What We Can Know - 20

I passed a part of that snowy night writing an apologetic note to Drummond. I lied about the cause of my delay and told him I was mounting an expedition and promised that he would be the first to know what I found. I intended to call the library later that morning to make sure he hadn’t set off to see for himself.

I got up at dawn, made coffee, and spread out a map on the floor. The gigantic waves of 2042 had smashed into the west-facing coast of Britain and also rolled inland by way of the Severn Estuary to form an inland sea that eventually included the Vale of Oxford. After many years of heavy rain and rising sea levels, it surged and forced its way further north and west into the valleys of the southern Cotswold Hills to form a series of islands and numerous islets. Most of those were abandoned a long time ago – too cut off, too small and steep to farm, and there was an acute shortage of labour.

For the fifth time, I validated the map reference online. There it was, the dairy, Vivien’s study. I called up an old map, Ordnance Survey, 1:25,000 and experienced familiar wonderment at those beautiful miles of open countryside, the spidery trails of footpaths, some of them a thousand years old, magnificent copses once intended as cover for foxes, and hillsides too steep, even for grazing. Half asleep at my desk, I sent myself across that landscape, mile after mile, across well-tended fields and past farmhouses of local limestone, built in the vernacular style, and down hollow ways, where mossy walls of the same stone and gnarled tree roots enclosed the path.

On the 1:1,250 Official Land Registry site plan, the Barn was shown after its conversion, which was when various small outhouses were demolished. The boundaries of the ten-acre plot did not change after Blundy made his purchase. I knew from Vivien’s journals that across a wide lawn was a wooden gate in a hawthorn hedge that gave on to a path that descended through pastures to cross the stream by a footbridge. I had walked that way many times in my thoughts, always with Vivien at my side. We lingered on the footbridge, hoping to catch sight of small brown trout shooting through the broken shade.

I called up a current map, barely twenty years old, based on Nigerian satellite imagery, which showed the site of the Barn to be on one of the smaller islands, steep-sided, tree-covered, roughly three miles by two. I could not see an obvious landing point. I would need a boat with an experienced captain who could thread his way through the islands and avoid the shallows. I guessed such sailors were few and not cheap. Difficult. To approach Rose, ease matters between us and ask favours while Kevin Howard was in her life would be further humiliation. I had a higher goal, but I cared for my self-respect. I lacked the courage to abase myself. I knew no one else with spare money. The Blundy Society might contribute but then my secret would be out.

I dozed off and woke at eleven, forty-five minutes before my first seminar of the day. In a hurry, I tried the Bodleian but could not get a line. I was due to teach Mabel Fisk’s The Hammer , an early novella about first love. A masterpiece. The setting was Glasgow. An eighteen-year-old lad, son of an Italian waiter, works in a quick-change tyre franchise. A lass his age comes by one day with a flat tyre on her open-top sports car, a recent birthday present. They fall in love. She’s from a wealthy bohemian family – her mother is an artist, the father is a well-known jazz pianist who takes an immediate dislike to his daughter’s boyfriend. He’s too low-class for her. On the evening of a big concert, the young man vengefully removes a wooden piece – the hammer – from the jazz player’s piano. The E above middle C won’t play and he has to improvise around it. The novel ends sadly, with the young couple going their separate ways, but not before a hilarious and moving speech from the boy’s father, the waiter. Many of Fisk’s later themes of love, revenge, class and integrity are condensed within this simple coming-of-age tale, one of the loveliest literary achievements of the late twenty-first century. Only a master could evoke such laughter and tears. Only Shakespeare could have conjured such a finale as the antic figure of the Glaswegian waiter with his Scots-Italian accent. After a lyrical remonstration, he bestows forgiveness on the small cast of characters. So warm and wise and funny.

I was only a few minutes late for the session. In the two weeks allotted, almost half the kids had done some of the reading, well above the norm, though none had managed the full ninety-six pages. My students found it near impossible to read a whole book and form a judgement, even an adverse one. I did most of the talking, pushing myself to coax responses from minds that were flattened and timorous, indifferent to the entire enterprise of literature. But I was inured to their ways and not cast down.

