The Blue Tent Read online

  Contents

  New Article 1

  Dedication

  Quotes

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Note

  Parthian Fiction

  Copyright

  THE BLUE TENT

  RICHARD GWYN

  For Rose, in our tent of days

  The mercurial water and alchemical quintessence are frequently described as being sky blue or azure. Paraclesus introduced the symbol of the sapphire from the Cabbala into alchemy, where it came to signify the arcane substance. Thomas Vaughan described the tincture as having the colour of ‘a certain inexpressible Azure like the Body of Heaven in a clear Day’. He called the Stone ‘an azure Heaven’. Elsewhere Vaughan wrote that the water of the sages was a ‘deep Blew Tincture’. To clothe in an azure shirt or garment means to make projection of the tincture on molten metal in order to convert it into silver or gold.

  Lindy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery.

  In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency … The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished … [I] saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth, and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth.

  J.L. Borges, ‘The Aleph’.

  I went daily to the Bibiothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening … losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn.

  W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz.

  Thou art a toylsom Mole, or less

      A moving mist

  But life is, what none can express,

  A quickness, which my God hath kist.

  Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans.

  1

  I stand by the kitchen window, staring at a blue tent. It is pitched just beyond my garden fence, in Morgan’s field. The tent is bothering me. It is too near the house, too close for comfort.

  There is no sign of a car or any other vehicle in the field, nor in the drive that leads to my house. Whoever owns the tent must have arrived by foot. They are well off the beaten track.

  I step out into pale sunshine and the air quivers with birdsong. To one side of the house lie steep woods, burgeoning green, and a buzzard hovers high above the trees, a speck in the pristine sky. I wander down the drive, to make sure no vehicle is parked on the verge, hidden by the hedgerow. Behind me, the house presents an imposing facade, the three upstairs windows forming a dark triptych, giving the impression of symmetry and substance.

  Walking back into the garden, I come to a stop beside a tangle of rose bushes. From here I have an unobstructed view of the tent, huddled close to my house as if taking advantage of the shelter and security that such a solid building provides. What a foolish presumption. How can the occupant or occupants of the tent know that the house is not inhabited by a dangerous lunatic, some deranged rustic assassin? Why on earth do they imagine that they are safe? Lord knows, I have an axe.

  If Iwere to pitch a tent in a field, while on a camping holiday, I would pick a spot further away from the only building in this part of the valley. Under the big oak in the middle of the field, perhaps, or beside the stream that runs alongside it, but not at the edge of someone’s garden, practically under the eaves of their house. There is, after all, a lot of land out there, a great deal of green land. Why so close?

  2

  I am accustomed to solitude and since living here have become suspicious of any incursions from the outside world. I have few visitors, and have spent the winter – which, due to the recalcitrance of spring, stretched well into April – reading, writing and occasionally walking in the surrounding hills, or Black Mountains, as they are called. They are not black, of course; they acquired the name centuries ago on account of the perennial gloom into which the sky shrouds them when approached from the east, offering a promise of darkness and exclusion, a state or condition personified no doubt by the warlike Celts who once defended their muddy pile against the no less hostile Saxons and Normans. I suspect the owner, or owners of the tent have come the same way as the Normans, from the east, over Gospel Pass and down through Capel-y-Ffin.

  Perhaps they lost their way in the dark, did not care to venture further into the field at night. Perhaps they pitched their tent here out of convenience, since it was not far from the road and therefore nearer to civilisation. Perhaps they were afraid that a bull or some other dangerous beast was loose in the field, or that they might otherwise incur the wrath of a splenetic farmer with their trespass. Or maybe they were simply tired, and set up their tent in the first convenient spot, before crawling into their sleeping bags. In which case, perhaps, I should let them sleep on. I am inclined, now that the sun is on my face, to treat them kindly.

  The tent.

  It is of a strong construction, with no manufacturer’s label, nor any other marking to indicate its provenance. It is a two-person tent, and quite generous in width, set up with steel and wooden poles, rather than threaded onto a light aluminium frame in the modern style: to all appearances, therefore, a traditional, old-fashioned tent. But its colour shocks me. It is a deep blue: in fact, it seems to me, close up, that it is the bluest thing I have ever seen. It expresses blueness, as though rather than being a colour, blue were an idea or a thought: no, as if blue were an extreme, intense emotion.

  I stare at the tent, trying to decipher what kind of fabric or dye could manifest such a distinct hue that it actually pains one to look at it. I turn away. My eyes have begun to water.

  No sound comes from the tent but I can sense the presence of human life stirring within.

  I have been bending over, my head turned side-on to the tent’s entrance, as if awaiting some sign or message. I pull myself up, and look around, feeling my behaviour to be somehow unseemly.

  A dog is in the drive, in the exact spot I was standing a minute ago, when I stopped to look back at the house. I have never seen this dog before. It watches me momentarily, then turns and leaves; I don’t quite catch its colour as it runs away, a flecked grey or dull russet. The appearance of this dog adds to my unease.

