Rise Above Read online

  ***

  He remembered the darkness of the cottage where he grew up, eight children in one badly lit room, the low windows, the dirt that always somehow got into their room, however careful they were to wipe the mud from their feet when they came in from the streets. Mother spent all summer sweeping dust out of the house, and in winter smoke from the fire made their clothes stink, and begrimed every surface. Now he was fastidious; he couldn't bear a cracked plate, or a greying ruff, but had his clothes burnt and the crockery destroyed as soon as it showed signs of wear.

  He'd been an early child, they said, born before his time; his head too big for his slight body, his lungs congested. They thought he'd die every winter; he felt like an afterthought when spring came, and he hadn't.

  He struggled to conquer his feebleness; threw himself against wind and water, learned to swim in the clear cold water of the river below the mill, climbed the downs, got himself thoroughly chilled and soaked despite his mother's disapproval. He was never free of a nagging cough, but he learned to breathe deeply, to get out of the house and walk, fast, not stopping till his breath came ragged and the cold air burned his lungs. (His doctor told him much later in his life that this was the best thing he could have done. The air of such cottages was full of pestilence.)

  On the downs above the town, he once walked through a cloud of bright blue butterflies, feeling the wind of their wings caress his face. The beauty nearly made him cry; tears always came easily to him, another weakness in an already feeble child.

  He often saw kestrels above the downs, hanging still in blue air, only the blur of their wings moving. They were his savage angels, delivering the message of a world higher and clearer than the one he lived in; he vowed to rise above, to fly into purity.

  When he discovered scholarship he knew he had found his method of flight. It took him longer than his brother; Robert learned everything quickly, reading, writing (a dull task, scratching with their quills dipped in acrid smelling ink that blotted and spattered), then Latin, but Tobias struggled. Letters came to him grudgingly, exacting a tribute of ink stained fingers and bitten nails. Robert could recite strings of Latin conjugations like a magician's abracadabras; and they were magic words that opened their parents' heart and purse-strings, that made sweetmeats and gewgaws appear out of thin air for him. It wasn't till he first parsed Horace, exegi monumentum aere perennius, that he first understood the point of it.

  "I have built a lasting monument... in the air."

  That was wonderful, he thought; a floating castle, a monument built on the clouds.

  "Idiot," Robert hissed at him.

  "Perennius, not perennis." Old Morse spoke with barely concealed impatience; it could break into bad temper easily, Tobias knew, and usually at him. "Not lasting, but more lasting. It is a comparative, Tobias."

  "I have built a more lasting monument..."

  "Aere, from aes not aer."

  "More lasting than bronze," Robert broke in.

  "Did I ask you to contribute, Master Robert?"

  "No, sir."

  But the nod and smile that Morse gave Robert took the edge off the reprimand.

  Tobias had got it wrong again, of course. Yet that thought of the falcon striding the air, the cloud castles, seemed to continue in his mind as they parsed the rest; higher than regal pyramids, the monument of poetry, the wreath of Apollo. Non omnis moriar, I shall not all die, said Horace; and it was amazing, to Tobias, that a Roman, a pagan, should have found the truth of the resurrection, even if perhaps he had found it the wrong way, and not through Christ as the Church taught. He realised that the rote learning of the Latin words was only a way through to this sudden burst of light; he saw clearly, for an instant, where study would get him, and then the clouds closed again and he was floundering, with Morse asking him whether he had been dreaming again.

  "You're always dreaming," Robert said on their way home from the grammar school; "you'll have to concentrate harder if you want to improve your Latin."

  Tobias's mouth moved - more like flinching than smiling – and he shook his head.

  "I'll try."

  It never stopped the rote learning from being tedious and difficult; there were days, reading the blunt Caesar or rotundly rhetorical Cicero, when Tobias wondered whether life would always be like this, struggling for an unworthy end. But the light of that first revelation stayed with him; and while the Church fathers were sometimes barbarous, sometimes annoyingly credulous, when he read of deserts, of hesychasts, of hermits in the high mountains, of aesthetes sitting high on pillars, something in him seemed to echo like a bell.

  One day in the schoolroom he looked up, and there were motes of dust in the air, glowing golden in the sunlight as they drifted slowly. Angels, he thought, dancing their intricate patterns to the music of the spheres.

  He and Robert went up to Cambridge at the same time, though Robert was two years younger; solid Tobias, they said, the boy who worked for everything, and Robert, the glittering child to whom everything came easily. Robert even wrote poetry; smooth verses, nicely rhymed, neatly constructed, that won him golden opinions.

  Tobias only attempted one piece, when young Ledward of Christ's died. He didn't know Ledward, except by reputation, but somehow the wet autumn, the hayricks rotting in the fields and the lawns sludgy with mud, his own infirmity, and the death of the young scholar, came together in a great cry of despair and pain. It was the tears in things, the violent first rending apart of light and darkness, the loneliness of God.

  No one understood it. His scansion, which he had thought to make deliberately halting like a wounded heart, was seen as incorrect, his imagery obscure, his diction overwrought. His sincerity was doubted. Friends were polite about it in that chill and unspecific way that meant they'd hated it; enemies (and he'd already mastered the art of making enemies) were joyously insulting.

  That was his first and last venture into poetry. Thereafter he sheltered in the shallower waters of theology, where, if he still found moments of gilded ecstasy reading the occasional Hesychast text or apocryphal vision, he had learned to disguise it.

  Music had always had the power to stir him; a scholar might not play or sing (the gentlemen of the choir might officially be scholars, but they were regarded as mere mechanics), but to listen to music with discernment was the mark of a gentle nature. He had been listening to a viol consort once; as he so often did, he'd forgotten now what he'd been listening to – something by Ferrabosco perhaps, or Byrd, with plangent suspensions that tore great holes in the music, and resolved only into another suspension, so that you felt your heart jump every time, as if you were falling, and falling – and Robert had seen a tear in his eye.

  "You show your feelings far too openly," Robert had said, and Tobias had confirmed his opinion by blushing hotly, and blinking away the moisture in his eyes.

  Yet he settled well enough in Cambridge in the end. That corner of the library where he sat day after day, working on the Church Fathers, became known as Tobias' snug. He saw the cherry tree in the court outside through all its seasons, from the first creeping buds of green to its glory of blossom, and the weeks afterwards when the soft sludge of fallen petals scented the court with putrefaction. He never cut his initials in the wood of the table, its edges rounded and cracked and blackened with the passing of the years, though he noted that ES and William Le Strange and CT his Mark had done so. He was becoming a fixture, he realised one day, the summer before he got his doctorate. (It was an odd feeling, as if time had shifted around him; he had always thought of himself as a young man with fleeting tenure in the honeyed courts of learning, and looked at Dr Lestrange, the oldest of the fellows, as something different, a piece of history like the ivory drinking-horn in the college treasury, or the chained volumes of early manuscript in the library; and now he was himself ossifying into one of the institutions of the place. History was no longer something apart from him, but had claimed him; he belonged, now, more to the past than the future. He felt a
lmost as if his life had passed him by, yet he was only twenty-eight; but he had an uneasy feeling that life might continue interminably like this, unchanging, and himself unchanged other than by the gradual thinning and whitening of his hair. )

  Fate was not so unkind. He built his reputation as a scholar; the dry-as-dust Fellows approved his diligence and wide reading, the firebrand Puritans his uncompromising pursuit of Scriptural simplicities. His only sadness was that he had no friends in either party; he was too soft-hearted for the Puritans, and the scholars never forgot and never forgave that single venture into poetry. He was elected, nemine contradicente, the Master of his college, the youngest ever to achieve that distinction; and he felt old.