For Clementine, Isaac and Buzz,
dear to my heart
Contents
Epigraphs
17 October 1191
1 Last Summer
2 East London
3 Jerusalem, Two Months Later
4 The Horns of Hattin
5 The Levant
6 Late October
7 Back in London
8 Richard Arrives
9 Mr Macdonald
10 Richard and Saladin
11 Finding
12 Mr Macdonald
13 Shipwreck
14 Crack-up
15 Lords
16 Noor
17 Richie
18 Oxford
19 January 1193, Marseilles
20 Port Meadow
21 To the Auvergne
22 Oxford and London
23 Richie
24 Emily
25 Noor
26 SO15
27 Richie
28 Auvergne, April 1193
29 Ella
30 Noor
31 The Devil is Loose
32 Kensington
33 Richie
34 Philip is Humiliated
35 Father Prosper
36 The Death of Richard the Lionheart
37 The Map
38 Richie
39 Heading South
40 Letter from my Aunt Phoebe
41 Letter from my Father
42 Symi
43 Aftermath
44 Six Months Later
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Also available by Justin Cartwright
Fiction:
1. Literature in the form of prose, especially novels, that describes imaginary events and people;
2. something that is invented or untrue;
3. belief or statement which is false, but is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so.
Oxford English Dictionary
If we view ourselves from a great height it is frightening to realise how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end.
W. G. Sebald
17 October 1191
From Richard, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Poitou – to Saladin, Righteousness of the Faith:
I shall not break my word to my brother and my friend. I am to salute you and tell you that the Muslims and the Franks are bleeding to death, the country is utterly ruined and goods and lives have been sacrificed on both sides. The time has come to stop this. The points at issue are Jerusalem, the cross, and the land. Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we would not give up even if there were only one of us left. The land from here to the other side of the Jordan must be consigned to us. The cross, which for you is simply a piece of wood with no value, is for us of enormous importance. If you will return it to us, we shall be able to make peace and rest from this endless labour.
From Saladin, Righteousness of the Faith, to Malik al-Inkitar, Richard, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Poitou:
Jerusalem is as much ours as yours. Indeed it is even more sacred to us than it is to you, for it is the place from which our Prophet made his ascent into heaven and the place where our community will gather on the Day of Judgement. Do not imagine that we can renounce it. The land also was originally ours whereas you are recent arrivals and were able to take it over only as a result of the weakness of the Muslims living there at the time. As for the cross, its possession is a good card in our hand and could not be surrendered except in exchange for something of outstanding benefit to Islam.
1
Last Summer
One afternoon, about six months ago, Emily and I walked down to the Globe Theatre. It was an astonishing day, the sort of day that dispels memories of rain and impenetrable cloud and lip-chapping cold. In winter when the winds blow up from the estuary, it can be bitter here. The view back across the river to St Paul’s, serene and unmoved, the cheerful throngs around the theatre, the busy traffic on the dense river (almost at high tide), the sense of a teeming history – all these things filled me with eager anticipation for Richard III with Mark Rylance as Richard. It felt that day as if we were in a city right at the epicentre of all that mattered, and that there was nowhere on earth I would rather be.
Emily and I were groundlings. From where we were standing, with our elbows on the stage, on the left, in line with one of the marbled pillars, we could see back stage as the actors, in full pleated skirts, stockings, hats (some of these hats looked like flowerpots) and those ballooning and rather comic trunk hose, were preparing to go on. They had an intensity about them; they were looking silently into the distance. They may have been trying to remember their lines, or they may have been looking to find their cores. This core is important for actors, a sort of mythical state of mind. Their task, I thought, was difficult and maybe impossible – to make us believe that a play written in about 1591 concerning events which took place a hundred years earlier could grasp us and move us. (Plays arouse questions in me about the nature of reality.)
I now see that I was already beginning to be irritated by Emily, although I didn’t acknowledge it. Also, I was still constantly surprised by her sexual avidity. She was staring intently at the actors, lending them support, as if she had a special relationship with them, not necessarily shared by me. I thought that she had a tendency to look at the world to see what aspects of it she could appropriate for her collection of useful spiritual truths. I notice that women have this habit – certainly the women I know do. It is often accompanied by a kind of manifesto, sometimes shared earnestly with friends in public. The friends, too, have their own gripes, but they nod sympathetically until their turn comes. These manifestos seem to contain goals and objectives, many of which, I think secretly, are unfeasible. Maybe even meaningless.
In the gallery above the stage I could see only one member of the orchestra, a young woman wearing a plant-pot hat and black-rimmed glasses; she was playing a kind of oboe I would have guessed. But I could also see the slides of three brass instruments – possibly sackbuts – but not their operators. Suddenly, unseen, these sackbuts blared out a fanfare. Their imperious harshness suggested a state occasion. Instead, Mark Rylance shambled onto the stage. He was not grossly disfigured, although one leg trailed. His hair was straggly.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York . . .