Afterwards, I walked to the refectory in mellow state after my immersion in the prose of the mighty Fisk. I had read some passages to my students, wanting them to hear what I heard and rouse them into a passion for her work. From the looks of two or three, it might have succeeded. I was watching out for Rose. Hoping and dreading. She usually went across at this time for lunch. I had no plan beyond seeing her and letting something happen. I was almost at the building’s entrance when she stepped out. She was close behind a loud group, but she was not part of it. I assumed what I hoped was an open expression, more inquisitive than friendly. Hers, I thought, was wry. She stepped back and held the door open for me. I went past her and turned.

She said, ‘Eating?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why don’t you invite me?’

‘Come and eat.’

‘I’ll watch you.’

The faculty dining room was too small for the size of the teaching staff and there was always a din. We found a table, smeared and littered with the remains of abandoned lunches. We cleared up and sat. She asked me how I was. I said I was fine. We had to raise our voices.

‘How’s Kevin?’

‘I told you.’

‘What?’

‘When we last spoke. It’s over.’

I shook my head. I knew this wasn’t right.

‘You wouldn’t listen. Anyway. September. It was a two-night thing.’

‘I know of at least three.’

She was irritated. I had to remember my purpose.

‘Whatever. Two, three. I kicked him out.’

I wished I’d been more familiar with the old TV soap operas. I would have been ready with the right lines. But what I did next might have been well within the tradition. Or I surpassed it. I shrugged, took out Drummond’s letter and handed it across. As she read, I watched her face closely. I had to keep stern. Unforgiving, but ready to fold.

She looked up. ‘This is amazing.’

‘It’s interesting.’

‘Are you mad? Tom, this is stupendous. Of course. It’s just the sort of daft thing Vivien would do. Bury it and leave it to fate. The librarian is right. It has to be the poem.’

I shrugged again. ‘It might be.’

A nearby table was erupting at a joke. Rose was having to shout. ‘Tom, what’s wrong with you? Look at the date. Two months ago! Some child genius and her uncle have handed it to you on a plate. You can’t just sit on this. You’ve got to go!’

I looked at her and smiled and held her gaze. I too was a genius. I said, ‘Come with me.’

That afternoon, between seminars, I got through at last to the Bodleian. At first, the news I had dreaded, then relief. Mr Drummond had been away from work for several weeks. He had been ill again and was making a slow recovery. He was expected back within the month. Hardly decent to rejoice in another’s ill health, but I couldn’t help myself. The treasure was safe. I sent a second message to wish him a good recovery. After classes, I went to Rose’s apartment. Or was it ours? The route back to reunion was not smooth, for that evening we had another row in which I rose to operatic heights about trust and marriage and how she had torn ours apart. We made up by eight, in time for dinner. I kept up the pretence that going to the site of the Barn was her idea. I was the laggard who wanted persuading. But we would need a boat with a shallow draught, I told her, and a skilled captain who knew the area. It would be expensive. Was she ready for that? She smiled and reached across the table for my hand. I squeezed hers, but we were not ready for declarations of love. That night, we parted with a chaste but friendly kiss, and I slept across the way in my cell.

We met again in the department the next morning. If her manner was different, I realised within minutes, it was because she was her old self. Her behaviour yesterday – the enthusiasm for my quest, the affection – was an element of her version of contrition. Now, that was behind her. As we settled on a torn sofa in a recess by the herb tea vending machine, she started by warning me that if Vivien had not taken expert advice on preservation, her document would be at best a stain of dried mould. If the material was stored in a wooden box, there would be nothing. Rose set out her conditions. The captain we hired would be paid half before we set out, the rest after bringing us back safely. She had checked the Land Registry. The site belonged to the military. If we were told to leave, we would leave. She warned me against confrontational behaviour. Even the lowest-ranking soldier had powers of arrest. The earliest date we could set off was mid-March when the university closed for the ‘reading break’, treated by students and faculty alike as a holiday. We would still be on winter hours and to extend our digging time we’d need powerful lamps of the kind builders used. Not easy to find. Rose had a friend living near Port Marlborough, an artist, a nature-sculptor, who kept a little sailing boat and had friends down at the harbour. They might know the right captain.

