When I had stretched the body out at some little distance, I lowered the rope again and returned to the promontory in order to direct Aviston-Tresco how to attach the sling if he was inclined to do it carelessly. He was sitting on a boulder smoking a cigarette and making no move towards the dangling rope.
‘Are you tired?’ I asked.
He did not raise his voice. It came faintly echoing up in a clear, articulate whisper as if he were speaking from the darkness alongside me instead of eighty feet below.
‘No,’ he replied, fiddling with his shoe lace, ‘not very. But I am not coming up.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because this is the end for me.’
I tried to encourage him. I thought he had merely given up, or perhaps had at last been overcome by guilt in the presence of what was left of Fosworthy. I was eloquent about his hills and animals.
‘You don’t understand, my dear Yarrow,’ he said. ‘There is nothing in this life to detain a man who loves his profession and can no longer follow it. I have left a note in my surgery that I intend to walk out into the mud of the Parrett until it has me. It will be hopeless to search for my body once the tide has come up and ebbed again. But I shall not hang about down here to embarrass you. This will release me in a second.’
He took off his shoe which of course I had never thought of searching. I could hardly see what he held between finger and thumb. At the end of the beam was just a tiny spark of reflecting glass.
‘But I can never get you up,’ I reminded him. ‘Think, for God’s sake, of Cynthia Carlis! Suppose she does tell what she knows and the place is full of police. It’s no good hauling up Fosworthy and leaving you.’
‘Miss Carlis will never talk, Yarrow. She believes Filk did it, and that is that. My explanation to you was deliberately a little complex.’
‘But then why bother with all this? Why not jump?’
‘It was essential, you see, to keep you happily occupied. I have noticed that you are always entirely absorbed by any mechanical task.’
Again I asked why.
‘You might have kept an eye on the hatch. You might have decided that there was no reason why our friend up there should not be with us. I was afraid you would.’
‘Where is he?’ I shouted.
‘Gone home with his tractor and trailer. He knew what I intended.’
Gone home! How could I guess? All my plans and precautions had been founded on the natural assumption that Aviston-Tresco wanted to get out alive. I took the man’s normal fear of death for granted in spite of so much evidence that this particular man had none.
‘I hope that you will soon forgive me,’ he said. ‘It will all seem so unimportant when you and I and Barnabas meet.’
The cave wall transmitted every sound. I swear that I actually heard the crunch as he put the capsule between his teeth. It took effect at once.
I did not yet go back to the hatch to see if he was telling the truth. I knew it. I realised that the draught in the passage had long since stopped. It was barely noticeable, a mere caress of ice on the cheek, but always there when the hatch was open.
I went and sat on the winch, bewildered that he would sacrifice his life to ensure my eternal silence, bewildered by his absolute, proved certainty of survival. What a creed for soldiers! Well, but there is nothing new under the sun. The fanatics of the early armies of Islam believed it and were unconquerable.
The thought passed through my mind that I might as well slide over the edge myself. But while I was considering this in all honesty, I put out one of the lamps. There was no avoiding the irony of that. Something in me wanted so badly to live that it was already economising paraffin. I must be the very opposite of Aviston-Tresco—a creature of simplicity, never seriously questioning instinct, never doubting that, whatever the purposes of life are, one of them is to live it.
It was no good sitting there. First, I rushed to the hatch in a wild access of optimism. Perhaps Aviston-Tresco had not in fact told the cricketer of his intention. But he had, and it was shut. Then I wallowed in many minutes of emotional despair. There would never be any opening of the cave by those spiritless, guilty cowards up above on the Mendips. Jedder might do it if he could limp his way down, but that day was far off. The Gate of the Underworld had closed on me as inexorably as on my only companions.
