Arcadia by Iain Pears
‘Do you say now that it must have been an illusion? That perhaps you fell asleep and dreamed it? Are you prepared to admit that you made it all up?’
‘No,’ Jay said stoutly. ‘No. I’m not. She was there. As solid as you are.’
‘But a little thinner, I hope?’
‘Oh, yes, much.’ Jay had done it again.
The Storyteller looked at the ceiling and recited quietly, ‘“It smiled once more, a radiant, celestial smile that brought the warmth back to his body. It raised its hands in what Jay took to be a gesture of peace, then took a step back and was gone.” Would that be a reasonable account?’
Jay closed his eyes to avoid meeting the man’s gaze. ‘How do you know that?’
‘How indeed? A good question, although I am sure you were told to ask none. Obedience and silence are not your strongest characteristics. But what are we to do with you now, eh?’
‘You said I wouldn’t be punished. You promised.’
‘Did I?’ He stood up, walked to the tent entrance and summoned the soldier guarding it. ‘This boy must stay here tonight. I have to discuss matters with his family. Make sure he does not leave this tent. Oh – and could you get him some food? I imagine he is hungry.’
Jay got up, numbed and shaken. He had been lied to. He had trusted the Storyteller – trusted the sound of his voice – and had been betrayed.
‘Jay.’
He turned round. The Storyteller was standing over him, but was not frightening now. ‘Why did you interrupt me?’
‘I … I just wanted to know the answer. I had to know.’
‘You asked how something could be ice and desert at the same time?’
Jay nodded.
‘It is a good question. Do you want a correct answer or a truthful one? The two are not always the same.’
‘I want a truthful one.’
‘Then I will tell you. I do not know.’
Jay stared at him, puzzled.
‘There are many questions in this life, and few answers. Would you like to help me find some?’
*
The next morning, before dawn, Jay – who had slept on the ground, wrapped in a thick blanket given to him by the soldier – was roughly awoken by the toe of a boot.
‘Up. We’re leaving. So keep quiet.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Never you mind.’
‘What about my mother? My family?’
‘You will not see them again. Not for many years.’
6
After he put the final full stop to his writing that evening, Lytten laid down his pen and leaned back in his chair. This he did with great ceremony; not for him a hastily scribbled note, or the vulgarities of a ballpoint pen. He used an ancient Parker with a gold nib which had belonged to his grandfather, with a peculiar purple-brown ink that he mixed himself. His handwriting was florid, almost ostentatious, the down strokes broad, the letters elegant. Each piece of paper was carefully blotted before he turned the page. In neat stacks on the leather-topped desk – his father’s, once – were his notebooks, jottings of thought and information stretching back to his youth. In them, Anterwold had formed in fragments, and now he was drawing those together into a world. He had sent Jay to Ossenfud, and brought in village life, the importance of the Story.
As he considered the visitation scene he had written a few days previously, he realised what he had done. He had taken a scene from Lewis and inverted it – presented it from the point of view of the person who sees the vision, not of the person mistaken for one. He had also disposed of Lewis’s annoying tendency to make everything so terribly suburban.
Lytten believed he had a somewhat better approach. Anyone encountering the supernatural would be terrified, aghast, awestruck. Bernadette of Lourdes reacted like that, as indeed did most people who were predisposed to believe in things they had never actually seen for themselves, be they gods or flying saucers.
The trouble was, of course, that Lewis operated in a simple world where, oddly, the supernatural was banished except for that bloody bore of a lion of his, perhaps the most humourless creation in all literature. It was all so unsatisfactory. If a rat started talking, (despite grossly inadequate vocal arrangements and brain pan which did not allow for anything other than squeaks) his characters did not seem even briefly surprised. If a beaver offered you tea, your only reaction was to specify how many lumps of sugar you wanted. Lewis tried to invent an entire world, and created only a middle-class English suburb with a few swords.
However, if Lytten had just written about an apparition to show how an ordinary person would react if suddenly confronted with a mere fairy, he had to admit he had constructed a problem for himself. What was he going to do with it now? Writing something down because it popped into your head was one thing, but he suspected it would have to come out again later. Unless he could make it into a general point about religion and its place in societies of all sorts. It could stay until he made up his mind, but he was certain of one thing. No fairies in his story. Not real ones, anyway.
The darkness of an English autumn was falling; summer had put up a reasonable struggle this year, but was now surrendering to the inevitable. Outside there was the chill of night already tinged with the more serious cold of winter; it was the time of day and year when all good people pull the curtains shut and block out the world until morning comes again. A moment of comfort and tea, and of little sponge cakes which were his evening treat on a Saturday, made for him especially by Mrs Morris, who had for some reason taken on the task a few years ago.
In truth, he did not care for the damp fingers of sponge with their thin layer of strawberry jam in the middle. They made Mrs Morris happy, though, and she would be hurt if he did not eat them. So he would sip his tea in the battered armchair by the fire, and only occasionally give way to temptation and hide the cakes under the settee until she had gone home and he could safely throw them away.
