“The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

A ruined splendour, a white wasteland … what has happened in the great wood?
When his overbearing magnate father dies, Geoffrey believes that he has inherited everything and can at last come into his own. But the old man’s will contains a shock: he has left the estate’s ancient wood, Geoffrey’s secret place, to be “divided equally” between his son and Rolf, a mysterious stranger.
Geoffrey and Rolf meet, divide the wood, and build a fence between them.
Each seeks in his half of the wood to realise his deepest dreams:
Geoffrey creates at first a realm of solitude, then of culture, finally of spirituality;
while Rolf begins from primitive simplicity, evolving his realm into successive expressions of his personality. Different worlds.
But, although separate, their individual paths lead them ineluctably to their interlocked destinies in the ancient wood.
In this tale we share in the making of new worlds, while registering the deep undercurrents of generational and sibling rivalry.

Note: this is the beginning of the novella. Available in full on the drop down menu MY BOOKS above.

PART I

I don’t come here often. But sometimes, when my life has become too complicated, too relative, it’s the only place to be. It doesn’t resolve anything, but it makes things starker, which helps.

My foot on the first cracked tread of the curved staircase, grand, broken.
Do I dare? It has happened so quickly, the building coming apart, as if without Geoffrey, his order, his will, there is nothing to hold it together. Most buildings stand for ages, inertia stronger than disintegration; but here, it’s as if every bond is broken, each element disconnected, withdrawing to its own. I remember being at its deep centre, enclosed within layer upon layer of meaning, letting go, journeying into the unknown, free to be … And I climb slowly, winding up towards the gallery.

I lean over, breasting the emptiness, a bird about to take off, oh freedom! – a sudden vertigo, the mosaic floor lurching up towards me, has me grabbing the thin ebony balustrade. I step back. Then forward again.
Above me the dome of stained glass, ranks of etched geometries, figures, constellations, spiralling up to the rose-cut polar crystal that cracked that night. Life-filled, green-leafed branches thrust between bronze glazing bars. And deep below, seeking roots push into the foundations, through walls, prying blocks apart, reaching towards the empty centre. Tropisms. I push one of the twelve doors, the first, the moon, opal, mirror, spider, madness, love … It sticks, won’t open. ‘Oh, Geoffrey!’ I cry. And although the dome is broken and the painted pillars moss-muffled, his name echoes, visiting each surface in a series of thinning embodiments, then fades to nothing. I walk slowly down the stairs.

At the door I turn, take a last look across the mosaic floor, a graphic encyclopaedia, such learning! to the main room. How often I sat there, how lively the atmosphere, how lifeless now.
Outside, I stand by the rusted sculpture, intertwined figures, lovers: each moved independently, touching, apart, conjunction of two perfect balances in a mutual space; now locked together until structure itself breaks down. I look one way along the exactly-calculated avenue to the solitary tree on the sculpted hill, the other to the jammed wind generator blades, the broken solar panels. I listen to the rippling stream, and miss the hum of the turbine.
‘Dreams are important, aren’t they?’ I’d said. Why had I brought her that day? ‘Without dreams there are no possibilities, only alternatives. To dream you must be a little lost, a little free. And to make a dream come true takes a special sort of courage.’
‘Yes, a foolhardy sort,’ she had said.
‘How so?’
‘By choosing one you exclude all the others. And by making it come true, you bring it into this world, into the realm of your own personality, which is what we seek to escape from in dreams.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘Don’t patronise.’
It hadn’t worked. Of course it hadn’t. Why had I tried to make this place work for me? Forget her. Forget everyone. Let it be. Let it be. And, yes, to dream one must be a little, unmoored.

I walk carefully through the mazy knot-garden, overgrown now, the rare and precious overwhelmed by the common and vigorous, to the seat in the rose-covered arbour, old, scented roses, pink, sharp-thorned, on the low knoll at its centre. What sensitivities of geomancy went into the locating of this precise place!
From here the whole of Geoffrey’s private domain is in view; and beyond the wood, over the bank, the parkland and the big house small in the distance. My task, as always, is to bring it into being before my eyes, tell its story, then witness it falling apart. As if with this telling, I will understand. I close my eyes. Opening my eyes, I examine carefully the scene before me, and at last bring my eye to rest on the distant golden house that, in this instant, is lit up, illuminated by a beam of soft silver light.

