Polystom (7 page)

‘Do you like trees?’ he blurted out, reaching for a bread-sweet, and breaking it with both hands. The hot sugared dough steamed.

There was a little silence.

‘Trees?’ she echoed in her small voice, as if from far away.

‘I love trees. My father loved trees, and I have inherited that love. Most of my estate is woodland,’ Stom said. ‘Beautiful trees,’ he continued, hoping to reach her with his enthusiasm. ‘You’ll love it.’

She looked up at his face, as if about to speak; paused. Polystom had the sudden rush of hope, that he had touched her. She drew a breath, let it out. ‘I like open spaces,’ she said in her sing-song voice. ‘No walls.’

‘There are no walls in my woodland,’ said Stom, a little over-eagerly, still trying to reach her.

‘Trees are like walls,’ she said. The sentence was spoken with an enormous quietness that implied grave, sad wisdom. She waited a heartbeat, and said: ‘trees are walls.’ She looked away.

How wrong! For days Stom could think of nothing else than this little speech by his wife, rehearsing possible replies in his mind, circling round and round the little dialogue over and over until it had condensed into a sort of rage inside him. How could she be so blind? He thought he had been granted an insight into her; saw her spirit fleeing for ever over endless plains, over grasslands, running and running. But this was an illusion, this sense of escape. Because what did it boil down to in the end? Beeswing’s tiny body, her too-rapidly beating heart, her own being-in-the-world, it was
that
she yearned to escape. And there was no escape from selfhood, it was a responsibility, not a burden. Couldn’t she see? And even though the two of them
had not quarrelled
as such
, even though no voices had been raised or cross words spoken, nonetheless this little exchange had revealed to Stom the sheer unbending stubbornness at the heart of Beeswing’s mind. The stubbornness of the child who has not yet learned (as Cleonicles would have put it) that the gap between wish and world must be accepted or it will shred us to pieces. That wishing is not a crime, but wish – like a metal – only becomes
useful
if alloyed, tempered, with a sense of
how the world is
. That was what growing up involved. Didn’t she see that? That was what Stom’s great poetry told him, what his reading revealed, what his late-night discussions with Cleonicles over a mulberry or ashberry whisky confirmed in him. This was his co-father’s insistent refrain; and, more than all this, it was his father’s very essence, every aspect of his silent passage through life. Acceptance, this was the key. The universe of things is all around us, it supports us, it sustains us. Why fight it?
I want to go diving today, papa!
Not today, Stommi.
Why not father, why
not
why not?
And in reply to this eight-year-old insistence his father would not even need words, just the slow turn of his head, his glistening placid eyes meeting his son’s. At some level below speech the little Polystom felt the knowledge, the wisdom, slide into his soul. He was surrounded by the sustenance of things, and also, equally tightly, by his responsibilities. It was a
great
responsibility to be Steward, and this could not be avoided or shirked. It was better not even to try, but simply to accept. Why couldn’t Beeswing see this? Surely his own wife . . .
surely
she should understand, if anybody should.

One of his favourite habits was walking in the forest by himself. On several occasions, early in the relationship, Stom urged Beeswing to come with him, but she declined, obliquely at first, and then more insistently. ‘Why must you be so insistent! I’m no pet
dog
,’ she said, one time, with a febrile edge to her voice, ‘for you to take on walks.’

Stom had said nothing to this. He had turned completely about and walked away.

If she wouldn’t come, then he would go without her. She was the one who lost out. She stayed behind in the house, doing whatever she was doing, and Stom felt himself buoyed up in the purity of his solitude. That was it, he told himself. He felt raised up, lifted by the purity of his solitude. Her loss.
Most of my estate is woodland
he had told her; so by hating trees she was spurning the bulk of his estate, rejecting him. He was not surprised. She was a child. Her child-like body harboured a child-like mind. He had been foolish to think otherwise.

