5
Far away to the northwest, where the serried wrinkles of Exmoor channel a dozen rivers from purple heath and brushwood wilderness to seas north and south of the Atlantic-facing tip of England, two other Swanns might be said to have been migrating, but they moved in tight circles, temporarily haltered to base. At that particular moment they might also be said to have been celebrating their own Oktoberfest, the opening of the autumn term cross- country season, for here, in at least one respect, the occasion bore some slight resemblance to the Bavarian festival. It was launched with sustained and discordant clamour.
It does not take a British schoolboy long to establish distinctive rituals. The influence of the late Arnold of Rugby upon the British educational system was admittedly profound, but it was not confined to concepts involved with culture-and character-formation. Pride of place in all these new, stylish and singularly Anglo-Saxon foundations was accorded to ritual and West Buckland, although no more than a quarter-century in being, had already acquired traditions that would, in time, become fossilised. One such tradition was the series of cross-country runs over set courses of moorland pasture and river bottom, and each began with a ritualistic cacophony of Dervish-like yells flung at the indifferent hills as competitors swarmed through the narrow quadrangle arch and streamed east across the playing fields towards the larch and conifer plantations marking the limit of the school enclosure. Among them, yelling as loud as anyone, went Giles and his brother Hugo, the one completing his third year on the moor, the other entering upon his second term.
For Giles especially this was one of the most stimulating moments of the school year. The opening of the cross-country season marked the renewal of his licence to roam far beyond school bounds and this meant the granting of a personal freedom that he found essential to his peace of mind within a closed community. It also marked the last yellowish glimmer of the upland summer and the onset of winds and sleet showers that would, in a matter of days, turn every leaf of every tree in the twin drives a different shade of rust red, soldier scarlet, guinea gold, and apple russet. Soon, from the high window of the Brereton dormitory where he was splashing himself after rising-bell, he could contemplate the forced march of autumn across the hills that rose behind the plantation to the spot where, years and years ago, one of his father's managers had stamped the name “Swann” on the local map by recapturing a toothless circus lion and hauling him the length of the Exe Valley to Exeter. For the boy, this event had significance. It had already passed into legend, so that as soon as the smallholders learned one of Swann's boys was up at “skuel” (the local blanket word for the straggle of neo-Gothic buildings crowning the ridge) they made the story public. Giles, answering their questions as to whether or not it was true that his father had paid the captor a shilling a mile for the haul, found himself saddled with the nickname “Chaser” in honour of the half-forgotten feat.
From October onwards, Giles “Chaser” Swann would take full advantage of the lifting of school bounds and set off on any number of officially sanctioned training runs across the slab-sided fields, through blue-black coppices bordering rushing streams, over miles of purple heather and spiky yellow gorse, as far as the very summit of the moor where a line of barrows marked the burial places of Iron Age kings. And once here, blessedly alone under a wide sky of drifting cloud, he could identify with a landscape in a way that brought him an inward tranquillity he prized above anything in his experience. For up here there were no time, no bells, and no people. Nothing at all to come between a man and his search for the meaning of existence, pursued all day long between the covers of books, and at the feet of men further advanced upon the journey than he, but not, seemingly, so concerned with the all-important questions of when, in what manner, and, above all, why?
All this, of course, was before Giles Swann found a disciple in his younger brother Hugo. A very unlikely one to most observers, for it was difficult to imagine two brothers less alike—physically or temperamentally. Giles, though stocky, was below average height, whereas Hugo, at thirteen and a half, was already five feet ten and a half inches in his knitted socks. Giles was recognised by masters and boys alike as being exceptionally bright. Hugo, everyone soon discovered, was an amiable peasant, possessed of astonishing strength and agility certainly, but without the ability to recall where he had left his football boots much less tangle with Euclid and Pythagoras. Thus it soon became accepted that Giles carried Hugo, nursing him as he had been seen to nurse a succession of other new boys now able to fend for themselves, and if Giles resented this intrusion into his rare moments of privacy he did not show it. When he set off for the Barrows, Hugo usually tagged along, a great bumbling bear in the wake of its trainer. Hugo was capable, if called upon, to cover ten miles of track in just over the hour without intruding once on his brother's train of thought so that, little by little, the relationship between them strengthened and deepened. People watched them and people wondered about them. But nobody ever knew what they talked about on these excursions. How could they know that Giles was already charting Hugo's destiny. Or that Hugo saw Giles as an old, old soul, a celestial guide invested with the distilled wisdom of the ages, who happened, for reasons of his own, to be masquerading as a schoolboy?
They had made a great, right-handed sweep striking out across the hill pastures in a northeasterly direction that would have carried them beyond Bratton Fleming had they held to it. But then they swung south and southwest, so that by four o’clock they were breasting the great wooded escarpment that rose behind Lord Fortescue's seat. They could see, in the near distance, the grey and purple blur of the school and the straight lines of the angled plantation enclosing it in the east. They paused here for a breather, for the escarpment was a rough, steep climb, and they rested their elbows on the palings faced with wire mesh that the estate workers had put there to keep the rabbits out of the park.
