‘That your dinghy what’s gone up river?’ the boatman asked.
The last thing we wanted was for him to chug up-river ahead of us, overtake the dinghy and find out what I had been diving for. How right Marrin had been to confine his explorations to the hours of darkness!
‘Don’t you bother!’ I said cheerfully. ‘We’ll catch her up in Slime Road.’
I think he was impressed that I knew the name of the main channel on the right bank.
‘If she don’t go up Oldbury and come to grief on the rocks. I wouldn’t bet on it. And what the goodness were ‘ee doing on the Stones with all that underwater rubber on ‘ee?’
‘Fishing,’ I answered and was searching for the least improbable lie when Elsa piped up in a sweet little-girl voice:
‘I wanted a swim and there wasn’t anywhere else.’
I took my cue and added apologetically, ‘You know what women are.’
‘Serve you right! Where you from?’
‘Chepstow. Came down on the tide.’
‘And that there boat?’
He couldn’t possibly have seen me take it out from New Passage.
‘Towing it, in case the girl wanted to go and bask on a sandbank.’
‘What she want to do that for?’
‘You see, I do love to sunbathe with nothing on,’ Elsa said.
The boatman must have been a good Welsh methodist, for he sheered off at once. If we were bound for hell anyway, it didn’t make much difference when we drowned.
‘Good night!’ Elsa called. ‘And thank you for wanting to help us.’
The fast flood had now swept us under Severn Bridge and into Slime Road, so it had probably done the same for the dinghy. She’d be pretty safe there, bumping her way up from soft bank to soft bank. The tide was not yet high enough for shipping to be proceeding up-channel. That was lucky. If the dinghy were picked up by some enterprising mariner and natural curiosity led him to see what was in the bag, we were not likely to hear any more of her – especially as my clothes were in the bottom indicating that the owner might have gone for a swim which was his last.
Twice we nosed into shore to examine possible dinghies; one turned out to be a stranded log and the other a drowned cow. We left it to the tide to do what it wished with us until we came to the tip of the Shepherdine Sands and had to make up our minds between the main channel and the Lydney channel. The boat, caught by a swirl, twisted round uncertainly three times until I back-watered and directed us, stern foremost, into the Lydney channel. Elsa, watching the wide and promising expanse of water the other side of the sands, protested. I replied that the dinghy might have been caught by a similar whirlpool and that we should put our trust in Nodens and the Roman Manual for pilots.
Neither let us down. The dinghy was aground, heeling over but still dry, just behind the Guscar Rocks, her ghostly helmsman trying to make the vanished port of Woolaston.
There was nothing we could do but wait alongside her for the tide to rise, and ensure that she remained on an even keel until she was on the shale beach where Marrin and I had come ashore from the rocks. It was after midnight and there was not a sound but the suckings and splashings of the river. The dim line of the railway embankment cut us off from the world.
Meanwhile, we discussed what should be done with the twenty or so pounds of gold which we had and the much larger quantity which remained in the cave.
‘What do you think happened to them?’ she asked.
‘All we know is that the tribes of the marshes did not know what gold was and had no use for it. My guess is that the adventurers never returned to the cave or the ship, and that the pet of the voyage died there.’
‘Perhaps they were taken away and worshipped like the gods which Uncle Simeon was training the colonists to be.’
‘Or made the common mistake of the half-civilised in taking a dance of welcome for a war dance and opening fire with whatever weapons they had.’
We moored the boats – safely this time – to a bush overhanging the bank, and slept a little in each other’s arms on the short, sheep-nibbled grass of a Severn lawn.
‘I could stay here for ever,’ she said.
An express from South Wales hurtled past on the embankment, the roar and the lights reminding us that we were not on a private planet of green earth and salt water orbiting the Milky Way overhead, but in a demanding modernity from which relief could only be obtained by labour on the land and by pretences, like those of Broom Lodge, that the world of machines did not or in the future would not exist.
First light was showing in the east and a cock broke the silence.
‘Where do we go now?’
There at least I could answer her with certainty.
