Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.) Read online

  ‘Dean,’ said Bates. ‘I must confess I do not quite . . .’

  But Oldenberg’s attention had been taken by something else. ‘See,’ he cooed, twisting round to look out of the carriage window again. ‘Spitalfields! Fields of Spital! Sputum civitatis! Observe the butchers carrying their carcasses into the city. Ah, might the city not be an organism and each of us but cells in the whole? Do you not agree? But then there are no shadows upon the face of the sun and it casts shadows, whereas the moon existeth in shadow yet can still - on a full and moonlit night - and the moon might cast the sundial’s shadows, yet we do not call that a moondial, do we?’ He snorted. ‘Do you not,’ he added, abruptly, ‘see the resemblance between a church steeple and the bayonet upon a soldier’s rifle? Excuse me if my thoughts gallop - and gallop. Does it distress you, my dear sir?’ Before Bates could answer he said: ‘I have been awake all night! I have not slept since yesternight. Not a moment’s sleep!’ His voice seemed to imply pride at this fact, as if it were an accomplishment.

  ‘Not slept?’ said Bates. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too excited. Grand adventure, away, over the hills and far,’ said the Dean, and started bobbing up and down on his seat.

  Bates later discovered that Oldenberg’s high spirits were temporary aberrations in his demeanour, brought on (as the Dean himself admitted, or rather boasted) by a particular variety of snuff of which he was especially fond. He took out his snuffbox and displayed the contents to Bates as they passed into the countryside north of the city. ‘The opening of the Pacific has brought many such goods into our ken,’ he said.

  ‘I have not seen this before,’ said Bates, looking carefully. The ebony box contained a fine white powder, like milled salt, or like flour. He took a dab on the end of his finger and tasted it; it had a sweet quality, and it made the end of his tongue tingle. ‘What manner of tobacco is this?’

  The Dean shrugged. ‘Some albino form, I assume. I am no expert on the varieties of the tobacco plant. But I find it more invigorating than my usual snuff.’ He put the snuffbox away, and turned to look out of the carriage-glass at the passing countryside. Already he seemed a little calmer.

  A little later he yawned, settled himself, and fell asleep with his chin tucked into his neck. He slumbered deeply, despite the worst rattles and bumps of the carriages motions, for many hours.

  As they moved away from the city and into the rustic expanse of Hertfordshire, Bates’s spirits rose. His heart leaped up. All his despondency was left behind in the sink of London, the crease at the bottom of the city where the river followed its lowest declivity. Now he was moving ahead, and Bates permitted himself to consider positive possibility - for perhaps his life was about to improve. Might it not?

  Climbing up Highgate Hill, when the French soldiers dismounted and walked to ease the burden for the horses (the two Englishmen were, of course, exempted from such footwork), Bates felt his body relaxing in consonance with his rising spirits. They passed a church whose steeple looked not so much like a bayonet as a blade of bronze grass. The sunlight fair sang in the blue sky. A stream flowed alongside the highway, hemmed into a brick channel here and there, at other places flowing through feathery rims of grass grown long enough to bow down over the water. And here, near the summit of the hill, the stream fell down a short cataract, a culvert of sorts, as their coaches mounted alongside, like salmon. The water was glassy and leaden-coloured except where a protruding rock slit the belly of the flow whitely. Such liveliness in water! When Christ had blessed water, choosing it as the sacramental embodiment of spirit, he had surely blessed all waters - as precisely as aware of this little Highgate stream as of the Oceanus Pacificus and the Mare Tranquillitatis - the thought gave Bates all the physical symptoms of excitement.

  The Dean snored as if he had the east wind in his throat.

