off home, abandoning the idea of an exploration of the track that evening. But on the following day, work being rather slack at that time of the year, I found myself leaving the office early and getting out of the tube train at Highgate at half-past four. Liz, I knew, would be out. On an impulse, I crossed the street and turned into Holmesdale Road. Many a time, walking there before, I had noticed what seemed an unexpectedly rural meadow lying to the north of the street, a meadow overshadowed by broad trees, though no more than fifty yards from the roar and stench of the Archway Road. Now I understood what it was. I walked down the slope, turned south-eastwards where the meadow narrowed and came on to a grassy lane.
It was about the width of an English country lane and it was bordered by hedges of buddleia on which peacock and small tortoiseshell butterflies basked. And I might have felt myself truly in the country had it not been for the backs of houses glimpsed all the time between the long leaves and the purple spires of the buddleia bushes. Arthur’s lilac hour had not yet come. It was windless sunshine up on the broad green track, the clear, white light of a sun many hours yet from setting. But there was a wonderful warm and rural, or perhaps I should say pastoral, atmosphere about the place. I need Arthur’s gift for words and Arthur’s imagination to describe it properly and that I don’t have. I can only say that there seemed, up there, to be a suspension of time and also of the hurrying, frenzied bustle, the rage to live, that I had just climbed up out of.
I went over the bridge at Northwood Road and over the bridge at Stanhope Road, feeling ashamed of myself for having so often walked unquestioningly under them. Soon the line began to descend, to become a valley rather than a causeway, with embankments on either side on which grew small, delicate birch trees and the rosebay willow herb and the giant hogweed. But there were no tansy flowers, as far as I could see. These are bright yellow double daisies borne in clusters on long stems and they have the same sort of smell as chrysanthemums. For all I know, they may be a sort of chrysan-themum or belonging to that family. Anyway, I couldn’t see any or any lilac, but perhaps Arthur hadn’t meant that and in any case it wouldn’t be in bloom in July. I went as far as Crouch End Hill that first time and then I walked home by road. If I’ve given the impression there were no people on the line, this wasn’t so. I passed a couple of women walking a labrador, two boys with bikes and a little girl in school uniform eating a choc ice.
Liz was intrigued to hear where I had been but rather cross that I hadn’t waited until she could come too. So that evening, after we had had our meal, we walked along the line the way and the distance I had been earlier and the next night we ventured into the longer section. A tunnel blocked up with barbed wire prevented us from getting quite to the end but we covered nearly all of it and told each other we very likely hadn’t missed much by this defeat.
The pastoral atmosphere disappeared after Crouch End Hill. Here there was an old station, the platfo
rms alone still remaining, and under the bridge someone had dumped an old feather mattress – or plucked a dozen geese. The line became a rubbish dump for a hundred yards or so and then widened out into children’s playgrounds with murals – and graffiti – on the old brick walls.
Liz looked back at the green valley behind. ‘What you gain on the swings,’ she said, ‘you lose on the roundabouts.’ A child in a rope seat swung past us, shrieking, nearly knocking us over.
All the prettiness and the atmosphere I have tried to describe was in that first section, Highgate station to Crouch End Hill. The next time I saw Arthur, when he was back in the world again, I told him we had explored the whole length of the line. He became quite excited.
‘Have you now? All of it? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Did you see the foxgloves? There must be a mile of foxgloves up there. And the mimosa? You wouldn’t suppose mimosa could stand an English winter and I don’t know of anywhere else it grows, but it flourishes up there. It’s sheltered, you see, sheltered from all the frost and the harsh winds.’
Arthur spoke wistfully as if the frost and harsh winds he referred to were more metaphorical than actual, the coldness of life and fate and time rather than of climate. I didn’t argue with him about the mimosa, though I had no doubt at all that he was mistaken. The line up there was exposed, not sheltered, and even if it had been, even if it had been in Cornwall or the warm Scilly Isles, it would still have been too cold for mimosa to survive. Foxgloves were another matter, though I hadn’t seen any, only the hogweed with its bracts of dirty white flowers, garlic mustard and marestail, burdock and rosebay, and the pale leathery leaves of the coltsfoot. As the track grew rural again, past Mount View, hawthorn bushes, not mimosa, grew on the embankment slopes.
