‘He says that all of them need me, and there’s no risk from the half-wits. I’m holy or something.’
‘That’s what he said about himself.’
They are running short of cash, he says, and we should return Uncle Simeon’s brooches and ash trays and things. What does he mean?’
The major had clean forgotten that we had never told Elsa that he was the burglar. Now that had to come out.
She listened to my story disapprovingly. ‘But I still don’t see why he did it,’ she said.
‘For the sake of his old friend. I should never have agreed, but I did. You see, he didn’t believe in the alchemy for a moment. He was afraid that your uncle was stealing gold somewhere or that he was faking antiquities to sell them as genuine finds. I suspected – and I still do – that he had really found a buried hoard and was breaking it up. Iniquitous! So we determined to get hold of the cauldron for a couple of days so that I could take it to the British Museum. But Denzil was always halfway to believing it might be the Grail and his nerve failed him. He wouldn’t lay hands on it. So he left it and just emptied out the drawer of trinkets. That’s what we have to return.’
‘Denzil Matravers-bloody-Drummond behaved like a two-year-old,’ she exclaimed, ‘and you too. And then you have to carry out this crazy plan on the night Uncle Simeon was drowned!’
‘We didn’t know he was going to be drowned,’ I said weakly.
‘Well, you should have known. And what did you precious pair do with the swag? Of course it must be returned at once.’
Not a word about the cauldron, which was just as much the commune’s property as the rest.
‘It’s up at the den.’
‘Well, we must go down and get it.’
We drove down to the Forest, which gave her time to recover her – for those days – usual frivolity. She saw the major’s professional management of window-glass and his exit by the drainpipe as pure comedy, and said that in future the commune should be more careful of its guests and not admit burglars and dissolute snakes in the grass. When we arrived at the den, which she had seen only at night and in the presence of the major, she examined it all with the disparaging interest of a young wife inspecting her husband’s bachelor flat and after bouncing provocatively on my former bed of twigs drove me away on the grounds that it was prickly.
The major’s bag containing the trinkets was buried under the iron plate which had been my roof. I dug it up and handed it over.
‘We can’t just walk into Broom Lodge with it,’ she said.
‘That had occurred to me.’
‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’
‘Leave it to Nodens. His speciality is returning lost property.’
‘I wish you’d stop talking about Nodens as if you believed in him.’
‘I do – half.’
‘Well put up a prayer – half.’
To amuse her, I did, wondering with too personal and academic humour how I should address him. I didn’t know any old Welsh, and Nodens certainly didn’t know Anglo-Saxon since the invaders never paid any attention to him. So I tried him with Latin.
‘Deus piscium siderisque, Nodens immutabile, adesto propitius’ – followed by my very reasonable request for a good idea.
Now I swear that it was at the very moment when I was thinking of Nodens on his hill top commanding the river from the horseshoe bend to – to what? – that I was inspired. If the river ended anywhere and became the sea, it was at the Shoots. The underwater gorge at the time of Nodens the God must have been much as it is now: a deep, narrow, navigable channel. But far earlier, in the blossoming years between the retreat of the ice and the return of the sea, the Severn, still a river of fresh water, poured in rapids or perhaps a fast silver stream through the Shoots and on through the forests which are now the shoals of the Bristol Channel. Why had I not thought of that? Bright water, and the shadows of the gorge.
‘And what did Nodens say?’ she asked.
‘That we should bung the bag in some bushes as if the burglar had dropped it and let the colonists find it.’
‘I could have told you that without bothering Nodens.’
It really only occurred to me afterwards that Nodens had answered a quite different question, always assuming that the incorporeal communicates through the imagination: the sole medium we can offer.
At the nearest village I asked Elsa to telephone Denzil to meet us at the sapling stump. I did not wish to visit Broom Lodge or to let my voice be heard, to ensure the anonymity of the mysterious being responsible for the disasters at Wigpool. Even a glimpse of the way I walked or held my head might remind one of the druidicals of the back view he had seen.