Rose’s proposals were sound and I agreed to them all. To get my way and her funding, I had to let her take over my adventure. A fair deal. She had been the transgressor, now I was the suitor, waiting on her forgiveness while pretending not to. Even that strange reversal did not bother me much. Our expedition was launched. But Rose, working through her list, had saved the most important item until last.

‘How do we find it? There’s no GPS.’

She was right, the system had failed months ago. The old low-orbit satellites were dropping earthwards, burning up in the atmosphere. The handful of people who knew how to replace them were busy on other projects and, as usual, materials were scarce.

‘It’s simple,’ I said. ‘We take bearings on two landmarks and where the lines cross—’

‘Tom, you’ve seen the map. We’ll be in a forest. There are no landmarks.’

I was struggling. I said, ‘OK. We’ll mark the site on the Nigerian map. The captain will know where he’s landed. We can get a compass bearing to walk by. We can pace the distance to Blundy’s barn. My stride is about a metre.’

‘We’ll be on our hands and knees in the undergrowth.’

I had vague notions of a sextant and a chronometer, but I thought they needed stars or the midday sun or the horizon of the open seas.

‘Then I don’t know,’ I said finally. ‘We could speak to someone in Earth Sciences.’

And so our meeting ended. She went off to teach an Aphra Behn seminar, and I went back to my cell to start on a grant proposal for our department’s Auden week. We parted without a kiss.

Preparations for the voyage held us together, and there was not much else between us. But in early December I spent an afternoon in her bed. It was not an explosive embrace of joyous reconciliation, more a cautious or exploratory exchange. We knew each other too well to fail to give immediate pleasure, but there was sadness in that half-hour, I thought. It seemed merely collegiate, even contractual. We were on a job together and the niceties must be observed. Afterwards, as we lay side by side, and as if to compound the sadness, Rose told me how it had ended with Kevin Howard. It was morning. They faced each other over the table in her flat drinking coffee. He had been silent for a minute or two, propping his head on his hand and staring into his cup. Then he made a fateful announcement. He loved her and always would, wanted to live with her, marry her, have children with her.

‘I should have cut him off. Every word was a hook in my skin. He said he imagined three pregnancies close together. He wasn’t asking, he was telling, as if his plans laid some kind of obligation on me. I said as kindly as possible that I didn’t want any of that. He didn’t hear me, and he started over again. Children, marriage, love forever, complete fusion of minds. Finally, I couldn’t take any more. I said, “Kevin, just leave.” He looked baffled. I opened the door and stood by it, waiting, and watched him walk out. How, after a couple of nights, could he feel so entitled? Three times over! I heard him shouting something along the corridor to the lifts. I felt guilty. And I suppose the best cure for guilt is anger.’

I said, ‘He’s just a kid. So, Rose, what the hell were you doing? Trying to get yourself sacked?’

Bad questions. She turned away and, fortunately, did not reply. If she had, the starting bell would have sounded for another row. Later I thought about her story. I couldn’t deny some satisfaction in my rival, my disruptor, dispensing of himself so conveniently. But Rose’s account had softened me, a little, just a little, towards Kevin Howard. A young man, clever, strangely pretty, inexperienced, falls crazily in love. He sees, as in a vision, the bright terminus beyond which his loneliness need not proceed. Rose’s tender arms were around him last night. This is where their lovemaking has brought them, and he knows she’ll understand. He blurts it out, three children so close in age that they and their toys are constant happy playmates. He is the willing prisoner of an ecstatic solipsism. But Rose brings ruin with her alien antipathies and withdraws her love. Banishment! He takes his sorrow along the airless corridor to the lift that will carry him down into an indifferent world. According to John Milton’s Paradise Lost , Adam, expelled by God from Paradise, departed hand in hand with his Eve. Not so Kevin Howard.

Rose’s story felt familiar, clammily close. I was Percy falling for Vivien, then driven from her love by disease. Or Vivien in love with Blundy’s poems, then discovering the man. Or Francis himself, so in love with his fifteen sonnets that he could not judge them. Or Rose, risking our happiness for nothing much. All blended into me, in love with non-existent Vivien. Our myopic little company. How hard to see straight when we felt so much.