‘It belongs to Haringey Council.’ Arthur’s voice was always vibrant with expression and now it had become a drawl of scorn and contempt. ‘They want to build houses on it. They want to plaster it with a great red sprawl of council houses, a disfiguring red naevus.’ Poor Arthur’s writing may not have been the effusion of genius he seemed to believe, but he certainly had a gift for the spoken word.
That August his annual novel was due to appear. Liz had been given an advance copy and had duly read it. Very much the same old thing, she said to me: Kallinarth, the hero-king in his realm composed of cloud; Valaquen, the maiden who sleeps, existing only in a dream-life, until all evil has gone out of the world; Xadatel and Finrael, wizard and warrior, heavenly twins. The title this time was The Fountains of Zond.
Arthur came to dinner with us soon after Liz had read it, we had three other guests, and while we were having our coffee and brandy I happened to say that I was sorry not to have any Drambuie as I knew he was particularly fond of it.
Liz said, ‘We ought to have Xadatel here, Arthur, to magic you some out of the fountains of Zond.’
It was a harmless, even rather sympathetic, remark. It showed she knew Arthur’s work and was conversant with the properties of these miraculous fountains which apparently produced nectar, fabulous elixirs or whatever was desired at a word from the wizard. Arthur, however, flushed and looked deeply offended. And afterwards, in the light of what happened, Liz endlessly reproached herself for what she had said.
‘How were you to know?’ I asked.
‘I should have known. I should have understood how serious and intense he was about his work. The fountains produced – well, holy waters, you see, and I talked about it making Drambuie . . . Oh, I know it’s absurd, but he was absurd, what he wrote meant everything to him. The same passion and inspiration – and muse, if you like, affected Shakespeare and Arthur Kestrell, it’s just the end product that’s different.’
Arthur, when she had made that remark, had said very stiffly. ‘I’m afraid you’re not very sensitive to imaginative literature, Elizabeth,’ and he left the party early. Liz and I were both rather cross at the time and Liz said she was sure Tolkien wouldn’t have minded if someone had made a gentle joke to him about Frodo.
A week or so after this there was a story in the evening paper to the effect that the Minister for the Environment had finally decided to forbid Haringey’s plans for putting council housing on the old railway line. The Parkland Walk, as the newspaper called it. Four and a half miles of a disused branch of the London and North-Eastern Railway, was the way it was described, from Finsbury Park to Highgate and at one time serving Alexandra Palace. It was to remain in perpetuity a walking place. The paper mentioned wild life inhabiting the environs of the line, including foxes. Liz and I said we would go up there one evening in the autumn and see if we could see a fox. We never did go, I had reasons for not going near the place, but when we planned it I didn’t know I had things to fear.
This was August, the end of August. The weather, with its English vagaries, had suddenly become very cold, more like November with north winds blowing, but in the last days of the month the warmth and the blue skies came back. We had received a formal thank-you note for that dinner from Arthur, a few chilly lines written for politeness’ sake, but since then neither sight nor sound of him.
The Fountains of Zond had been published and, as was always the case with Arthur’s, or Blaise Fastnet’s, books, had been ignored by the critics. I supposed that one of his depressions would have set in, but nevertheless I thought I should attempt to see him and patch up this breach between us. On 1 September, a Saturday, I set off in the afternoon to walk along the old railway line to his house.
I phoned first, but there was no answer. It was a beautiful afternoon and Arthur might well have been sitting in his garden where he couldn’t hear the phone. It was the first time I had ever walked to his house by this route, though it was shorter and more direct than by road, and the first time I had been up on the Parkland Walk on a Saturday. I soon saw what he had meant about the crowds who used it at the weekends. There were teenagers with transistors, giggling schoolgirls, gangs of slouching youths, mobs of children, courting couples, middle-aged picnickers. At Northwood Road boys and girls were leaning against the parapet of the bridge, some with guitars, one with a drum, making enough noise for a hundred.