In order to generate in myself some sense of calmer acceptance, I decided to revisit them. In the Painted Cave I used, as always, only lanterns; they were still far brighter than the blubber lamp and its eddying pencil of smoke, on which the artist had counted to give the stir of movements to his hunters while they killed and were forgiven. There they were, as they had been for the last twenty-five thousand years, abandoning themselves to their environment with a gaiety which we have forgotten. The interrelationship between them, the deer, the horses and the accepting mammoth belonged to the science of ecology rather than anthropology.
Was it this to which Aviston-Tresco looked forward? Well, no. I cannot believe that he primitively wanted happy hunting grounds. Then what parallel, in his own terms, did he foresee? Some sort of unity with all other animals, I suppose, within which his own individuality could be expressed. I can go a bit of the way with him. We are all uneasily aware that man is on his way to the ant-heap community, and that he knew more of the true business of living when he was old and diseased at forty. We are too fascinated by the actual time we remain alive. Their life of forty years held just as much in it as ours of eighty, just as a year at ten is twice the length of a year at twenty.
‘What the hell shall I do now?’ I silently asked them. ‘Here I am with enough food to keep me fit for two or three days and allow me to work for a week longer. What would you have done with only your horn and bone and flints and bits of wood? You obviously thought of life and death as a kind of continuity, but I take it you didn’t give up until some other carnivore was asking you for forgiveness.’
Their answer was not very satisfactory. They were no more mystical than boy scouts. They suggested that I had steel tools and the knowledge to use them: in fact that I was about on a technical level with Arthur.
Arthur. His name incongruously came into my head because I was staring at him. Subliminal advertising.
At the back of a recess to the left of the overhang I made out a scratched engraving of four women—the exaggerated spear-heads of their breasts establishing sex—sitting upon a line broken by the conventional curves of water. No doubt about that. One cannot mistake that the deer of Lascaux are swimming. With the women was one recumbent man, dead or sleeping, wearing the head of a horse. Who was he and why was he being ferried in canoe or dug-out across the Lake of Avalon? Can a folk memory from the palaeolithic still exist as a fairy story?
An important discovery? My mind, stunned and taking refuge in the only companionship there was, thought so at the time. Now I doubt it. One might as well say the man with the horse head was the origin of the chess knight, which is manifest nonsense. No, I had merely joined the club of Glastonbury eccentrics. I have probably been nearer to them, all along, than I ever suspected.
But the Arthur/steel association stuck. Though nothing except explosives or millions of years of flowing water was going to be much good against the limestone of the Mendips, there must be other objectives if I applied a bit more imagination to the search for them.
When Fosworthy and I had been alone, we accepted the impossibility of either reaching or lifting the hatch and tried to find another way out. Afterwards, when I was alone, the right game was to keep hysteria under control and wait for the hatch to be opened. But now, at last, led on by my little friends—who reminded me that tools are tools—I saw that my best bet was to tackle the work of man. I had not been at all successful in tackling the work of nature, whether it was rock or the human minds of Undine and Aviston-Tresco.
I turned away from the hunters by the once warm waters of Avalon and set off to the hatch with all the lights I could collect. If Jedder had bedde
d the brick frame of the hatch into surrounding rock, I was done; if he hadn’t, there was a hope. But it was hard to find out what method of construction he had in fact used, since there was no ladder from which to inspect it. What was left of the companion ladder was firmly cemented in place and useless anyway. Only the outer handrail was intact.
The shaft was smoothly lined with brick. Fosworthy and I had already found that it was impossible to climb to the top by piling up bits and pieces, and I was now clean out of wood in useful lengths, having sawed it all up for my fire. As a last resort I could knock out the shores and props from the gallery, but I did not much care for that. The roof, as it was, had a tendency to spew bits of itself out.
I went back to the winch to fetch the pick and cold chisels. Then I started to test Jedder’s mortar. No trouble there! He had been using as much material as possible from the cave itself, and his sand was full of clay. Even so, it was a long, tedious job to knock out the bottom course of bricks, especially since I needed them and did not wish to break more than I had to.
