In The Tent

by David Rees

  A twig snapping nearby instantly made him fearful, and he looked to his musket. Was there some Parliamentary sniper hidden in the trees? To be killed by the men towards whom his natural sympathies inclined would be lunatic. There was someone there. The day was windless, yet the bushes shook slightly. He raised the gun. Then lowered it, for into the clearing staggered a figure he recognized, torn and blood-stained though the clothes were and wild the face and hair. It was Saint-Hill.

  Saint-Hill was delighted beyond measure to see Tim, and in his customary manner of accepting what had not quite been offered, he made to climb upon the horse. They trotted slowly back to the city. Saint-Hill’s mission had, apparently, not been a success, but only he seemed surprised. He had not at first been allowed to see Fairfax, but had been interrogated, at length and arrogantly, by an underling. Then he was blindfolded and made to walk a great distance, eventually finding himself inside a house. When he was allowed to see, he was in a room in the middle of which was a long table, six men seated on either side. At the head of the table sat Sir Thomas Fairfax, at the foot Sir John Berkeley. It was the dining-room of Poltimore.

  ‘I was made to repeat my story,’ he said. ‘And when I stumbled, as I was bound to do, six Royalist commanders and the Governor being present, I was prodded, most uncomfortably, by a sword. Sir John was enraged, and demanded I should be taken out instantly and shot. Sir Thomas, an urbane and ironic man, did not agree. He assured the Governor, on his word of honour as a gentleman, that he would not, in any circumstances, have acted on my suggestions. It was quite contrary to the rules of war. I must be an imbecile, he said, harmless no doubt, but obviously deranged. A good whipping was all I needed.’

  ‘And were you whipped?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘Less than I was. But my back is a mass of raw flesh.’

  It was not maybe the fate Saint-Hill’s idea merited, Tim thought, but the man, considering his foolhardiness, was lucky to be alive. Belief in oneself and nothing else, it occurred to him, was poor clothing with which to face the wily ways of the world. ‘How did you escape?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t have to escape. They turned me loose into the night, covered in blood as I was. As I left I heard from the dining-room the noise of clinking glass and loud laughter.’

  ‘Some interesting little deal is being hatched in there, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. A considerable sum of money will probably change hands. Berkeley and his advisers will be allowed to leave the city unharmed; liberal and fine-sounding guarantees concerning the fate of Princess Henrietta Maria will be announced together with proclamations on the sanctity of property and the freedom of religious worship for all denominations. Berkeley will surrender; Fairfax march in (he will claim that he captured Exeter without a shot being fired), then the Puritan soldiers will have free rein to sack and pillage as much as they like.’

  ‘I had always heard that Fairfax was a decent, humane man, that the New Model had an iron discipline.’

  ‘I’ve heard otherwise.’

  There was a long silence. It was good to be alive, Tim thought; the ride had refreshed him, given him a sense of well-being: the sour smells of autumn, the weak sunlight turning the distant hills gold, the estuary glittering towards the sea. And there was work to do now, real work, not insignificant little jobs that Anthony could easily do himself if he had a mind to. Tim had Saint-Hill, had to wash his wounds, nurse him, restore him to health. He was needed.

  ‘We’ll go in by the south gate,’ he said. ‘It will be safer.’

  ‘I must shelter. There would be danger in my own house.’

  Anthony let them through without comment, but as soon as Saint-Hill had dismounted, a dozen soldiers emerged from behind the church and arrested him. They attempted to drag Tim off as well, but released him when Anthony intervened.

  Tim was appalled, but common sense stopped him from protesting aloud at what the soldiers were doing. ‘What will happen to him?’ he asked, despairingly.

  Anthony gestured across his throat, and a strangled gasp came from his mouth. ‘You are lucky not to suffer in the same way!’ he shouted, and this was the first sentence of an angry tirade, in which he berated Tim at length for his thoughtlessness and stupidity.

  ‘I couldn’t leave him ... what else could I do?... I had no option!’

  ‘If you survive long enough, which I doubt, maybe you’ll learn to ignore the requests of men like Saint-Hill. It nearly clapped you in gaol! And as for him, he’ll be dead by tomorrow morning. If you’d left him alone to wander round the countryside, maybe he would have lived!’

