Theirs Was The Kingdom (39 page)

With an adroit heave and a twirl or two that George saw as a brief exercise in Swedish drill, she undressed herself, folded her clothes methodically, laid them aside, and drew herself slowly erect as if for inspection, flexing her arms and pivoting slowly, as though upon a revolving pedestal.

He had a vision then, not of a naked woman getting on for twice his age, but of a perfectly formed and immensely impressive Teutonic goddess who had materialised for his specific gratification. His senses, groping wildly for some link between mortality and the elect—between Rosa, his statuesque Munich landlady, and Rosa, the essence of every adolescent fantasy he had ever had concerning women—telescoped in a memory that plunged him momentarily back into his childhood and a coloured illustration in a nursery edition of a book called
Myths and Legends of the North.
He recalled it in the greatest detail, a picture of a huge, flaxen-haired Brunhild, poised to hurl her spear in the celebrated contest with King Gunther. And here was Brunhild herself, stripped of her winged helmet and quilted armour, confirming what he had always suspected concerning Brunhild and Rosa alike—that their splendid strength and symmetry was all but subdued by draperies that blurred the majestic rotundity of their breasts and the sublimity of their powerful thighs that swept past dimpled knees to shapely calves and surprisingly neat ankles. Strength and vitality were there in abundance, revealed in every line of her body, but the impact remained essentially soft and feminine, perhaps because everything about her was so perfectly proportioned.

He cried, involuntarily, “Why, Rosa, you’re beautiful! You’re perfect…!” but she seemed unimpressed by his veneration, seemed, in a way, to be looking past him, for her expression was thoughtful and it came to him that her mind was already engaged with the mechanics of his initiation.

She said, contemplatively, “There is a little difficulty. On account of your shoulder,” and then, “Ja! It would be best if you were to stand, Herr Swann. So…” and she took his sound arm in a firm grip, levering him upright, and then, with a movement that seemed to him as deft and sinuous as a wrestler’s, took his place on the edge of the bed and enfolded him as though he was a warm and welcome garment.

His share in the encounter was purely passive, an instrument or appliance of some kind that she was using to demonstrate a trick that she had decided he must learn without fuss and without delay. It was accomplished in the same subdued key, without a flicker of urgency on his part or hers, so that any sensual delight he might have derived from her swift and effortless absorption of him was submerged in the great tide of deference she inspired inasmuch as he did not see himself as possessing her, as a woman is possessed by a man, but making obeisance, as a pilgrim before a shrine. And yet her own impassivity, distinct from his, was an integral part of her bestowal, for while a goddess might unbend to a mortal, she could not be expected to be moved by one, physically or otherwise. In the moment immediately preceding the climax, he saw himself as having been advancing towards this specific point in time throughout the whole of his life, not to spend himself in the complacent body of a German woman but to attain a status and dignity hitherto denied him. It was this that he acknowledged as her intention. It was for this purpose and no other that she had made herself available and sprawled on the edge of his bed, enveloping him, body and soul, with her great, muscular limbs while drenching him in her vitality, that she might promote him, in the instant, from child to man.

Perhaps less than a minute elapsed before she elected to break the spell, stepping out of her Olympian role to reappear, miraculously, as humdrum Rosa Ledermann, a genial hausfrau, who had taken it upon herself, from motives hidden in the timeless history of personal relationships, to drag him over a threshold of the human family. She said, with shattering finality, “
Gelt!
It is very simple, Herr Swann. There is no mystery here, as the poets tell you. You are a man now and will begin to think as one.”

He said, hoarsely, “For God’s sake, Rosa… after this… how can you address me as ‘Herr Swann’ in that way? George! I’m
George
…!” and he cautiously withdrew from her, standing mute, confused, and utterly undecided on how one was supposed to conclude such an apocalyptic experience.