  Down the far side the drivers put on the brakes and passage became more jolting. Bates let his thoughts slip forward. Perhaps the successful completion of this adventure would raise his reputation amongst the occupying force. Perhaps he would be given some more dignified role than mere Ami de la France. A counsellor, perhaps; liaison between the benign occupying force and the English - offering guidance on how best to maintain the welfare of the Pacificans. Once the French knew he could be trusted, then he might begin to use his influence for good. He glanced forward to a possible future in which the unpleasantness of the invasion was past, England restored in partnership with the French - two Christian nations in brotherhood together, both equal, portions of the universalis civitas humani generis. And the Pacificans converted, brought into that harmony. The Dean muttered something in his sleep, and the hawk swooped with its customary suddenness inside Bates’s thoughts. What of Oldenberg’s plans to betray the French? What of that? Would Bates become caught up in some sedition - hanged, who knew, from a flagpole? Bates felt his good mood dissipate. He spent long minutes considering ways in which he could distance himself from the Dean - should he not, perhaps, betray the betrayer, inform on him to the French? Or if that would be too despicable, then was there some other way in which - in which—

  The Dean sneezed in his sleep, and this woke him up.

  The procession stopped at an inn for luncheon in the countryside well north of the city. The Dean was silent the whole time. Bates attempted to engage in conversation with him, but he merely grunted in reply and lifted his glass of wine. But Bates’s good spirits returned nonetheless. It seemed futile to fret about what the Dean might or might not do - he, Bates, was master of his own destiny, was he not? After months of stagnation in the city he felt himself now free - away, in motion, moving like Odysseus towards the ever-receding horizon of possibility. He finished his eating, and stepped outside the inn.

  Sunshine filled him.

  There was an enormous oak outside the inn, plunging upwards out of a broad circle of close-mown grass. It took Bates’s fancy and he strolled over towards it. The clear spring light smoothed the sky into a flawless paleness of blue, and came through the leaves of the tree like clear water splashing down, to dapple the lawn beneath with a scattered network of shadow and brightness. The French Colonel (his name was Larroche, Bates recalled) was standing against the trunk of the old tree smoking his pipe.

  ‘And good day to you, Monsieur le Colonel,’ said Bates.

  The Colonel withdrew his pipe from his lips. ‘Good day, Mister Bates,’ he said. ‘I apologise for being brusque with you earlier.’

  ‘No need for apology.’

  The Frenchman nodded, and sipped again at the stem of his pipe.

  ‘The weather is fine today,’ said Bates.

  Larroche looked at Bates with an expression of amused puzzlement.

  ‘Ah,’ said Bates, benignly. ‘But my observation is simply the truth. Is it not? The weather is fine. And look around you, sir,’ Bates added, sweeping the panorama with his arm as he turned. ‘Is it not beautiful? Even yourself, though a foreigner, must accept England to be beautiful.’ The landscape was trim green hills swelling to the horizon, like the cheeks of a giant green face, spotted here and there with the white dabs of grazing sheep. Closer to, a herd of sheep plucked the grass, and rolled their white eyes, and chewed as if chewing were the only thought their heads could hold. Bates watched them, and thought of the many biblical verses about sheep: their placidity; their gentleness; their fundamental connection to the earth. God’s chosen, said the apostles, and Christ himself. Nor was the gospel example ill-chosen, for there was a sort of nobility about the creatures, their unmistakable idiocy notwithstanding. There was something honourable in the notion that sheep might safely graze.

  ‘Beautiful,’ agreed the Frenchman, without passion.

  ‘Those sheep,’ said Bates. Perhaps he had picked up the spirit of garrulity from the Dean. ‘Those sheep. Do you not think it significant that our Lord the Christ chose the sheep as his type of the faithful disciple? I have sometimes wondered whether it does not especially signal a divine fondness for England, the isla
angelica. For England is the great land of sheep, is it not? We have cultivated sheep for a thousand years, and we cultivate more of them than any nation on earth. Our Lord Chancellor sits upon a woolsack, you know, in recognition of the fact.’

  The nearest sheep of the flock raised his head and looked at Bates, as if he knew he was being discussed. The head was white-silhouetted against the sky. The flock, Bates thought vaguely, must be grazing in a valley, or a cut-away of the land, to be able to lift their heads apparently above the level of the horizon in that manner. ‘Those sheep,’ he said again, ‘are the essence of God’s England, I think. A timeless feature of our landscape.’