Geoffrey’s story

There was once a man who began his life very poor, and ended it very rich. He had a genius for making money, a genius whose origin lay in a singular view of the world; he saw everything in terms of price: what price to pay, what price to sell at, what price this man will take, that man will give. The world as market, its fuel financial transactions. Throughout his life, from selling single cigarettes and matches to school mates, to selling fleets of warships to governments, he applied the same principles: no ethics, beyond the basics required to stay in the market, with need measured by the willingness, right by the ability, to pay; associates are safer than friends, and the safest associates are the most dependent; trying to be liked and avoiding being disliked waste energy and get in the way of business. He did not lust after money; his pleasure was in making good deals. And the best deals were those that made the most money. To that end he got up before the other man, went to bed after him, and worked harder in between. And he became extremely rich.
Of course such an obsessive life had corollaries: how can you simply look at a Bellini “Madonna”, value it, when you are thinking of the price you paid, the rivals you beat, the amount its price has risen? where is there a place for a companionable social life? how can there be friendship where everyone has his price?

The middle-class wife was sidelined when he no longer needed her modest capital as seed corn, succeeded by a steady parade of attractive, expensive twenty-two-year-olds. All that went on in London, the Côte d’Azur, the Caribbean. A simulacrum of family life was created at the big house in front of me, rebuilt in the Eighteenth century on West Indian sugar, set in a landscape remodelled by Lancelot Brown, surrounded by farms bought cheap by the then owner, an armaments manufacturer who’d bought his Barony from Lloyd George during the Depression. It was furnished and decorated with the finest things, on the advice of experts who knew what was going up. The result was a house full of quality but without class.
It was there that his wife and their only child, Geoffrey, lived, and where he came when required by obligation or the sudden, infrequent surges of guilt.
Geoffrey was expensively educated, given all the opportunities his father had never had. His mother, a timid, dreamy woman whose limited self-esteem had been ground to nothing by the rich man’s abrasive ways, could offer him little beyond sentimental love and a narrow, grey orderliness. His father would alternately take him up, whisking him away to exotic locations for glitzy holidays, insisting he lose his virginity with his own mistress (the next day she was gone, never seen again), having him spend days in his office, the humming, phone-yelling centre of his empire, the glass-walled powerhouse high over silent London, the highest in the land, aeroplanes passing silently, grooming him for the succession; and ignore him, not be in touch, fail to return his calls, as if he didn’t exist.
For the rich man could not accept his own mortality. And he could not forgive Geoffrey for being a reminder of that mortality. For years Geoffrey thought that his father would will himself to outlive him. So that when the old man died, Geoffrey’s strongest feeling was one of relief. ‘Now,’ he said as he watched his father’s desk being moved out and his own moved in, ‘now my life can begin.’

The old man’s will contained one surprise, and it concerned this wood; it said that the wood must remain unaltered until the old man’s intentions were revealed, in a codicil to be opened three years after his death.

Geoffrey gave this little thought. He was fully occupied holding the business together in the period of uncertainty and instability that follows an entrepreneurial buccaneer’s death. He moved quickly to consolidate the core business, off-load the riskier parts, put into place a solid, conventional corporate structure. His time at Business School paid off; the market responded, giving the revamped company a “dependable” rating.
He then focussed on improving the corporate image, with carefully-placed sponsorship, an annual “Environmental Action” prize, research endowments carrying the company name. He was soon two rungs up the ladder of the great and the good.
He got married and started a family. He had met his future wife at his father’s funeral, found himself impulsively thrusting a handful of earth into her hand to throw onto the lowered coffin. They made love that afternoon in the old man’s office, she on top, he staring up at his father’s portrait, thinking, there you are, you old bastard, cold in your grave, while I’m here, now, so bloody alive, a sudden rush of heat in his belly when he came, as if she had impregnated him, crying tears of gratitude and relief, holding her close.
She was a warm and cultured woman, the sort his mother might have been if given the chance. Under her careful supervision the house became a stylish and comfortable place, noisy with children, busy with guests, alive with social occasions. Geoffrey began to feel, at last, solid, located.

