To the River (13 page)

Voices were coming from downstream, and at Barcombe Mills I found a crowd so strange it took a while to separate them out. Three men were playing with a rubber dinghy. One had a twisted face, and the speech of all three sounded distorted, their mouths moving exaggeratedly as they towed the little boat back and forth. Further on, a white-haired woman and a girl with dreadlocks were sitting on the bank in swimsuits, their legs invisible beneath the cloudy water. As I approached they slipped in together, as seals do when startled. Under the big willow, a boy was sitting full-lotus in a nest of sheepskins, naked except for his trunks. He was tanned and very beautiful, his back straight, his eyes closed. The air was heavy with meadowsweet, that funereal, sneeze-inducing scent.

I plopped in too, undressing more discreetly this time.
Isn’t it wonderful
, the old lady sang out. It was. The river seemed warmer here and I trod water in the wide pool by the rushes, leaning my head back till the silt soaked into my scalp. The boy jumped in too, and disappeared towards the weir. As I dried off he returned, and stood on the bank for a long time, enfolded in a tight embrace with the younger of the women. When she turned to go he called after her:
Hey Jen? Something else we should do while we’re on this summertime nature thing? It’s a practice Jesus taught for healing? To go down to the river and cover ourselves with the clay where it’s warmed in the sun?
There was something about his voice that made me uneasy. He had that singsong intonation I knew from festivals and retreats, high on its own visions: the antithesis of the joyous splash with which he’d launched himself into the river.

I’d been visiting this patch of ground consistently for over a decade, alone or with friends. I’d last come – it seemed astonishing that I’d forgotten this – with Matthew the weekend that we split up. It was the only time the river failed to work its spell. I felt I was walking somewhere I’d never seen before, that I was not connected to in any way. The sun was shining, there were the usual swimmers and cavorting dogs, the horses grazed by the Bevern, and I walked and breathed and wept without even really feeling any pain. It was the localised numbness that follows immediately upon upheaval, the consequence of a benevolent tincture of endorphins and adrenalin. The world seemed enormously far away, and at moments its unfamiliarity was terrifying, as if the sky hung yellow or the sun set in the east.

How long ago was that? Two months, I thought, for it had been a few days after my thirty-second birthday. We’d courted here too. I remembered kissing in the rain by the weir, and lying together in Primmer Brook one August years ago, the pinkish grasses grown over our heads so that we were hidden in a cavern away from the world, the river running north to south a few yards beyond our feet. I felt as if I were shuffling memories like cards in a deck. They fell onto the bank: a king and a jack, a four of clubs. This is, I suppose, why people go abroad after a change of some troubling sort, to walk on ground untenanted by ghosts.

Memory is a funny business. Sometimes, moving through water, I feel I’m washed of all thoughts, all desires: content to luxuriate like a starfish, rocking on my own pulse, sensate to no more than the wavering light as it sinks through space to reach my eyes. I might as well have never been born; I’m not sure I know even my name. And then, on other days, the opposite occurs. There have been times when, sunk in a river or a chalky sea, I have felt the past rise up upon me like a wave. The water has loosened something; has dissolved what once was dry; weighted as if with lead, it filters now through my own veins. The present is obliterated, but what the eye sees, what the ear hears, it is not possible to share.

The river was clotting with sodden lumps of poplar fluff. It was falling from the female trees, drifting like an artificial Christmas across the track and into the nettles. It was tempting to gather it up to plug my ears, to drown out the voices of the dead and gone. When Odysseus sailed past the island of the sirens, he used beeswax to shield the ears of his sailors, so that they wouldn’t be tempted by that clear-voiced, insinuating song. But he left his own ears open, and so he heard what they offer men, which is neither material wealth nor sexual pleasure. The sirens promised Odysseus knowledge: both of what had been and what was yet to come. Bound to the mast he begged to go closer but the oarsmen ignored his pleas, rowing on until the lovely voices were lost beneath the waves.

