A Shadow on the Wall

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  “Such as?”

  “I believe he disregards more than religion, Richard. There are some who say he considers himself above common morality, that he holds all ethical and moral systems to be mere conveniences. Surely you know this?”

  I shook my head. Atherton’s private opinions had never been a consideration of mine.

  “I have never spoken with him about such matters. My dealings with him have been . . . more academic in nature. I find him a pleasant enough man.”

  “I only ask you to be careful, Richard. You have a reputation to protect. And, if I may dare say so, you will very shortly have the reputations of a wife and child as well. Take care with Atherton. Break with him if you can. If not, be sure your dealings with him remain, as you say, academic.”

  We parted after that, and I returned to college, revolving in my mind how Atherton had offended Charles and his set. There was no question of my breaking with him. The promise I had made to his mother still had force over me, more than ever since the night before.

  Simone and her father visited me the next day in my rooms, where I had just finished a tutorial. The wedding was fast approaching, and we still had preparations to make. My skip, Bott, brought tea, and as we sat in front of the fire eating buttered muffins, we could hear the muffled voices of the college choir, as they practised in the chapel nearby.

  When we had eaten, I showed René some books I had mentioned during my stay in France. There was one particularly heavy volume which I had acquired earlier that year from Mr Quaritch, and this I had to transfer to the table. We spent a little time leafing through the text, René entranced to have seen at last a series of engravings of which he had until then only heard the reputation.

  As I closed the book and made to lift it from the table, René noticed a map that I had spread out there some hours earlier. This was a plan of Thornham Abbey, drawn by Bradwell in the course of his excavations. I had been going through it in order to familiarise myself with the layout of the site, preparatory to making a visit there in the next few days. To peruse the plan was to make vivid once more the details of the anonymous account I had read. Here were the infirmaries, one for the canons, one for the lay brothers, here the abbot’s lodging, where William had entertained Sir Hugh de Warenne and his wife, here was the abbey church, the choir, the altar at the east end before which William had deposited his relics and performed his ritual of magnus clamor, invoking God knows what forces in a vain attempt to save his people from the plague. Or had it been to save himself and his noble guests alone?

  René has a fondness for maps and plans. He will often pore over one for hours, extracting from it all he needs to know about a place. Bradwell’s delightful plan, so minutely executed and so lovingly adorned with sketches of the ruins, drew his attention at once. It had been inadvertent of me, I should have preferred to say nothing about Thornham.

  “Such a beautiful plan, Richard. So full of detail.” He glanced at the title in the right-hand corner. “Yes, of course, I have heard of Thornham Abbey. A great Benedictine establishment. A daughter-house of Fleury, through Abingdon, am I not right? Simon of Malmesbury wrote his Anecdota there, yes?”

  I nodded glumly. I had no wish to excite his further interest.

  “You have been there recently?”

  I shook my head. “I was thinking of going in the new year, or perhaps the spring.”

  “But surely it is not far from here. I would so much like to visit the place. All these colleges of yours are very well, but I wish to see some ruins, I wish to breathe some of your fine country air. I would like very much to visit Thornham Abbey. And I am sure my dear Simone would love to go there too. We shall make a picnic.”

  Before I could protest, Simone was beside me, urging me to agree.

  “A day in the country will be wonderful,” she said. “Papa can visit his ancient monuments, my mother can bake tarts with your sister for us to bring, Bertrand can play in the fields with Herbert and Alice, and you and I can have a long walk and talk about what we will do when we are married.”

  I could not refuse her. How could I have looked into those eyes, so full of love and passion, and refused? She enchanted me, and what she wished, I performed. Good God, I feel it tearing at me even as I write, the regret that I have lived with since, the remorse that has eaten away all the years between. I should have known that evil knows no boundaries, and that it has no pity.

  “Yes,” I whispered, and I caressed her face as I did so, “we shall all go to Thornham Abbey.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The morning of the picnic was vibrant with autumn sunshine. There was a nip in the air, and a promise of colder weather to follow, but the whole world that morning seemed fresh and energising, and we set out in the best of spirits: Simone, her parents, Bertrand, Agnes, Herbert, Alice and myself. Charles absented himself, pleading a light cold; I suspected him of malingering, for I knew he did not feel it entirely proper to go on outings on a Sunday. We left early, and were at Ely by ten, where we hired an open carriage from a man called Sudley.

  I put on a brave face, and managed to convince the others that I could think of nothing more delightful than a trip to Thornham Abbey. I had done my best to dismiss the fears that had first arisen when the idea of the outing was put forward. Danger lay, not in Thornham, but at Thornham St Stephen. That was where William de Lindesey’s remains lay buried, that was where he had been released from his long imprisonment. Yet I could not wholly cast aside the thought that it had been at the abbey, not the church, that he had first invoked the evil that had in time engulfed him.

  But that day, that slightly chilly day at the end of autumn, no one but I had any thought of evil. The children were delirious at the thought of eating in the open air, the adults enamoured with the place or the weather or each other. On this, our first day away from the constraints of formal society, I truly think Simone and I became lovers for the first time. There is great irony in that, as I think back, and yet a certain logic too, quite inexorable, as though the conjunction of love and evil had been travelling towards us for a long time.