But as the time drew near for the opening of the codicil, his thoughts cut loose ever more often from the formal complexities of business, to imaginative speculations on his father’s intentions He found his eye straying from the refined comfort of the drawing room, through the French windows, across the parterre and sunken fence and up the carefully-casual parkland, to the furthest corner of his domain, the wood. Sometimes he imagined a sudden leap to a new freedom as his father, dead, was able, in that codicil, to say at last the words he had never been able to say living. And sometimes he saw descending on his briefly unencumbered shoulder a hand that would never be lifted.

The day before the third anniversary of his father’s death, Geoffrey stood at the edge of the wood, wearing new boots and walking gear, and carrying a stout stick. He had never entered the wood: his nervous mother had discouraged him from wandering alone on the estate, had emphasised the dangers of the wood; and he had been an obedient boy. He took a deep breath, climbed the bank, crossed the ditch, and confronted the wood.
A chaos, a tangle of trees and undergrowth, vertical pillars locked together by diagonals of fallen trees and broken limbs, palisades of slender trunks, entanglements of bramble and thorn. He launched himself in, slashing with his stick, tugging his thornproof clothing free, kicking through the underwood, cursing as first a hazel then a briar whipped his face, aiming for the centre, bulldozing on, aware only of his slashing progress. After several minutes battling he emerged suddenly into a small clearing and, breathing hard, stopped.
There was soft grass underfoot, and trees all around, tall smooth slender trees reaching high, reaching for the light with bright leaves, exactly outlined emerald shapes shimmering against the blue sky. As his breathing quietened he began to hear birds, for the first time, each a short outpouring of song followed by silence, each an individual spark of livingness, each exactly located although invisible, giving him through the ear a sense of depth and distance denied the eye by the density of vegetation. And with each birdsong came a faint echo, and a sense of their and his enclosure within the same space. The aural clue to the spatial dimension awakened his eye to more than the immediate, to see direction, to begin picking out faint paths through the wood. He followed the paths, at first changing direction towards the imagined centre, but soon acknowledged that he was quite lost, and then he simply walked, at the centre of his own small circle of experience.
Within this small compass, his eye cleared. He could stop and simply look. Lichen on a rock, a fragment of it suddenly unpeeling, fluttering through the still air, landing on a tree limb, becoming part of it, gone. Two slender trunks twisted together like enraptured lovers. A tree so fair of line, so full of form that he loved it. An antlered stag in a sunbeam, staring full face at him, then snorting and crashing away through the undergrowth, leaving a swirl of animal energy that he felt enter him.

And then he came to the tree. His search for the centre of the wood was forgotten; he had arrived at his destination. this moment’s centre of the world. An enormous beech, lofty and spreading, strong of grey limb and firmly rooted. He entered its protection. He leaned back against it, felt its sap, the sanctuary of its branches and foliage, closed his eyes; felt it send him forth strengthened.

He walked on, quite lost, not caring, entirely self-possessed. And suddenly was at the wood’s edge, and before him was the broad prospect, the distant horizon, the vast sky, and around him a great width of air. He gasped, suddenly breathless. Then his eye focussed slowly on the warm solid rectilinear house, and he set off across the grazed grass, staff swinging, looking all around, feeling the wonderful expansion after the tight wood. He looked up, and stopped. There, in the slow convolutions of cloud he saw his father’s face as he had never seen him; open, benign, unenvious, pleased for his son having experienced something he had not. In the moment he stared the clouds tumbled the face out of existence, but it had been there, he had seen it, and he threw his staff high into the air, watched it spin upwards, stop, tumble down; and he caught it.