He was mildly surprised by what he had written so far; it certainly had not been his intention to stray into mystical meanderings, at least not so early on. He had put in a vision, and that smacked of religion. While he knew he would have to grapple with beliefs at some stage he didn’t want it taking over a major part of his narrative.
He realised where it had come from. Rosie had asked – with a strange intensity, as though it was important – about apparitions, and the girl’s question had made him reflect on the question, especially as he had already jotted down a passage about a vision to establish the idea of the scholars as authority figures. All societies held supernatural beliefs, but the nature of the apparitions told you a great deal about the people who saw them. A mechanical society feared mechanical things, a spiritual society feared spiritual things. The beliefs of Anterwold would have to be sculpted carefully.
Rosie, bless her, was still – just – in that innocent state which found room in her imagination for ghosts and fairies. It wouldn’t last long, no doubt. Soon she would be worrying about her clothes and boyfriends. Indeed, there were alarming signs of that already.
He liked the girl, who had such great spirit and such drab parents. Rosie had introduced them when they met on the street once. Her mother was a silly, fussy woman; her father dull and conventional. How on earth they had produced a girl like her was quite beyond him. He could only assume there had been some mix-up in the hospital where she was born, and they had come home with the wrong infant. They all look pretty much the same at that age, so he understood. A mistake could easily have been made.
The Wilsons lived in the next street, across one of those invisible but powerful divides which criss-cross most English towns. Lytten owned a shabby Victorian house which had a small front garden in a street with trees lining the pavement. Rosie’s family was in a shabby Victorian house with neither. One street was the preserve of academics, lawyers and men of business; the other was inhabited by shopkeepers and bank clerks. Neither would ever dream of crossing over into the other’s territory to live.
Every now and then a group of boys would pass Lytten’s house on their way to the parks to play football and, on one occasion, Rosie’s utterly uninteresting elder brother had kicked a ball into his garden. He had been too afraid to come himself and Rosie had been sent to get it back. Lytten handed it over gravely and they had talked for some time about the weather, purely for the pleasure in making the boys wait.
They greeted each other in the street a few days later and talked again; she saw Professor Jenkins stretched out by an open window – a rare concession on his part to fresh air – and stroked him. He warned her that the cat could get nasty, but Jenkins had stood up and become almost flirtatious. Gradually she took to dropping in and, bit by bit, they became as good friends as a fifteen-year-old girl and a fifty-year-old man with little in common can become. Rosie took charge of Jenkins periodically, and Lytten slipped her a little money by way of thanks. He knew she got no pocket money.
He had given his apparition her coat and face. She was a pretty girl, and her face could be that of a fairy, had it not been for the ridiculous way she had cut her hair. Dreadful coat, though. Red plastic and shiny. Adolescent fashion.
*
Lytten’s speciality was Sir Philip Sidney, favourite of Queen Elizabeth, courtier, scholar, poet and man of action. Indeed, he died fighting the Spanish in 1586. A romantic figure; dashing, handsome, well connected, even if his abilities were never as great as he imagined. He desired a fine role in the government but Elizabeth, wise old bird that she was, kept him at arm’s length. The great queen was highly suspicious of extravagance from anyone but herself.
He compensated for this by writing (or at least starting – he never quite finished anything) the greatest romance in the English language. Almost no one has even heard of it now, which is a pity, because if modern sensibilities are suspended – if you do not care about plot, action, events, morality, structure or pace, if you are not bothered by absurd coincidence or unlikely motivations, if irrelevant digressions of immense length do not weary you – then his Arcadia has many fine qualities. His characters do not do much, it must be admitted; the only event of any real note in the entire book is a seduction, but Sidney cut this out in a later rewriting for fear of being considered vulgar.
What is left is a rudimentary plot of such absurdity it is best ignored – aristocrats dressed up as peasants when they are not disguising themselves as women, falling in love with other peasants who are also aristocrats in disguise for reasons which really don’t matter too much. Many of Shakespeare’s plots are similar, if a little shorter.
Besides, for Sidney the plot is only a vehicle for talk. Rather than doing anything, the characters talk in language which is so beautiful that it is difficult to resist. The words create an imaginary landscape of perfection, a soft dream of warm evenings with chuckling streams and dappled sunlight playing through the leaves of a forest.
Death and threat are there, but only to highlight the perfection of the present. Others have created a similar effect – the scene in Le Grand Meaulnes, where Meaulnes wanders into a Watteauesque party and goes in a daze around an elegant estate, full of beautiful women in silk and men in Pierrot costume. The Venice Carnevale, when all reality is suspended and dreams take over the entire city. All these images and impressions had lodged in Lytten’s youthful mind, a hidden refuge from the reality of a grey industrial land, full of strife and surrounded by the darkening clouds of another war.
Lytten never allowed his imaginings to overwhelm reality. Sidney was a man he studied; Meaulnes a character in a book; Venice a city he visited. Still, over the years, his recollections and studies slowly reorganised themselves in his mind to the point where the land of Anterwold began to take shape, particularly the domain of Willdon, which was the central point from which the whole story emerged, just as Sidney’s world emerged from his sister’s possessions as Countess of Pembroke.