  Sleep would not return, so he studied the map. The names were fascinating—The Lord’s Rake, Crinkle Crags, Gavel Neese, Pike of Blisco, Aaron Slack, Pike of Stickle. Not one Sourmilk Gill, but several. He was fairly certain they were by High Hause Tarn on Glaramara, but which was the right direction? He had an obscure conviction that north lay on the far side of the tarn, but there was no possible way of discovering for certain. John stirred, crawled from his sleeping-bag and went out to pee.

  ‘We should have brought another compass,’ Tim said, when he returned.

  John, equally dismayed by the weather, said, shortly, ‘Well, we didn’t.’

  ‘Quite mad to bring only one.’

  After a while John asked ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Which direction do you think is north?’

  He scratched his head. ‘I’d say, a wild guess, beyond the tarn.’

  ‘I’ve that feeling too.’

  Breakfast was eaten in gloomy silence. Aaron grumbled that he was still hungry, and took the Kendal mint-cake out of his rucksack.

  ‘Don’t eat that!’ Tim warned.

  ‘Why not? And who the hell do you think you are telling me what to do?’

  ‘We don’t know when we’re going to get our next meal.’

  This truth was so obvious that Aaron replaced it. ‘Wish I’d never come,’ he said. ‘Half-term bloody Monday. I could be lying in bed at home.’ No-one answered.

  ‘Do we move or do we stop here?’ Ray asked, eventually. Again, silence, and he said ‘Tim, I’m talking to you!’

  ‘Stay. For the time being. No point in getting drenched. And walking round in circles, maybe. If the rain stops well . . .’

  ‘Which direction?’

  ‘Any way that’s down. Borrowdale, Langdale, Eskdale even; it doesn’t matter so long as we reach civilization.’

  ‘Civilization!’ Aaron snorted. ‘Whose idea was this crummy expedition in the first place? Back home we’d be playing records and thinking about where we’d go out this evening.’ He opened the tent flaps. ‘I’m not staying in here a moment longer,’ he said, and went outside.

  ‘Where are you going?’ John asked.

  ‘To find the way down. You can sit on your arses and starve to death if you want.’

  ‘Don’t be such a berk! Come back!’ But Aaron was already squelching through the mud. ‘He’s crazy! Suppose he gets lost?’

  ‘Ssh!’ Tim whispered. ‘He’ll not go far. Listen.’ Soon they heard him returning, the footsteps slower.

  ‘Did you find it then?’ Ray asked, genially.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just walked off a little surplus temper, eh? What did you see? Sheep?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Tim said.

  ‘Why don’t you just fuck off?’ .Aaron shouted. ‘All of you!’ He took the mint-cake out of his rucksack and began to eat it. Three pairs of eyes watched in accusing silence, and when he could no longer bear to ignore them he stuffed the remaining half-bar noisily into his possessions. Then he undressed, climbed into his bedding, and pretended to sleep.

  ‘End of part one,’ John said. ‘Now for the adverts. Have you tried Suñer, the amazing new compass? Slips easily into the pocket and out of it. Useful in all weathers, including the strongest sun rays, ha-ha-ha. With it comes this free coupon for a free holiday on the sun-baked Costa
del Glaramara—’

  ‘I know,’ Ray said, sighing. ‘I know.’

  ‘Which direction do we really want, Tim?’

  ‘For Langdale, south a bit, then more or less east down the motorway . . .’

  ‘Leaving Captain Scott’s flag on the right by the South Pole?’

  ‘. . . and I think we’d best go on our hunch about north being on the far side of the tarn.’ Tim stared again at the map; it must, somehow, yield up the secret of where they were. The contour lines, the crags, the footpaths, the blue streams were already imprinted on his memory, but still there was no real clue.

  ‘Do you think we should make a move?’

  ‘Not yet. We could just wander about and get saturated for nothing.’

  ‘Ron did have a point when he talked about starving,’ Ray said.

  ‘If we had to stop here all day and all night, and tomorrow as well, we might get hungry, but we wouldn’t starve.’