By five in the morning—if there had been any morning—I had removed six courses and piled the unbroken bricks at the entrance to the gallery. By then my back was aching and hands beginning to blister, so I knocked off and ate a can of bully and a raw onion. I was thankful that I had packed a small store of food, though expecting to use it in the open, if at all. At the bottom of my knapsack was the clothes brush. How ingenious Aviston-Tresco had been! The suggestion of the clothes brush, which he knew I was never going to need, was a wonderful confidence trick.
I forced myself to rest, awake or not, for six hours. Sleep was less easy than during my first imprisonment. Then I wanted to get away from pain and terror; now, I was only suffering from an unaccustomed form of exercise. I was also conscious of the stench—partly of blood, partly of my rank former self—which my bed of sheepskins gave out when they were warmed up by my body. It reminded me that in envying the freedom of the hunters I was inclined to forget their living conditions. But we are fussy. It is said that we should be revolted by the stinking of even the eighteenth century.
When I resumed my task, it was much easier. I could now swing a pick at the level of my knees, get the point behind the bricks and often detach several at a time. As soon as I was working above the height of my head, I built a platform of sound bricks to stand on. Shifting the platform round the shaft began to take more time than the actual demolition, but that went fast—sometimes too fast at points where Jedder had not properly bonded his brickwork into the rubble of the shaft. When the whistle blew for supper, I was working twelve feet from the ground with eight or nine more to go.
Twenty-four hours had passed since I entered the cave with Aviston-Tresco. I was cautiously pleased with my progress, though aware that the next shifts were going to be far more complicated and dangerous. I had to make a sort of steep staircase out of the loose bricks; since there were not enough, the structure was too narrow and horribly unstable. Swinging a pick was impossible. Even using a hammer and cold chisel was alarming. I never felt secure on my teetering staircase unless I had one hand on the wall of the shaft. An uncontrollable fall in a shower of bricks was a nasty prospect when I could not afford a sprain, let alone a fracture.
However, I could now examine the underside of the hatch. Its frame was not let into rock or concrete; it simply stood on the top course of bricks. Under that were left some twelve more courses, completely unsupported. With all the weight of hay on top of the hatch, the brickwork might at any time come down with a wallop, dropping the hatch on me while I was chipping away underneath. I was none too happy, either, about the exposed rubble through which the shaft had been dug. There was a sizeable trickle of water in one place, and in another threatening little showers of pebbles and earth.
Some sort of scaffolding was essential, which would allow me to get both hands to the job and also check the falling hatch while I jumped for my life. But I could not see what to use nor how to support it. So I opened my last can of food, took a generous shot of whisky to help imagination and slept on the problem.
The solution was fairly clear in the morning—which turned out to be midday by my watch. Working down from the top, I changed my staircase into a pillar. Opposite, I built another pillar as high as I could reach. I sawed off the handrail of the companion ladder and cut it to fit the diameter of the shaft. My difficulty then was to build up the second pillar to the height of the first and hoist the beam up to rest on the pair of them. I felt hopeful that the pillars would hold once my weight was on the cross beam.
Meanwhile, hold they would not. When the top of the second pillar was beyond my reach, I carried on building by balancing single bricks on the end of a last piece of two by four timber, holding it up like a caber-tosser and sliding them into position. Twice the whole stack fell down. And when at last I had finished it I could not get my beam up.
The only possible method was to hoist it up by means of a hook driven into the wood of the hatch, but there was nothing at all in Jedder’s stores which would serve or could be bent to serve; nor had he got a drill. I cursed blind and sat on my knapsack, in which nothing remained except the damned clothes brush, some biscuits and the revolver. But that was it! There was my hook and there was my drill.
I dismantled the two pillars and turned them back into a stair. I fired a shot obliquely into the wood of the hatch, and hammered and twisted the barrel into the splintered hole until it was firmly jammed. The butt, turned upwards, then formed a neat and reliable hook. It was the only use I had ever found in all my life for that large, clumsy weapon.