7
Until the soldier – the same one who had shown him kindness – pulled back the covering and gestured to him, Jay travelled in near darkness. Not a single person had so much as said a word to him. Competing emotions had beset him throughout the journey. Fear, of course. Boredom. Resentment. Finally, a burning, desperate curiosity. Just on the other side of the canvas were wonders such as he had never seen before. Forests, woods, houses, mountains – who knew what was there to be looked at? He tried to pull up a piece of the covering so he could see out, but it was too thick and strong. He dreamed of a daring escape, but it was pointless even to try.
Then he emerged into the fading light of an early evening, with a fresh wind in contrast to the smelly, sweltering heat of the wagon, which he had endured in glum silence.
‘Come and sit by me, and keep your mouth shut,’ the soldier said. Jay hurried to obey in case he changed his mind, and squeezed himself down besides the man’s impressive bulk. He looked around and gasped. Not in astonishment or wonder, but in surprise. There was nothing much to see that was very different from his home.
‘Where are we?’ he began.
The soldier shook his head. ‘I said shut up. It means be quiet. Keep your mouth closed. Say nothing. Silence. Do you understand?’
Jay nodded.
‘I will talk. You will not. Agreed?’
Jay nodded again.
‘That’s good. Because there is not much time. We will arrive in an hour or so. Are you frightened?’
Jay opened his mouth to speak, saw the look on the soldier’s face, then nodded for a third time.
‘Do you know what is going to happen to you?’
He shook his head.
‘Thought not. It seems a shame to be scared for no reason. So I’ll tell you what I’ve heard. Okay?’
Another nod.
The soldier grunted. ‘You see? You can do it when you try. Right then. You are going to Ossenfud to be a student.’
Jay looked at him curiously.
‘You don’t even know what that is? Very well. A student is someone who learns. What you learn depends on your teacher, but it takes years and years, and the best become Storytellers.’
Jay could no longer contain himself. ‘A Storyteller! Me?’
‘I said the best. Storytellers need years of discipline and immense knowledge and intelligence. They must commit everything to memory and be able to summon it all as required. They are the custodians of the past and the shapers of the future. Does that sound like you?’
Jay shook his head.
‘Precisely. You may become a keeper of accounts, or something like that. Lower, but still important. That’s more like it. The thing is, you were chosen. By that Storyteller himself. Henary, his name is. That’s very unusual.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s not how it’s done, usually. As the Visitors and Storytellers go around the country, they keep an eye open for people. Young, trainable. Generally they are recommended. Someone exceptionally smart. They’ll be noticed by a mayor or a chief. They’ll be questioned, tested. Then chosen. That’s not the way it was with you. Something you must have said or done – and don’t ask me what, because I would have just given you a good thrashing and sent you back to your mother – must have persuaded Henary that you were just such a kid.’
‘But I can’t do anything. I know a bit about blacksmithing.’
‘You will be taught. Don’t think it will be fun. Long hours, hard work, sitting at a desk all day every day. You’ll wish you were back in the fields. Most people couldn’t stand it. I certainly couldn’t. You can have the power and the glory if you have to become a wizened, half-blind creature with a bent back to get it. Not for me.’
‘Who are you? I’m sorry, but I really don’t know much.’
‘Just a soldier. I come from Willdon, about three days’ march from here. Every settlement sends soldiers to act as guards to the scholars, for a while. I’ll be done soon, and then I’ll go back to
‘I doubt it.’
‘I doubt you’ll answer.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you don’t. You people.’
You people. Jay found it confusing. Until three days ago, someone like the soldier sitting beside him would have been impossibly grand and powerful. Someone Jay would naturally have addressed as ‘sir’, with a bow. Yet here he was, talking almost as though they were equals. Already he could feel an even greater change; but what it meant his young mind could not begin to grasp.
‘I’ll answer you. What’s your name?’
‘Callan. Son of Perel.’
‘Callan Perelson, then. When we meet, whoever I become, you will be my friend, and I will answer your questions.’
Callan looked touched by this naivety. ‘Thank you. You will forgive me if I say I don’t believe you.’
‘No,’ said Jay a little sadly. ‘No, I won’t forgive you.’
*
Jay had never seen a town before, and the city of Ossenfud, where the scholars lived, was fairly large. About six thousand souls lived there most of the year, although this number fluctuated according to the seasons. It was settled on a river, and was approached by four roads, one coming from each of the points of the compass. Unusually, outlying buildings were scattered along these roads, up to a mile away from the city proper.
So many houses, so many people, the clattering of the cart over roads paved with stones, everything made Jay tremble with excitement. Even more alarming was when they stopped outside a vast building of unimaginable magnificence.
‘Here we are, then,’ Callan said cheerfully. ‘Home, sweet home. East College, where Scholar Henary is, and where you will be until either you are finished or they throw you out.’