“You’re such an egalitarian,” said Oscar. The great bell of the cathedral echoed out the first stroke of ten—the accepted sign that the meeting of the BBs was adjourned.
“Well, gentlemen,” said Arthur, rising from his seat, “now that we have, as always, broken our solitary rule against the discussion of affairs, and with the unsavory image of David bedding a Nobel laureate ready to haunt my dreams, I bid you good night.”
The Champagne had made Arthur feel alert rather than groggy, and so, after the others had left, he repaired to his study and his secret collection—a case of books about King Arthur and his knights, and about the Holy Grail. These were the books that he read again and again, looking for a clue, a hint to help him solve the mystery that had intrigued him since childhood. He turned on a lamp and settled into a wing chair to spend an hour with his books searching for the Grail.
He had kept his promise to his grandfather to keep his search a secret, though he had still not discovered the reason for that secrecy. That promise was why his Grail library was hidden away upstairs. Besides which, he liked having a secret, something that connected him and only him to his grandfather, but he also felt a slight shame and guilt that he kept a part not just of his book collection but of his life from his friends.
Arthur’s collection of Arthurian literature was not large and contained few items of great value—this was a working collection. Thomas Malory had worked from several sources, both French and English, and Arthur had modern translations of all the earlier versions of the Grail stories—the works of Chrétien de Troyes and Robert de Boron and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Each of these medieval writers had his own vision of what the Grail really was. He had later works as well—all of Tennyson’s volumes of Arthurian poetry, including The Holy Grail, in their green cloth bindings, and a number of more recent academic studies on Grail lore and history.
He had bought, and read, many of the twentieth-century adaptations of the Arthur legends—The Sword in the Stone, The Mists of Avalon, and so on, but he always preferred Malory. Those later versions, he felt, tried to impose some sort of order into a collection of legends that he loved for their disjointedness, their narrative chaos. It was odd that Arthur, who was himself almost obsessively organized, should be so drawn to such a loosely knit narrative. He supposed it was because of the very medievalness of the legends—reading them in Malory was a constant reminder that these stories were written hundreds of years before the invention of the novel, before the idea that a long narrative could be anything other than a collection of vaguely related short narratives. The one exception to his anti-twentieth-century bias was the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The cobbling together of comedy sketches that never really told a coherent story seemed to Arthur to fit the idea of the medieval original. And the movie was the perfect union of his two collecting passions—the Arthur legends and British humor. The item in his collection in which he guessed his grandfather would take most delight was a copy of the screenplay signed by every Python.
—
Tonight he pulled down the second volume of his prized possession—the 1816 edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur edited by Alexander Chalmers. It was the first edition of Malory published after the Stansby version Arthur had held so recently—a lapse of 182 years in which the Knights of the Round Table were absent from the public consciousness. With the Romantic revival came a surge of interest in all things medieval and King Arthur and the Grail returned. Arthur cringed to think that the legends might have remained buried and obscure—known only to academic medievalists—if the Romantics hadn’t dug them up. He read for an hour, words so familiar he could recite many passages from memory, then laid the book on a side table and sighed deeply.
Although he lived quietly, suffering through his job and rarely leaving Barchester, although he had never ridden a horse across a desert, or flown in a plane, or gone on an adventure of any sort, Arthur nonetheless thought of himself as a Grail hunter. Ever since that conversation with his grandfather, he had believed in the Grail. He couldn’t help believing in it, the same way he couldn’t help not believing in God. He believed the Grail was real, he believed it could be found, and, thanks both to his grandfather and to other discoveries he had made over the years, he believed it might well be in or near Barchester. But if it was ever found, it would not be by an action hero, thought Arthur, but by a scholar. And even though the discovery would bring him neither fame nor fortune, because of his promise to his grandfather to keep the Grail a secret, Arthur intended to be that scholar.
—
This was the life of Arthur Prescott. It was a life of rhythms—rhythms that irritated him, like the cycle of meetings and lectures and tutorials at the university; rhythms that stimulated him, like his walks with Gwyn and his evenings with David and Oscar; rhythms that challenged him, like his perennially exciting yet dependably frustrating work in the cathedral library; rhythms that intrigued him, like his regular rereading of the Grail stories; and the rhythm that soothed him, the daily life of the cathedral: Morning Prayer, Evensong, and Compline repeating like the motion of the planets, eternal and unchanging. Arthur lived by these rhythms; he depended on them; they guaranteed the immutable truths of his life—that work would always be an annoyance, that the cathedral guide would never be completed, that he would remain forever single, that the Grail would always beckon him, and that in spite of all this, he would be reasonably happy, lulled by the ancient rhythms of the cathedral and by the timeless texts and bindings of the books in which he immersed himself, into knowing that his life was only a ripple in rhythms that would drive the world until its end.
In such a mind-set Arthur, so he believed, did not need a stranger to arrive in Barchester; he did not need to be dragged into the twenty-first century; and he certainly did not need to fall in love.
III
THE CHAPTER HOUSE
The chapter house, traditional meeting place of the cathedral canons, is one of the lightest, airiest spaces in the precincts. This octagonal room, supported by a single central pillar, boasts clear windows in the Decorated style that cover every wall from just above the stone seats to the vaulted ceiling and admit sunshine at all times of day. The stained glass in this fourteenth-century structure was destroyed during the Civil War, but the change from the dim meeting room of the Middle Ages to the bright space we see today can hardly be considered for the worse.
A.D. 794, St. Ewolda’s Monastery
The Monastery of St. Cuthbert
Lindisfarne Island
12 June 793