T
he old man shuffles to a halt and stands for a
moment, head bowed, shaking a little, holding on
to his staff. He looks at the end of his days – but
then he’s looked that way for a long, long time.
Is he more exhausted by the walk he’s just
made across the moors, or by the thought of the
miles he will walk tomorrow? Maybe it’s just the
weight of all those years of guilt. I don’t much
care.
He’s suffered long and hard, but so have I. I’ll
waste no sympathy on him. His death would free
us both, but, spiteful to the last, he seems to go
on and on. Maybe he’s immortal, for we’ve walked
together for centuries now. Soon it will be nineteen hundred years since the birth of Jesus.
Our dress is very different from those about
us, but there is something in the magic that
surrounds us that means I’m hardly noticed at
all. I’m seen and yet not seen. I flit like a
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thought into the heads of those I pass, and then
that thought flies on and I am forgotten in an
instant.
The old man’s clothes are no more than shabby
rags and his long hair and beard, both frosted
white, mark him as a travelling beggar and nothing more. There are plenty enough of them in
this new age, just as there were of old.
We’re back in our own country. We’re once
again in England after so many years in foreign
parts. It’s different now, and yet the same, like
the ghost of the girl still visible in an old woman’s
face.
The old fellow sits down on a low wall and
leans the tall staff against it, resting his bony
arms on his wasted thighs. I can see his lips
moving silently. Is he praying? Are you praying,
you old sinner?
It’s cold. The leaves have fallen from the trees
and redwings hunt among the tangled hedge for
the last of the berries. The old man shivers and
hunches his shoulders.
He pretends he doesn’t know I’m here, but we
both know he does. I’m always here. We’re tied
together and he knows it. We might each of us
wish it weren’t so, but it is and there’s not a thing
either of us can do about it.
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3
He lifts his head. He raises his eyes and looks
at me. As soon as he sees me, I watch the usual
burst of pain rack his body. After a moment, he
looks at me again, his face pale and contorted,
his eyes sunken. He searches my face for something – pity? – but finds nothing of comfort. He
closes his eyes and hangs his head.
A young man walks past me, dressed in black,
a scarf tied round his neck. He pays me no heed.
He seems caught up in his own thoughts, muttering quietly to himself.
He’s a big man, with black unruly hair. His
clothes, though respectable, are also a little
shabby. He seems absent-minded. His large eyes
are watery and he has the air of a sleepwalker
about him.
All in all, he has the look of someone cultured
but not someone of any means. Perhaps he is a
country parson or schoolteacher. Whoever he is,
his life is about to change for ever.
Bells ring out from the church tower in the
town. A horse and cart rumbles by and the man
stands aside and finds himself beside the old
tramp, who he had clearly not noticed till then.
He looks at him with his large, kind eyes.
The young man is about to speak – perhaps to
ask if he can be of any help – when the old man’s
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hand shoots out like a snake and clutches at the
stranger’s sleeve. He tries to pull away, telling
the old man to leave him be. He does so with good
humour. But there is a quiver of fear in his voice.
As well there might be.
The young man tells him that he is expected somewhere – that friends are waiting for him – that he
has to go. I almost feel sorry for him. He has no idea
what he is about to hear. He asks again, his voice
more pleading now, for the old man to leave hold.
But he doesn’t let go.
‘There was a ship,’ begins the old man hoarsely.
The young man laughs but his patience begins
to fade and again he tells the old man to leave
him be. His tone is angry now and the old man
looses his grip. But it means nothing. His true
hold on the young man is only just beginning. He
fixes him with his shadowed eyes, twinkling like
rock pools. The young man becomes still.
Though I have watched this scene acted out a
thousand times before, it still pulls me in: the
moment when the old man traps his prey. The
young man sits alongside the wizened old traveller,
staring intently at his leathery face. Passers-by
who had noticed the old man stop the stranger, now
seem not to see either of them at all and continue
on their way without giving a sideways glance.
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5
And so the old man begins his tale: a tale I
have heard many, many times before. In any
event, I hardly need to hear it told. It’s not something I’m ever likely to forget. I was there, after
all, though you would scarcely know it by the
way he tells the story.