The sirens, Homer says, lived on a meadow starred with flowers. Their father was the river god Achelous, and though in the Hellenic period they were as much birds as women, bearing both wings and claws, by the eighth century they had acquired the tails of fish, had become indeed the mermaids that sing sailors to their doom. And their song: was it like the sea moving through caverns, or like air playing across hidden holes in the cliffs as a flautist plays on a flute? I don’t know if I could have resisted it, the lure of perfect knowledge. It was the mess of the past that troubled me, the attrition, the impossibility of telling whose memory was right and whose was corrupted or incomplete.

But those who did listen to the sirens didn’t profit from it. When Circe first warned Odysseus about the island, she told him that the sirens sat in their pretty meadow surrounded by a great heap of bones belonging to rotting men, their skins tanned by the wind until they resembled hides. Perhaps their knowledge paralysed them, for how could you act if you knew everything that had occurred or would occur? Maybe it’s better to go on as we do: half-blind, half-deaf, trailing the litter of the past behind us like a comet’s tail, now flashing, now flailing through the infinite dark.

At the weir, the river got into a tangle. Andrew’s Cut flowed roughly east, down to the hidden reservoir and the water treatment works. The main river sloshed under Pike’s Bridge, while two little channels sheered west through a pair of sluice gates, toppling down into the millpool where fishermen cast for pike in winter and in summer sea trout and carp. The Ouse becomes tidal at Barcombe Mills, and a great deal of effort has been expended on the preservation of the sea trout, which grow unusually large here, though they are elsewhere rare in lowland rivers. The sluices and weirs had been fixed with ladders so that the fish could work their way upstream to spawn, and catches were limited to six a season.

Somewhere I’d come across a copy of the health and safety warnings issued by the local angling club. Dangers included catching Weil’s disease (
All anglers should take sensible precautions, including not putting your hands in your mouth after immersing in river water and not touching any dead animals, especially rats
), being bitten by pike and wrapping your fishing line around a high voltage cable. Rabies was also a possibility, since it’s not unknown for a fly fisherman to hook a bat as he casts at dusk. It was an image that struck me as horrifying, though I suppose it’s no more so than fishing itself, since bats at least breathe air and are not simultaneously suffocating as they’re reeled to the bank.

I stood for a long time on Pikes Bridge, looking down into the pool. No one was fishing today, and the water was dark as liquorice and as intolerant of light. The sea trout were swarming just beneath the surface, and on the wall of the old toll house there was a sign displaying the prices it had once cost to cross here:
one shilling for a motor car
;
one and six for a wagon and horse
. Barcombe Mills was the site of one of the earliest bridges across the Ouse, and Simon de Montfort’s troops are thought to have come this way from Fletching to where Henry III and his army were camped at Lewes. For the rest of the day I’d be travelling in their wake, walking first through the old marshes where the London troops were routed and then climbing up into the town itself, where the king had been cornered and forced to sign away his power.

There are places where the past gathers as thickly and as insubstantially as pollen, places where it seems as oppressive as – how had John Bayley put it? – a cancer eating up the present. What had happened by the river almost eight hundred years before had left a mark on both the landscape and the nation that remains visible in certain lights, for it is one of the stories by which England herself was shaped.

The Battle of Lewes had its roots in the civil unrest that led to the signing of Magna Carta by John Lackland, the hopeless Plantagenet king. A generation on, the question of how far a king’s power might extend remained unsettled. Indeed, the period between the Battle of Hastings and the first Tudor king was when the nation’s identity began to be hammered out. In the thirteenth century, England was emerging from centuries of conquest. The most basic aspects of nationhood – how a country is governed, what language it speaks, where its boundaries lie – were still in flux, particularly with regard to the Channel. In 1227, the year in which Henry III began his rule, French was still the official language of court. English territories would be held in northern France until 1558, while French armies had controlled London not twelve years back.