  The sun is well up; it must be warm inside the blue tent. Whoever is there will be getting sweaty and uncomfortable by now, unless they are too tired to notice. I reach down for the zipper, but just as I am about to yank it up I have second thoughts, or rather – how should I express this – I have a strong sense that this is the wrong course of action. I will leave the occupant or occupants of the tent in peace for now, give them the opportunity to show themselves, if they wish, but will not act out the role of meddlesome neighbour, even if the notion of being neighbours seems far-fetched, I being an actual resident of the valley and they merely passing through. I turn and walk back to the house.

  3

  A few things about the house.

  Llys Rhosyn dates back to the fourteenth century, but was rebuilt after the Napoleonic wars by one of my ancestors on what was left of
the earlier structure. On the first floor are four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and another smaller room, barely larger than a cupboard, used for storing linen. Three small rooms in the loft provided sleeping quarters for the servants in the days when the house had staff. This attic space is no longer used. Indeed, only the master bedroom, with its wide view down the valley, is occupied now, although I very rarely sleep there, for reasons I will explain.

  Downstairs, there is a large oak-beamed kitchen, a sprawling living room with various small closets and enclaves and – most notably – the library, which, apart from its eleven thousand books, accommodates an ancient carved fireplace, supposedly the centrepiece of the original building.

  Clearly the house is much too large for single occupancy. Living alone here, I feel like a derelict nobleman awaiting his demise in grandiose isolation.

  I cannot speak of the house without referring to its previous owner, my Aunt Megan, without whom there would be no story to tell, and with whose person the house is – to my mind, and the minds of the others who will inhabit this story – irrevocably associated.

  Megan was my mother’s older sister, and they were the daughters, by his third and final marriage, of my philandering war hero grandfather, Rhodri Parsifal Llewellyn and Myfanwy Mildred Vaughan, the latter being the only child of impoverished Welsh gentry to whom the house had belonged for centuries. My own mother died when I was six, and my father, a country doctor in Pembrokeshire, was married, within the year, to a woman who provided an almost annual supply of babies (and me with a rapid succession of little half-brothers and half-sisters). At seven, I was bundled off to boarding school in England, and Megan became something like a surrogate mother to me.

  She had, by the standards of most women of her generation, led an unusually adventurous life. After completing her undergraduate studies in medicine at Oxford, she trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley and later in Zurich, where she worked under the renowned psychoanalyst, Marie-Louise von Franz: student, research assistant, colleague and collaborator of C.G. Jung. She then spent a number of years in Paris, practising as a psychiatrist, and sharing an apartment with an old friend from her student days, a Frenchwoman called Zoë, before returning to Llys Rhosyn in the late 1970s to look after her elderly mother, on whose death, shortly afterwards, she inherited the house. It was then that she started work at the Mid Wales Hospital or, as it was once known, The Brecon and Radnor Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum at Talgarth, over the hills to the west. She was appointed consultant psychiatrist, and stayed there during the last twenty years of the hospital’s existence (it was closed on the eve of the new millennium). Considering her cosmopolitan past and the breadth of her interests and intellect this was, perhaps, a surprising choice of location, but she always maintained that once back in Wales, she hadn’t wanted to leave Llys Rhosyn, from which the hospital at Talgarth was a short drive. However, she returned to France often, maintaining her friendship with Zoë, who, in the late 1980s, and well into her forties, was surprised by pregnancy following a fling with a jazz musician. And although Megan continued to travel widely when on leave – to South Asia, and to Mexico and Central America – and made frequent trips to the continent to stay with Zoë and her child, and for visits to rare book fairs and auctions (she was an inveterate collector), she always considered this house to be as fundamental to her as, in her own words, ‘a second skin’.

  Megan, who never married – leading to some idle conjecture about her sexual orientation – left me the house when she died, a year ago. Although our actual meetings were few in recent years, we had enjoyed a closeness that belied those long absences enforced by distance (I have lived abroad for the past decade) and it was clear that my aunt held an affection for me which she did not display to other members of our extended family.

  In her will, then, she bequeathed me the property and all her possessions, down to the battered Mercedes Estate in the drive. What remained in various savings accounts and bonds – a substantial sum – was mine. The will placed one condition on my inheritance: that I was to keep the library intact and, if I were to have children, to ensure that the house and its library remained within the family. If, by contrast, I died without issue, the library was to be left to the Oxford College at which Megan had studied and, in mid-life, been a visiting Fellow.

  The solicitor, a certain Brynmor Williams, who communicated the news of Megan’s death to me – I was living in Mexico at the time, and received the call during an electrical storm, the handset crackling and hissing as he bellowed down the line in his fastidious south Powys English – emphasised the detail about the library, repeating himself not once, but twice, as though he had been instructed to ensure that I understood and agreed to this part of the contract before even considering myself the legal heir to my aunt’s estate.

