To the River (6 page)

Throughout his life Gideon Mantell was afflicted by a sense of waste, for he felt himself shut out of the intellectual society he craved on account of his poverty and the heavy demands that doctoring made on his time. His diary is a melancholy litany of slights and humiliations suffered at the hands of the more educated and better born, and barely a year goes by without bursts of bitter self-recrimination at the squandering of his talents. The iguanodon acts as a counter to these thoughts, for though Mantell would go on to discover other dinosaurs and write and publish other books, it is this first find that stands as his monument. The discovery of the giant lizard shows him at his finest, summoning back from a litter of bones a world that had become buried in time, with not much more at his disposal than a chisel and a dogged refusal to be proved wrong.

There’s a strange coda to Mantell’s story. A persistent rumour circulates that after his death a section of his spine was stolen by Richard Owen, though how this was supposed to have been facilitated I’ve never seen explained. In fact, Mantell himself left a sum of money in his will to fund a post-mortem, adding that ‘if any parts are worth preserving for examples of morbid changes, let them be sent to the Hunterian Collection’, the same place where he had found the evidence that proved his giant tooth was reptilian in origin. The spine – which turned out to demonstrate an unusual and presumably intensely painful lateral curvature – was pickled and exhibited for almost a century in the Hunterian Museum alongside all sorts of oddities, from Roman teeth and skulls to the skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne. In 1941, during the early days of the Blitz, the museum was bombed and something like 40,000 anatomical specimens were smashed to smithereens. A further rumour, repeated in almost all his biographies, is that Mantell’s spine was among their number, but this is not the case. The spine survived the war intact, and was inadvertently disposed of by the museum’s staff in 1970 during a clearout of the shelves, by which time much of Mantell’s grand collection of fossils had been sold, lost or dispersed, an act of unmaking that this time really was contrived by the malevolent Richard Owen.

I could see Whiteman’s Green from where I stood. It was one of the patches of wood that lay just to the south of the ridge. The Downs were blue behind it, and beyond them, invisible, were the low lands, the marshes that ran at sea level from Lewes to the coast. It was a wrench to imagine it as it must once have been: a tropical forest divided by a mighty and nameless river; a steamy world of tree ferns and cycads in which the English oak and ash were utterly unknown. I imagined the iguanodon passing between those flowerless forms, calling its rough music, the branches snapping beneath its feet. It was a sight that would never again be glimpsed on this earth, for it is one of the quirks of evolution that a design, once discarded, will not be repeated.

I don’t know if Virginia Woolf knew of Gideon Mantell, but her last novel, completed the winter before she died, is full of visions of the primitive world he unearthed from beneath the Weald.
Between the Acts
is set in a country house on a summer’s day right at the precipice of the Second World War. The narrative slips between characters, picking up stray thoughts and soliloquies as a radio picks up static. One of the women, Lucy, is reading a book called
Outline of History
, which merges two real works: G.M. Trevelyan’s
History of England
and
The Outline of History
by H. G. Wells. Throughout the day images of the rich, sequestered English countryside are set in contrast to the prehistoric wilderness of the dinosaurs this book describes.

There is – initially at least – a larky comedy to these juxtapositions. One of the first comes early in the morning, when Lucy is lying in bed:

She . . . had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon, from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend.

Entranced by her vision, which compresses time most oddly, she fails for a moment to distinguish the maid who’s entered the room bearing a tray of tea in blue china ‘from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree in the green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest’.

Between the Acts
is a novel obsessed with the past, and how to make sense of it when confronted with the rupturing effect of war. Much of the narrative is concerned with describing a village play, in which England’s bygone days are presented as a sort of mocking, tongue-in-cheek pastiche, a mash-up of Elizabethan poetry, Restoration comedy and Victorian triumphalism, complete with forgotten lines and interpolations by cows and rain. What is being sent up here is the official, imperial approach to history, which sees the past as a continuous pageant of coronations and battles; an approach regarded with intense suspicion by Woolf and her circle.

Despite this uneasiness, the past also proves intensely consolatory. In fact, it is startling how much the novel resembles an archaeological dig: a dig that has worked down through the cultural psyche of England, turning up the layered finds of centuries of thought. It’s constructed largely from snatches of overheard or overlapping conversations, which themselves often contain fragmentary references – quotes, misquotes and allusions – to the great works of prior eras: scraps of Keats and
Lear
; orts of Racine, Swinburne and Lord Tennyson. These fragmentary relics testify to human endurance and continuity against the odds, and so too in a wider sense do Lucy’s visions of the primeval past.

The novel was written on the brink of a great shift in the world, the incalculable change that followed on the heels of the Second World War. It was a change Woolf anticipated but didn’t live to see. The approaching conflict appears only in glimpses, but the intensity of its threat is very strong. Sometimes the tone rises almost to despair, but
Between the Acts
is also playful and not immune to hope. It ends at night, in the timeless darkness of Lucy’s visions. Violence, it is clear, will follow, but so too will love, for these are the cardinal points of experience in a world that existed long before man descended to the stage and spoke.

I left the ridge then and began to walk roughly east, descending slowly into one of the valleys through which the river flowed. Beneath me was a field of sheep and as I passed between the skinny ewes and fat, unshorn lambs, a hundred or more rooks rose out of a single oak, winging across the field and heading south-west with the wind. The noise rooks make
en masse
is staggering. What were they doing? Holding a meeting? Plotting a coup? A few swung back, the jacks of the pack, and I could hear more coughing in the trees, but they were nothing on the cacophonous crowd I’d flighted. The sheep looked up, nostrils flared.
Mayor!
, they bellowed. And again, more plaintively,
Maayor!
They followed me to the gate and watched as I went, yellow eyes slitted against the unwavering light.