I felt a deep and pleasurable tremor run through me: in all of Shakespeare there are no more potent phrases.
But I – that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty,
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time . . .
Rylance played this great speech as broad comedy. He involved us, the audience. We laughed uneasily, in the knowledge of what was to come: we knew that this vicious bitter little man, with stringy hair, was a psychopath. Emily was in tears before Richard’s innocent brother, Clarence, entered, under guard on his way to the Tower. As he was led away, Richard said:
Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so;
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven . . .
It was funny, but chilling.
The shoes of the players, en route for the Tower, passed inches from my face. These shoes were square-toed, like old-fashioned children’s shoes. I was enjoying this ground-up vantage point.
Three blissful hours went by in a flas
h. The sense that time has flown unnoticed provides an inkling of what eternity might be.
Richard III was the last Plantagenet king, killed in 1485 on Bosworth Field in battle against rebels and he was also the last English king to be killed in battle. His helmet was struck with such force that it was driven right into his skull. Recently his skeleton was found underneath a supermarket car park in Leicester. The skeleton suggested that its owner suffered from curvature of the spine, though nothing so serious that could be described as a hunchback, and the skull had an injury to the head. Now DNA evidence has proved that it is the body of Richard.
Emily and I walked along the turbulent river, hand in hand, heading for a cheap Italian restaurant near Borough Market. We were dying to discuss the play. Our verdicts on plays and books were full of self-importance. I knew that the moment the waiter had taken our order there was going to be a personal skirmish, dressed up as a reasonable conversation.
‘Now, what are you going to eat?’
I sounded a little stilted, even to my ears. For a provincial, there’s always tension when you are ordering in a restaurant; there’s the fear of not pronouncing the Italian or French properly; there’s the fear of spending too much money; there’s the fear that your friends are going to order a second bottle of wine and – God forbid – mineral water in a blue bottle. Maybe I am especially aware of these things because life with my aunt Phoebe on Deeside was always tense; she was terrified she might give offence. She was also poor: she scanned shops to save a few pennies and kept sheaves of special offers cut from the local newspaper. Her nervousness was understandable: she was scared that she could be turned out of the lodge at any time. And a light down was spreading on her face, as a biblical punishment.
I ordered penne arrabiata, and Emily chose spaghetti luganica. She had a glass of white and I had a glass of red.
I wanted to make comparisons with Richard I – I wanted to say what a pity it was that Shakespeare didn’t write a play about him – and I wanted to talk about what Shakespeare was signalling: the end of the unlovable Plantagenets and a new order, which, by God’s will, had ushered in the Tudors. Emily spoke first – her deposition was bound to be a little feminist: she said the male actors playing the women – they were taller than Mark Rylance – were clearly supposed to suggest that the women were being used as a sort of ironic echo of the men, by repeating their words at the end of each sentence.
‘Interesting, but do you really think this is the most important thing about the play?’
‘No, Rich, it probably isn’t. It’s just something that struck me. So sorry to have an opinion; I’ll try to keep them to myself in future.’
‘Em, you know I didn’t mean that. I meant that there are some very big issues, Catholicism, the end of the Plantagenets, the Protestant future . . . all the things that Shakespeare thought about. I just think these are more important. Sorry.’
‘Shakespeare created the English language,’ she said.
‘I agree.’
And I do, in a way.
2
East London
I was named Richard because my father loved Richard I of England, the Lionheart. But I am usually called Richie. My father’s surname – and mine – is Cathar, which he adopted when he was at Oxford in 1963 and often under the influence of drugs. Our family name was previously Carter, way too mundane for my father.
There is a small but distinct group of men that I recognise at a distance, and try to avoid. My father was one of them. They have a kind of frayed-at-the-edges charm and a slightly distracted cheerfulness, as though they are attuned to amusing private frequencies. Their hair is long, even if decimated by hereditary patterns of baldness; their clothes are a little threadbare and ill-matched, so that a Tibetan shari can be worn with an old pinstriped suit; or perhaps a thick pair of corduroys, of a type found only in a few streets near the traditional London clubs, will be paired confidently with a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt.
This morning, on the first leg of a relatively pointless journey on the No. 30 bus and the Underground to buy some sausages, I saw a woman – a grandmother, but still a ditsy blonde – enter my carriage pushing a pram. She had that unmotivated optimism of my father’s generation. She was wearing a short ostrich cape and a yak-wool scarf. The cape had once been – I guessed – an electrifying green, but now, like the Statue of Liberty, it was verdigris. As the air of the train eddied, disturbed by the rushing anxious progress, it caused the cape to spring into a lively but syncopated dance: scores of antique ostrich feathers fluttered onto the floor and into the pram. I could not see the baby within; perhaps it was being smothered by the errant ostrich feathers or maybe it was soothed by their snowfall touch. I wanted to speak to this woman who, I could now see as she bent over the baby, was wearing a Navajo silver belt low on her jeans. The silver discs on the belt bore important Native American messages. I got a glimpse of a puckered, tripe-textured stomach when her cheesecloth shirt opened for a moment. I wanted to know where she was going with her grandchild. Also I wanted to ask her if she knew that the cape was moulting: if she were going as far as Dollis Hill or Clapham Junction, it would be bald on arrival. She smiled at me as she saw me looking her way: women with babies imagine you are interested in their charges. Her teeth were not good, worn down to stubs, but her smile was complicit. She was old enough to be my mother, but she recognised something in me. She was, I thought, like my father, one of those not securely moored to reality. It is his birthday today, and he has been dead for ten years.