The rage coalesced into something hard inside him. He would be doing her a favour by making her see, by
making
her leave childhood behind, taking on an adult’s perspective. After five days this had settled deep, a subconscious sediment layering the base of his mind. He no longer needed even to think of it. Just as his responsibilities extended to educating the children of his workers and servants, so they extended to his wife. She was wilful, but once she had been broken she would be grateful. It was as universal a law as gravity, as omnipresent a fact of life as the air we all breathe. Afterwards she would thank him. She’d be happier too – healthier, live longer. All this fretful fighting against everything would wear her out otherwise. It was in her own best interests. He had not decided how to impose his will upon her just yet, but the need for it was certain.

For five days after their seemingly bland conversation the two of them spoke no words to one another. They slept in separate rooms, took their meals apart. They rarely passed one another in the enormous house. On the sixth day Stom’s mind was made up; he mistook the burning inner solidity of his rage for certainty, mistook it for strength of will. It was nothing of the sort, of course.

Most of my estate is woodland, Polystom had told his wife on the morning after their wedding. He had hoped to impress her, hoped perhaps to win her over to himself, to bridge the space between them. But there was no such connection; it had been impossible. It was still hard for him to understand how it was that the beauty of the trees had not reached her. The forest is a kind of prison, she had said. Was ever a more absurd thing said?

Most of my estate is woodland
. He still felt the tingle in his abdomen –
my estate!
It had been three years since his father’s death, and he still could not evade the sense that he was only playing at being Steward in the old man’s absence. Here . . .

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. . . thoughts [of his] father. These thoughts were somehow – he knew not how – inseparable in his mind from thoughts of the woodlands that his father had loved so completely. The dark, shadow-sated forests, the elegant shafts of trees planted in the rich earth like javelins, and in the air the interlocking thick bushes of fir leaves. Seventy thousand hectares of new planting north-east of Moss Cove between the coast and the mountains, now seven years old, bristling sticky saplings covering the curve of the hills like stubble. Six hundred thousand hectares of ancestral forest, to which
the Old Man had devoted all his energies and most of his love.

Polystom had wandered through those forests as a boy and as an adolescent; solitary, most especially the woodland between the Neon Mountains and the sea, to the west of the house. He still did, now that he was a man and Steward of the whole estate. The solitude there seemed cloistered by the trees themselves, an almost sanctified tranquillity. Their great black stems, around which Stom could just about throw his arms for his fingertips to meet. Their pure reach of height, fifteen or twenty metres before branches appeared. They were like sword-blade epitomes of the shadows they cast, like shadows themselves made material and tangible. Polystom could walk through the cool fragrance of the woods for hours, the brown fir-needles under his feet like springy gravel. He might catch himself, head back, staring up the length of a trunk to the starburst spread of branches and needles above him, with only shreds of blue-mauve sky visible in between, might catch himself staring upwards, and feel foolish. He wasn’t a child!
This sort of mooncalfing around isn’t dignified
(this was his co-father’s voice in his imagination, this chiding).
It doesn’t befit a Steward, a ruler
. But the shade of his father, in this shady place, didn’t rebuke him. The spirit of his father would say to him that it was not displeased: drink the peace of the trees, this would be the Old Man’s advice. Not words he had ever spoken to his son in life, of course, for Stom had never had the wisdom to solicit them when Old Polystom was alive. But his father had never considered it beneath
his
dignity as Steward to wander the trees. His arboriphilia hadn’t diminished his gravitas as local ruler. Polystom tried to take consolation from this thought as he meandered amongst the tree trunks. He walked, and walked, until he emerged from the other side of the forest and strolled down to the shoreline of the Middenstead sea. Intensely thoughtful.

Polystom sat, that afternoon, for a long time, looking out at the unquiet Middenstead sea. Or not looking, really, but rather hearing the sound the wind made as it moved through mauve-dark sky. The sifting noise of wind brushing the trees behind him. The noise of the water touching and touching at the beach, and the sound of the sand itself, the sound of the sand lessening.

