Over the years, I often woke to find myself standing at the very edge of Ryhope Wood, damp with sweat, convinced that the shade of my mother had beckoned to me urging me to enter, to follow, to find her, to bring her home! And she seemed to call out: A girl, centuries older than you think, took you on a wild ride. Chris! She, too, was ghost-born. Open your eyes! If you listen to me, it may not be too late!
Her warning, I now realise, came in my dreams, insubstantial, yet affecting.
And yet, how quickly I dismissed these sensations as no more than guilt and grief at the loss of a woman who had mattered to me so much.
There was something else which struck me as strange, in those last years of the 1930s, before the war in Europe would change our lives for ever: whenever the field by ‘Strong Against the Storm’ was ripe, with corn or beets, or grass if fallow, two trails would appear on the anniversary of my mother’s death, one leading towards the tree, the other leading to the wood.
To stand where the track divided was to hear an unearthly song, the sound of wind from a cavern; it was to smell the deep earth, to hear lost voices. Perhaps I was catching a glimpse, by odour and touch, of the twin gates that would one day confront me: those of Horn and Ivory, of Truth and the Lie.
I have often wondered if my father at this time entered into an odd form of dialogue with me, he writing in the pages of his journal, me responding with naive, awkward questions which he dismissed to my face, but seemed to answer later in his ungainly scrawl.
Frequently, I prowled the closely written pages of his journal and fought the wildness of his mind, finding, in my reading, a certain satisfaction, since my awareness of the wood and of events was slowly broadened. In this way I discovered the meaning of the ogham inscription that Kylhuk’s ‘marker’ had left that time before …
He has marked the slathan … the burden is lighter for the ever-searching, fearless man, Kylhuk.
And I read that Kylhuk, according to legend, as a young man had arrogantly enlisted the help of Arthur of the Britons and his knights – Kei and Bedevere and the rest – to help in his marriage to Olwen, a ‘giant’s’ daughter. Olwen’s father had set Kylhuk a series of wild and wonderful tasks, from the ploughing up of whole forests in just a day, and the finding of magic cauldrons, to the rescue of an entombed god and a confrontation with animals older than time.
But there was nothing in Huxley’s journal to suggest a meaning for the word slathan, which settled upon my youthful shoulders like some silent, watching bird of prey.
Only the reference to ‘the Ivory Gate’ openly puzzled my father. All he wrote was:
According to Homer and the Roman writer, Virgil, false dreams, dreams that delude the sleeper, enter the world through the Gate of Ivory; and true dreams, truth, if you will, through the Gate of Horn.
This legend does not link with the other, that of Kylhuk, and the reference is perplexing.
I noted this entry with interest, but was too young at the time to understand the significance of these mythological ‘dreamgates.’
All of the entries in Huxley’s journals, convoluted and confused as they were at times, related to manifestations of mythological creatures and heroes that my father called myth imagoes or ‘mythagos’ (I shall keep the man’s eccentric spelling of the coined word).
The ‘forms’ of these mythagos, he believed, arose in Ryhope Wood as a result of being seeded by the human minds close by. They would first appear at the edge of vision, in the peripheral area of awareness where imagination and reality co-exist in shadowy tension. But the very fact that they could be glimpsed here, haunting ghosts, vague, startling movements seen from the corner of the eye, meant that in the deeper forest they were being given form, and life, and certainly a past … a history and a role in myth, born with the solid flesh, and a life that functioned as it had functioned in prehistoric times, perhaps. They could arise time and time again, conforming to memory and legend in many ways, but utterly unpredictable. And dangerous.
Indeed, there was a short entry referring to my mother that saddened me deeply, though again I couldn’t grasp its full significance:
Jennifer sees her. Jennifer! Poor J. She has declined. She is close to death. What can I do? She is haunted. The girl from the greenwood haunts her. Jennifer more often hysterical, though when the boys are around she remains coldly silent, functioning as a mother but no longer as a wife. She is fading. Giving up all hope.