You’d think you might have more than a passing word to say about your own nephew, you old
liar! Yes, that’s right: that withered old bag of
bones over there is my uncle. My own flesh and
blood, heaven help me.
He is my own father’s brother. He hails from
the same West Country town that I do, though so
much time has gone by now I no longer feel that
we were kin at all. I wish we weren’t.
It is a sure sign of a lack of any knowledge of
the world when country folk tell you that their
own particular patch of land is the best in all the
world, but that is exactly what I once thought of
my small stretch of the Somerset coast.
And strange to say that though I have travelled
far and wide, I still feel the same. All those years
I spent dreaming of foreign lands and now I have
the same yearning for my home.
I would give anything to see my home again,
though I know that everyone and everything I
knew will long since have turned to dust.
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Even so, I would love, just one more time, to
walk the moss-floored oak woods, to stand on the
harbour wall or skim pebbles across the breakers
as I once did. These things are like a dream to me
now. They are like words written in mist.
And yet they are there still in my memory and
perhaps I can make them live again. But where
to start my story? Which beginning shall I
choose? Yes, I think it must start on the day I saw
the pilot’s son in the woods . . .
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PART THE FIRST
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I
W
e lived in a little hunchbacked cottage on a
tree-lined track that led out from the town and
up into the wooded slopes beyond. We went to the
town regularly to sell our wares – my mother
made baskets – and to buy provisions, but we saw
few people at the cottage.
It was a small place but comfortable and, like
many others of those times, with a wooden frame
and thatched roof across the house and the adjoining barn. Dog roses climbed over the garden fence
and honeysuckle grew over the porch.
My mother had a little vegetable patch where
she grew beans and cabbages, and a small orchard
of apple and plum trees, and beyond that lay the
woods of oak and hazel that coated the slopes
leading down to the pebble beaches below.
I slept in the top of the house, the beams crowding in around me. My father had cut me a round
window in the gable end and I could crouch on
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my bed and look out across our vegetable patch
and towards the woods. I loved to look at the
woods at night and hear the owls and, sometimes,
in warmer weather, the nightingales that lived
there.
My parents had taught me all about the nature
of the local fields – my father about the animals
and birds, my mother about the plants and
flowers and trees. I could name almost anything
we came across by the time I was seven.
Often, if I couldn’t sleep and the weather
wasn’t too cold, I would take down the round
shutter my father had made to cover the window
at night and I’d look out at the night woods and
wonder what animals went about their unseen
business among the trees.
One summer evening as shadows grew, I was
kneeling on my bed and looking out when I saw a
figure I knew well, standing in the clearing
beyond my mother’s little vegetable patch. My
mother was dozing in her chair by the open back
door and scarcely noticed me passing as I went
out.
The pilot’s son stood exactly where I had seen
him from the window. He hadn’t moved a muscle.
I walked slowly towards him, stealthily, not wishing to frighten him.
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11
The pilot, who steered a safe course through
the treacherous shallows for ships coming in and
out of the bay, had been a good friend of my father.
They’d known each other since they were children. He’d been kind to us since my father died. I
had a strong suspicion that he bought more
baskets from my mother than he could ever use.
And I had known the pilot’s son all my childhood, but I could not say we were friends exactly
as he had always been something of a strange
boy. We had played together as young children,
but as he got older, more and more, he entered
into a world of his own making and we didn’t
talk as true friends might.
He was pale-skinned with pitch-black hair and
eyes that seemed a size too large for his thin and
delicate features. He was always out and about,
come rain or shine, but his smooth, wan skin was
like that of a newborn infant.
His hands were long and thin fingered and
those fingers seemed as though they were without bones. When he made gestures – as he often
did, for no obvious reason – they moved like
seaweed fronds in the tide.
‘Hello!’ I whispered, following his gaze.
He didn’t respond and I was about to speak
again when he turned to face me. He appeared to
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take a moment to remember who I was. Then his
eyes opened wide.
‘The Devil is coming to your house,’ he said, all
of a sudden.
I was momentarily startled, as you can perhaps
imagine. But then little of what the pilot’s boy
said made any sense. It was better not to try to
make sense of it. On this occasion, for some
reason, I decided to humour him.
‘What do you mean?’ I said with a nervous
chuckle.
