Bones by the forest road, p.1
In Zodiac Light, page 1
About the Book
It is December 1922 and the aftershocks of the First World War continue to make themselves felt. Ex-soldier, poet and composer Ivor Gurney, suffering from bouts of paranoid schizophrenia, is transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford.
Neglected by the military and by his own family, and abandoned by all but a handful of his friends, Gurney begins a descent into the madness which he believes has long been waiting to claim him. Yet following his arrival at Dartford, it seems that he might find some calm and ease in his life, and thus achieve the status so many consider him still capable of.
But few of those now responsible for Gurney realize the consequences of their hopefulness. They have no real idea of what he endured on the Western Front and the effects it had on his mind. Ultimately it is not the war but the refusal of his admirers to acknowledge the trauma of his experience that will take him closer to the edge of sanity that he both craves and fears . . .
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part II
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
About the Author
Also by Robert Edric
Copyright
In Zodiac Light
ROBERT EDRIC
For Bruce Jones
another Gloucestershire boy
I walked midsummer in Flaxley Wood,
And waited through the daylong night;
Attendant of a world not come,
And cast by dark in zodiac light.
Ivor Gurney, ‘In Flaxley Wood’
London Mercury, 17 June 1921
zodiacal light: a very faint cone of light in the sky, visible in the east just before sunrise and in the west just after sunset. Caused by the reflection of sunlight from cosmic dust in the plane of the ecliptic.
Part One
Dartford Asylum, London
Spring, 1923
1
Because we were an asylum party, the bus driver refused to set off before checking each of the names on the list I’d given him. And having checked the names against the labels on the men’s pockets, he then insisted on checking them again. There was considerable malice in the man’s actions, but unwilling to delay us further, I refrained from commenting on his remarks.
‘That you?’ he said to the first of the men – a man called Hartley, already standing on the open platform and gripping the polished rail with both his hands. ‘That you, is it? That you?’
‘This is Hartley,’ I told him, putting a hand on Hartley’s shoulder to reassure him.
‘Ought to be alphabetical by rights,’ the driver said.
There were only six men, and our outing had been arranged late the previous evening, after an hour of special pleading before Osborne, who had only given his permission shortly before our departure.
Hartley looked from the driver to me.
‘Your name’s on the list,’ I told him.
‘No one’s denying that,’ the driver said. ‘That wasn’t what I said.’ He slapped the sheet of paper against his steering wheel and looked Hartley up and down, pausing at his hands, still locked tightly around the rail.
We were distracted by a shout from one of the other passengers, an elderly woman sitting close by the door. She demanded to know when we would be moving.
The driver glanced at her, but said nothing.
It was normal procedure on these outings for the patients to be seated together at the rear of the small single-decker buses, and this often necessitated other passengers moving forward to vacate those seats. The timing of the outings was invariably calculated to avoid the fuller buses of the early mornings and late afternoons.
‘Are we going to have to move seats?’ another woman called.
I told her this was unlikely, that there were only nine of us.
‘Nine?’ the driver said, slowly counting the six names on the list.
‘Six patients, myself and two orderlies,’ I told him.
I held my hand over Hartley’s for a moment and then told him to walk down the aisle.
Hartley released his grip on the pole and started walking. I motioned for those still waiting at the roadside to board the bus and follow him.
‘You need my permission to board,’ the driver said.
We didn’t, and both he and I knew that.
‘You’ve got your list,’ I told him.
‘All this tells me—’
I took the sheet from him, held it against the small window which separated us and signed my name.
‘Plus three,’ he said. ‘Write that down. “Plus three”.’
I wrote the words, folded the paper and gave it back to him.
He pushed it into the leather satchel beside his seat. It would be presented to the relevant medical committee at the end of the month and the bus company would be duly reimbursed. Life in and around the asylum was filled with such precise and minutely observed procedures.
The five other patients followed Hartley on to the bus, gathering together as they came. The elderly woman said hello to each of them as they passed her; only Hartley and one other answered her. None of the few remaining passengers spoke. On other occasions I had seen women on the buses surreptitiously cross themselves as the men passed them by – though whether this was done out of any genuine feeling of sympathy for the inmates, I was never certain. Perhaps it was merely some instinctive gesture of self-protection on their part to insure against the possible contagion of the men’s suffering. Or perhaps it was some equally inexplicable display of relief that the same had not befallen their own husbands, brothers and sons, lost or returned – a warding-off of malign spirits.
The men finally arranged themselves on the rear seats and sat facing forwards.
‘And the rest?’ the driver said.