The major was at the rendezvous when we arrived. I could see by his cheerful appearance that the guards officer was for the time being in total control of the visionary. I asked how the boring from within was going.
‘No need to bore, old boy. Damn glad to see me, they were! They miss Simeon. Nobody to give orders. Can’t run committees because they all agree with each other. All equal, you see. Too happy to argue. Outsider – that’s where I come in. Don’t have to be equal. Just occurred to them that half the stuff they make in workshops is unsaleable. Training for reincarnation all very well, but got to eat in this life. I’ve suggested that saddlery would be an improvement on sail-making.’
‘Reincarnation backwards, Denzil?’
‘I have already told you that backwards is as likely as forwards and perfectly compatible with the faith of a Christian,’ he pronounced with dignity.
‘And the six?’
‘Very quiet. I told you they would be. Their gods have let them down. The commune’s come round to seeing them as a nuisance. Took it for granted when Simeon was alive that they had the secrets of the universe. Not so sure now.’
‘And am I holy just to that lot or everybody?’ Elsa asked.
‘That lot. Priestess of the Grail. All they have left to hang on to.’
‘Not me! I’ve had enough as abbess.’
‘It shouldn’t bother you, girl. They’ll keep their mouths shut and just give you a nod in passing as they did to your uncle.’
‘And stare at me. No!’
‘Think of the rest of them, then! There you were, chief clerk in the orderly room filling up the government forms. All at your fingertips!’
Seeing that her devotion to the commune made her hesitate, I told the major that it was out of the question. I needed her. After that she could decide for herself.
Only she and no other person could be allowed to accompany me in what I was proposing for myself. I had given agitated weeks of my life to solving the problem of the gold, and it had become an obsession. I had to have a yes or no. Nodens’ inspiration might end in a triumph for underwater archaeology or a dowry for Elsa or another body coming up on the tide to Sharpness Docks. That was why I said that later she could decide for herself. The commune could fill a very empty space.
I could see that she thought me somewhat cold-blooded to suggest that she might return to wasting herself in the service of Broom Lodge. She dismissed the subject at once and came to the point of our visit.
‘Here’s your bag, Denzil! Where will you leave it to be found?’
‘Mustn’t let the druidicals find it. That would start them up again like the chap who found his watch where Piers put it. Let me see! Burglar goes round house in his car. No reason why he should drop it and run. But he might hide it, intending to come back for it later. We need a new pit for the garbage.’
‘We do,’ Elsa agreed. ‘I’ve been at them for months to dig it out.’
‘Good! House Committee will vote on it. Just organised. Got it in my pocket. Dig a new dump and, lo and behold, there’s the bag at a depth of two feet. Ah, yes! And three or four lengths of wire sticking out from it so that if the burglar misses the exact place first time he’s bound to hit a wire.’
‘Have you done much burglary, major?’ Elsa asked with pretended innoce
nce.
‘First offence. Sentenced to community service. Can always take it up again if required. Where are you two off to now?’
‘With the permission of the regatta committee we are going to inspect the boat at Bullo and see what state it’s in,’ I said.
But before that I had to take a long look at the Shoots and the English Stones which I had never seen. If we hurried we could get there by road at the bottom of the tide, just as Marrin had done. Had done? That revealed the impatience of my mood. Might just possibly have done would have been a more reasonable thought.
Marrin’s motive in trying to drown me because he was afraid I would bring package tours of archaeologists to trespass in his underwater preserves had always seemed inadequate. I had told him of the new interest in riverside caves and shelters where palaeolithic man might have lived before or soon after the ice age, when water levels were far lower than now. He insisted, rightly, that all the sheer banks of the Severn had long since been eaten away to shoals and beaches. I tried to remember whether I had ever mentioned the Shoots. Well, yes, I had. I had said that the only possible site would be the Shoots at the entrance to the Bristol Channel. Since then I had never given that underwater gorge a thought. Of course I hadn’t. I had been thinking of man living on fish and game in natural shelters along the river, and I said he would have been as comfortable as any Canadian Indian. But that primitive hunter, palaeolithic or early neolithic, had not discovered gold and would not be burying chieftains in splendour.
