Warlight(46)
The list continued. Cork, pieces of ash. Some of what he asked for he had never used before. Could she bring him a small notebook? He was only imagining possibilities, as if he were in an unvisited library. She asked for details of the thread, the size of the hooks. She noted even then that unlike his handwriting the sketches were meticulous. They seemed made by a different person. The youth felt this was his first conversation in years. The next day he heard the motorcar leaving the driveway, the girl with her mother.
Most of the day he sat by the sunlit window, his fingers constructing the fly, echoing his drawing but for the colours. Or stood awkwardly in front of their map and searched it for what he already knew and what he had not known before—the clear line of oaks along the straight Roman road, the long curve of the river. At night he slid from the bed into the darkness and tried to move his ungainly body. It was important he couldn’t see himself. If the hip gave way, he fell against a wall or the bed. He moved as long as he could, then got back into the bed, covered in sweat. All this was unknown to his family or the girl’s family.
During their last week of work the brothers slipped themselves into their rope halters and leaned over the roof, using the blade of the long-flew knife or the long eaves knife to trim the gable ends. Looking up through the window, the boy could see just the iron blades sweep back and forth, the remnants of straw falling like barley.
Then the family carried him, once more horizontal, back onto their cart and disappeared. The silence that had been lost filled the house again. Now and then in the following months the girl and her parents would hear of the Felons working on a house in a distant village, as if crows had found a new copse to nest in. But the youngest son, Marsh, whenever he was allowed free time, attempted to overcome his limp. He’d wake in the dark and walk past houses they had once thatched, or go down into the river valleys as night began dissolving, already with birdsong. It was the hour with that tense new light that Marsh Felon now began searching for in books whenever the writer strayed from a plot to attempt a description of that special hour, perhaps remembered from the author’s youth too. The boy began reading every evening. It allowed him a deafness while his brothers talked. Even if he knew the thatcher’s craft, he was separating himself from them.
Plenitude. What does that mean, exactly? A surfeit of things? Replenishment? A complete state? A wished-for thing? The person named Marsh Felon wished to study and inhale the world around him. When Rose’s family rediscovered him two years later, a young man, they barely recognized him at first. He was still watchful, but he had become another, already serious, curious about the workings of the wider world. Her parents gathered him in as they had once done during the injured solitude of his youth. Aware of his intelligence, they were to support him through his university years. He had essentially left his own family.
Felon nested himself against brick cornices, then climbed up the college tower in the dark, more than a hundred and fifty feet above the unseen landscape of the quadrangle. Three nights a week he tested himself along the rain-slicked tiles until the hour or two before light when buildings and lawns began to display themselves. He had never considered the public tests of rowing or rugby; just his scarred fingers and quick movements revealed his strength. In a secondhand bookstore he had found an anarchic work, The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity, and assumed at first its obsessions were a fiction, a childhood adventure, so he had begun to climb as if to search out its truthfulness, or perhaps a meticulous raven’s nest in a belfry. He saw no one else there on those nights, until one evening he came across two names scratched with a nail, beside the year 1912. He strolled the cloister roofs, ascended rough walls. He felt ghost-like even to himself.
He started seeing other nocturnals. It turned out to be a climbing tradition based on that privately printed book Marsh had discovered by Winthrop Young, a rock climber before his Cambridge days, who, missing such adventures, turned what he called the “sparsely populated and largely anonymous buildings” into his college Alps. The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity, with maze-like illustrations and meticulous descriptions of the best climbing routes, had during the two previous decades inspired generations of “stegophilists” who ascended drainpipes along the “Beehive Route” and slithered across the insecurity of tiles cresting the Babbage Lecture Theatre. So there would be other climbers, yards away, alongside Felon. He stilled when he saw them, slid past with no acknowledgement. Just once, in a windstorm, his hand reached out and gripped a coat as a body fell past him, and he pulled the person into his arms, the shocked face staring through the buffeting wind at him, an unrecognized first-year student. Felon left him there on a safe ledge and climbed higher.
In December, descending a chapel tower, Felon passed a woman who touched his arm, refusing to let him pass without a greeting. “Hello. I’m Ruth Howard. Mathematics—Girton College.” “Marsh Felon,” he found himself saying. “Languages.” She continued, “You must be the one who caught my brother. You’re the secretive. I’ve noticed you up here before.” He could barely see her face. “What else are you studying?” he said. His voice felt loud to him in the dark. “Mostly the Balkans, it’s still a mess.” She paused, while looking out at nothing. “You know, I’m sure you do…there are a few roof sections no one can achieve alone. Would you like to team up?” He made a tentative but negative gesture of his head. She lowered herself and was gone.