Gwyn The Blue Tent

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-912681-58-7
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 220 Seiten

In a lonely house deep in the Black Mountains of south Wales, a man spends insomniac nights absorbed in the ancient texts left him by his mysterious aunt. When a blue tent appears in the field at the end of his garden, his solitary life is turned inside out. But who owns the tent? And when the tent's occupants emerge, whose story are they telling? As his life unravels, the man begins to question whether he is the orchestrator or the victim of his own experiences. Are the stories that guide or steer his life - any life - real, or merely the echo of other, possible lives?

Richard Gwyn was born in Pontypool on 22 July, 1956 and grew up in Crickhowell, Brecon-shire. After several years of self-abuse and heartache, he left London and spent the 1980s travelling, much of it recorded in his memoir, The Vagabond's Breakfast, which won a Wales Book of the Year award in 2012. In 2005 he achieved bestseller status with his first novel, The Colour of a Dog Running Away (Parthian, 2005), which has since been translated into eight languages. Richard has since written two other novels, including The Blue Tent, and is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of them being Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure (2018).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gwyn, Richard

Leseproben

8

Shortly after daybreak I drop off to sleep in Megan’s favourite and final resting place. By the time I struggle into wakefulness it is mid-morning and Alice is kneeling by the fire alongside me, an iron poker in one hand, smoke swirling thickly in the fireplace. My first thought on seeing her is that she is going to smash my brains in with the poker. I have a fleeting vision of her setting about the deed with unrestrained ferocity, and I sit up with a start. But no, she has made tea, and hands me a cup and saucer, in Royal Worcester china.

I would not, in the normal run of things, have used this tea set, certainly not while living here on my own, and I am almost affronted by Alice’s decision to bring it out from the Welsh dresser in the kitchen. But, even in this moment of mild outrage, I realise that, paradoxically, I approve, and I think: Megan would want us to use the best china. Of course she would. She always liked attention to the detail of things.

Alice is dressed in the same patched jeans as yesterday, and wears a large and tattered grey pullover.

I knocked, she says, but there was no answer, so I let myself in. I hope you don’t mind. Do you always sleep here?

No, I say, rubbing my eyes and sitting forward to sip my tea. I sleep, when I can, in a variety of locations about the house. Wherever I happen to be.

Like a cat, she says, wherever you find a perch? But as she speaks, she is studying the carvings in the stone fireplace.

She turns and re-arranges herself on the rug so that she now sits cross-legged, facing me. The sleeves of her oversized pullover cover her hands like mittens and she clutches the cup between them. Her auburn hair is dishevelled, loose ringlets brushing the bare skin where the pullover strays down over her shoulder.

Hey, she says, as though the idea has just occurred to her, how about we take a trip today? A mystery tour. I choose the place, you drive.

I surprise myself by agreeing.

We climb into the old Mercedes Estate, which in spite of its change of ownership still exudes the personality of my aunt: old-style breeding, and a benign, no-nonsense reliability. It chugs along the country lanes with a reassuring purr, which, given its age and lack of tending, is impressive. It is another fine day. Alice sits by my side in the front. She has taken off her shoes and is resting one bare foot on top of the dashboard in a pose of relaxed – but possibly studied – abandon. I let down my window and the scent of mown grass and hedgerow spills into the car.

Following Alice’s instructions (she has yet to divulge where we are going) we pass the village of Cwmyoy, the hill behind it supposedly rent asunder by an earthquake on the day of Christ’s crucifixion, then on towards Llanbedr along a slightly broader lane, its borders bright with purple and yellow flowers.

At Crickhowell we join the main road, and follow the river valley, past Bwlch, where the country opens out, with undulating hills crested by plantations of Norwegian pine foregrounding vistas of the Beacons and conferring on the native landscape the incongruous effect of a hastily-added coniferous tiara. As we descend a long sweep of embankment, Alice points out the little church, which lies just off the road to the right. Wooded hillocks punctuate the terrain, and close by flows the Usk, its water reflecting the midday sun.

I park in the lay-by just beyond the church and we climb the path towards the graveyard. A faded yellow placard advertises the final resting-place of the parish’s most famous son, Henry Vaughan, who called himself The Silurist (after the Silurian tribe that occupied the area during the Roman era), with quotations from his poetic works: it also informs us that the whereabouts of the remains of his twin brother, Thomas, the one-time pastor, are not known.