Giles said, “This is the best place of all, kid. The best place to see it as it was,” and Hugo took this to be a rare admission on his brother's part that Giles had indeed been here before, perhaps several times, and was remembering what this stretch of empty moorland had looked like when they buried those kings in the Barrows thousands of years ago.
He said, incuriously, “What was it like, Giles? I mean, were there farms then? And a big house, like Castle Hill on the Barum Road?” Giles said, “Not farms as you think of them. Hut circles, and long-horned sheep out on the hillsides, and as for that house, why it's newer than Tryst. The lie of the land was the same. That hasn’t changed in a million years. Not since the earth cooled.”
He looked up at the great crimson ball suspended over Barnstaple Bay in the west, as though judging the distance it had yet to fall. “Come now, we can make it back in twenty minutes and change before tea bell. Take it slowly to the level and I’ll pace you over the last mile.”
They set off one behind the other, picking their way unerringly over tussocks of coarse grass, heather clumps, and outcrops of stone that studded the reverse slope. Nothing more was said about how the western edge of Exmoor had looked to Giles four thousand years before Caesar landed in Kent or, indeed, about anything more important than a pot of apricot jam enclosed in a recent parcel from home. After tea, of course, they had to separate—Hugo to sit at prep in lower school, Giles, as a prefect, to take his turn supervising middle school prep. It was not until several hours later, when everybody else in the Brereton dormitory was asleep, that they resumed communication.
It was after silence bell then, but down at this end of the long room, where a shaft of moonlight fell across the line of washstands touching the upper half of Giles's bed, that their discussions were never overheard. They had come to regard their bedspace as another area of privacy.
Hugo had noticed long ago that Giles never seemed to need sleep. Perhaps old souls didn’t. Perhaps they took their rest in long hibernations between spells on earth. He could see him now, flat on his back, fingers interlocked behind his head, gazing up at
the ceiling, as though it guarded all the secrets of the Universe and was feeding them, one by one, into the head of the only person Hugo regarded as fully qualified to absorb them. Presently he said, “What will you do, Giles? After you leave here, I mean. Will you go to Cambridge like they say? And then into the business?”
“No. I won’t do that. I’m not sure what I shall do. But whatever it is it won’t be that.”
“Why not? Fulbrooke Major told his brother he heard Tommy tell Mr. Shaw you could pass any examination they set if you wanted to.”
Tommy—the Reverend J. H. Thompson, M.A.—had been headmaster of West Buckland more than twenty-five years now, and enjoyed Giles Swann's respect and affection. Nevertheless, Giles replied, “Tommy's a schoolmaster. He has to think in terms of examinations. But they aren’t any guide at all to a man's capabilities and never will be. Don’t forget that. It's very important that you shouldn’t, because you’ll never pass any.”
Hugo, reflecting that this was almost certainly true, asked, “If that's so then what should I go for when I move up next year. I’ll be nearly as old as you then and they’ll be sure to write home and ask.”
“What you can do better than anyone else.”
“But no one can make a living running and playing games,” Hugo said, but then wished he hadn’t. It was only rarely that he questioned Giles's pronouncements and what was surprising about that? It was ridiculous to argue with someone who knew what the Bray Valley had looked like thousands of years ago.
Giles said, without taking his gaze off the ceiling, “Some people can. If they’re as fast and beefy as you are.”
“How, Giles?”
“People are beginning to think very highly of athletes. Nobody expects an athlete to be clever, or to cram for examinations and degrees. George will be home by then and I daresay Father will put you in his charge. You won’t work all that much but your being there will make it worth their while.”
“Why, Giles? How will it?”
“In the way Hamlet Ratcliffe boosted the firm by catching that lion. They’ve never forgotten that. But the boost was local and yours could be national— international, if you’re as good as I think you are. That's why I intend to keep you hard at it so long as I’m here.”
He paused, waiting for the obligatory hiss of indrawn breath that passed for Hugo's assent to almost everything he said. When it did not come he went on, “Maybe you’re too young to understand it yet but it is so. Someone who can break track records, and get his name in all the papers, would be the best advertisement Swann-on-Wheels ever had. You’ll enjoy doing it, too.” Hugo's silence puzzled Giles so that he raised himself, propping chin with hand. “It's all you think about, isn’t it? Ever since you staggered everybody walking off with the under-sixteen mile your first term here. And you, a kid of thirteen.”
“Not ‘thought’ exactly. Dreamed tho’; the same dream over and over again.”
“Tell me. Tell me about the dream.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“You try. It's important that I know.”
“It's just a sound.”
“What kind of sound?”
“A sound like a waterfall. Or a gale, like the one we had the first week of term that brought all the trees down.”
“How do you and that sound come together?”
“I don’t know. It sounds so silly.”
“It won’t sound silly to me.”
“You wouldn’t tell anyone? Ever?”
“Of course I wouldn’t.”
“God's honour?”
“God's honour.”
“Well then, I’m running you see, running hard, much harder than anyone runs here, and I’ve got a clear lead, half a lap maybe. I don’t even have to look over my shoulder, you see?”
“Go on.”