‘Down on the ebb. We can’t do anything else. We might try New Passage. Your uncle knew what he was doing, and if we pick up his mooring we can get off at half tide.’
‘You’re going to try again?’
‘We have two more days when the Stones will be well above water and it will be late dusk. After that we might have to wait a fortnight or a month to get it right.’
True enough. But I was impatient to find more evidence, if there was any, rather than more ingots.
So New Passage it was. Dead tired and hungry, we took an early bus to Bristol where I bought an old army valise to carry the aqualung and the rest. That was enough to persuade a hotel to accept two very shabby travellers whose only other possession was a bag containing enough wealth to buy the place.
Bathed, clean and breakfasted some energy returned, and we wandered through the town searching antique shops in the hope of finding such a cylinder as I had in mind. Old leather buckets there were, but too wide. Umbrella stands of china, but they might break. A wooden roller of God knows what use, but the hollow centre was not big enough. Eventually I bought the brass case of – I think – a six-inch naval shell which had been polished up and had an ashtray to match, fitted to the top. I got the reluctant proprietor, proud of his ingenuity, to remove the ashtray and to bore three equidistant holes in the top to which the end of the rope could be attached. After that, fifty feet of rope was easy enough to find in a seaport, and we returned with our purchases to the curious glances of a hotel porter who must have thought them odd for a pair of lovers.
Next day we went by train to Gloucester and by bus to Bullo, where we recovered my car and returned to Bristol. In the late afternoon we drove out to New Passage, took both boats off Marrin’s mooring and anchored off the rippling dark water which covered the Stones to wait for the bottom of the tide in the late dusk. This time there was no risk of being watched from the Welsh coast, but while picnicking in the dinghy we were hailed three times to warn us of the invisible rocks.
They emerged from the sea like a herd of slow monsters, quickly uniting to become the flat and weedy desert of the English Stones. We made our usual inlet, then walked out to the blowhole where we lowered the shell case on the end of its rope. It was checked only once, easily clearing the obstruction, and we could feel it hit the bottom at a depth of forty feet.
As soon as there was no perceptible current in the Shoots I went in. No adventures or dangers of any sort this time. Our cylinder was resting on the slope which led up to the funnel. I loaded it with the remaining ingots and watched it disappear as Elsa pulled it up. That done, I searched the terrace for any other evidence of man, sweeping the silt gently and methodically away with my eyes and my torch so close that I could miss nothing. I found only two flint arrowheads of early neolithic type: one close under the back wall, the other more or less in line and two yards out. That only proved that one or both parties had discovered the bow. I should have expected the immigrants to have it, but not necessarily the fishers and hunters along Severn banks. Apart from the gold, there was no sign that the cave had ever sheltered man.
I came up before the turn of the tide. Elsa was staring at the pile of ingots she had emptied out of the shell case, their colour still faintly showing gold in the st
arlight. I knew that my first haul had weighed about twenty pounds. This lot was double as much. So we had sixty pounds in all.
‘Broom Lodge must have some of it,’ she murmured, ‘since that was what Uncle Simeon wanted and so do I. But I’m damned if they get the lot! Have you got everything you have been risking your life for?’
‘I’ve got everything I could want, my darling.’
‘I didn’t mean a tall bit of nonsense with fair hair. Are you going to add a chapter to history and tell them seamen got here with gold soon after the melting of the ice?’
I said that I had not had time to think about it.
‘Piers, who knows where our world is going? We too might have to sail off to the unknown with this as cargo.’
‘And sell it for half a deer and some sausages. Or shall we start up the first bank and credit ourselves with £600 a troy ounce?’
‘Is that what it’s worth?’
‘Roughly £432,000.’
I had intended to take both boats up to Bullo with the tide. One reason was that the dinghy belonged to the commune and Dunwiddy would want to know what had happened to it; another reason was that the rowing boat could not remain much longer at New Passage without arousing curiosity. But when it came to the point, I funked the voyage to Bullo. With a five-knot tide under me and as much again from the engine it could easily be done in four hours by any fisherman who knew the river, but I disliked the thought of navigating the channel in the dark and I was not at all sure whether I should reach the horseshoe bend before or after the bore. So I decided to put into Sharpness where Elsa would meet me with the car and the gold, and leave Bullo for another day.