I remember that as I walked along, unable because of the noise and the press of people to appreciate nature or the view, that I turned my thoughts concentratedly on Arthur Kestrell. And I realized quite suddenly that although I thought of him as a close friend and liked him and enjoyed his company, I had never even tried to enter into his feelings or to understand him. If I had not actually laughed at his books, I had treated them in a light-hearted cavalier way, almost with contempt. I hadn’t bothered to read a single one of them, a single page of one of them. And it seemed to me, as I strolled along that grassy path towards the Stanhope Road bridge, that it must be a terrible thing to pour all your life and soul and energy and passion into works that are remaindered in the bookshops, ignored by the critics, dismissed by paperback publishers, and taken off library shelves only by those who are attracted by the jackets and are seeking escape.
I resolved there and then to read every one of Arthur’s books that we had. I made a kind of vow to myself to show an interest in them to Arthur, to make him discuss them with me. And so fired was I by this resolve that I determined to start at once, the moment I saw Arthur. I would begin by apologizing for Liz and then I would tell him (without revealing, of course, that I had so far read nothing of his) that I intended to make my way carefully through all his books, treating them as an oeuvre, beginning with Kallinarth, the Cloudling and progressing through all fifteen or however many it was up to The Fountains of Zond. He might treat this with sarcasm, I thought, but he wouldn’t keep that up when he saw I was sincere. My enthusiasm might do him positive good, it might help cure those terrible depressions which lately had seemed to come more frequently.
Arthur’s house stood on this side, the Highgate side, of Crouch End Hill. You couldn’t see it from the line, though you could get on to the line from it. This was because the line had by then entered its valley out o
f which you had to climb into Crescent Road before the Crouch End Hill bridge. I climbed up and walked back and rang Arthur’s bell but got no answer. So I looked up at those Gothic lattices as I had done on the day Liz was with me and though I didn’t see Arthur’s face this time, I was sure I saw a curtain move. I called up to him, something I had never done before, but I had never felt it mattered before, I had never previously had this sense of urgency and importance in connection with Arthur.
‘Let me in, Arthur,’ I called to him. ‘I want to see you. Don’t hide yourself, there’s a good chap. This is important.’
There was no sound, no further twitch of curtain. I rang again and banged on the door. The house seemed still and wary, waiting for me to go away.
‘All right,’ I said through the letterbox. ‘Be like that. But I’m coming back. I’ll go for a bit of a walk and then I’ll come back and I’ll expect you to let me in.’
I went back down on to the line, meeting the musicians from Northwood bridge who were marching in the Finsbury Park direction, banging their drum and joined now by two West Indian boys with zithers. A child had been stung by a bee that was on one of the buddleias and an alsatian and a yellow labrador were fighting under the bridge. I began to walk quickly towards Stanhope Road, deciding to ring Arthur as soon as I got home, to keep on ringing until he answered.
Why was I suddenly so determined to see him, to break in on him, to make him know that I understood? I don’t know why and I suppose I never will know, but this was all part of it, having some definite connection, I think, with what happened. It was as if, for those moments, perhaps half an hour all told, I became intertwined with Arthur Kestrell, part of his mind almost or he part of mine. He was briefly and for that one time the most important person in my world.
I never saw him again. I didn’t go back. Some few yards before the Stanhope bridge, where the line rose once more above the streets, I felt an impulse to look back and see if from there I could see his garden or even see him in his garden. But the hawthorn, small birches, the endless buddleia grew thick here and higher far than a man’s height. I crossed to the right hand, or northern, side and pushed aside with my arms the long purple flowers and rough dark leaves, sending up into the air a cloud of black and orange butterflies.