To his enormous relief she smiled, her broad, beaming features composing themselves into their homely, familiar cast as she heaved herself up, took his face between her hands again, and kissed him lightly but tenderly on the lips, saying, “
Georg.
A very English name. It suits you, I think. You will sleep now and lie upon this side. There will be bruises in the morning. A little stiffness also perhaps. But for you it was a rewarding tumble downstairs,
gelt
?”

Her forthrightness, her terrible directness, was the most awesome aspect of her. But perhaps this was true of all women—the young, old, plain, handsome, prim, and sensual—down the corridors of time as far as Eden. For here she was no longer in the least concerned with his attainment of maturity. That had been briskly accomplished. What occupied her mind now was that painful jar he had given his shoulder on the newel post of her staircase. Swiftly but methodically she drew on her skirt and blouse, making a neat roll of the rest of her clothes and tucking them under her arm. He watched her every move, not knowing what to say in the way of thanks or even acknowledgement, but she did not seem to expect a comment. When she had buttoned her blouse and smoothed her skirt she said, as though addressing herself, “George,” nodded rather absently, and moved towards the door.

He called, “Rosa—don’t go! Stay with me all night, Rosa,” but she replied with mild reproof, “Ach, that would be foolish. With that hurt how could we expect to have rest in that little bed? Besides, there is work to be done. For me if not for you.
Gute Nacht, Herr Georg
.”

The door closed on her. The single candle threw long shadows on the raftered ceiling. The subdued roar of the
Oktoberfest
seemed to reach him from another city. His shoulder ached, but not unbearably, and he lifted a hand to the swelling, massaging it slowly and thoughtfully. His brain was sharp and clear for the first time since he had come rolling home from the festival, climbed the stairs, and stumbled and fallen from what now seemed to him the summit of a mountain, so distant was the experience in relation to all that had happened since. Carefully he retraced his steps, move by move, from the moment when he had sportively fondled her behind, to the moment when she had gone her careless way. Something eluded him and he searched hard for it, lowering himself carefully on to the rumpled bed and holding himself rigid with the effort of concentration. Then he understood what was missing. It was guilt. That was the strangest thing of all. He felt no wisp of guilt or regret. If it had been there at all it was lost in a long groundswell of uncomplicated affection for Rosa Ledermann.

5

Far away to the northwest, where the serried wrinkles of Exmoor channel a dozen rivers from purple heath and brushwood wilderness to seas north and south of the Atlantic-facing tip of England, two other Swanns might be said to have been migrating, but they moved in tight circles, temporarily haltered to base. At that particular moment they might also be said to have been celebrating their own
Oktoberfest
, the opening of the autumn term cross- country season, for here, in at least one respect, the occasion bore some slight resemblance to the Bavarian festival. It was launched with sustained and discordant clamour.

It does not take a British schoolboy long to establish distinctive rituals. The influence of the late Arnold of Rugby upon the British educational system was admittedly profound, but it was not confined to concepts involved with culture-and character-formation. Pride of place in all these new, stylish and singularly Anglo-Saxon foundations was accorded to ritual and West Buckland, although no more than a quarter-century in being, had already acquired traditions that would, in time, become fossilised. One such tradition was the series of cross-country runs over set courses of moorland pasture and river bottom, and each began with a ritualistic cacophony of Dervish-like yells flung at the indifferent hills as competitors swarmed through the narrow quadrangle arch and streamed east across the playing fields towards the larch and conifer plantations marking the limit of the school enclosure. Among them, yelling as loud as anyone, went Giles and his brother Hugo, the one completing his third year on the moor, the other entering upon his second term.