His father and co-father had died within weeks of one another. It was a sort of revelation to Polystom. He had only seen their relationship from the outside, and had taken the bickering and emotional turbulence for the entirety of their connection. So it is we mistake tics and superficial habits for a deeper truth. But Polystom’s father sickened and died over six months, and by the seventh month co-father was gone too. It was as if his prop had been knocked away. Polystom realised, belatedly, that there were depths in his two fathers’ relationship (and by extension, in any relationship) of which he had been unaware. For all their bickering, the two of them had been together without breaks for longer than Polystom had been alive. For all they had fought, their relationship had worked.

They seemed so incompatible, an ill-matched pair. His father so placid, a man who might go for a whole day without saying a single word. A tall man, skinny, but always a little hunched over as if in embarrassment at his height. Many mornings he would simply not attend to his hair, not even call a servant to smooth it down, so it flailed and spiked off the dome of his head. He would wear the previous day’s clothes, stained as they might be with food. There had always been that quality in his father of elsewhereness. As a boy it had infuriated Polystom, because he had read it as a sort of withdrawal, a stepping away from Polystom himself, as if his son’s demands were somehow irrelevant to the father. But perhaps there had been a greater peace in that elsewhere, wherever in his father’s head it was located.

His co-father, on the other hand, had been a shorter, bulkier person, his body covered in hair. His beard had reached from just below his eyes right down to cover his face, chin and neck in sow-bristles. Even his back had been knitted with thick hair, as Polystom knew from swimming expeditions. And as if this bristliness were an index of sheer energy, as if the hairs were like iron filings standing up in the magnetic force of his personality, he had been enormously, bustlingly restless. Do! Do! Create! Create! What was needed was
action
– now above all!
Now
above all! The Mudworld was a threat to everybody, to the Stewardship of all the worlds! They must do something, organise, push
on
, sort something out.

‘Why?’ Young Polystom had once asked. ‘How exactly is the Mudworld a threat?’ The three of them had been picnicking on the eastern flanks of the Neon Mountains, father, co-father and Polystom, with servants and a car a respectful distance away. The afternoon had been hot and clammy, every crease of Polystom’s young body stuck with sweat.

‘Are you an idiot?’ co-father had blustered. ‘Don’t you read the newsbooks? What’s the matter with you? Your own cousin died fighting on that world!’

His father, slowly pulling free the cork of a bottle of black wine, had said nothing. Polystom, hot and young and feeling bad-tempered, had pointed out that he had hundreds of cousins, had lost count of his cousins, but co-father ground him down with the relentless force of his personality.

‘Do you want me to recite the casualty lists? Don’t you see how vital it is to contain them there, on that world, rather than have them come through interplanetary space and attack us here? The whole System of Worlds has never been so tested! Young men like yourself have never had such an opportunity for glory and honour, for good working towards the common wealth.’ And so on, and so on.

‘I still don’t see why they’re such a threat, on that world,’ Polystom had grumbled; and co-father had gasped in exasperation, and father had silently poured three glasses of wine. Polystom had caught what he took to be a pained expression in his father’s eyes, although whether in disappointment at his son’s attitude, or distress that his partner and his son were fighting, was not clear.

And when not blustering at Polystom, co-father had blustered at father, sometimes with enough intensity to provoke a response even from that serene man. They would be arguing over nothing, some irrelevancy; and the servants would shuffle awkwardly in the background, uncertain whether to stay or go. Maybe co-father would goad Old Polystom with some perceived failing or other, going at him for a quarter-hour, half-hour, until finally father’s colour would darken and he would reply. It wasn’t so, he would say in his grumbling baritone. It wasn’t like that. Then why, co-father would counter, is
such and such
the case? Eh? Why did
such and such
happen, if things are the way you say they are? I really don’t know, father would say with quiet dignity, though his flushed face and hard-focused eyes gave away his anger. Perhaps because of
this?
Or
that?
How should I know? Of
course
you should know, co-father would shout.