‘Can we take him with us?’ said Lugavoy.
‘Not enough horses. Besides, I don’t like the look of him.’ Cadbury signalled to Kleist, who was nearest. ‘What’s your name, son?’
‘Kleist.’
‘Give him some food – enough for four days not more.’ Kevin had already hidden the rations given him by the Two Trevors.
Kleist approached Kevin slowly: he didn’t like the look of him either.
‘All right?’ he said to Kevin, as he got down and started rifling the ration saddlebag to see what was least palatable and so best for giving away – the staler bread, the harder pieces of cheese.
‘Got a smoke?’ said Meatyard.
‘No.’
Kleist set out what could only be described as an ungenerous interpretation of four days’ worth of edibles onto a square of cloth.
‘Where you from?’ asked Kleist.
‘None of your fucking business.’
Kleist’s expression did not change. He stood up, looked at Meatyard and then kicked sand all over the food he’d just laid out. Neither of them said anything. Kleist got on his horse and left to catch up with the others.
6
Life is like a pond into which an idle child drops a pebble and from that act the ripples spread outwards. Wrong. Life is a stream and not a stream in spate, just an ordinary piddling sort of stream with its routine eddies, whirls and no-account vortices. But the vortex and the ripple uncover a root, and then another, and then they undermine the bank and the tree by the stream falls down across the stream and diverts the water and villagers come to find out what has happened to their supply and find the coal unearthed by the falling tree and miners come, and whores to serve the miners and men to manage the whores and a town of tents and mud becomes a place of wood and mud, then bricks and mud, then cobbles to pave the street, then the law arrives to walk the cobbles that pave the streets, then the coal gives out but the town lives on or it dies away. And all because of a piddling stream and its piddling whirls and vortices. And so it is with the life of men, driven by the many-fingered hand of the invisible.
The visit that would have brought death to Thomas Cale at the hand of the Two Trevors was stalled by a drink of water from a tainted well, its messengers herded back to where they came from by a long-time friend who couldn’t really care less whether he lived or died, back to a city where the wife of the long-time careless friend was wandering the streets with her newborn girl, thinking her husband dead who was now returning towards her and who, in a few days, would pass no more than thirty yards from her in the great crowds that now crushed inside the walls of Spanish Leeds. Over and again their paths would nearly cross but for the little whirls and vortices pulling them a fraction this way and then a fraction that.
Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, sometimes lionish, sometimes very like a whale, but all the most cheerful philosophers agree that even the blackest cloud has a silver lining. And during the days and nights of wretchedness when Kevin Meatyard ruled, Cale discovered that the old ways he had of dealing with suffering came back to him. In the Sanctuary he had learned to withdraw inside his head, vanish to other places in his mind, places of warmth and food and marvellous things – angels with wings who did whatever you said, talking dogs, adventures without pain, even death without tears and sudden blissful resurrections, peace and quiet and no one anywhere near. Now for a couple of hours a day he could do the same when the retching and the madness gave him some elbow room. Daydreams came to his defence; for minutes at a time he found himself back among the lakes at Treetops, swimming in the cool waters, picking signal crabs out of the streams, thinking about the word he’d found one day for the sound of water on small stones as he pulled the crabs apart and ate them raw with the tops of wild garlic, just the way IdrisPukke had shown him. And then at night, as the long-winged bugs in the wood made their wonderful pulsating racket, they would talk and talk and he’d lap it up, sitting on one of the chairs that were almost like beds as IdrisPukke poured him a light ale and handed out the accumulated wisdom of half a century, insight, as he frequently pointed out, you couldn’t buy at any price.
‘People treat the present moment as if it is just a stopping point on the way to some great goal that will happen in the future, and then they are surprised that the long day closes; they look back on their life and see that the things they let go by so unregarded, the small pleasures they dismissed so easily were in fact the true significance of their lives – all the time these things were the great and wonderful successes and purpose of their existence.’
Then he would pour Cale another quarter pint, not too much.
‘All utopias are the work of cretins and the well-intentioned people who work towards the foundation of a better future are half-wits. Imagine the heaven-on-earth where turkeys fly around ready-roasted and perfect lovers find perfect love with only a little satisfactory delay and live happily ever after. In such a place, men and women would die of boredom or hang themselves in despair, well-tempered men would fight and kill to be relieved of the horrors of contentment. Pretty soon this utopia would contain more suffering than nature inflicts on us as it is.’
‘You sound like Bosco.’
‘Not so. He wants to wipe cats from the face of the earth because they like to eat fish and catch birds. You might as well wish for a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb. But you’re half right, in a way. I agree with Bosco up to a point – it’s true that this world is hell. But while I, too, am appalled by humanity as a gross caricature I also feel sorry for it: in this hideous existence so full of suffering, we are at one and the same time the tormented souls in hell and the devils doing the tormenting. We are fellow sufferers, so the most necessary qualities to possess are tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity. We all need forgiveness and so we all owe it. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. These are virtues, young man, in which, and I mean this kindly, you are sorely lacking.’
At this last offering, Cale pretended to be asleep, accompanied by exaggerated snores.
But drifting into the past was a place full of traps. He wanted to remember the first time he had seen Arbell naked – bliss it was to be alive that night. But the pleasure and pain, love and anger, lived too much cheek by jowl for this to take him into another world. Better to stick to wonderful meals, to memories of teasing Vague Henri about the enormous size of his head, of listening to IdrisPukke and getting the last word with everyone. But also he would think and argue with himself and try to work out what he really knew: that the world was like a stream full of gyrations, twirls and weedy entanglements, and that wherever you went the water always leaked through your fingers.
The room they had now given him was simple enough: a reasonably comfortable bed, a chair and a table, a window that looked out over a pleasant garden full of slender elm trees. It had two luxuries: he slept on his own and he had a key to lock himself in and everyone else out. They’d been unwilling to provide one at first but he had insisted with a degree of vague menace and, having asked the Director of the Priory, they had warily given him what he wanted.
There was a light tap on the door. He looked through a small hole he had drilled through the thinnest part of the door and, satisfied, he unlocked it with a quick twist and stood well back. After all, you never knew.
Suspicious, the Priory servant stayed where he was.
‘There seems,’ he said, ‘to be a hole in the door.’
‘It was like that when I got here.’
‘Sister Wray has asked to see you.’
‘Who?’