Yet the gorge of hard rock, that deep and narrow channel where the tide could run at ten knots carrying shipping up to and down from the river ports, fitted all requirements. During his salmon days Marrin in his mystic self-confidence might well have tried diving where the fish must pass, but neither nets could be used or weirs built; and then if he had found something other than salmon worth diving for, he could drive down from the barn at Fretherne in an hour, timing his arrival for slack water – diving any other time would be impossible or highly dangerous – and return to Hock Cliff to catch the flood tide which would take him home to Bullo.
The weather was as foul as it could be, the sky grey all over with frequent black clouds driven by a westerly and depositing their rain at the first feel of the land. I was impatient to get away, for there was a full moon and the bottom of the spring tide at the Shoots would be about six p.m. Elsa did not complain. She knew of my obsession with the search, but not exactly what I was looking for. I did not know myself.
We ran down to Chepstow with the Severn Bridge in sight most of the way: an unbelievably thin line looking like a tight rope with toy cars balanced on it. Crossing the bridge we turned south down the left bank to Severn Beach, which I had thought must be a playground for Bristol but in fact was an ugly little nineteenth-century village with a small caravan site, tucked in behind a formidable sea wall and without a sight of the water.
From the top of the sea wall the view was of utter desolation, made still more melancholy by the savage sky. For a mile and a quarter the English Stones extended out into the last of the Severn, forming a flat waste of rock, mud and seaweed indented by scores of ragged, brownish lagoons. The Shoots, separating the English Stones from similar weed-covered rocks on the Welsh side, was barely distinguishable from where we stood as a lighter streak of water. One longed for the tide to turn and cover the obscene nakedness of a seabed which should never have been revealed.
As the rain lashed this sunless, sorrowful Acheron where once had been forest and meadow before the ocean, higher and higher year after year, stripped it down to the bare, black rock, I could not believe that Marrin had ever walked and waded over it to reach the Shoots with time to dive and return. He must have had a boat to take him all or part of the way to the rock face where he plunged in.
Severn Beach had a pub, and we were both in need of something stronger than the all-pervading water. We went in and shook ourselves. Nobody was in the bar. The campers and local inhabitants must have been waiting for the rain to stop. The landlord, too, seemed to be feeling that he was as isolated as any lighthouse keeper at this shabby frontier of the land.
‘Beats me why they come here!’ he complained. ‘No beach. Nothing to do. Can’t get a view of anything except the wall. Go up it and you’ll get blown off as likely as not. Go down t’other side and up to your ankles in mud.’
That gave me an outside chance. In such a place Marrin must have been noticed.
‘My brother used to come down here sometimes,’ I said. ‘He’s in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and was making a count of conger eel or something. You may remember him. A tall man with a grey Morris car.’
‘Saw him once or twice, I did, but he didn’t come in here. Used to turn up towards dusk near the bottom of the tide and row out along the side of the Stones.’
‘He always was a chap for taking risks.’
‘Oh, it’s safe enough under the shelter of the rocks. But you wouldn’t want to be out there when they’re covered and there’s a wind like today.’
‘Where did he hire his boat?’
‘None round here. Bought it up-river somewhere, and kept it in the pill up at New Passage.’
We drove a mile up the empty road to New Passage, where formerly there was a ferry to the Welsh shore and a pier built out over part of the Stones. The road ended at a gate leading to true Severn country of river meadow and a low sea wall. Without arousing any curiosity, Marrin could have left his car there like any other tourist out for a riverside walk or a view stretching from the Black Mountains to the Cotswolds. Beyond the remains of the pier was the mouth of a small pill with a rowing boat, high and dry, moored by a long chain. He could never have reached it at half tide, but did not want to. At or near low water it was easy enough to get at it over a beach of shale and mud.