Nothing in me hurts at the thought of this.
The girl from the greenwood? Not the ‘whispering woman’, I imagined. And surely not the impish girl on the grey horse! So to whom had he been referring? And what role had this ‘greenwood woman’ played in my mother’s suicide?
There were no answers to be found at the time, and life at Oak Lodge settled into an uneasy and grim routine.
Two
Years passed. A devastating war swept across Europe, and when Steven and I came of age we were both called up and saw action on the Front. When the war ended, I returned as soon as possible to Oak Lodge, and the brooding and obsessed presence of my father. I had hoped Steven would be there, but he sent an enigmatic, oddly sad letter: he was staying on in France, with the family of a nurse he had met in the field hospital.
He was well, recovering from a shrapnel wound, basking in the warmth of the South of France and quite at peace with himself.
This announcement made me feel very melancholy, very alone.
And I was still wallowing in a similar feeling of loneliness and pointlessness on the day, in December, some years later, when my father finally turned on me like a wild creature.
A heavy snow had fallen during the night. I had stayed in the village, sleeping on a couch at the crowded local hotel, but woke at six, made tea, then gratefully accepted a lift on a passing truck as far as Ryhope Manor. The main pathways on the estate had already been swept clear of snow, right down to the farm, and from there I followed the tracks of the tractors that had been out at dawn with hay for the animals.
By following the hedges and the stream, where the snow was thinner, I came quite soon to the garden of Oak Lodge. As I jumped the gate, I noticed what I can only describe as a panic of footprints in the snow of the garden, as if there had been a chase, or a wild dance, circles of impressions leading from the kitchen door, through the spiral formations and then to the gate. The single trail then crossed the field to the wood. The impressions were small. Deeper marks in the snow showed where the person had fallen or stumbled.
These were not my father’s footprints, I was certain of that. Whose, then? A woman’s, I felt.
The house was in chaos; someone had ransacked the kitchen, opening and emptying cupboards, battering at cans of food, smashing jars of preserved fruits and vegetables. There was blood on the surfaces, and in the sink, and a towel was blood-stained where it had been used to mop at a gash. Nervously, I walked through the rest of the house. My bedroom too had been ransacked, though nothing seemed to be missing. In his own room, Huxley lay naked and in a deep slumber, face down on the bed, his skin scratched and grazed, his eyes half opened. His right hand was clenched as if holding something, or frustrated by the loss of something which he had been gripping firmly.
‘What have you been up to?’ I whispered at him. ‘And what have you been eating?’ I added, because I had suddenly become aware of the odour in the room; not a human odour, not animal at all; no smell I could associate with winter. Indeed, there was the scent of summer grass and autumn berry in the atmosphere of this disrupted room.
‘Where have you been?’
I left him where he was, went downstairs and laid a fire. The house was freezing. And it was as I struggled to light the kindling in the grate that my father suddenly lurched into the room, still naked, his flesh pitted with the cold.
‘Where is she? What have you done with her?’
His appearance was startling. The growth of greying beard on his face and the strands of dishevelled hair made him look wild. The watery ga
ze was hypnotic; the wet slackness of his mouth after he screamed the words at me stunned me into silence. He looked quickly round the room, then lurched for one of the two shotguns stacked in the corner. He grabbed the weapon and swung it round.
‘Don’t be mad!’ I shouted at him, throwing up my hands as he pulled the triggers. The two dull clicks brought me back to furious reality. In the past, those guns had been kept loaded, the breeches broken.
He advanced on me with the empty weapon, his thigh bruising against the edge of the table, his eyes still shining.
‘Where is she? The girl! What have you done with her?’
‘There’s no one here. Dad, put the gun down. Get some clothes on. There’s no one here – just you and me.’