That run to Sharpness with the boat in tow was, I think, the most melancholy hour of my life. Yet so black a mood should have been impossible when I loved and was loved in return and had no financial worries. I foresaw the betrayal which I mentioned at the outset of this report. A professional betrayal. I was bound in honour to put the ingots on show and publish the story of the find. But if I did so, my reputation as a serious scholar would be ruined. Despondency was of course affected by the high, black banks on both sides of the channel, cutting out all sight of the land and filling me with apprehension as if I were a shade alone in Charon’s boat taking the ferry over to hell.
Science and folk memories agree that a great flood was fact, but the very reasonable assumption that some community progressing towards urban civilisation might have been drowned is considered fantasy. Why? After all, London and New York within a few millennia will with absolute certainty be under either ice or the sea. Fantasy would be the accusation against me. An accusation powered by jealousy perhaps, but unanswerable.
What was I to publish? What proof had I? I remember saying that bones were not the only memorial, but bones and artefacts, decently packed in the earth, at least give dates. I had found only two arrowheads and had no evidence at all to prove that they were contemporary with the ingots, though I believe they were. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the seamen took to the country fully armed. After the massacre, two of the mortally wounded struggled back to the landing place and died side by side. The arrowheads in their bodies are all that remained. Laughable!
All laughable. I could hear the learned voices. In the patterns of the chop of the tide I could read the reviews. ‘Mere conjecture.’ ‘I am sorry that a man like Colet should have fallen for Atlantis.’ ‘All mixed up with a bunch of latter-day prophets he was.’ ‘Yes, I’ve been shown the ingots but I’m not impressed. Peruvian probably and from a wreck.’ ‘The glyptodont? Well, I’m told it’s possible that the carapace could be preserved under the silt, while the bones had of course disappeared. Pickled in salts, if I understood it. But what proof have we that Colet didn’t find it among some curios in a shop?’ ‘I hear he had the impudence to go to the British Museum with a gold bowl which was made yesterday.’
I decided that I could not publish, that I must leave my proofs – which are not proofs – to some later time when other discoveries may incline archaeologists to accept my story.
I swear that my motives were not hypocritical. I am not in the least afraid of giving the details of how I was led to the Shoots; it would be easy to leave out the irrelevancies of the den and of the deaths of Marrin and Evans. And I did not decide to keep my mouth shut because my wife would be stinking rich if I did. I kept it shut because I had nothing to add to history, and belief in my adventurers from the ocean would be damaged rather than confirmed.
Elsa was at Sharpness and ran down the water steps to greet my arrival.
‘You met a bit of spray,’ she said as she kissed me.
Running with the tide, there was no spray. It seems that I can become overwrought when forced to choose, so much alone, between two alternatives equally detestable.
We had to wait till dawn for the dinghy to enter the canal behind a little freighter with a sweet-smelling cargo of timber. Then we set off for London, placed our wealth in a metal deed box which had belonged to my grandfather and deposited it to join the cauldron in the bank, devoid of any idea what to do with either.
After a day’s rest in the flat with my delicious girl, so level-headed in all but love, we drove down to Sharpness again to take the boats up to the Bullo mooring on the morning tide. While we were sitting in the sun on that lawn, exclaiming like a pair of children at the lovely product of nothing but silt and sheep, she asked, ‘Do you think we could go and see what’s happened at Broom Lodge?’
‘You, but not me. They mustn’t see any connection between you and me and Wigpool.’
‘Suppose the major has been chucked out?’
‘If he has been, take care that you are never alone and get out quick!’
I didn’t like it, but I knew that the commune was still a part of her life. When we first fell in love she had protested at being considered ‘maternal’. But in fact her feeling towards Broom Lodge was inevitably maternal. She could not be expected to keep away.