They say Thomas was sacked from his job here, says Alice, for drunkenness and immorality, but that was a common Roundhead accusation against priests whose sympathies lay with the king. Thomas may have lost his parish because he was a royalist, or else because he was an alchemist, or on both counts. But I’m sure you know all this, being descended from the Vaughans yourself. In case you’re wondering how I got into it, she adds, it’s because of your aunt reading Henry’s poetry to me when I was convalescing at Llys Rhosyn. She convinced me to go back to Cardiff and finish my degree. I wrote my dissertation on Henry Vaughan.

I wondered how much more of the family story Alice knew. About Thomas, specifically. Although he was one of the three or four most important alchemists of his day, information about him was sparse. He published a number of texts or treatises in English in the 1650s under the name of Eugenius Philalethes. Apart from his brief tenure of the parish of Llansantffraed, he is known to have lived in both Oxford and London, finally quitting the capital during the Plague year, 1665, and settling in Albury, near Oxford, where he met his death by inhaling mercury, or else – according to a different account – in an explosion caused while experimenting with heated mercury. A dangerous business either way, sniffing or cooking mercury.

In 1651, he had married a woman about whom nothing is known, except that her first name was Rebecca, but she died seven years later, causing Thomas terrible grief. The marriage had, as far as records tell, been childless. Vaughan is supposed to have been buried on March 1st 1665 at the parish church of Albury, but if this is so, no record remains. The registers at the parish hold no trace of him, and his brother, Henry, records in a letter to one John Aubrey that Thomas died ‘upon an employment for His Majesty’. So, some mystery was evidently attached to the circumstances of both his death and burial; and, to compound the mystery, two years after his alleged death, there appeared in Amsterdam a treatise in Latin called Introitus Apertus Ad Occlusum Regius Palatium, accredited toEiraneus Philalethes. However, scholars are generally agreed that Vaughan was not the author of this tract, on the dubious grounds that he had not previously published in Latin (though he was, of course, quite capable of writing it), and the rather more plausible grounds that he was, by all accounts, even if unproven, already dead.

Family legend, however, is that Thomas faked his own death – no doubt due to some fall-out from that ‘employment for His Majesty’ – and secretly retired to a cottage in an obscure Welsh valley, where, among other things, he had a beautiful and ornate fireplace carved, before dying peacefully of old age.

Bluebells grow in clusters around the peripheries of the graveyard and the encircling hedgerow blossoms with small white buds. I stop to examine some of the more extravagant gravestones as we pass by the church. The first to catch my eye is the statue of a robed and girdled angel, a star on her crown, holding in one outstretched hand the flower she has just plucked from the ground, an image elaborated upon by the words chiselled into the stone beneath her: ‘It was an angel visited the green earth and took the flower away’. The flower was a little boy named Awbery, who had died on the 14th of January, 1905. On the plinth below the statue and its inscription, barely legible beneath a century of moss and damp, are the words: ‘Good Night Darling, Not Good Bye’. Over a century on, the gravestone invokes an Edwardian world populated by characters from Peter Pan. Alice kneels to read the inscription. I cannot tell from her face what she thinks of all this.

In the porch of the church a note informs visitors that a key is available from the warden in the pink house to the side of the churchyard. I can see no pink house from where I am standing, and in any case feel no desire to go and ask to be let inside. The head of a hideously moustachioed man wearing a Norman helmet protrudes from the wall by the door presaging further Gothic aberrations within. Instead we amble through the long grass, sprouting dandelions and elder, towards the churchyard’s celebrity grave, which lies beneath an ancient yew. Henry Vaughan obviously wanted posterity to know of his extreme humility, for his moss-stained epitaph reads SERVUS INUTILIS: PECCATOR MAXIMUS HIC IACEO. Here lies a useless servant and very great sinner. Three curiously bewigged moon-faces illustrate the slab, to what purpose I cannot guess. At the foot of the tomb, looking down over the churchyard towards the Usk, where sheep nibble the grass in a scene of perfect rural tranquillity, stands a brand new bench. I sit on it, while Alice studies the wall that supports the more antique, fallen headstones from around the graveyard. She stops in front of one and gestures to me that I should come and look as well.

I peer at the weathered headstone lamenting the loss of Ann, wife of Thomas Thomas of this parish, who died on the 4th of November, 1857, aged forty-five years. Below was inscribed Gwyliwch, gan hyny, am na wyddoch pa awr daw eich ARGLWYDD. I translate, at Alice’s request: ‘Watch, therefore, because you do not know at what hour your LORD will come’.

I do not know at what hour my Lord will come, Alice repeats, half-statement, half-question, and she...