by Ashly Graham
Downs not whale-backed, per Kipling,
But formed by a fallen god
Stretched out: the body of Pan,
Tumbled to the pagan ground he trod
Until the unsuspecting Thamus reeled
To hear the sound of a great voice proclaim
That the great god Pan was dead!
Painful news
To those who celebrated his indolence
And penchant for merry-making.
As the only god to die in our time,
Many people still frequent
His chalk altars and wooded shrines,
and lie
Where slow waves of mortality pass
Over his tomb of lark-infested grass.
*
Ophelia was a dedicated walker, and considered her day to be incomplete if she had not climbed either up one of a number of winding paths or via the woods, to the downs ridgeway and along it to east or west, or cut across the bottoms—a direction much less travelled by others—south towards the coast. Morning-time, as early as an ante-meridiem-averse person as she was could manage, and late afternoons until dusk, were her favourite times; the hours between she found too lacking in magic to be mentally refreshing.
Usually she left home with only a general notion of what direction she would take. But she always included in her itineration some point that would afford her a prospect of the village where it lay tucked at the foot of a fold in the hills. There she would pause and wonder at how small and alien the place and the people who inhabited it seemed, how distant from her own sensibility and understanding, once she was far above and removed from them in mind and body.
Except for Effie, of course; and as she shaded her eyes to pick out her own home, she knew that her dear friend would at that moment have an earthenware bowl cradled in her arm, and the telephone gripped between cheek and shoulder. As she stirred and folded the ingredients with a wooden spoon, the slightly panting cadence of her speech became synchronized with rhythmic action.
“So I told her she could take his...I mean, the temerity—the gall! I said I’m sick and tired of...and she could shove it where...pfff... Hold on a sec, the cord’s twisted...that’s better. She and her horse could...what? Oh yes, she got the message, by golly. I didn’t beat about the bush.”
Ophelia smiled; she knew the lines word for word.
Going for a walk was not so much an opportunity to think as one during which to empty her mind, so that, like an artist’s blank canvas it might be refilled with fresh shapes and colours and ideas. Though she covered the same criss-crossing paths over and over again along any of a dozen routes, there were many random distinctive things about each outing to pay attention to. There was the going underfoot to be considered; as well as whether or not it might drizzle; how windy it might be at the top; how the trees were dressed and how the woods smelled at different seasons and at bluebell time; which slopes the sheep and cattle might be grazing on; which tiny flowers might be emergent in the greensward, especially the cowslips and orchids; the timing of her descent in case sundown was special.
There were deer to be looked out for amongst the trees; and she never failed to be excited by the sight of a daylight fox as it froze at the sight of her, with one paw raised, before streaking off. There was the possibility of coming across in the scrub a badger sett she had not known about, or finding an arrowhead coughed from a new rabbit hole, or, if she had stayed on the field and woodland and water meadow flats rather than ascending, exposed by a plough. Though she was no ornithologist, there were sightings of partridge and pheasant and falcon, and wheeling buzzards with their eerie one-note cries, and a cuckoo to listen for, and in the gloaming the whisper of a barn owl to be surprised by.
Winter was the season in which it was easiest to be precise in her observations, and she did not consider the time plainer or less salubrious than the others despite the frequent bone-freezing winds. She harked to the shrill of the few remaining leaves that, shrivelled and Tithonus-like, were still attached to branches begging to be released into another world...until the Cromwellian month of March, which governed in the interregnum before spring’s coronation, heeded their cry and gave them their quietus so that they might be buried with the rest of their generation in ancestral humus.
The variety and combinations of visual sensations and smells of air, tree, blossom, flower, and the petrichor of rain on dry ground, were endless and always welcomed.
On her perambulations Ophelia never started out with a destination in mind, or planned to cover a certain distance or do anything particular along the way. She did not go for the exercise, or with the object of looking for rare flowers, or to pick berries, or to beat the bounds of the parish, like those who were more earnest than she in their naturalizations. Whatever happened, happened, arising or occurring serendipitously as she maundered or “doddled”, as the old shepherds had termed it, along.
The only essential was the being out of doors. The moment that the village was behind her she entered a timeless zone, the memory of which, when temporal rectitude—was there such a thing as the “right” time?, she wondered—was restored upon her return, she would be able to summon and draw upon in her mind’s eye as if she had taken a book off a shelf to read.