‘It will be all right. I’m still St Elsa,’ she said.
‘But St Elsa has the cauldron.’
‘That’s why I ought to show myself. And I have a good excuse – I need my clothes and things.’
I stopped close to the colony, and she walked the rest of the way as if she had just come down from Gloucester by bus. Then I concealed the car under the oaks – I was getting quite good at that – and took up my old post in the foxgloves where I could watch the back of the house.
The major had not been chucked out. She led him round the west wing where I could see him. To my amazement he had adopted the tonsure of the druidicals. Was he following the practice of the Celtic church and had Arthur gone pagan? No doubt he had a good reason and no doubt I should not be able to understand it.
She took my advice and did not stay long. When she returned, with a suitcase in each hand, she told me that she had not seen any of the six but had been received with touching affection by all the ordinary members of the commune whom she had met. Denzil had warned her that affairs were critical but that he would not give up. ‘Give up what?’ she asked, and only received the typical reply that he was not worthy. She tried to tell him that we knew the origin of her uncle’s gold and had the lot. He was not interested. She had the impression that he was busy with some spiritual awakening of the colonists and that finance was of no importance. Nothing was yet safe, he told her, and the pagans must be delivered from temptation, so she had better clear off. He would come to the den in the afternoon. Choice of the den seemed to indicate that the druidicals were wandering through the bracken as irresponsibly as frightened pigs and might interrupt us at the old rendezvous of the sapling stump.
After a quick lunch we went up to the den. It was much as I had left it. Again I was threatened by the melancholy of disappointment and had to shake it off. I had spent so long there, hot on the track of the mysterious cauldron. It had indeed been a Grail for me, to be revealed through danger, discomfort and the reverence of the seeker. P
erhaps that is the essential mystery of any Grail. It exists but, when you know it exists, it exists no longer.
The major turned up, climbing the slope in the heat of the afternoon with the determination of the wandering friar he called himself. In the depths of his eyes, somewhat fish-like in his club, shining in the forest, I could see that he was carrying the shield of Arthur into battle.
‘I need a miracle, old boy,’ he said.
I answered that I had run through several miracles in the last few days and hadn’t one left.
‘Do they still believe I pinched the ornaments?’ Elsa asked.
‘Doesn’t matter. Executor chap called Dunwiddy has been after me. I told him how we’d found the bag digging out a new rubbish pit and were short of cash. Right, he says, we’ll sell ’em, major. He knew the name of the firm which bought from Simeon, so we took the bag up to town. Glad to see us, they were. Weighed. Assayed. Paid by cheque to late Mr Marrin’s executors. No questions asked. Broom Lodge products well known. Clever devil, Simeon was.’
It was my failure to see how the commune made a profit which had first set me off. Elsa was not so astonished. She knew her uncle did sell his wares, but no more than that. Whenever Broom Lodge needed money, it had been transformed from Marrin’s personal account which she never saw.
‘No reason why you should. Laundry. Catering. Sales of meat and vegetables. Shoulder to cry on. But uncle’s private account not your business and not the commune’s.’
‘You mean that all his work in gold had a market?’ Elsa asked.
I didn’t see why she should look at me with such sudden intensity, but the major was prompt to understand.
‘Give us half. Instalments as and when. Is it a deal?’
‘Done! But there isn’t a goldsmith among the lot.’
‘Will be, if I have my way. What do you think I’ve gone bald for, Piers?’
‘God knows.’
‘He does. You’re right. Solidarity, that’s why. I’m showing sympathy with the opposition. Beats them! They’re as curious as cats. Look here! All those decent chaps at Broom Lodge haven’t any religion. A pity, but there it is! I’d call ’em well-meaning agnostics. All that reincarnation stuff just makes them feel good. The only truly pious are the druidicals and myself. Their religion is sincere but their rites are degrading. How do you think the missionaries converted the Saxons? Started with a pagan priest of course. Converted him, and the other fellows followed.’
Summon the Bright Water Page 18
