Sandlands (15 page)

The short walk from his college rooms to Gilbert Scott's controversial edifice was the one he had undertaken every weekday morning at 8.45 am throughout the Long Vacation, this summer as for the twenty-one preceding summers: every working day in fact, since the last examination script had been marked, moderated and put to bed in June. Nor, this year, had his routine been interrupted by the onset of Michaelmas term, because Dr Whybrow was on sabbatical leave.

‘Enjoy your freedom.' That was the greeting tossed his way by the head porter, Ernie, this and every morning since term began, after he'd picked up the mail from his pigeonhole. But it certainly didn't feel much like freedom. He had lingered as long over Weetabix and the
Today
programme as he could allow himself on a working day without the creepings of guilt. His email, disappointingly light in anything requiring a response, he had dealt with before leaving his rooms, carefully avoiding the recriminating gaze of the icon that crouched in the corner of the computer screen as soon as he booted up. The Book. It must be three weeks since he had even opened the file, though he was intent upon not counting. Much easier to shut down the computer, arm himself with old-fashioned paper and pen, lock up his rooms with the wretched thing inside and head for relative safety beneath the library tower. There, at least, lay the promise of surrounding calm – even if not inner tranquillity.

 

It was an irony not lost on Dr Whybrow that his personal bolthole – in that deplorable contemporary phrase, his ‘happy place' – should, like the University Library, also be a tower, and also built of brick. The land certificate recorded him as registered proprietor since only the end of May, but it was many years since he had first become accustomed to think of it as ‘his' tower. Since early one morning of the Easter holidays in fact, when he was eleven or twelve, back home in Suffolk from the purgatory of boarding school and reclaiming the pleasures of solitude and unmarked hours. Home on leave, was how he came to think of it: each school term a fresh tour of duty, a posting into hostile terrain, and each homecoming shot through with relief at having survived.

It must have been Easter because it was too mild for Christmas and too damp for July or August. The mist as he recalled it was no light summer sea fret but a tenacious spring fog, lying low over cold earth saturated from the night's rain. It was early, too: the sun, just visible through the veiling cloud, was low and bloated, bleeding a mauvy-pink. He wouldn't have been up and out at an hour to watch the sun rise if it had been the summer holidays. He was on his bike, he remembered – or rather, he had his bike with him, because out there across the muddy fields and the wetlands which lay beyond there were few places where tyres would not be soon bogged down. There were stiles to be hoisted over, too, and through the salt marshes the wooden duckboards were frequently so narrow that to wheel a pedal cycle became a precarious operation, promising at any moment a skinned ankle or a foot submerged sock-deep in foetid black silt. But it had been a present, that bike, a reward from his father for passing the school entrance exam, and he was too young, or too stubborn, for the double edge of this to dent his pride in the machine.

He was going fishing, an activity he understood for other boys was a means to congregate but which Whybrow did to be on his own. None of them caught anything, either way. They had no rods or tackle apart from a stick or a garden cane, perhaps some bait wheedled from an older brother and such pieces of line as could be found snagged in brambles or bulrushes along the path. Today he had not even that. The dewed strands festooning the reeded banks had all been cobwebs, not knotted nylon. He had stripped himself a likely willow switch some way back along the river but abandoned it again while tugging and hauling his bicycle through a place where vegetation had invaded the footpath from both sides so as to make it almost impassable. He had been heading for the curve of the estuary, where the ebbing tide left spits and banks of gravel which were almost like a proper beach, and where the pretence of fishing could be dropped in favour of skimming stones across the water. But the mist and the fight with the brambles must have disorientated him. He had missed his way and come too far right, but instead of turning back had trudged doggedly on while the path bent round to the south and east, towards the marram dunes and the sea.

That's when he had first seen it: his tower. Not loomingly tall, at least until you came close, but solid, squat and low, it resolved itself from out of the backlit brume and stood sombre against the skyline. At more or less the same time he became aware of the sound of the sea effervescing on the shingle. His tread quickened as he walked towards the apparition. Perspective clarified and he could see that it was a round fort, flat-topped and unbattlemented, emerging from below the embanked pathway on the beachward side and reaching above it by some twenty or thirty feet. Its brick walls, the colour of damp sand and slick with moisture, were unrelieved by any doors or windows visible from this aspect. It was the Dark Fortress; it was Minas Morgul; it was Cair Paravel. It was his and his alone.