It was hot now, the beginning of a heatwave that would grip the coast for a fortnight, before the summer subsided into rain. I passed up a dusty track into a farm, where I wandered bewildered between sheds that bore warnings of asbestos, unable to find the path. In an outdoor school a slouching girl was failing to get a pony over a set of trotting poles. Like an idiot I wasn’t wearing any socks, and my right foot had begun to burn.
Keep hunting
, read a sign in the window of Sideneye Cottage, the words quartered white and red by the St George’s flag.

The track gave way to a lane full of wild roses, sugar pink and sugar white. They were making hay in the valley, the blue bales embossed against a suddenly fallen sky. The hedgerow here was stuffed to bursting, a botanist’s sweetshop, full of St John’s Wort and campion, beetroot-pink hedge woundwort, agrimony, meadowsweet and the silver-leaved tormentil that can both stem the flow of blood and dye leather red. I wanted to sink down among them and let my eyes slide shut for a while, but cars kept swooping by and the lane seemed – to my sore heel at least – to run on for ever and a week.

At last the path swung free, down a flight of wooden steps into one of the prettiest fields I’ve ever seen, full of rustling pink grasses hedged by elder foaming with flowers the colour of Jersey cream. I lay on my back under an oak tree and feasted, hated shoes flung off, on oatcakes, cheese and a Granny Smith, pared into slices with the rusty unlockable knife. Flies were landing on my rucksack, resting there a few seconds and then lifting clean away. Each time I closed my eyes the noise of grasshoppers switched on, as if my sight needed to be muffled before I could begin to catch what the day had to say.

I’d barely seen the Ouse all morning and now I could hear water running low under the nettles, a tributary trickling to the valley beneath. A couple of wood pigeons were entreating one another to
take two cows, Susan
,
take twooo cows, Susan
. Behind or above them I could hear a train passing, calling with its horn as it reached the massive viaduct that vaulted the river. The wind was sifting the leaves and the passing sun cast streaming cloud shadows across the countless grasses. There was only one more field ahead, and then the path would meet the water.

I’d had enough of waiting. I lolloped under the viaduct, hardly pausing to admire its 11 million bricks. For years I’d crossed this bridge twice daily to work, craning each time for a glimpse of the river pothering beneath. Now I was out, scot free, and I didn’t have time to look up to where the trains rattled past, packed with people rebreathing air branded with discontent. At the edge of Rivers Wood, though, I slowed. The landscape had undergone one of its periodic shifts, oak giving way to alder, the high ground to the low. The trees cut out the light, discouraging the grasses. It was a gloomy place, the water stripped of its camouflage and sunk down into the clay. I walked along the bank and came to a halt by a holly bush, setting down beside a clump of wilted ransoms that released as I crushed it the pungent reek of garlic. Upriver I could hear the water running over stones, but here it came slow and grey through the sheer banks, eight feet high and vertebraed with tree roots in fantastic, impossible knots.

Later that day I would walk into Lindfield and eat chicken tikka in the village pub. I’d see a clump of orchids growing in a verge festooned with litter and I’d sleep at last in a truckle bed in a house that had been built in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, surrounded by a thousand-year-old box hedge, the oldest in Sussex. The bed was made up with sheets that had been densely hand-embroidered, white on white, and in it I passed a turbulent night, oppressed by the heat and the constant sound of a spring I could not see.

None of that mattered. As I rose I saw a deer drinking. She didn’t see me as she climbed the bank; then all of a sudden she did. Her hindquarters bunched the way a horse’s will, a motion I knew with my own muscles as the prelude to a buck, and then she sprang away. She moved in an oddly rigid, rocking-horse gait, bounding on stiffened legs across the track and into the darkness of the wood. She was neither rare nor extraordinary, that deer. There were thousands like her, as there were millions like me. But there she was, attending to her own path, which, for a moment, intersected mine. She was as unlikely as the iguanodon, and as imprisoned in time. It was a weave we were all caught up in. Beside me the stream was clicking east, relentless as a needle. A stitch in time, a stitch in time. Was there really more to the world than this? The details of the day – the cool still air, the sharp stink of garlic – were for a moment so precise that the great and hidden age of the earth seemed as unlikely as a dream. I ducked my head, bewildered, and followed the deer into the trees.

III

GOING UNDER

I
WAS STAYING THAT NIGHT
in a house called Copyhold Hollow, which was set beneath a towering wall of beeches. The garden was bursting with flowers – peonies, columbines and overblown roses that strewed their scent through the clear dark air. I didn’t sleep well, and as I lay on my truckle bed drifting in and out of dreams I thought I saw rivers I knew only from books turning like snakes through their shifting terrains. There was Eliot’s strong brown god; Joyce’s Liffey; the plum cake-smelling Thames of
The Wind in the Willows
; and the terrible river Alph of Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan
.

Territories overlaid each other, or floated weightless, free of any known geography. The rivers riddled through worlds both real and false; they welled up in springs and fountains and gave out on great bleak estuaries and marshes. They ran through Dickens, George Eliot and the Bible, carrying bodies and babies in baskets. There was the Say and the Floss, Conrad’s glittering black Congo, the swift trout courses of Hemingway and Maclean,
Huck Finn
’s Mississippi, and the Thames of
The Wasteland
and Virginia Woolf. Though they were nothing more than paper rivers, I felt almost drunk upon them, for they were the true sources of my own obsessive hydrophilia.