  The minutes that Simone and I snatched for ourselves apart from the others were spent for each other wholly, without reserve. We walked hand in hand through Thornham Wood, among shadows, and at the same moment paused, and kissed, and did not separate for a very long time. And then we heard the children’s voices coming in the distance, and the spell was broken. As we left the woods, all we desired was to be married without delay.

  René had insisted on bringing Bradwell’s plan with him, and, while the women and children busied themselves in preparations for lunch, he pressed me to accompany him on a tour of the site.

  Though much overgrown by grass, weeds, and ivy, Thornham Abbey is still quite well preserved. Parts of the west front and almost the entire presbytery remain standing, the chapter house gate is virtually intact, there are five cloister arches still in place, and parts of other walls. It is surprisingly easy, with the help of a good plan, to form a coherent impression of the whole establishment as it had been on the eve of its dissolution.

  As we passed from ruin to ruin, tracing the lines of one building after another, my earlier mood of elation gave way to one of introspection. At one point, as we stood in what had been the church’s east end, René identified the spot where the altar had once stood. A flat rectangular stone still lay there, on which the altar must have rested.

  I stood there, looking back westwards along the chancel, tracing with my eye the stones that marked the choir, imagining it in darkness, as it had been on the night of the clamor, and almost, if I closed my eyes, I could hear the voices of the monks chanting their prayers in plainsong, and the silence following, and the voice of Abbot William, those soft, arrogant tones that I had heard less than a year before.

  “Are you feeling all right, Richard?”

  René was beside me, a look of concern on his face. He had seen me totter and almost fall. I took his arm to steady myself.

>   “Yes, yes,” I said, “I’m fine. I just felt a little dizzy, that’s all.”

  “It’s time for lunch. You will be dizzy if you do not eat. Let’s go and see if the food is ready.”

  We had our picnic in the area marked by Bradwell as the refectory. There were Scotch eggs and cheese and pâté (brought from France), quails’ eggs, slices of ham and chicken, little game pies from Sewell the butcher, and cake. Mme Seillière had baked fresh bread the night before, light French loaves quite unlike our stodgy local fare, and René had presented us with three bottles of wine, that he had brought for just such an occasion. The children had pop, and ate more cake than anything.

  I scarcely ate, though I did my best to conceal the fact. Simone noticed, and expressed concern that I might be ill. I made light of it, saying I was too much keyed up about the coming wedding to have a proper appetite. She believed me, and apologised for eating as heartily as ever.

  After lunch, Simone asked to be taken round the abbey. Agnes watched the children, who had returned to play, while René and Mme Seillière took a ramble beside the little stream that bisected the site. We set off hand in hand, Simone posing questions, I explaining as best I could the significance of the different parts of the ruin.

  To most people, ruins are merely romantic or picturesque. But for those of us who visit them with an informed eye, they can be reinhabited and made to live again. And that, I believe, was my undoing, for the more vividly I conjured up for Simone the uses to which the various parts of the abbey had been put, the clearer they became in my own mind’s eye.

  At one point, we entered the long space that had been the lay infirmary. I was reminded of the scenes that had taken place here during the Black Death, and I began to describe some of this to Simone, in the hope that it would bring the place alive for her. I seemed to have succeeded, for when I finished she was very quiet for a while, as though moved by my account of the unendurable sufferings so many had undergone.

  Dark clouds had come up from the east, threatening rain. We sat together on a stump of wall, all curiosity quenched. I thought I might hear, if I listened very hard, the groans of the dying, or the gentle voices of those who ministered to them. And other voices, perhaps, whispering among the stones like memories.

  Simone turned to me. Her face had grown pale, or was it just the faltering of the light?

  “I thought at first this was a good place,” she said. “Quiet, inhabited by the spirits of holy men. Now, I’m not so sure. Something is wrong here, isn’t it, Richard? Something is not right.”

  I said nothing. I looked about me, at the ivy, dark against the grey stone, at the moss, growing across old paving stones and clumped on pillars, at the woods beyond all this, full of shadows, the branches of the trees shedding their leaves in anticipation of winter.

  Silently, I put my arm round her shoulders. She shivered involuntarily. It was growing darker, and the breeze was like ice.

  “It’s time to go,” I said. “We’ll fetch your parents.”

  We stood, my hand still in hers, helping her. Beneath our feet, the grass was damp and cold. From the woods where we had been earlier, a clamour of rooks started, black against the deeper blackness of the sky. Simone shivered.

  “Someone’s watching us,” she said.

  I looked round, but there was no one. The ruins were empty.

  “I can feel it,” she said, shivering again. A breeze took her hair and lifted it across her startled face. There were too many shadows here, I thought. Too many shadows, too many eyes.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  I kept her hand in mine until we were far away from Thornham, and the high octagon of Ely Cathedral had come in sight.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Simone and I were married six days later, on a day of trembling, rose madder light. As we had planned, the ceremony was unpretentious, and the festivities that followed plain. My brother came down from Edinburgh (he is older than I, and was agog to see at first hand the woman who had ensnared me after so many years of dogged bachelorhood), together with a couple of essential aunts and uncles from the shires, the sort who dangle substantial inheritances as bait for impoverished dons such as myself.

