Looking around in the calm of the evening. Finding that the place was instantly familiar and perceptibly strange. Familiar because of well-known landmarks, like the stone obelisk projecting like a stubby pencil from Eastnor Park in Herefordshire. And May Hill, in western Gloucestershire, identifiable from the Black Mountains to the Cotswolds by the stand of pines on its summit.
At the tail of the Malverns, three counties were drawn together by landmarks and legend. The closer countryside was scabbed with odd mounds before it scrolled out into low hills, woods and copses and isolated clumps of conifers, all of it textured like velvet in the softening light.
And it was strange because none of this seemed random. It was as though each feature of the landscape had a special significance, a role to play in some eternally unfolding drama. And if they carried on walking into the arena – and it did feel like an arena – they’d be given their own parts to play.
Perhaps this was the great lesson to be learned about all of nature, although there were only certain spots where you could receive it with any intensity. Places of – oh God, wake me up before I turn into Jane – palpably sentient scenery.
They were alone in the landscape but, as they followed a vague path over a shallow rise, the sunset turning flat fields into sandbanks, she couldn’t lose the feeling that something knew they were coming.
You won’t miss it, Winnie Sparke had said. Nobody could.
She was right.
Merrily saw that Lol had stopped about twenty paces away, as though he was wondering how best to approach it, if he should take off his shoes.
‘Nobody said it was still here.’ His voice quite hoarse.
‘Nobody said it was still in use,’ Merrily said.
OK, it probably wasn’t the original one, after which the place was named, but it had to be many centuries old. Even without white leaves, it had grown into the heart of an earlier belief system which conspicuously lived on.
There were several other oak trees nearby, young satellite churches around this ancient, ruinous cathedral.
‘Venerated,’ Merrily said. ‘Still. On a serious scale.’
There was enough veneration to cover several Christmas trees, but the great oak, with its enormous swollen bole, had easily absorbed it all.
Offerings. Ribbons tied to twigs, fragments of coloured cloth, foil, labels with handwritten messages, flowers, balls of wool. Tiny intimate, symbolic items stuffed into folds and crevices, snagged in clawed branches. Hundreds of them, some fresh, some decaying, some fusing with fungi on the blistered bark.
Small sacrifices. People were still coming here – now – to make small sacrifices. Immense in the muddied light, the oak represented an everyday, naked paganism.
‘You uncomfortable with this, Merrily?’
Lol walking softly all around the oak – considered steps as if he was moonwalking or something.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just… It’s very… human. All these people making their pilgrimages, leaving their small offerings in… what? A celebration of survival?’ She dared to touch the tree with one hand. ‘What about you?’
‘To be quite honest, it kind of excites the hell out of me.’
‘Mmm, thought it might.’
‘Like, you read about ancient theories on music, and it seems so remote and… theoretical. But when you actually find a link with a bit of landscape only an hour or so from where you live. And then you come, for the first time, and it’s…’
‘It’s a tree, Lol.’
‘Merrily, it is so palpably not… just… a… tree.’
‘Well, it… it’s certainly the oak in the big picture over Tim Loste’s fireplace. I’m sure of that.’
It was all rolling at her like the ball lightning that Spicer had talked about, connections forming: all the saplings in the pots outside Loste’s house and the one planted in his garden… had they been grown from acorns picked up here, descendants of the Whiteleafed Oak?
It was as well to keep reminding yourself that the central reason you were here was finally to get to meet Tim Loste, without whom…
Lol stepped back, as if the atmosphere was too charged so close to the massive tree. You brought a blocked musician to what was alleged to be the most powerful source of musical energy within his ambit, you had to expect a certain… fascination.
‘If a few white leaves appeared on your oak tree, it was taken as a sign of major change.’
‘Athena?’
‘So if there was a tree here that was full of white leaves, maybe it was seen as a place where you could find transformation.’
‘That figures. Winnie’s blueprint for Tim Loste seems to be all about transformation. Like The Dream of Gerontius. The processing of the soul.’
‘You mentioned there were some other pictures on Loste’s walls,’ Lol said.
‘Mostly, they were places I didn’t recognize. Hills. Churches. But some were well known.’
‘Stonehenge?’ he said. ‘Glastonbury?’
She stared at him.
‘What the hell else did that woman tell you?’
Lol sat down in the grass, outside the growing shadow of the oak.
‘I didn’t want to confuse you with the bigger picture before you rang Winnie. The Three Choirs is only the local part of the story.’
‘I’m not sure I can handle this.’
Merrily sat next to him and he told her, his face shining in the blush of evening, about the big picture: twelve of them. A dozen perpetual choirs in south-west Britain, on the perimeter of a vast circle – supposedly. Their locations including Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit Major in South Wales, site of an ancient monastic college.
Not exactly recorded history. Poetic history. It could be valid, but scepticism, Merrily thought, might be safer at this stage.
‘If you plot the big circle,’ Lol said, ‘you find Whiteleafed Oak is the centre – equidistant from Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Llantwit. The pivot.’
‘But these – Stonehenge, Glastonbury, et cetera – were the only known sites?’
‘The only ones actually named in early Welsh literature. The others have been identified in places like Meifod, near Welshpool, Llandovery in west Wales and Goring-on-Thames – the word Goring comes from Cor, which means choir.’
‘So we’re… sitting at the centre of…’
‘… Arguably the most important focus of musical energy in Britain’s oldest established culture. A culture in which music was not one of the arts, part of entertainment… but a crucial element in the structure of life. An element in religion but also part of science and mathematics. And all the more spiritual for that.’
‘So all these offerings…’
‘Oh… I should’ve mentioned that some people visiting the presumed sites of perpetual choirs have said that they can still be heard. As a kind of droning, like distant bees. But then… people are impressionable.’
‘Erm…?’
‘Just the birds,’ Lol said.
‘Thank God for that. So, we’re assuming that Elgar knew this place.’
‘Elgar said there wasn’t a single lane in Worcestershire that he hadn’t been down. Would’ve been an easy walk from Birchwood. Where he was living when he composed Caractacus. Is this his sacred oak? Look.’
Lol stood up and walked down below the tree where, guarded by younger oaks, there was a depression in the ground, a hollow. Merrily looked down at a charcoal stain near its centre. Fires were still being lit here. Worn bits of branches were lying around in the shallow pit like discarded bones. So much here suggestive of bone. A knobbly outgrowth at the base of the great oak itself was like a big bovine skull with one jagged eye socket.
‘Everything has its dark side,’ Lol said.