I looked out to where Cox, the senior orderly, and Lewis, a recent appointee, stood and smoked. I called to Cox, but other than raising his hand to me, he made no move to board the bus. Lewis, a youth of eighteen or nineteen, began walking the few paces to the doorway, but Cox held his arm and told him to wait.
‘Just finish this,’ Cox called to me, holding up his cigarette.
‘No – now,’ I said, unwilling to raise my voice.
Cox whispered something to Lewis, and Lewis laughed. Then both men dropped what remained of their cigarettes and came to the bus.
Lewis was the first to board.
‘Go to the rear. Sit ahead of them,’ I told him.
Lewis hesitated, half turning to Cox, who remained on the road.
‘Best do as he says,’ Cox said. He blew out a last mouthful of smoke and then spat heavily into the overgrown verge behind him. All of this, I understood, was for my benefit, asserting his authority over the men under his immediate control. He was an old soldier, a sergeant, and this remained apparent in everything he said and did. Equally evident to me was his resentment at all he had lost upon his return to civilian life. He was in his early forties, and most of the men in his charge were half his age.
Finally boarding, he reached out his hand to the driver, who shook it.
‘Give you the list, did he?’ Cox asked the man.
‘Such as it is,’ the driver said.
‘Go to the others,’ I told Cox.
Cox drew himself suddenly rigid, saluted me and shouted, ‘Sir.’ And before I could respond to this, he dropped his arm, slapped the driver on the shoulder and laughed. The driver laughed with him, glancing at me to see if I was finally prepared to share in their cold joke.
Cox then walked slowly down the bus, pausing to look at the elderly woman, who turned away from him as he passed her.
I followed him, and as soon as I started walking, the driver engaged his gears and the bus lurched forward, causing me to stumble and to hold on to the seats as I continued.
Our journey lasted less than fifteen minutes, and when I saw our destination ahead, I rose and returned to stand in the doorway. I pointed out to the driver where we would alight.
‘Not a designated stopping point,’ he said.
Ignoring this, I beckoned the others forward and they came.
Cox, the last to rise, shouted, ‘Do as he says,’ to the driver, who drew close to the road junction and then braked sharply, causing the men to collide with each other.
Unwilling to tolerate any further delay, I told Lewis to lead the men away from the bus and off the road.
‘Is this the right place?’ he asked me.
I showed him the
I pointed out to him the inverted ‘T’ of the road and the lane we were about to follow. ‘And the river’s just beyond,’ I said, indicating the waving line the nurse had drawn.
‘The Thames?’
‘Unless there’s another,’ I said.
The men started to move ahead of us and I told Lewis to catch them up and walk with them.
The land around us was open and treeless, a few fences and low hawthorn hedges, a line of telegraph poles and a drainage ditch on either side of the lane.
There were buildings in the distance, and a succession of smoking chimneys, but nothing close by. It was clear to me that we were approaching the river, but it was not yet in sight. It was a bleak, exposed place, planed by a constant wind. It had been my intention to ask the bus driver how frequently the service returned past the asylum, but I had forgotten to do this. Cox would know.
I looked back to where he followed us, smoking again, plumes of smoke forming above him in the cool air. I waited for him.
‘Is it far?’ he asked me, swinging his arms.
I showed him the map.
‘What does that tell you?’ he said. He traced his finger to where the lane met the river, and then slid it to the marked cross. ‘Did she tell you how far?’
I’d guessed the river to be no more than a couple of hundred yards from the road, and if that were true, then the distance from the lane’s end to the cross was considerably less.
‘And what if the tide’s in?’ Cox said, his voice low, and his manner considerably less aggressive now that we were out of hearing of the others.
‘Above the high-water mark, she said,’ I told him.
‘Makes sense,’ he said.
We were on our way to see a beached whale. The creature had been sighted a week earlier, already stranded and dead, and since then there had been a succession of reports in the local newspapers, prompting visits by anyone interested enough to want to see it. It was upon reading one of these reports that I’d made my application to Osborne. I’d been reminded of all the other stranded corpses I’d seen, in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles before the war, and I’d put up a notice in one of the day-rooms to see if anyone else was interested.
I knew as we walked that those earlier sightings – most of them on the white sands and dunes of the Inner Hebrides – would be considerably different from what we were likely to encounter today.
And almost as though reading these thoughts, Cox said, ‘You got their hopes up. They’re going to want to see it swimming up and down, blowing water from its hole and probably with Jonah standing in its mouth and waving back at them.’
I acknowledged this. Even the nurse, who had visited the creature four days earlier, when its corpse was only recently discovered, had told me not to expect too much. She had hesitated when I’d asked her if the visit was worth making. Then she’d said, ‘How often do you see a whale?’