  It didn’t strike me as odd that Megan should be so concerned about the care of her library once she was dead. The collection of books was her passion, if not her obsession. There was, besides, much about Megan that was original or unconventional; I hesitate to say eccentric since this was the term always drawn upon by members of my family to describe her, sometimes fondly, sometimes with ire, depending on what particular social formula she had ignored or whom she had upset. I think she quite relished riling people with less natural wit than herself.

  Needless to say, I accepted this condition. I have always loved this house; I know every nook within it and have wandered for countless hours through the woods and fields that surround it. During my years of travel overseas, this is the home which I always revisited in my dreams. Living here now is returning to a place always known. Besides, I had no house of my own, and very little money, so it was an easy decision. Moreover, the task of inheriting a library, especially one as well-stocked as my aunt’s, appealed to me, for I am an ardent reader, something of which Megan was well aware, leaving a cryptic, handwritten on her desk – for me, as I imagined – and which I found shortly after moving in. It read like an instruction: One book opens the other. Read many books and compare them throughout and then you get the meaning. By reading one book alone you cannot get it, you cannot otherwise decipher it.

  This advice, or directive, was to give me much cause for reflection over the year to come.

  Megan had passed away – peacefully, as they always say – in the library, in her favourite armchair, by the embers of the fire, leaving clear instructions that she was to be cremated and her ashes spilled eastward, from one of the nearby peaks, Lord Hereford’s Knob (a considerate detail, bearing in mind the prevailing wind direction), a duty I subsequently carried out alongside a wheezing and disconsolate Mr Williams, who was required by the last will and testament to be in attendance at the ceremony: heaven knows for what indiscretion or perceived failing she was seeking posthumous satisfaction by insisting on the presence of the forlorn and guileless septuagenarian lawyer. Perhaps she thought the climb would finish him off. Perhaps he was an ex-lover. From what I have heard locally, and in contrast to my family’s assumptions about her sexuality, she left more than one local man broken-hearted in her youth.

  4

  I know few people in these parts now, the local population having changed character since my childhood, the old indigenous families mostly gone, their houses bought by incomers. Some of the older residents of the valley remember me, however, from my visits as a child, when I holidayed here every summer. Morgan, for example, the farmer in whose field – at the edge of whose field – the blue tent is currently pitched: he remembers me.

  When I arrived for my aunt’s funeral last year he greeted me sadly, with a blast of whisky breath, and reached out a bony hand – as gnarled as the ancient hawthorn – as if, incongruously, to ruffle my hair, as one might a child’s, before returning with a start to the present, his eyes glistening with unwept tears, a man of a race and generation not given to outbreaks of emotion, yet demonstrably moved at that moment by the passing of my aunt, a spinster – a term deceptive in its associations – perhaps rememb
ering those summers long ago when I had been a childhood visitor to the house, or, retreating deeper along the rheumatoid and foggy corridors of things unrecoverable, to those yet more remote days when he was a farmer’s lad and she a rebellious, wilful, young woman. He withdrew his hand slowly, reluctantly, so overwhelming was the memory and so inexorable the onset of age and the proximity of death, especially on this occasion, a funeral, refuting the passage of the years, the decades, realising that the man standing before him was himself – myself – approaching middle age and that such a tender gesture might be inappropriate, or at the least, misunderstood; and I do not believe he made that gesture consciously, rather that it had been a reflex response to seeing me, however much I too had changed, so lost was he for an instant in the vortex between the long ago and the indisputable present, and although to pat the head of a child would be acceptable, to pat the head of a child who has long since become a man would be regarded as the sign of an ailing mind.

  I know few people, but am not lonely. Loneliness is not to be confused with being alone, with solitude sought out and cherished, even jealously guarded, just as I, at this moment, was protective of my little domain and for that reason suspicious of the uninvited appearance of the blue tent. Solitude could be a hard-won gift, and its disruption, or even the threat of its upset was, I realised, already taking shape, wiggling its way into my thoughts. Even the visit of the postman was an event: people who live isolated lives become like this, we get fractious about any disturbance in the predictable pattern of our days.

  Although the pace of my life here is slow, my days are by no means idle.

  I made my living, until last year, as a writer of articles and travel guides about places I had never visited (as well, to be fair, of a few that I had). It’s very easy to do this, thanks to the Internet. I’ve given all that up now, apart from the occasional book review or travel piece, but I am never short of things to do, and in the library, where I spend the greater part of my days, there are many books to read. I must confess, however, that the more I look at the books that line the shelves, the more perplexed I become. I have this compulsion to find things out, to expand my understanding of the world, but at times it becomes difficult for me to identify what, precisely, those things are. Sometimes it is as if the pursuit of knowledge were a mirage, that every objective is forever in flight, throwing up behind it a string of false clues in the form of ‘texts’ that lead one further and further from any kind of satisfactory intellectual resolution. Perhaps literary study of this kind is, by definition, an unending exercise in digression, the pursuit of ever-multiplying footnotes. Could this have been the course of activity that Megan had been proposing for me with her cryptic note – ‘One book opens the other?’