  ‘Monsieur,’ said the Colonel. ‘Not those sheep.’

  Bates looked again.

  He experienced that trembling sense of consciousness, a purely mental shuddery inner sensation, as the perspective of the scene reorganised and its true proportions reasserted themselves. What he had taken for sheep of ordinary size close to him were in fact sheep of gigantic proportion far in the distance. The realisation made him giddy, in a small way. How could he not have seen it straight away?

  ‘I have always found,’ the Colonel was saying, ‘the mouton from the Brobdingnagian animals too coarse. The . . .’ he paused. ‘How you say? Hairs? No, no. I do not know the word.’ He looked into the bowl of his pipe, as if the word were hidden inside. ‘The, you say, threads? The threads of the meat are too large. Yes?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Bates. ‘The fibres of the meat.’

  ‘Ah, very good,’ said Larroche. ‘The fibres of meat are thick like my little finger; and inside is very very little taste, little savour.’

  ‘It is for the poor,’ said Bates. He was, greatly - disproportionately - unsettled by the fact of his not seeing the gigantic sheep for what they truly were. Now that he watched them, it was impossible to mistake their proportions. One of them moved, its limbs sweeping with bizarre slowness, and digging deep into the clay of the English countryside. The horizon was dotted with similar craters. And what he had taken for grass was, quite obviously, the green bolted-wheat that farmers grew as fodder for the creatures. Some farmers, Bates knew, had tried growing Brobdingnagian grass from British soil, but it drew too much of the goodness from the earth, and rendered fields barren for more than a year afterwards. Besides, the animals grew fatter on a diet of English wheat.

  ‘We must depart,’ the Colonel said, rapping his pipe bowl against the trunk of the oak. As he walked back towards the carriages Bates heard him repeating to himself, ‘fibres of the meat, fibres of the meat’, as if fixing the phrase in his memory.

  All that afternoon, as they trundled further along the Great North Road, the Dean was awake, though surly and withdrawn. Bates watched the slowly processing countryside. Farmhouses and inns moved into view and then paraded, stately and slow, past them. They went through villages, along rudimentary high streets and out the other side again. The sun began its declination. A roseate quality tinted the light.

  Late in the day, after many successive hours of silence, the Dean suddenly spoke. ‘The box they carry in the final carriage, back there,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Dean?’ Bates replied.

  ‘The large box,’ said Oldenberg.

  ‘I believe it to be a Calculation Machine.’

  Oldenberg grunted his agreement. ‘I attempted to examine it before we left.’

  ‘I would imagine you were prevented by the soldiers.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Dean. ‘Oh, I was. But I’ll have my look in there. I will.’ He was silent again.

  That evening they stopped in a village a few miles from Cambridge. Bates was to share a room with the Dean. After dining he requested a candle, and argued for fifteen minutes with the landlord over the item. He was charged a shilling for one tallow candle of poor quality. ‘A shilling? Robbery. I could buy a dozen such candles for the sum in London.’ ‘You an’t in London now, sir,’ said the landlord, a wheezy old man with one eye cataracted the colour of tooth-enamel. ‘Besides, the war puts prices up, you know.’

  ‘The war? There’s no war hereabouts,’ blustered Bates. ‘There’s no war south of Derby. And I have no need for the whole candle. I only wish to read a little before I sleep.’

  ‘Shillin’,’ said the landlord, implacably.

  ‘I’ll give you sixpence,’ said Bates, fumbling in his pocket for change. said the landlord.

  ‘Shillin’,’

  Bates looked at the man. His chops were silvery with stubble. His forehead knobbed and shiny. His one eye, despite its wateriness, fixed Bates with an immovable stare. ‘I’ll have a word with the French Colonel,’ Bates said. ‘The gentleman with whom I am travelling. He will have something to say about your profiteering.’