“That sound is all round me. It's for me and because of me, and it's… well, wonderful, the most wonderful thing you could imagine. It gets louder and louder, until it seems like everyone in the world is shouting. But then it stops and everything goes quiet and I’m by myself but glad, you see? Glad and comfortable and… well, satisfied. The way you feel when you’ve finished a Christmas dinner. Is that just a dream, Giles? One of those dreams you keep on having and not always when you’re asleep? Sometimes I think…” but here, conscious of his brother's unwinking gaze across the narrow strip of moonlight separating their cots, he stopped, feeling himself blushing.
Giles said, “You don’t have to be ashamed of dreams of that sort. Everyone dreams of doing something splendid, of being someone important, but mostly they accept the fact that they are dreams and go on doing something ordinary. And you don’t, do you?”
“No. That sound is more real than real sounds. More real than bells, for instance. Sometimes I don’t even hear the bell at the end of a period. Sometimes I think that's the reason I don’t remember anything much and why everyone here thinks I’m bone from the neck up.”
“Don’t let that bother you,” Giles said, grimly, “they’ll all be glad enough to have known you when they hear that sound, kid.”
“You think it’ll come true, then?”
“Certainly it will. I’m glad you told me. I wasn’t sure I was right about you but now I know I am.” He lay back, lifted the blanket level with his chin and clasped his hands behind his head in what Hugo always thought of as his secret-probing posture. “It's after eleven now. Go to sleep, kid.”
“Yes. Goodnight, Giles.”
“Goodnight, kid.”
Streamers of blue-black cloud moved to obscure the moon and Giles watched them fight a losing battle. Finally they gave up, slipping past in wisps and tatters as the moon rode out high and full into a clear sky. He saw it as a kind of object lesson in purpose. In the pursuit of purpose. In the end it was all that mattered.
Everybody had to have purpose. Almost everybody he knew had. His father had the business. Alex had glory. His mother had the family. His sister Stella, now that she was married again, had a husband, a baby, and a farm. If George's letters home were anything to go by, George's purpose was to wander the earth, watching and learning, but even this was not profitless, or not to Giles's way of thinking. Neither was young Hugo's obsession with a sound that he had not yet identified as applause from a crowd at a sports stadium. The really difficult thing was to find the purpose, identify with it, train for it, and then hold fast to it, the way his father had when he founded Swann-on-Wheels all those years ago; the way Phoebe Fraser did when she rose at six-thirty in winter and summer and tackled the endlessly repetitive task of teaching children to mind their manners. The headmaster's purpose here was to mould a young school into the pattern of older, more famous schools. The purpose of Gladstone was to build a new society so universal that it might even make sense of his father's jovial boast that God was an Englishman. They all had a purpose and it piqued him that here he was, turned seventeen and still without one.
He had hints. That old couple being turned out of their cottage and Gladstone's thunderous proclamation of the power of the common people meant something, but as signposts they were not explicit. Perhaps they would be, for purposes did not always define themselves as clearly as his father's, Alexander's, and Hugo's. Tomorrow, mulling over Swift, or Shakespeare, or Bacon, he would give it more thought. It was impossible to hurry these things. You waited and thought and read. Sooner or later a phrase jumped at you out of a page and there was another signpost you hadn’t seen before. He lay back and looked up at the high-riding moon. A dead planet, they said. But it knew its purpose in the scheme of things.
Three
1
HIS DAILY MAIL, REACHING HIM IN TWO STREAMS, ONE AS A STEADY FLOOD AT the yard, and the other as a slow trickle at Tryst, were in great contrast judged by the relative pressures they applied to him, the concentration they demanded, and the effort needed, here and there, to read between the lines.
The yard mail arrived by the sack but was winnowed by Tybalt and his industrious cl
erks. Only regional reports and letters demanding urgent decisions were passed directly to him and most of these were annotated and clipped into relevant files. Heavy as it was, his office mail never occupied him more than an hour or so. He worked at it like one of those new sorting machines, recently installed at the General Post Office: papers flying this way and that, with a dash of a pen here, a marginal note there and, just occasionally, a well-aimed flourish in the direction of the gluttonous wastepaper basket that stood between the window and Frankenstein.
It was very different with his private mail, laid on his study desk against his return home in the evening, or sometimes handed to him opened by Henrietta. These letters could not be dealt with quickly, for they were not overt communications, involving waggons, teams, infringements of territorial frontiers, bad debts, new customers, new contracts, the fabric of regional premises, tiresome changes in railway timetables, complaints concerning dilatory employees, pleas of extenuation involving bad roads and dishonoured promises—all the small change that came cascading from the tailboards of twelve hundred waggons and two thousand hired hands dotted about Britain, from the Grampians to the Kentish Weald, from the Cornish tin mines up through the Mountain Square to the Polygon and the Cumberland fells that knew him as a boy.
The letters he pondered in the great study at Tryst were about people, and herein lay the difference. Whereas one could base a decision concerning, say, the gross weight of a haul of Llanberis slate, on past experience, experience was of little use to a man on the look-out for unspoken thoughts in the artful phrase or the telltale postscript.
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 34