His answer was to swing the stock round to crack against my head, but I was too quick for him, avoiding the desperate blow and grabbing the barrel. We struggled for a few seconds and I was astonished at his strength, but I had learned a trick or two in the last few years and disabled him with the briefest of kicks. He howled, hunched over his battered flesh, clutching himself in agony. Then, like some berserk creature of old, he was on me again, hands at my throat, musty breath in my face.
‘Where is she? Where is she? I’ve waited too long for this encounter … I won’t let you interfere with it!’
‘There’s no one here. You. Me. An unlit fire. That’s it. Dad, stop fighting me.’
He seemed shocked, staring hard into my eyes, his own eyes wide with alarm. ‘Fighting you? I’m not fighting you, Chris.’
‘What, then?’ I whispered.
And he answered quietly, ‘I’m frightened of you.’
His words astonished me. I was too stunned to speak for a moment as I stared at the grey, apprehensive figure of my father in all his filthy glory. Then I simply asked, ‘Why? You have nothing to be frightened of …’
‘Because you saw me …’ he said, though he said it as if the statement should have been obvious. ‘Because you know …’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You know what I did. You saw me!’ He was suddenly exasperated. ‘Don’t pretend!’
‘You’re making no sense.’
‘Aren’t I?’
He was shaking, now, tears spilling from his eyes. I held him close to me. His body slackened, his gaze dropped, fatigue catching at his strength. I didn’t understand his words, but they had distressed me. There was an emptiness in this cold house again, a hollow sense, that I had last known when my mother had danced for me on that terrible day and I had felt that – because of a whisper – I was the cause of her anger, her hatred, and her suicide.
I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat. I wanted to be anywhere but here. For some reason the fire, which had refused to light at my urging, suddenly caught, and the dry kindling crackled in the flame. I helped my father down onto the sofa, now more than conscious of his nakedness and of the bruising on his groin. His hand stroked and soothed the wounded limb and he slumped to one side, tears rolling on his cheeks, glowing with the sudden fire. I pulled the cloth from the table and covered him, and like an old man he clutched at the edges, drew the warming blanket up to his throat.
‘She was here,’ he said quietly, and for a moment I thought he meant Jennifer Huxley, but he had never referred to my mother with such tenderness in his voice.
‘Who was here?’
‘She was here,’ he said. ‘I went with her. She was everything I had expected. She was everything. Everything I’d imagined. Everything …’
‘The girl from the woods?’
‘The girl …’ he whispered, touching a shaking hand to his eyes to wipe the tears.
‘Guiwenneth, you called her …’
‘Guiwenneth,’ he repeated, clutching at the blanket. ‘Exactly as her story had said. But she is mine. Created from my own mind. I had known that. But I hadn’t known what it would mean … Poor Jennifer. Poor Jennifer. I couldn’t help it. Forgive me …’
‘What does that mean? The girl was yours, you said. What does that mean?’
‘They reflect our needs,’ he answered, then turned his head to look at me, and suddenly all weakness had gone, only the canny look of the thinking man that I had known for all my life. It was as if his face tightened from the flaccid mask of despair to a stone-hard look that concealed all emotion. ‘They take from us. I should have known that. They reflect us, and they take from us. We are them. They are us. Mythagos! Two shadows from the same mind. I was curious; therefore, so was she. I was angry. Therefore, so was she … I longed for her in certain ways. Why should I have expected anything different from her?’
Suddenly, he threw the tablecloth aside and leaned towards me, hands at first seeming to go for my throat so that I pulled back defensively, but I think he had merely wanted to embrace me. He said, simply, ‘Did you see her? Any sign of her?’
‘She danced in the snow.’
‘Snow? Is it snowing?’
‘Last night. It’s quite deep out there. She went back to the wood, but she’d danced first.’
‘Back to the wood … If that’s so, then I can follow. There’ll be a way in for a moment. Into the wood. The way is open more clearly for a moment … Chris, make me some tea. Please! And a sandwich or two.’