Ironically enough, the man who would lead the Barons’ rebellion was himself French. Simon de Montfort was born around 1208, the youngest son of a nobleman and crusader also called Simon de Montfort. The elder Simon had inherited from his mother a claim to an English earldom, but was prevented from taking it up by an edict from King John that forbade French nobles from holding English lands. Like his son, Simon was by all accounts a dogged fighter and brilliant strategist, though he put his skills to less noble ends. He was the military leader of the Albigensian Crusade, and was eventually killed in 1218 during the siege of Toulouse by the heretics he’d made it his life’s work to eradicate.

As the youngest son, Simon de Montfort hadn’t inherited lands of his own, and after his father’s death he began the complicated process of regaining the English earldom. By 1230 he had the spoken agreement of Henry III, and within a year had taken possession of the Leicester lands. This sounds like something of a coup, but the new earl was only beginning his ascent. He became close to the king, who was a year his senior, and in 1238 married Henry’s sister, Eleanor of England, during the Christmas court.

Eleanor was twenty-three and already a very rich widow. At the age of nine she’d married William Marshall, the second earl of Pembroke, and after he died in 1231 she’d sworn a vow of holy chastity in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although Henry had given his consent, the wedding was secret, and when it was discovered caused uproar among both the nobility and priests. Henry’s brother Richard of Cornwall was particularly incensed and for a few days civil war seemed a distinct possibility. Simon – courteous, cunning Simon – smoothed matters over, showering Richard with gifts before dashing off to Rome to have his marriage validated by the Pope.

The king took Simon’s side, but cracks in their relationship soon started to develop. The first occurred when Simon named Henry as the assurance on a debt without first asking his permission, an act of catastrophic rudeness that enraged the king. Henry III was a generous man; he liked to give gifts, from tuns of wine to castles, and his habit of spoiling new and often French favourites, in particular his wife’s relations and his own half-brothers, infuriated his barons. A generous man: what an understatement. Henry was incapable of realising limitation. He was lavish in his responsibilities to the Church of Rome, and profligate when it came to his own comforts and entertainments. When Dante called him
il re della semplice vita
, king of the simple life, and seated him alone in purgatory, we might take it as read that he was being ironic.

He kept a menagerie at the Tower of London: two leopards, a bear, the first elephant England had ever seen. He was obsessively interested in art and architecture, and his palaces were intricately embellished. The walls – what odd details survive – he liked painted green, picked out with silver stars and the heraldic roses that were the favourite flowers of his wife. The Gothic abbey at Westminster was his grandest project, and he laid the first stone when he was only twelve. ‘I want to think of it in its first fairness,’ the architectural historian William Lethaby wrote centuries later: ‘when Henry III ordered pear trees to be planted in the herbary between the King’s Chamber and the Church, evidently so that he might see it over a bank of blossom.’

And the money for that bank of blossom, not to mention the ill-planned wars on France, or the scheme to buy the kingdom of Sicily from the Pope: where was it to be found? From wherever it could be bribed, borrowed or stolen. Raising money for crusades that never took place was a favourite trick, for who would refuse their pious king, bent on the work of Rome? When his son Edward was born, Henry had turned back presents that weren’t suitably lavish, and now, as he travelled round the country, he demanded extravagant gifts as well as bed and board. Nor was he averse to crueller methods. When a bad harvest in 1257 led to famine in London, he seized the corn imported from Germany and tried to sell it at a profit to his starving people. This latter scheme, following as it did upon the absurd attempt to make his son king of Sicily, led directly to the first serious conflict with the barons: the so-called Mad Parliament of the summer of 1258.

In the two decades since his wedding to Eleanor, Simon’s relationship with the king had cooled. During one violent row, the monk, diarist and legendary gossip Matthew Paris reported that Simon de Montfort ‘openly declared that the King was a manifest liar’, to which the king replied: ‘I never repented of ought so much as I now repent me that I ever allowed thee to enter England, or to hold any land or honour in that country where thou hast fattened so as to kick against me.’ Nonetheless, the earl of Leicester remained unshakeably loyal to his adopted country, refusing an offer from the French nobility to return as High Steward while Louis IX was on crusade. But loyalty to the country was not the same as loyalty to the king, and in the months before the Mad Parliament Simon de Montfort became a central figure in the drive for reform.