When I had hung a length of rope on it, I changed the stair into two pillars again. That sounds simple; but it took six blasted hours of trial and error and repeated rebuilding before I had hoisted the handrail of the companion squarely into position on the bricks. I had just enough energy left to climb up the rope and sit on the beam, not caring greatly whether the whole crazy structure collapsed or not.
By this time I felt that I would rather be squashed than climb down again, probably bringing a pillar with me. So I knocked out the last courses with hammer and chisel, leaving the frame supported on only eight bricks. Three of them stayed where they were by the magic of inanimate bodies. Five on the other side were cemented—pretty well for Jedder—to a solid paving stone on the floor of the barn.
It looked as if I might now have a future provided that I got out from under quick. I slid down—half a pillar and the beam came down as well—and removed knapsack and tools into the comparative safety of the gallery. My watch surprised me. It was already afternoon in the outside world. As I thought it unwise to attempt the break-out when there might be people within earshot, I ate my biscuits and rested.
I could only doze uneasily, while obsessed by all the incalculable ways in which hatch, shaft and barn floor could collapse, as well as by the awkward evidence I was leaving behind: bloodstains, fingerprints, mess and a couple of bodies. I was sure that Aviston-Tresco had told the truth and really left a suicide note since his whole objective was to end once and for all the sequence of events which had started with his imprisonment of Fosworthy. When his body was found, analysis would show he had poisoned himself. But why hadn’t he drowned himself in the Parrett as he said he was going to? And who lowered him, alive or dead, down that hole?
Well, the question marks had to be left, but I could ensure that there would never be easy answers. I suddenly realised that with a bit of luck I could close the entrance so convincingly that no trace of it would remain. If at some future date an unknown pot-holer found his way into the cave by a new route, he could work out the tragedy for himself. Digging to see where the wires led beyond the companion ladder, he would come upon Fosworthy’s body. Then, or perhaps earlier, what remained of Aviston-Tresco would be discovered. Coroner and police could spend months trying to work that mystery out. Nothing fitted, but there was no suggestion of murder, no third person concerned. Fosworthy had apparently been overwh
elmed by a landslide as he tried to get help.
So I left the winch where it was with the rope hanging down and I carried Fosworthy’s body into the gallery. I knew that he would have forgiven this. He was always so anxious to protect me. ‘A mere envelope,’ he would have said. ‘If you consider, my dear Yarrow, that it may relieve you from the grave embarrassments for which I was inadvertently responsible, it is entirely at your disposal.’
The next task was admittedly chancy; but every stress and strain of that gallery was familiar to me and I knew what I was doing. I began to knock out the props, starting from the top of the companion. The result was instant and spectacular. Access to the cave was already closed. Working backwards towards the shaft, I slammed out some more of the shoring over Fosworthy’s body. When I had prised loose a boulder in the roof, I jumped back to wait for the crash.
It worked. The gallery had ceased to exist except for some twelve feet at the entrance to the shaft, and Fosworthy’s body was buried. But while the dust was settling and I was shining my torch on the yellow wall which faced me, there was a roar like the end of the world behind.
At first I thought that I, too, was buried. My feet were knocked from under me and I felt drowned in dust and debris. But when my torch could show anything, it showed that the joists above me were still intact. What had happened was that the waves of my minor earthquake had brought down the hatch, with the hay and half the shaft as well.
I was caught in my bit of crumbling tunnel. I accepted dully that it might be anything from five minutes to a day or two days before I could dig myself out. By God, that vile hell-hole had trained me in patience!
Clearance of the entrance with pick and hands was very slow, since bricks, debris and hay bales had to be stacked in the gallery. Calculation on the back of an envelope showed that there must be more solid matter in the shaft than would fit into my twelve feet of space. However, I did at last arrive at a sort of working face, though there was very little room to work at it.
The Courtesy of Death Page 16