He looked at me with an odd expression, a little
surprised, no doubt, that I was actually trying to
understand him. He searched my face for any
sign that I was joking at his expense.
‘The Devil,’ he repeated, as though I had been
too stupid to understand his meaning the first
time.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I saw him,’ he said, pointing to his head. ‘In
here.’
‘And did he have horns and goat’s feet? Was he
lit by flames?’
The pilot’s boy regarded me for a moment and
then shook his head, as though it was not worth
the effort to explain to me. Then, seeming to
change his mind, he turned back and spoke again.
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13
‘I don’t know about the things you say,’ he said.
‘But he is the Devil.’
He looked so serious; I had to find out more.
‘And he was going to my house? You’re sure?’
The pilot’s son nodded solemnly but said nothing more. I shrugged, uncertain whether to
continue this conversation or just let him grow
bored with it. Somehow I couldn’t let it go.
‘He was probably just a customer wanting to
order some baskets from my mother,’ I said.
‘What did he look like? Maybe I know him.’
The pilot’s son frowned and cocked his head,
closing his eyes clearly trying to picture the scene.
‘He had a rabbit in one hand, two birds in the
other,’ he continued.
I shrugged and raised my eyebrows.
‘What?’ I said, confused.
The pilot’s son opened his eyes. The huge pupils
shrank until they were pinpricks.
‘He carried a rabbit in one hand. In the other
two birds.’
‘How was he dressed?’ I asked, more and more
confused.
‘Like a man,’ said the pilot’s boy. ‘But he wears
a cross on his chest and has another on his back
that mocks the first – for it kills as the other
saves.’
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I was baffled. The image of this man – if man
he was – was getting stranger and stranger, but I
felt I had to try to make sense of it.
‘I’m sure you’re mistaken,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he
was just a man like any other.’
The pilot’s boy frowned at me. He shook his
head.
‘But why then did he have so many demons
with him?’ he said.
‘Demons?’ I asked in amazement. ‘What do you
mean?’
The pilot’s boy looked down and shook his head
rapidly, and clenched and flexed his long fingers.
I had seen this before. Whenever he reached a
point where he did not want to explain any more,
he closed his eyes and shook his head, and – as he
did now – ran away, flapping his arms like a bird
and squawking.
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II
T
hough I knew the words of the pilot’s boy to
be nonsense, they bothered me. I was still thinking about what he’d said when a hand touched
me on the shoulder and I almost jumped into the
branches of a nearby tree.
‘What has my young friend been telling you?’
I turned, relieved to see a smiling, bearded face
I knew well. It was the hermit who lived alone in
the oak woods that covered the hills thereabouts.
He lived in a hut among the trees on a hillside by
the sea. It was nothing more than a pile of sticks
held together by honeysuckle and moss. How he
survived there in winter, no one knew.
I liked him and would often seek him out when
I had no work to do. He would give me some
nettle tea and tell me stories. They were strange
stories, and though I did not always know exactly
what he meant by them, I liked his voice and I
liked the way my brain seemed to quiver after
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listening to them, as if he had roused some part
of it that had been sleeping and it woke, confused
and restless.
‘I don’t know,’ I said finally, in answer to his
question. ‘He talks so oddly. Why is he like that?’
The hermit laced his fingers together.
‘Some say he is a changeling,’ he said matterof-factly. ‘That the elfin folk took the pilot’s baby
and swapped him for one of their own.’
I stared off in the direction in which the boy
had gone.
‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.
The hermit shrugged.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘He has the look of an elfin
child about him.’
It was true. There was something other-worldly
about his appearance.
‘I just thought he was crazy,’ I said.
‘Crazy?’ said the hermit, waving his hand in
front of his face dismissively. ‘That word can
cover many things, my boy. Perhaps he sees things
that we cannot.’
‘But how do you know he sees anything?’ I
asked.
The hermit shrugged again.
‘How would I know that he does not?’
I smiled.
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17
‘I knew a man who went mad,’ said the hermit
as he set off walking back to his home among the
trees with me following behind. ‘He thought to
himself that we are not really, truly, here at all.’
‘Not here?’ I said.
‘Not truly,’ continued the hermit. ‘His thought
was that we were all players in another man’s
dream.’
I frowned. The hermit continued.