For Giles especially this was one of the most stimulating moments of the school year. The opening of the cross-country season marked the renewal of his licence to roam far beyond school bounds and this meant the granting of a personal freedom that he found essential to his peace of mind within a closed community. It also marked the last yellowish glimmer of the upland summer and the onset of winds and sleet showers that would, in a matter of days, turn every leaf of every tree in the twin drives a different shade of rust red, soldier scarlet, guinea gold, and apple russet. Soon, from the high window of the Brereton dormitory where he was splashing himself after rising-bell, he could contemplate the forced march of autumn across the hills that rose behind the plantation to the spot where, years and years ago, one of his father’s managers had stamped the name “Swann” on the local map by recapturing a toothless circus lion and hauling him the length of the Exe Valley to Exeter. For the boy, this event had significance. It had already passed into legend, so that as soon as the smallholders learned one of Swann’s boys was up at “skuel” (the local blanket word for the straggle of neo-Gothic buildings crowning the ridge) they made the story public. Giles, answering their questions as to whether or not it was true that his father had paid the captor a shilling a mile for the haul, found himself saddled with the nickname “Chaser” in honour of the half-forgotten feat.

From October onwards, Giles “Chaser” Swann would take full advantage of the lifting of school bounds and set off on any number of officially sanctioned training runs across the slab-sided fields, through blue-black coppices bordering rushing streams, over miles of purple heather and spiky yellow gorse, as far as the very summit of the moor where a line of barrows marked the burial places of Iron Age kings. And once here, blessedly alone under a wide sky of drifting cloud, he could identify with a landscape in a way that brought him an inward tranquillity he prized above anything in his experience. For up here there were no time, no bells, and no people. Nothing at all to come between a man and his search for the meaning of existence, pursued all day long between the covers of books, and at the feet of men further advanced upon the journey than he, but not, seemingly, so concerned with the all-important questions of when, in what manner, and, above all,
why
?

All this, of course, was before Giles Swann found a disciple in his younger brother Hugo. A very unlikely one to most observers, for it was difficult to imagine two brothers less alike—physically or temperamentally. Giles, though stocky, was below average height, whereas Hugo, at thirteen and a half, was already five feet ten and a half inches in his knitted socks. Giles was recognised by masters and boys alike as being exceptionally bright. Hugo, everyone soon discovered, was an amiable peasant, possessed of astonishing strength and agility certainly, but without the ability to recall where he had left his football boots much less tangle with Euclid and Pythagoras. Thus it soon became accepted that Giles carried Hugo, nursing him as he had been seen to nurse a succession of other new boys now able to fend for themselves, and if Giles resented this intrusion into his rare moments of privacy he did not show it. When he set off for the Barrows, Hugo usually tagged along, a great bumbling bear in the wake of its trainer. Hugo was capable, if called upon, to cover ten miles of track in just over the hour without intruding once on his brother’s train of thought so that, little by little, the relationship between them strengthened and deepened. People watched them and people wondered about them. But nobody ever knew what they talked about on these excursions. How could they know that Giles was already charting Hugo’s destiny. Or that Hugo saw Giles as an old, old soul, a celestial guide invested with the distilled wisdom of the ages, who happened, for reasons of his own, to be masquerading as a schoolboy?

They had made a great, right-handed sweep striking out across the hill pastures in a northeasterly direction that would have carried them beyond Bratton Fleming had they held to it. But then they swung south and southwest, so that by four o’clock they were breasting the great wooded escarpment that rose behind Lord Fortescue’s seat. They could see, in the near distance, the grey and purple blur of the school and the straight lines of the angled plantation enclosing it in the east. They paused here for a breather, for the escarpment was a rough, steep climb, and they rested their elbows on the palings faced with wire mesh that the estate workers had put there to keep the rabbits out of the park.

Giles said, “This is the best place of all, kid. The best place to see it as it
was
,” and Hugo took this to be a rare admission on his brother’s part that Giles had indeed been here before, perhaps several times, and was remembering what this stretch of empty moorland had looked like when they buried those kings in the Barrows thousands of years ago.

He said, incuriously, “What was it
like
, Giles? I mean, were there farms then? And a big house, like Castle Hill on the Barum Road?” Giles said, “Not farms as you think of them. Hut circles, and long-horned sheep out on the hillsides, and as for that house, why it’s newer than Tryst. The lie of the land was the same. That hasn’t changed in a million years. Not since the earth cooled.”