  ‘Charming,’ Ray said, after a silence.

  ‘There’s biscuits, chocolate, apples, plenty of tea, and plenty of water in the tarn. I’ll fill the kettle and make some tea. Give me something to do.’

  He returned, dripping wet.

  ‘If you left it outside,’ John pointed out, ‘It would soon fill itself.’

  ‘Yes. So it would.’

  ‘Regular little housewife she is,’ Ray said. ‘Must be the Irish Catholic in you. Tea with bog water.’

  She? Did Ray mean anything? But he was grinning, quite amicably. Tim hoped his own face betrayed nothing. While they sipped their drinks he had to put up with a lot of banter about his religion. He was used to this, though never before from these two: the same kind of stupid remarks, however. Why weren’t Catholics allowed into RE lessons? Miss Tweedsmuir was an earnest creature with spectacles who tried desperately to be as nice as pie to the rows of heathen in front of her. She would hardly be likely to deprave and corrupt, would she? And this rigmarole about Confession. All you had to do was reel off your sins to the priest, Father I had sex every night last week, say you were sorry and be free to go off and do it again as much as you wanted. And all those statues in the churches. Catholics worshipped statues, didn’t they? You might just as well be a pagan on a South Sea Island.

  ‘It’s not like that at all,’ Tim said.

  ‘What is it like, then?’ Ray wanted to know. This was the trap, he knew from past experience. You were led on into explaining, for example, the need to feel repentant without which Confession was quite useless, and this only meant more scorn. ‘Go on,’ said Ray. ‘I really want to know. It’s no battier than Anarcho-Syndicalism, I can assure you.’ So he droned on, mechanically, aware of laughter in John’s eyes, and he thought to himself with some astonishment, for it was perhaps the first time he had felt it, why does it sound like so much twaddle? It is twaddle. Isn’t it? Force of habit. Not belief.

  ‘After that mouthful,’ John said, turning on the transistor, ‘I need some music to flush me out.’

  But it was news time, the local news. A fire in a house in Windermere, one woman dead. Hold-ups on the A66 owing to extensive roadworks at Bassenthwaite. Workington Council said last night that plans to build two new factories in the area had been shelved because of the economic crisis. ‘Fears are being expressed for the safety of four teenagers on a walking holiday in the Lake District,’ the news-reader said. ‘They should have arrived in Langdale yesterday evening, but they have not been seen since Saturday, when they were heading for the south-west slopes of Great Gable. No search has yet been possible owing to the bad weather ...’

  ‘That’s us!’cried Ray, appalled.

  Half a dozen people were standing in the church porch. A man was taking photographs. A christening: the young woman in the centre was holding a tiny baby. Smart suits, long dresses, floppy hats. Tim and John waited until they had gone, then went inside. The vicar was writing a new name in the register of baptisms. It was not a particularly interesting church to the sightseer, but Tim was absorbed: all around, on the walls, and on the floor, were memorials to the Bampfylde family.

  Here lyeth John Bampfylde

  baronett who died April 24

  1650 in the 40 yeare of his age

  ‘So he didn’t survive long, then! If we were him, we’d have only fifteen years left! I feel no intimations of mortality.’

  ‘The inscription’s odd,’ John said. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  THE RIGHTEOUS PERISHETH AND NO MAN LAYETH

  IT TO HEART AND MERCIFULL MEN ARE TAKEN

  AWAY NONE CONSIDERING THAT THE RIGHTEOUS

  IS TAKEN AWAY FROM THE EVILL TO COME

  ‘It sounds querulous,’ Tim agreed. ‘Whoever wrote it didn’t approve of the Commonwealth, perhaps. It’s a year after the King’s execution. The Bampfyldes were Parliament men, though. What it is probably, yes, the son was a Royalist, the father not. The Civil War divided many families.’

  ‘You’re not lecturing your students now,’ John said.