Every now and then she was accompanied by one of any number of dogs, foisted upon her by a villager who spotted her and knew what she was about, and who would be grateful to be spared the trouble and time of walking it round the cricket pitch or along the Street. She felt sorry for these domestic undomesticated animals who spent their days slumped before an empty grate, or with their noses under garden gates watching for something, anything, to happen, when they could have been rippling off after a scent, or a rabbit, or putting up a pheasant, or starting a hare from its form. She was interested in how the senses of the lower orders of being were so much sharper than human ones.
But, though it sometimes made her feel selfish and guilty, usually Ophelia wanted to travel alone, like Kipling’s cat in the Just So Stories that walked by itself...except that all places were absolutely not alike to her. She thought of her walks not as poems but as short stories or novellas: they had beginnings, middles and ends, plots and subplots, and sad and happy endings. There were chapters and dialogue in different languages, and drawings and illustrations in colour and black-and-white, and many, many, speaking characters amongst the animals, birds, growing things, and topographical features.
Traversing the hills Ophelia was happy to be nothing, and to pass like a fleeting shadow cast by the clouds that trafficked the welkin. Up and down the hills and aslant and broadside she would walk, her body held erect or bent or braced as terrain and wind dictated; stopping only to catch her breath and return the stolid gazes of grazing or cudding sheep or cows. When the going was especially steep she crawled upwards on all fours, or slid down feet first on her backside; and sometimes, if the cleats of her boots were clogged with loving mud and could find no purchase, she would slip and fall so hard that she was winded without having time to exclaim or groan.
The easiest part to negotiate was the drovers’ track that ran up the bostal and along the hog’s back ridge, which extended, it seemed, for ever. To the north from the escarpment that dropped sharply to the village, the view from the highest elevation some eight hundred feet high stretched fully fifty miles across the plain of Wealden clay and greensand loam to the dark streak of another similar but lower range of hills; while to the south the land undulated like a saltwater swell until it reached the coast and resolved into the element that it resembled.
Standing on tiptoe and stretching a hazel wand, which she had plucked in the woods to use as a switch, above her head, from her lofty coigns of vantage Ophelia imagined that she held the firmament in abeyance and was drawing the naked souls of others like her, for whom superiority of height had become a living metaphor of withdrawal from the dross and clinker of humanity, aloft to join her in briefly assuming a mantle of eternity. The village, strung out alon
g the Street like illiterate or sesquipedalian prose, when regarded as a whole of sentences looked ugly, even obscene. Within the context of the landscape it seemed to lingually insult it. The downs, on the other hand, wrote and communicated as beautifully as they had no need of mouth and tongue and palate and breath to express themselves, succinctly and to the point.
The curate’s favourite point of all was a bowl-shaped tumulus or barrow, an ancient burial mound, which, because it was removed from the footpaths and in the middle of a side of the largest of the downs, was always a challenge to find, even for one who knew it as well as she did. Though she tried to identify some feature of the landscape that she might use to orient its position, there was no tree or bush, contour mark or outcrop to guide her to the spot; so, having no bearing to lose, she always had to cast about in different directions until she came upon it, each time thinking that now she had an atmospheric fix on where it was.
Emotionally the draw that the genius loci of this tumulus exerted upon her was powerful, magnetic, and she had come to regard the place as enchanted. Here on the massive flank of the hill, breathing its rarefied air, things might be understood that never could be when one was in the village fug. That which might seem of great pith and moment in the toil and moil of ordinary life here did not rate a thought for its consequence.
Far beneath the barrow’s hollow crown, Ophelia pictured a sepulchre into which the dust of skeletons had sifted from their shallow graves. Seated or lying protected within its timeless round, she felt that she was communing with the spirits of tribes whose crumbled bones had become part of the DNA of the hill, even of the primum mobile itself. Whether it constituted prayer or not she had no idea, but within the sacrosanct space of the ring she cupped her own lively flame like that of a candle as she sent out tremulous signals to the deep empathy that she felt beneath her, endeavouring to share with it a sliver of her own sensibility.
Often the sun would have just set when, after descending on her way home, she crossed the common outside the village and saw the lights of the first houses. Winding through the blackthorn scrub as darkness fell, in spring she would pause to listen to the nightingales starting up. But try as she might, now that she had returned to the denser atmosphere of the quotidian world, she who aloft had become proficient in so many languages could not interpret their garbled words. This she found frustrating. Then it came to her that these drab and tiny birds, who had no need of gaudy plumage or display to advertise their presence but only one means of expression, their entrancing voices, whilst they had no greater ability to articulate the divine language that inspired them than she, they shared the same sublunary medium.
The silences that interspersed the nightingales’ ungainly effusions were as lovely as the sound they produced:
“Jug-jug lugs snag,” commented the invisible songsters; “tereu.”