 

In the farthest corner of the University Library Reading Room sat Dr Whybrow, at the stretch of table that was his habitual hiding place.

The library had a quality like no other place, a paradoxical power to make the reader feel himself subsumed into the greater body of collective intellectual endeavour and at the same time secluded, walled off from the world. Once, not so very long ago, he'd been able to bury himself in its studious embrace and focus only upon the quiet hours between himself and the time of its closure. The thing about scholarship – in his youth a frustration and then, for many years, a comfort – was that there was always more to be read. Reading became its own end: a self-justifying virtue. Here in the sheltering silence there was no need to think of the days, the weeks and months going by, nor to measure any larger progress – or the absence of it. No need to acknowledge that his reading had become an alibi, a substitute for writing: the work of others a defence against his own. But in this last year even reading had lost its power to quell the demons which whispered against him. The stone clerestory and panelled oak ceiling of the Reading Room, even the long rows of desks, were a-hum with their denunciation; censure purred through the central heating, and every soft step on the deadening blue carpet was a new indictment: of his shortcomings as a scholar and the deficiency of his output.

He pulled the journal he was reading closer towards him, running a finger along the fold to press it flat. More than once he had found that his eyes had run over a paragraph without anything registering upon his mind at all. It was as if some functional connection had worked loose in his brain, so that the words upon the page no longer linked to their corresponding mental images. Reading was what he did; it was his life. For a moment he entertained a fantasy that the relevant synapse might break apart completely and print become mere patterns of ink, no longer decipherable into ideas. He would be left adrift: his pathway to this world, his only world, irreparably severed. Dad, after all, had been little older than Whybrow himself was now when his neurons had first begun to misfire, taking him away from his son. Out of reach, the way William Colstone seemed beyond his reach these days, too. There, but not there.

If it happened to me...
He would have to retire, and go and live in his tower by the sea.

It was nonsense, of course; his faculties were perfectly sound. He glanced down at the pad of A4 narrow feint at his right hand. Apart from a heading, carefully inscribed with a wiggly underlining at 9.05 am, the page was a blank. Dragging his eyes back to the text, he tried to force his mind to follow, but its meaning slipped and slithered past the edges of his consciousness.

Perversely, when interruption came it was still unwelcome.

‘Dr Whybrow.'

Above almost all else, he abominated the library whisper. Quieter than its stage cousin, it nevertheless shared with it an irritating overstated quality – as well as containing a sibilance that made him want to swat at the whisperer like a buzzing fly. The culprit in this case was someone who should have known better. Someone in fact whom, in the usual run of things, Whybrow was inclined to view with favour, and even a modicum of personal affection: his former doctoral student and now a Research Fellow of his college, Dr Jenny Lassiter.

He raised his head at her salutation and offered a suppressed smile which he hoped conveyed the discouragement of further conversation.

Evidently not. ‘How's it going?' hissed Jenny.

He rearranged the smile into a frown. Disapproval did not prevent him, however, from sliding a guilty sleeve across his empty page of notes.

With a waggle of her own notepad, she turned to continue her progress towards the inquiry desk. But not before jangling his nerve-ends with a parting whisper.

‘Enjoy your freedom.'

 

It had felt like fate when it came on the market. Not that Whybrow had any truck with such a superstitious concept, but even hard science could allow for patterns, for balances and synergies, for things falling into place. He saw the photograph in the estate agent's window in Saxmundham and recognised it instantly, although the angle – from the seaward side – was unfamiliar.
Opportunity to own a piece of history
. And that felt strange, as well: as if a person might own a slice of the sea or the sky.

The price was not prohibitive. Two decades of living rent-free or almost so in college rooms had facilitated the accumulation of a sizeable nest egg, even after allowing until recently for care home costs, and even on his modest academic stipend – not a
professorial
stipend either, as he required no reminding. And it was after all just a derelict shell, for all its historical interest, and lacked vehicular access into the bargain. Even the agent had not had the gall to describe it as ‘ripe for development'. It was itself, and unapologetically so: his tower.