Ahead of us, the men had stopped walking and were gathering together. Lewis stood beside them. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted something neither Cox nor I could understand, his words lost in the wind between us.
‘They’ve spotted the river,’ Cox said. ‘They’re on a dyke bridge.’
I looked at the men and saw that they stood on a slight rise.
‘A sluice or something,’ Cox said. ‘There used to be brickfields close to the shore. For the clay. They’ve all gone now, filled up. Look at them – they’re like kids, excited because they can see the water.’ He pointed to our right and I saw a line of distant vessels sitting on the horizon, appearing at that distance to be resting in the far-off fields. Studying a map the night before, I’d seen that the shipping channels opposite Tilbury were called the ‘Lower Hope Reaches’ and the name had made me laugh.
We approached the waiting men and rose alongside them on to the covered drain.
The river lay ahead of us, filling the horizon, its far bank visible across the miles of grey water.
‘So where is it?’ Lewis said.
The question was echoed by several others.
According to the map, the whale was to our right, towards the mouth of the estuary. I shielded my eyes and searched in that direction.
‘Should have brought some field glasses,’ Cox said.
I still possessed a pair somewhere amid the clutter of my half-unpacked belongings.
‘You’re right,’ I told him.
I continued walking to where the lane ended in a field of rough grass. Cattle stood between us and the water, turning to watch us as we approached.
‘Anyone scared of cows?’ Cox said, and laughed.
Two of the six patients raised their hands.
‘You two don’t count,’ Cox said. ‘You’re scared of everything. Always have been, always will be.’ He then walked towards the cattle, clapping his hands to disperse them. The animals turned at his approach and walked away from him. They were dark, thin creatures, mud-caked and with long, misshapen horns. I searched for the farm to which they might belong, but could see nothing. I urged the men to follow Cox through the open pasture, and within minutes our feet and shins were soaked. Turning to wait for us, Cox called for everyone to follow him single-file, indicating that there was a path of sorts through the morass and that he could see it ahead of him.
A few moments later, he rose from the field on to a low embankment, searched around him and called out that he could see the whale.
Upon hearing this, the others started to run, splashing over the sodden ground and then gathering around him where he stood. He pointed something out to them and they fell silent. Several of them wandered away from him in the direction he pointed. I knew from this sudden silence that there was going to be no spouting water or waving Jonah.
Cox waited for me. I climbed the low bank and stood beside him.
A short distance away, more than half-embedded in the soft, saturated mud of the estuary, lay a disappointingly small shape, a boulder perhaps, or an upturned boat.
A flock of gulls rose from the mound at our approach, shrieking and circling above us.
It was clear that we would be able to approach no closer to the whale than the rise on which we stood, an old flood-defence line curving back and forth along a lost boundary or a straightened curve of the river.
We walked along this until we stood directly above the whale. There was neither tail nor mouth visible to indicate which end was which. A mud-covered protuberance that might have been the remains of a fin had already been eaten away by the birds.
‘I wonder what sort it was,’ Cox said.
‘The newspaper reports said it might be a pilot whale,’ I told him. ‘Apparently, they’re not uncommon at the mouth of the estuary.’ I looked further to the east, to the dull, unbroken plane of water, its horizon with the sky and distant land already lost.
I told the others this, and some were interested, and some feigned interest. Most of those who were eligible for these excursions seized the opportunity whenever it was offered, regardless of their destination or purpose. One man picked up a stone and threw it at the corpse, missing but cheering his shot. Others copied him. The mud, more liquid than it appeared, swallowed their missiles and then showed no sign of where they had struck. A direct hit raised a louder cheer. Some of the men threw their stones at the circling gulls.
In one of the newspaper articles, the writer had speculated on how the pilot whale had acquired its name, suggesting that it was either because it led other whales to their feeding grounds, or because it led the whalers to where the larger whales might be found and killed.
I repeated this to Cox.
‘Why would it do the second?’ he said. ‘Where’s the sense in that?’
‘Perhaps it led the boats unwittingly,’ I suggested.
Lewis returned to us. ‘They think the real whale might be further on,’ he said, betrayed by his own lack of conviction.
‘Tell them to forget it,’ Cox said. ‘Tell them they’d have signed up for the outing, whale or no whale.’ He left us and walked to where the others stood above the corpse. He pointed. ‘That’s its head and that’s its tail.’ There were no clear grounds for this identification, but because he’d said it, then the others saw it too. ‘And that’s its eye, and there’s where its flippers are buried in the mud,’ he added.