Quiet.
“Gargle gurgle pirouette.”
Nothing.
“Grate grate gravel, trill trickle grind whistle proop.”
“…”
Leaving the nightingales and walking down the fenced track to the Street, Ophelia was conscious that the person who came down the hill was not the same one who ascended it, and her aura she felt must surely be detected by anyone she encountered. Strangely, or not, she never met anyone at the end of her walks, and this had become a source of both of joy and relief to her. Once on the hard level of the road, as she approached the cottage her now confident steps often prompted the recitation of a flawlessly metrical verse that had nothing to do with her walk, which she had learned at school, William Johnson Cory’s translation of an epigram by Callimachus:
“
‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy Nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.’”
And so she would arrive home a little light-headed but cheerful, fortified by the belief that, whatever it was that she was a part of, there was not a devil in the land who could stand up to the merest fragment of it.
*
“Lady, greyer than your dogs,
Lined against the morning sky,
Strained against leashes,
All muzzled, tight-lipped, dry;
“Why? the questionable path,
And always at this time of day,
Visible only in early light…
Does in-between dissolve you?”
“Why? Because the hills in this light,
And at this distance, stretch and feel
Their ennobling strength; they hum,
And count the wandering sheep.
“Because I seek the unforgotten,
Since immortal Time turned back
Indulgently to sport with the nymph
Of decay, and left me here alone.
“Because I hold missing as still beautiful,
Though undetected by reined-in
Greyhounds and a wistful gaze.
Alone and pale, perhaps—loitering, never.”
*
Where the leaves skitter, there I;
Where the horse snorts and whinnies
In the dark, I; where the Green Knight
Returns each year to swing his axe
And spray bright blood upon the earth, I.
Where the viaduct spans the valley,
Entranced in fields of
Oak-struck permanence,
Where klaxon calls of pheasant cocks echo,
Where spirits linger like the
Fade from stained-glass light
In brick-arched windows of fog-pearled sight,
There I am and go.
There, here, recorded in the stream
Over and over, the swirls of life
Are present and unalterably replayed
And listened to;
There, here, liquid names are engraved
And the living and departed are recalled to where,
Grave-plotted from youth, they shall meet again
Who are dedicated and devoted
Without the means of saying so;
There, and here, they remain and shall return
Each year, life transcending
Forever and a year, soft-shelled and tender
And together after ending.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was a beautiful morning when Ophelia picked her way down the hill with unusual haste, after an almost unprecedented dawn patrol that took in several of her favourite locations. It had been raining on and off for several days and the temperature was warm for the time of year. The banks were covered with creamy primroses, and stands of yellow and white daffodils and narcissi. There was a holy quiet in the beech wood, where tendrils of mist were still coiling around the boles of the trees, and moisture was dripping from the boughs and audibly seeping in the padding of leaves underfoot.
Unaccustomed as she was to appearing in public so early, Ophelia could not deny the thrill of being abroad in the respectful hush before Mother Nature had cast off her foggy blanket and arisen to greet the day; and she felt ashamed at the infrequency with which she lauded Creation at a time when everything seemed so much different to how it did later.
Ophelia and Effie had been invited to breakfast at the former Rectory, and had arranged to meet each other at the gates a few minutes before they were expected so that they could go in together. Effie would be arriving by horse.
Both women were shocked to receive an offer of hospitality from the devil lady; whatever prompted it had to be suspect and suspicious, and they debated for some time as to how to respond. Mrs Diemen would have the home advantage, and no do
ubt she had some fiendish plan in mind for confounding them, and through them, the hearts and minds of the other villagers. They would have to keep their wits about them and resolve to be strong. It was Effie who decided the matter. Foolhardy though it might be to accept—she admitted as much to herself—she was still glowing from her first encounter with the DL, and argued to a dubious Ophelia that the situation was as it was, and would have to be confronted if it were ever to reach its climacteric.
The curate speeded up to cross a field at the base of the hill behind the Annexe where Father Fletcher lived, as far away as possible from a small herd of Jacob sheep each of which had either four or six horns. Reaching the stile onto the footpath that led to the Street and the Old Rectory gates, she paused to enjoy the sight of half a dozen lambs playing King of the Castle around a tree stump. Consulting her watch, she saw that there were still ten minutes remaining until her rendezvous with Effie. When she reached the Street she stamped her feet to loosen the clods of clay, so much of which was clinging to them that it was as if she were walking in moon boots. Her moleskin trousers were splattered with mud that had already dried and hardened to a lighter colour, and they left marks when she scraped them off with her fingernails.