In recounting the disappearance of Howard from her life, Rose may have been warning me. I was not to oppress her with demands for children. We had spoken before about having a baby. She was not exactly against it, I was not exactly for it. We were busy. The decision could wait. I was weeks from turning forty-five and now I was more interested. But we did not even have a marriage. Had I forgiven her? Not quite. But I wanted to be with her. Did she want me? I didn’t know, and she didn’t either. It was going to be hard. Nothing could be discussed until we returned from the Barn – and only if we were successful. We were not good at joint failure.

Rose spent Christmas with friends in the Chiltern Hills. I passed it mostly alone, with an occasional evening drink in the company of my neighbour, Cyril Baker. I was content, rereading Fisk’s last novel and looking at maps and making lists of provisions for our journey. In January, Rose’s nature-sculptor friend found us a captain with a shallow-draught boat, but our teaching duties prevented us from meeting and negotiating a fee. We did not know how to judge captains or boats or their value or how long our trip would be. We did not know what would be available when we shopped for equipment on the quayside. No one in Earth Sciences could improve on my idea for locating the Barn.

The reading break began and those who liked books stopped reading. After a smooth passage over the Weald Sea, we arrived mid-morning at Ball Hill Quay. The day was anti-cyclonic, crisp and clear, worth feeling the cold for. At the hiring station there were no electric models available, so we took oak-frame pedal bikes. It was delightful to make the familiar journey side by side, chatting as we rolled along the chalky lanes. There was one hill where I had to dismount and walk up – our age difference was beginning to tell. Rose rode to the top and waited.

‘It’s only approaching death,’ I said when I reached her. She laughed gaily.

The Marlborough quay was as loud and chaotic as I’d ever seen it. We stood near a wood fire where a row of upturned barrels served as tables and we ate freshly baked eel pies. There was a four-man pipe band playing fifty metres away. Too close, too loud. The world seemed crowded. When the Blundys were alive, there were far more people, but Francis and Vivien managed a more spacious existence. It was while we were resting by the barrels that I noticed something different about Rose and realised that I had seen this a couple of times before. It happened as we finished our pies. I caught her staring at me oddly, as if weighing me up for the first time. When our eyes met, she smiled warmly – just as she had before.

‘What’s up?’

She shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just looking.’

She had been told that our boat, Salty , was moored alongside a 150-foot twin-masted barge named Grace . It took a long time to locate this large boat, and when we did, Salty was not there. After another search and some well-intentioned wrong directions from a sailor, we found her, moored on a muddy tributary. It looked to us like an old fishing boat, of the kind we knew from children’s books. There was no sign of the captain. We waited and soon began to feel the cold. We left a note and went shopping and found it easier than we expected, for at one end of the quay was a three-storey chandlery and hardware store. Perhaps the shopping lists of all novice adventurers are too long. Fork, spade, saw, trowel, rope, string, large backpacks, water bottles, sleeping bags, compass, ration packs, an extra map and a tent – all appeared reasonable. We also bought wax, cleats, a mousetrap, a whistle, nails, clothes pegs and twenty other items we would never use. Electrical goods were hard to find and expensive. We compromised with rusty miners’ headlamps. We filled the packs. I took the fork, spade and saw, and we humped our loads back to the boat. On the way I saw a wooden shack advertising spices, coconuts and other rare foods. I left Rose guarding my heap and came out waving a 200-gram bar of dark chocolate for Dolly. We calculated later that it cost me the equivalent of three hours of teaching.

Knowing I was bound to be wrong, I had imagined the kind of person who would be our captain. Tall, angular, brooding. Or large, bearded, jolly. A pipe smoker. I was right. The captain coming towards us was slim, compact and had short dark hair. She introduced herself as Jo Mideksa as she took Rose’s pack and my fork and spade. We followed her on board across a springy gangplank. We dumped our stuff on deck and sat in the cramped space of the wheelhouse while Mideksa went to the galley below to make tea. As it grew dark, we agreed on her rate. She knew the island but had never been on it. The military owned it, but no soldiers had been seen there, as far as she knew. There was once a lively foraging business in bricks and dressed stone for building elsewhere. A man called Hunter had lived in a cabin on the north shore for a few years and then vanished. A long time ago a scientist of some kind had tried to put wolves on the island, but it was not large enough to sustain them. Jo thought that March was a good time of year to walk into the interior. It was light until six and the undergrowth would be sparse. She showed us on the map where she intended to put us ashore. Together we calculated from Dolly’s map reference our destination on the same map and its distance from the landing point. We would need to walk 1,800 metres keeping eight degrees to the west of due north. Jo warned us that holding to a straight line across wooded knolls and gullies would be hard. As we progressed inland, we should improvise waymarks to guide us back to the boat. She intended to moor a couple of hundred metres offshore so she could watch a stretch of coastline and would expect us back within three days. She said there had never been a phone signal in the Cotswold Islands. When she was a teenager working this boat with her father, it was possible to rent walkie-talkies, but she hadn’t seen one in years.