  They walked through the gate at the end of the churchyard and along an avenue of enormous lime trees: spires of green and gold, ancient and beautiful. The sweet scent of the blossom was overpowering. Few people came this way; the grass between the two rows of trees was untrodden. The gardens, to the right, were derelict, a mass of weeds and untended shrubs. All that remained of a tennis court was the rusting wire cage that surrounded it. At the end of the avenue was Poltimore House. It was dying: loose tiles, cracked glass, peeling white stucco. Once it had been very handsome. Closed shutters on the insides of all the windows stopped anything intruding on its privacy.

  ‘Do you ever hear from Ron these days?’ Tim asked.

  ‘A Christmas card, that’s all. He’s still in California.’

  ‘And a millionaire.’

  ‘He reminds me of someone who was in the charts when we were at school. Marty Kristian, was it?’

  ‘Someone like that. I don’t remember.’

  The fields beyond the house had once been extensive parkland. Oaks and cedars of Lebanon, as old as the limes, stood singly in the middle of growing corn. A man and his two children were baling hay; they stared at John and Tim with curiosity, evidently wondering who these trespassers were. Three fields off, the summer traffic, en route for the holiday camps and caravan sites of Torbay, roared down the M5.

  ‘It was once a hospital, Poltimore,’John said. ‘It specialized in hernias, piles, rectal cancer, that sort of thing. It became too expensive to run, and when the new hospital opened in the city, it closed down.’

  ‘It has atmosphere.’ The wind made the trees sway restlessly, a pleasing, melancholy sound. The uncut grass was splashed with the red of poppies; thistles grew boldly in an elegant garden urn. Tim thought of the nurses, off duty, playing tennis, of Sir John Bampfylde and his family entertaining the commanders of the New Model.

  ‘We should be getting back.’ John looked at his watch. ‘Lesley will have tea ready, and the children will be home from school.’

  ‘You, with a six-year-old daughter!’

  ‘I was nineteen when Karen was born.’

  ‘I remember. Are you happy?’

  ‘Me and Lesley? Oh yes. Yes. Are you?’

  ‘I don’t have a wife and children, naturally. But I got over thinking that left me out of things years ago. Yes, I’m happy.’

  ‘A pity Franco couldn’t come.’

  ‘He’s in Spain for a fortnight.’

  ‘Do you ever see him?’

  ‘I had a drink with him last week. I often see him; we use the same pub. He’s still very militant, waving banners and going on marches, writing articles and lobbying MPs.’ John laughed. ‘What?’

  ‘You. You and him. Ron. Me. Funny the way it all turns out.’

  A loud crack like a pistol-shot made them jump. A tile had fallen from the roof and smashed to pieces. Birds flew up in alarm from the grass and the flower-beds. It was a place with a very special charge, Tim thought. The past here was unquiet. If ghosts wer
e real they would be in this house. The righteous perisheth and no man layeth it to heart: an epitaph for the whole troubled times, the troubled complex humans of both sides. They had never come to terms with the demons in themselves, did not know how to. A civil war derived not only from the inability of certain people to co-exist; it was an externalizing of the conflicts within the self. None of them had known that he could not possibly count himself with the righteous, that all men had an equal claim to that state. This house would always be restless.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The tent smelled of stale air and unwashed bodies. It was home and sanctuary but also prison: one moment Tim was grateful for its warm protectiveness; the next he longed to be outside tramping over the mountains to Langdale. The news on the radio had horrified him. He felt like a small child surprised in the act of doing something extremely naughty: what would happen if it was repeated on the national network; suppose his parents heard it? His plight being made so public made him feel inexplicably guilty, as if, once again, he had let them down.

  It was not the same for the others; he could sense this, even though John had said ‘They’ll be worried out of their minds!’ and Ray had gasped ‘My mother will be frantic!!’

  ‘Of course they’ll be frantic,’ Aaron said. ‘They’re bound to be! Nothing we can do about it.’

  Tim knew his control of the group was slipping away. Aaron sprawled in his sleeping-bag, sulking, Achilles in his tent. There was a feeling, emanating from Ray and John, that Tim’s usefulness had finished, that he could no longer make decisions, that he had nothing new to offer. Just sit it out; the rain must cease and the clouds lift some time: they didn’t like it. And he was sure they were thinking they might all slowly starve to death.