‘At first it was an idle thought,’ he said. ‘We
have all had such fancies, after all.’
I had never had such a fancy, but I kept it to
myself for fear the hermit would think me dull.
We reached the hermit’s nest of branches and
twigs. A fire burned nearby and we sat down on a
log beside it.
‘But gradually,’ said the hermit, ‘this thought
took root, like ivy in a wall. It wormed itself
through the mortar and slowly dislodged brick
after brick until his mind came tumbling
down.’
‘And what happened to him?’ I asked.
‘He threw himself from the church tower of
the town in which he lived,’ he said. ‘He was sure
that he could come to no harm because in truth
he was only a phantasm in another man’s sleeping mind.’
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‘He was wrong then,’ I said. ‘For I’m just as
sure he dashed his brains out when he hit the
ground.’
The hermit nodded.
‘He did,’ he said. ‘Most certainly, he did. But
that doesn’t disprove his theory.’
‘How?’ I said.
‘Because perhaps the sleeping man dreamt a
dream in which a man thought himself to be in a
dream and in that dream he threw himself from a
church tower and killed himself.’
I frowned, trying to take in what the hermit
said. He laughed. But I was troubled by this line
of thought and was not so easily diverted from it.
‘Perhaps we make the world ourselves,’ he said.
‘Perhaps we invent it all at every moment.
Perhaps all things are dead until we give them
life with our imaginations. Perhaps there are a
million worlds, each one existing only for that
one person and none other.’
I shook my head dizzily.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
The hermit smiled.
‘I shouldn’t boggle your brain with such
notions,’ he said.
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I like having my brain
boggled.’
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19
I picked up a twig that lay at my feet and
held it to my face. It was encrusted with
several sorts of lichen, yellow, white and pale
grey. Some covered the bark whilst others
formed a kind of forest of branches that echoed
in miniature the wood we sat in. Worlds within
worlds.
It was late now. Night was coming in and draining all the colours from the scene. The hermit’s
fire glowed more intensely and threw our shadows on the trees and on the mossy woodland
floor. What colour is moss at twilight? Not green,
nor any colour known by name.
A nightingale began to sing in the trees nearby,
its voice startling us both and then holding us in
its grip for the length of its song.
‘Some say it is a sad song,’ whispered the
hermit, as reverently as if we had been in church
and the bird’s song had been a sermon. ‘But I
don’t think of it that way.’
The bird let loose another burst of its song.
And I had to agree that it didn’t make me feel sad
at all. It lifted my heart and made the whole wood
come alive, as though it had been waiting for the
nightingale to sing.
‘The pilot’s boy says that he sees spirits,’ said
the hermit. ‘He says that in the air around us are
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different spirits, good and bad. They are attracted
to us depending on our characters. A wholly good
person will attract only good spirits.’
I thought of the man the pilot’s son said he had
seen, and the demons he brought with him.
‘And a bad person?’
‘A bad person will attract bad spirits – demons,
the boy calls them,’ said the hermit. ‘And that
must mean that there are many more demons in
the air than angels.’
‘Is that why you live out here on your own,’ I
asked, ‘because you think people are bad?’
The hermit looked at me very seriously.
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t shun
people because I am better than they are. I shun
them because I do not deserve to be with other
people. I shun them as a penance.’
He looked away, deep in thought.
‘You don’t really believe he sees these spirits?’
I asked.
‘I do believe he sees them,’ said the hermit.
‘Whether they are there or not, I couldn’t say.
And whether they have the meaning he gives
them, I likewise couldn’t guarantee.’
‘Surely demons could only be bad,’ I said with a
grin.
To my surprise, the hermit did not agree.
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21
‘Perhaps. But perhaps we need demons to drive
us to good things,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they are
neither good nor bad, but simply some vital part
of the world, like air or water.’
I frowned.
‘Come,’ said the hermit. ‘It’s getting dark. Time
you were home.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, getting up. ‘There’s no need to
go with me.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said with a smile. ‘With the air
full of demons, I would feel happier making sure
that you got safely to your house. Your mother
would expect it of me.’
I smiled. The hermit walked with me until I
could see my cottage and then I realised that he
was no longer there and I turned to see him
standing alone in the moon shadows. I waved and
he waved back, then he walked away.
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