The printed details relayed facts and figures which the academic in him filed away for reference but which seemed remote from the living image he carried in his mind.
The most northerly of twenty-nine
Martello towers erected along the east coast by the Board
of Ordnance between 1808 and 1812 to defend England from
the threat of invasion by the forces of Napoleon
.
The
towers' design was inspired by the round fortress at Mortella
Point in Corsica, unsuccessfully bombarded by British warships in 1794
. Most, like his own tower, were cylindrical in shape, the flat roof concealing a single interior dome – in contrast with the grander specimen at nearby Aldeburgh, which formed a distinctive quatrefoil, its four great towers now tastefully partitioned and rented out to holidaymakers. The Martellos were built to withstand cannon fire; a million bricks, it was said, went into the construction of each.

It was his period, he told himself, rationalising a decision he knew was already made. William Colstone's period. And his man, like Whybrow himself, was from that part of Suffolk: Colstone was born in Wickham Market where his father, Frederick, had the living. William held a commission with the regulars, the East Suffolk regiment. He'd served in India and the Dutch East Indies and at the capture of Mauritius, but was garrisoned in England for a time after 1810, lending backbone to the local militia. His letters, and an essay of 1811, were regarded as prime sources on the invasion panic which gripped the nation at that time. Posted back home to defend our shores from Boney – why not, indeed, in Whybrow's very tower? It was a tangible connection, as solid as anything to be found in books.

To arrange the viewing had been a guilty thrill, but it was also unreal, incongruous, to be noting an appointment time and who would meet him with the key, as if he were looking round a three-bedroomed semi.
A million bricks
. Only on the drive over did excitement make way for the lurching fear of disappointment.

He need not have worried. As soon as the heavy oak door swung open he felt it, that almost electrical charge which tingled the nerves in his scalp and set all his senses to hyper vigilance. It was a hard thing to describe exactly. A special quality of silence, certainly, the kind you encounter sometimes in an empty church or an underground cavern; the kind to make you understand properly that overused phrase ‘you could hear a pin drop'. It froze you to stillness; it set your ears on edge to listen for the pin. But it was more than that. Much later, he found the analogy which conjured it best: it was like being inside a giant bell. The high vault of the brick dome created a resonance which served to amplify the slightest sound and send it circling around and around. The least movement of air was translated to vibration, a thrum which reverberated almost below the frequencies of audibility. Even when nothing stirred, the air within the belly of the tower seemed to arc and crackle with life, as if detecting the presence of a listener. It was a place made for secrets.

‘Wait for the best bit, though.' It was the girl from the estate agent – the young woman, as he knew he was supposed to say – who had demonstrated the tower's special magic. ‘Stand over there. Put your head near the wall.'

She chose the spot directly opposite him across the line of diameter and leaned her face close to the bricks. He watched her lips move and for a fraction of a second heard nothing – and then the whisper came and it was if she were right beside him with her mouth to his ear, but in the same moment the single word rebounded about his head as if reflected from countless invisible surfaces, multilayered, at once both as loud as timpani and quiet as a sigh.

‘
Echo...
'

To look it up was a professional reflex for Whybrow. He had personally witnessed the same effect in the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's cathedral, but now he found mention of other examples: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence; the Gol Gumbaz mausoleum in Bijapur. Even, apparently, a gallery outside an oyster bar in New York's Grand Central Station. As so often, theories competed to explain the phenomenon, with argument going back to the nineteenth century. The Cambridge physicist Lord Rayleigh – a Trinity man – claimed that sound travelled round the surface fabric of the dome along its inner perimeter; the Astronomer Royal, the appropriately named Airy, contended that the waves bounced across the space inside the dome, moving through the air. Neither theory had been proved conclusively to be correct. Whybrow read of the recreation of strange acoustic effects in artificial whispering chambers, both circular and ellipsoid; he read of hot spots of acoustic symmetry and points of focus, and the observation of bizarre reversal events, where sound flipped round and seemed to be coming from the opposite direction.