‘Yes. Of course.’
And the man, so recently mad, so recently feral, walked from the room, a tablecloth for modesty, reappearing minutes later dressed for a winter’s walk, indifferent to me once again.
Three
I watched him go. He inspected the disturbed snow in the back garden, then quickly followed the strange trail into the scrub that led up to the wall of oak and elm that marked the near-impenetrable wood. He didn’t look back; he was swallowed by the winter darkness of the trees in an instant.
My curiosity got the better of me and I resolved to follow him. But first I entered the study, found his journals, and read the entries for the last few years.
They were very matter-of-fact, and I was struck by how repetitive many of his observations were. There were also several macabre references to my mother, written as if she were still alive.
I put these out of my mind. It was the recent visitor to the house who now fascinated me, and I had a name to go on. I leafed back through the volumes and found entry after entry referring to Guiwenneth. The two that excited me the most were these:
The girl again! From the woodland, close to the brook, she ran the short distance to the chicken huts and crouched there for a full ten minutes. I watched her from the kitchen, then moved through to the study as she prowled the grounds … The girl affects me totally. Jennifer has seen this, but what can I do? It is the nature of the mythago itself … She is truly the idealised vision of the Celtic Princess, lustrous red hair, pale skin, a body at once childlike yet strong. She is a warrior, but she carries her weapons awkwardly, as if unfamiliar with them. She is Guiwenneth of the Green!
Jennifer is unaware of these details, only the girl and my helpless attraction. The boys have not seen her, though they have certainly seen strange activity at the edge of the wood …
And from a later entry I learned this:
She is a warrior-princess from the time of the Roman invasion of northern Europe, but her characteristics, the essence of her story, are older of course. She is beguiling, intelligent, fast and vulnerable. Is she a benign and seductive form of the enchantress we know as Viviane? Or Morgan le Fey? This is an interesting heroine indeed, and she is as curious about me as am I of her. It is not surprising that my heart leaps to see her.
This time I cannot fail. She will be my guide to a greater understanding of all that rises from the past and is sustained inside Ryhope Wood itself.
I was intrigued. I dressed warmly and went into the woodland, following precisely along the line of the girl’s tracks, ducking below the branches and following the winding route between the trunks, aware that the snow was thinner here and that the light from above was rapidly fading – not because the day
was advancing into dusk, but because the whole nature of Ryhope was changing with every pace!
Suddenly, the winter had vanished.
Bemused, I stood and smelled spring. A brighter sunlight beckoned me forward and I entered a wide glade, a leaf-strewn clearing, criss-crossed with bramble, a fallen tree, now very rotten, cutting across its heart. All was stillness. All was silence. But this was not winter and my body was pricked with apprehension, my head whirling with the sudden sense of being watched. It was stranger and more chilling than the night patrols I had made in France, at the end of the war.
By closing my eyes, the fear subsided. But to stare steadily ahead was to experience movement, an intriguing movement, at the very edge of vision. To search for that movement with a more direct gaze was to see nothing but shadow and woodland. To hold steady was to experience a whole world of life and attention, so far into the corner of my eye that it might have been heat or light playing tricks on the budding leaves that had no business on the branches in this deep, December day.
I remembered something else that Huxley had once written: that the wood somehow turned you around, confusing the senses and sending you back to the edge. Small though Ryhope Wood was, it guarded itself against intruders, and I was now an intruder. A sudden panic gripped my senses. I turned and ran, bruising and grazing myself against the trees, finally, bursting from the edge, falling in the snow, scrabbling and swimming in the cold, refreshing mush.
‘Damn!’
Sitting up, after a while, I stared back along the way I had come.
For the first time in my life I had experienced the sensation that I was sure had first intrigued my father. Encounters with strange figures had featured large in my childhood years; but never this sense of being drawn in, turned inside out, scanned, approached, scrutinised and finally kicked back to the reality of snow.