Salty had one electric motor, three back-up batteries and a mainsail. Jo hoped to use the prevailing wind to bring us round to the old course of the Severn Estuary and pick up the incoming tide to waft the boat north-east towards the islands. Once there, we would depend on the motor to thread a looping course to our destination. Our island was not named on any of the maps. Jo thought she would recognise it. She used to fish with her father off its southern tip and sell the catch on the nearest quay, about fourteen miles away. We would need to cast off at 5 a.m. so an early night would be useful, but first she would cook us a meal. While she got busy in the galley, we brought in our stuff, stored some in the wheelhouse, and the rest we carried to the cabin below, squeezing past Jo to get there. We unrolled stowed mattresses and made up three beds on narrow wooden lockers which formed three sides of a rectangle.

Knee to knee, we ate a vegetable stew in the wheelhouse. Jo had not asked our business on an obscure island and we thought we owed her an explanation. At the name of Blundy she smiled and quoted, as so many could, from ‘In the Saddle’. She knew about the lost poem and would have come with us, she said, but she would be worried that her boat would be stolen.

Later, we talked ancestors. Back in the mid-twentieth century, Jo’s family had come to Britain from Ethiopia.

‘First they married in, then they married out, then in, then after the Inundation, out, out, out. Like breathing your last breath!’

My composition, as far as I knew, was Pakistani and Scottish white and various others. Rose gave hers as English white, Malian, Pashtun plus unknowns. When she was three years old, Jo lost her mother, and her father brought her up. He did not like talking about the past so Jo had only the vaguest idea of her own make-up. After Ethiopia, she assumed British white and thought that one of the Caribbean islands was in the mix. We agreed that we were, all three, chapters in the accidents of long-dead strangers’ lives. Then our captain suggested that Rose and I tidy up the galley while she checked on the boat.

Two hours later, I lay in total darkness listening to the steady breathing of the other two. That I was at right angles to my wife, feet to feet, was unhelpfully suggestive of our unresolved problems. Tomorrow’s journey and what we might have forgotten on our jaunt also kept me awake. So did our conversation in the wheelhouse. It reminded me of a book I had read a few months before. It was a sixty-year-old social history of Britain, something of a classic. An entire chapter was devoted to sunbathing. From the 1970s onwards, millions of white British travelled south in summer by cheap flights to spend hours each day spreadeagled by swimming pools and on beaches beneath a ferocious sun. The purpose was to turn white skin brown, which was considered a healthy and attractive look. That this idea coexisted with white racism was, the author suggested, one of the fascinating enigmas of social history. Even when medical science established the cancerous and ageing effects of excess exposure to sunlight, the practice continued well into the twenty-first century. With the tragedies of the Derangement, the Inundation and much else, the population plummeted. As systems broke down, international trade and travel became difficult. Chaos spread and the population continued to decline. Against all demographic predictions, inter-racial marriage increased to the extent that within a mere three or four generations, the descendants of many whites have realised the old sunbathers’ dream. However disastrous our condition, one much-quoted commentator insisted, ‘out of adversity, we are honey, we are golden’. A wider gene pool improved general health, though radiation from the wars pushed in the opposite direction. Completely white people have become a substantial minority. It is shameful that they experience discrimination. Same old story. We are not so sweet or golden after all.

I fell asleep sometime after three. At five the captain was shaking us awake. We were already moving. Acorn coffee was on the stove, eggs were in the pan and Jo wanted help with Salty ’s sail.