‘Thank you. Thank you so much,’ I say. ‘I love you guys. I really do.’ I say it with as much feeling as I can. I am not just thanking them for looking after my hawk. I get up to give Stuart a hug. ‘Don’t catch it,’ he says, backing away. I hug him anyway.
On this breezy August day in 1939 White is in Ireland hiding from the war. He knows he ought to enlist, but he’s persuaded himself his flight here is not mere cowardice. He’d be wasted as a soldier, he thinks. He has a more important thing to do – finishing his epic about the Matter of Britain that will solve the problem of why humans fight at all. And that is why he has come here to County Mayo, and rented Sheskin Lodge to write in, a crumbling aristocratic bungalow with a glassed-in winter garden set amid acres of feral rhododendron and pine.
He sits in the torn-leather armchair in the room with the peeling walls. The plangent sound of hawk-bells drifts through the open window each time the falcons bate from their blocks on the lawn. Cully is dead: she tangled herself in strawberry netting in the cottage barn and hung herself, but he has trained two merlins since, and now he has two peregrines: a bad-tempered falcon called Cressida, and a nervous young tiercel as yet unnamed. For the last half-hour he has been recording the delicate steps of their training in a vellum-bound journal. He pauses. A thought has struck him, borne in with the sound of bells. Perhaps he might write the book about hawks after all. He had tried once, and failed. Perhaps he would try again. It would not be the usual naturalist’s book about hawks. That would be bogus, he thinks. This would be real literature. He begins to sketch out why:
The initiation ceremonies, the voodoo hut of the falconer, the noises in the magic dark, the necromantic knots. Knots were probably the earliest spells. The two hawks consider themselves spell-bound to their blocks by my arts . . . I am convinced that if nobody had ever invented knots, nobody would ever have imagined magicians.
As a falconer he would be in the book, along with all the other parts he would play in the hawk’s education. First he will be Torquemada, the inquisitor. Then the ‘witch doctor of the ceremonies of puberty’ – and the terrifying presence that will test them, their ‘devil-god of the cave’. And then he will be Prospero, of course, the masterly magician who has led them through all the ceremonies and ordeals of their hawkish adolescence, for White thinks he knows what freedom is now, and what growing up means. He is party to the magic that is the binding of the hawk to the magician’s will, and knows that at the end of the book must come the deepest mystery of all. The hawk must escape. Of course it must; for the hawk would have to ‘unwind the charm, to escape, to cock his snook at the nigromant – only to find that there was a charm within the charm, that the wizard was a holy man after all, quite happy about the escape himself’. He finishes the paragraph and finds himself greatly moved.
There he would stand, small and inverted, looking up from the scorned earth, his planetarium of a cloak blowing in the wind, his wand outwitted, his white beard streaming. And Falco? A triumph, a hatred and a gratitude. No logic or moral. Only the magic for its own sake, weaving and unwoven.2
28
Winter histories
THERE’S A COMPLICATED sky of cold-front ragged cloud under swathes of high cirrostratus, and a headwind that sends larks up like chaff as we walk through the fields. Clouds of linnets bounce, half-midges, half musical notation, along the hedges surrounding my old home, and all is out of sorts as far as that notion of home lies because my father isn’t here. It is late winter and I’m back at my mother’s house. Things are better now, I know, and I’ve been coming here more often, but each time I forget how hard it will be.