Now, back from my sausage outing, I am throwing things onto a bonfire. A clear-out is long overdue. The accumulated stuff contains an implicit reproach. I am multi-tasking, getting rid of rubbish and intending to use the fire to barbecue my sausages when it has subsided. At the moment it is alarmingly excitable. The cleansing fire of purgatory, my father wrote, terrified people in the Middle Ages. He said that purgatory was designed to finish off the last, few, lingering sins – the sort of thing chefs do to a soufflé or a crème brûlée with a little blow torch: a light scorching before presentation. In 1999 Pope John Paul II pronounced: Purgatory does not indicate a place but a condition of existence. As if anyone were listening. What is it with these religious figures that they make absurd statements about sainthood and gay marriage and purgatory and the covering of women? Do they not realise that religion is purely cultural, an explanation and a comfort dating from a world before antibiotics, hospital births and logical positivism?
I am aware that in my loneliness my mind is unruly. It seems to be flying blindly about like a swallow trapped in a building, crashing into windows, unable to make a plan of any sort.
In the toxic, dark, cat-fouled, medieval strip of dank dead clay – once a lawn, still overhung by a few leggy leftover shrubs – the bonfire is casting interesting light and shadow on the derelict Welsh chapel which forms the end of the garden so that it looks incandescent, as though the Holy Fire from the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem has appeared here for a moment. The Orthodox Patriarch, who is the impresario of the Holy Fire’s appearances, is on record as saying that he has never had his beard singed – not once – as the Holy Fire whizzed about the church on its annual outing. This is the sort of convincing detail you want if you are going to believe in a miracle. Although, like many miracles, this one seems a little pointless – fire of unknown origin zigzagging about for a few moments from one Romanesque pillar to another without toasting the Patriarch. What does this mean?
The Welsh chapel, which once gave succour to the immigrant Welsh men and women, mostly occupied in the milk trade, is alive again. Its walls are host to wild dancing as the garden furniture catches fire. The few remaining panes of the chapel’s leaded windows are winking lubriciously. The Welsh dairies closed well within living memory. Fortunately, it happened before progressive people discovered lactose intolerance, which joined gluten, caffeine and cos lettuce intolerance as conditions to be wary of. People speak of their afflictions as if they convey s
ome distinction on them. Something else these Welsh dairy folk did not have to suffer was the slogan Breast is best. The incoming classes in this part of East London have adopted the Madonna Lactans as their patron saint. Formula milk stunts intellectual growth.
I am aware that irrationality is on the march – I am, after all, my father’s son. I know it when I see it.
I am studying the bonfire. The garden furniture went well at first – it was surprising how quickly the patterned seats and the backrests were consumed – the effect was almost explosive – but now the frames are glowing ominously, like something radioactive, and there is a sharp, choking chemical aroma in the air. I throw on a roll of damp carpet that has surreptitiously become wet in the former coalhole. It gives off a dense, dark smoke, like a tanker on fire at sea. I have to acknowledge that I am cursed with a kind of incompetence in regard to the straightforward and practical tasks of life. For instance, when I tried recently to change a tyre on the Honda inherited from my father, the jack inexplicably collapsed, bending the drive axle. I had to pay someone to scrap it. My cooking has often gone wrong: small fires have broken out, which included a rogue blaze in the cooker hood that could easily have rushed through the building; a pan has been welded to a cooker, any number of fishes and meats have been incinerated, and I once hooked my own nose when fly-fishing on the Dee. I was using a dry fly, a Tups Indispensable.
Emily was becoming exasperated: my charming disorganisation had begun to annoy her. She was increasingly inclined to ask questions with a rhetorical thrust: ‘Why are your underpants on the floor of the sitting room?’ The only possible answer was that I had dropped them there in the course of my morning progress from the thin shower, but of course no marks were awarded for honesty. She has a literary bent (2:1 in comparative literature, Reading University) and described me as becoming more and more like Oblomov. When I had read up on Oblomov I said, ‘At least you think I am amiable.’ (If, like me, you don’t really know anything much about Oblomov, I can tell you now that he is the astonishingly lazy but amiable Russian owner of a country mansion in a book by Ivan Goncharov. He fails to leave his bed for the first 150 pages of the novel.)
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