  The landlord shrugged.

  In the end Bates did not run tattletaling to Larroche. Instead he used his sixpence to buy a glass of hot rum and water, and sat downstairs in the snug trying to read by the firelight. But red light makes the eyes tired if they try close work, and the words soon swam in Bates’s mind. So in the end he simply sat with the book in his lap.

  ‘Reading?’ said the Dean, loudly.

  Bates started.

  The other man came through and sat himself in the chair opposite. ‘No wish to intrude, my friend,’ said Oldenberg, twitching a little. ‘Only I could see that you are reading, and not yet asleep, and I thought I’d come to chat with you. I wanted to apologise for being so taciturn in the carriage, you know. Taciturn as Tacitus, and he’s dead and gone and in a Roman grave.’ He giggled, in his high-pitched way.

  ‘I see that you,’ said Bates, ‘have refreshed yourself with some more of your snuff.’

  ‘Miraculous stuff,’ said Oldenberg, sitting next to him. ‘Miraculous snuff. Stuff. Snuff. Snuff-stuff. Invigorating. Envigorating. Unvigorating. Virile vigour. Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori. What is it you read?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Bates, unaccountably embarrassed at the question. ‘Only - some sermons.’

  ‘How devout you are!’ said the Dean in what sounded almost like a mocking voice.

  ‘Surely,’ said Bates, ‘as Dean of York, you—’

  ‘Oh I know, you’re perfectly right, pff, pff, pff.’ These last three noises were strange ejaculations, beginning with a pout of the lips and an exhalation but ending as a sniffing expulsion of air through the nose, inexpressibly dismissive. ‘Forms must be kept up, forms must be kept up. But gentlemen such as we are may dispense with the pieties, no? What?’ He winked. ‘Prayer and hymns and the eucharist? Necessary flimflam for the Lord’s flock. But we are not sheep, I think. Are we? No!’

  Bates, tired and cross after his experience with the landlord, could not help the petulant tone of voice in which he retorted, over-loud: ‘You call it the eucharist, sir?’

  But Oldenberg merely laughed. ‘Lord’s Supper, if you will sir. Lord’s Supper by all means. Low Church, if you will sir. What do I care? Panem nostrum quotidianum.’

  ‘I am, perhaps, sensitive on the subject, sir. There’s talk,’ said Bates, feeling immediate remorse about his tone and wishing to explain himself. ‘There’s rumours, you understand, sir, that the French will compel the Protestants of England to adopt the Roman faith. Perhaps I am over-sensitive to Romish . . . what shall we say? To Romanish flavours in habits of speech.’

  The Dean made his strange nasal noise again. ‘Pff, pff, I think not. The old rector at my school would call it Breaking the Lord’s Bread, no eucharist for him, no such papistry. Bread, papistry, pastry, fine French pastry. A nice cigar after supping. Food, important, eh? Food - ahh - food. I had the most delicious pigeon breasts in cheese sauce this evening. Delicious. One of the most commendable things about our Christianity is that it places good food, good wine - eating, in short - the heart of religion. Don’t you think it? What? None of your Indian Brahmin ascetics, none of your Mohammedan fasting, no sir. Good eating. Eating is worship for a Christian, sir. No?’

  ‘There were forty days,’
replied Bates, inflecting his words with the gentlest of rebuking tones, ‘and forty nights in which our Lord did otherwise.’

  The Dean, fluttering his hands before his breast, said only: ‘No, no. Medieval theology, sir. Fasting? What, and lashing one’s flesh? Hair-shirts and making your pilgrimage on your bare knees over sharp rocks, no no no. We are more enlightened these days I hope, and we may truly see that Christ himself placed eating and the drinking of good wines - none of your burnt tuppenny vintage, neither - but eating and good wine at the centre of religious observance. The very centre! Health for the body, health for the soul. Snuff too.’

  ‘You surely cannot assert,’ Bates interjected, ‘that taking snuff is, in any sense, itself eucharistic?’