  A few university friends were also invited, but Matthew Atherton was not among them. I could not have borne the sight of him that day.

  As I entered the church, I had the oddest sensation that a scrap of rag or a sheet of dark paper had attached itself to my foot and could not be shaken free. And then, as I started to bend in order to disencumber myself of it, I saw that it had been merely a shadow lying athwart the church door. Moments later, I forgot it entirely as I came to the altar and turned to see Simone arriving on her father’s arm, her head bound with fresh autumn flowers, and her unveiled face as I had always known it would be.

  Our honeymoon lasted a week. We went to the Lakes, to a cottage owned by James Spalding, my best man. He is the Max Brandt Professor of German, and his “rustic cottage” turned out to be a most romantic chalet in the Swiss style, hard by the shores of Ullswater. Its steep roofs and large windows do not seem at all out of place there.

  There was steady rain for three days, then, on the fourth morning, we awoke to see sunshine streaming across the hills and sparkling on the water, transforming our grey world into paradise.

  There were plenty of places for us to walk, hills to climb, sights to see, but we were more than content to remain before the fire in our cottage, with nothing to occupy us but one another. We would talk for hours, almost breathlessly at times. In spite of our talks during those long rambles in the Pyrenées, we still knew next to nothing about each other. It astonished me to find how little a thing my life seemed beside Simone’s, for all that I had lived almost twice as long and, as I had thought, richly.

  The fact is, I had lived no life at all till then. I had gone from public school to university, from graduation to a college fellowship, and, in time, to a professorship. My friends were dons like myself, bibliophiles, librarians, palaeographers—the chartered accountants of the mind. Most of them were unmarried, as was still common in the university then. My haunts were those of the bachelor, my interests almost entirely antiquarian. Almost all my knowledge of the world had come from books.

  At the age of twenty-six, Simone had been married, had given birth to a child, and had been once widowed. It worried me that, having married someone so much older than herself, she might face widowhood again in not many years, and a long life alone.

  “Nonsense,” she laughed. “You’ll live till you’re ninety. Till one hundred! There won’t seem such a gap between us then. Who knows? None of us can tell what may happen. I might die before you . . .”

  I cut her short, pressing sudden fingers against her lips.

  “Don’t,” I whispered. “You’re young, and I couldn’t bear to live without you.”

  Her face grew serious.

  “You would learn to live alone again,” she said. “I had to learn, and I had never been alone before. Marcellin was twenty-seven when he died. I did not think to lose him. I thought we would live for ever, and never grow old.”

  She had spoken little of her husband before that, and I had never pressed her to do so. He had been a veterinary surgeon, not long graduated from the school at Lyons. A dog belonging to a neighbour had developed rabies, and Marcellin, trying to rescue its puppies, had been bitten. He had died a few weeks later in terrible agony. Simone had stayed with him to the end. Other than that, she would not speak of his death.

  “He was a kind man,” she said. “He would never willingly cause an animal pain, unless to cure it. The farmers would have him operate without ether, but he always refused, even if he had to bear the expense himself. The beasts knew he cared for them. They were often quiet when he appeared, even the wildest of them.”

  “Was he good-looking?”

  I had no image in my mind of my predecessor. Perhaps Simone had a photograph somewhere, perhaps she took it out to look at sometimes; b
ut she had not shown it to me.

  “Yes,” she said, “very handsome. And his body was lean and hard. He was a good husband to me, and a good lover. Why should you care?”

  I stroked her hair. I wondered if she was mocking me.

  “I do care,” I said. “I’m jealous of your Marcellin. Of his good looks, of his lean body.”

  “You have no reason to be jealous. I loved him when he was alive. Now he is dead, and God has sent you to me, and I love you. It is not the same. I would not want it to be the same. It is the difference in you that makes me happy. I love you now, not Marcellin.”

  “You believe God sent me to you?”

  She nodded, very simple in her faith.

  “I know you don’t believe,” she said. “But you will see. God will show you.”

  “And this God of yours—did He cause Marcellin to die?”

  It was a careless question, and I regretted it the moment it had left my mouth. Simone looked at me wide-eyed. She seemed like a child to me, an old child who knows much beyond her years.

  “God causes no one to die. An infection kills us, or an accident, or old age.”

  “Then God is not necessary at all?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “That is why He is necessary. Does it not frighten you to live alone in a world where anything may happen? Where a rock falls and crushes you to death? Or a plague wipes out your entire village and leaves you without wife or child or neighbour? God will not stop those things happening, if they are in His will. But we can pray to Him, and if He wills He will protect us from them.”

  I did not answer. It was not that I did not have replies to all of these explanations, but rather that I had no answer for Simone. She was not a colleague with whom I might fence over the dinner table, but the woman I loved; and at that moment I understood that I could not love her without also loving her belief, however antipathetical it was to my own.