Right! That was all I needed to know except what I should find where the far edge of the English Stones dropped sheer into the Shoots. We would chug down-river from Bullo on the tide and take our time returning on the flood. That was impossible for Marrin if he wanted to do the journey out and back on the same night, keeping his movements and his cargo secret.
Next morning we went to inspect Marrin’s dinghy which had been returned to its moorings at Bullo Pill. As it had been picked up in the open sea after spinning away from any soft bank which it touched, the hull was in good condition. Engine and propeller needed some routine maintenance but they started at the second pull. The sun was out, and the west wind had died away to a gentle breeze giving a helpful popple on the water which would show me the course of the channel if in doubt.
There was no reason why we should not make our first attempt on the Shoots that evening, so I filled up the tank and carried on board suit, aqualung, mask and life jacket. Remembering too vividly the night of Marrin’s death, I had to suppress a feeling of repugnance as we left the pill on the same course with the ghost of myself following in the wake.
Swooping under Hock Cliff, round the Noose and over to the right bank we ran down ten miles to Lydney Harbour and had lunch. I explained to Elsa more or less what I intended to do. She was a little concerned for me – since that savage sea desert of Stones was too pressing a memory – but I pointed out untruthfully that I was as experienced as her uncle, and anything he could do I could do better. Personally, I was more alarmed by the startling speed of the ebb tide as those low red banks swept past. Severn shoals were mercifully soft, but if I made a mistake we might have to spend the night on one.
It was too late to get out of Lydney into the fairway across the top of Lydney Sand, so I took the channel between the shore and the Shepherdine Sands, where in my opinion the Roman galleys rowed up to their basin, and thanked the lord that the dinghy drew only about eighteen inches. I ran aground once with the Guscar Rocks in sight, but was off again without incident, while Elsa needlessly held her breath, out into the main shipping channel and under Severn Bridge. We were now aiming for the Shoots and if I was carried through I could
never get back again before the flood, so I hugged the messy left bank, which would have given a Severn pilot fits, and very cautiously nosed my way along the English Stones until I found a miniature harbour about the size of a bus. It may well have been there that Marrin anchored his rowing boat while he walked out to the Shoots.
I had often wondered why he found it advisable to cross from Bullo to Hock Cliff and then drive the rest of the way down-river, instead of taking the road through Chepstow to the Welsh bank and making a crossing of a mere mile to the English Stones. Now I understood it. The Welsh coast was too close. Although he dived, so far as I know, only when slack water fell in the hours of darkness, he risked being seen starting out, returning, mooring. Somebody was sure to be sufficiently curious to follow him and find out what the hell he was doing at the edge of the Shoots. However, if he rowed out from New Passage, utterly deserted, he would be lost against the background of the Stones, sure of the secrecy of his movements and – more important still – of his return with a cargo in the bottom of the boat.
I scrambled out to the west end of the English Stones, and there below me was the last of the ebb sliding as smoothly as a conveyor belt and a lot faster down the deep channel of the Shoots, not more than five hundred yards wide between the Stones and Gruggy Island. Then I went back to the boat to change and out again to a smooth shelf with a clean-cut edge to it. The cliff looked like the gorge wall that it was, and I sat there with the water some eight feet below me until the level had dropped another inch or two and all was dead calm. New Passage and Severn Beach were too far away for me to be clearly seen, and I hoped that from the Welsh coast I would appear only a foolhardy caravanner in a life jacket mucking about on the Stones.
I had told Elsa that I should not be more than twenty minutes underwater and would give her a wave when I was about to dive. When she waved back I plunged in. The silt, no longer carried by the current, was sinking with me like a sparse flurry of yellow snow. Visibility was very poor, but better over the clean rock bottom close under the cliff. I passed a sloping ledge halfway down, which could have been a beach, and a much wider one nearer the bottom worn by the ice. The face of the rock was cut by vertical fissures and crevices much like the many inlets on the surface of the stones. I worked southwards until I came across a promising cave, which might well have been inhabited in the Stone Age, and explored it at length, my interest now being purely and enthusiastically archaeological without a thought of Marrin and his gold.
Summon the Bright Water Page 16