The face was still clear in his mind when he took his seat in the solicitor’s office. The solicitor opened the envelope and read:
‘“I leave Gore Wood to my son Geoffrey, and to Rolf Marten, the two to meet together, alone, thirty days from this date, at the wood, there to divide the said wood between them, as they agree, their decision on that day to be final.”’
‘I don’t understand,’ Geoffrey said.
‘That is all I have – together with some instructions as to how to locate Mr. Marten.’
‘But who…?’
‘I know no more.’
The face faded, was gone. The space it had occupied within him contracted, closing, closed. In its place a small patch, quite dead of feeling. He left quickly, was already punching buttons on his phone by the time he reached the held-open door of the limousine, busyness his habitual response to emptiness and confusion.
To no avail. He, for whom knowledge was meaning, meaning was power, with his researchers and information services, could find out nothing of use. He needed something to bring to life that small blank patch, but he could not find it, not about the wood, not about Rolf Marten. The more information he gathered, the more helpless he felt, for he didn’t have a clue.

At the appointed time Geoffrey approached the meeting place, his head filled with chattering facts.
Suddenly, when he saw Rolf, it was as if the facts he had gathered were printed on the outside of a flat balloon, a balloon that was inflating inside him, and that he was now inside, inside a bubble of expanding emptiness. In front of him was a man he was seeing for the first time, isolated in the same emptiness as himself – the balloon enclosing them and the space between and around them – who was at that moment more real to him than anyone he had ever seen … How to explain?
An only child grows up in a world of whole numbers, of discrete entities. There’s none of the relativity of being a later child, the displacement at a subsequent birth, none of the being part of the changing pattern of relationships with parents and siblings, none of the bequeathing, the inheriting, the sharing of clothes or toys, that loosening of identities that comes when people mix up your names, or describe you as X’s brother, compare you with a sibling. There is a father, a mother, a child, and you are singular, an entity, occupying your own space.
But now, in his wood, his space, walking towards him in perfect step, was the one his father had chosen to share that space. He saw only Rolf.

At first, as they moved in exactly the same way, he saw a mirror image of himself, someone quite different who yet occupied the same space, moving steadily, as in a dream, towards him. But then, as they closed, he felt as if the space he occupied was being invaded; he felt hot, breathless. And then suddenly he was filled with an uprushing emotion, stronger than any he’d ever felt before, a desire at the same time to fall upon this intruder and destroy him, and embrace him, melt into him, become one … Their eyes, Geoffrey’s cool grey, Rolf’s intense blue, touched, flashed lightning between them. They looked away. Never to look again. The eyes of each roamed neutrally over the face of the other as they stood close. Then each extended a hand across the space, met at the mirror, grasped, let go, the hands fell back, each on his own side.

The bubble was gone, and the birds were making a terrific din. Geoffrey fumbled through his thick file of notes while Rolf looked relaxedly around.
‘It’s a fine wood,’ Rolf said in a soft, nondescript voice. Geoffrey didn’t respond, studied his notes then looked up abruptly and said:
‘I don’t know whether you’ve studied it?’ Geoffrey had, every leaf and stone. ‘I jotted down a few ways of dividing it that seem equitable,’ each division favouring, just a little, himself. ‘It depends on what you want to do with your half …?’
‘I haven’t a clue. I haven’t the least idea. I’ve never owned a square inch of land in my life, and I’ve no desire to now. But I suppose if it’s someone’s dying wish that you have something, it’s only respectful to accept it.’ Looking around, then back at Geoffrey, with a smile said:
‘Tell you what – you take the half you want, I’ll have the rest.’ A suggestion that somehow felt like a challenge.
‘That hardly seems fair.’
‘If we both agree, it’s fair – isn’t it?’
‘This one, then.’ The best land, the finest trees for himself, the more isolated, lower, sandier places for Rolf.
‘Great. See you.’ They both knew they never would.
‘Oh, just one more thing,’ Geoffrey said, ‘you wouldn’t consider selling your half, would you? I’d offer a very good price.’
‘Not for all the gold in Fort Knox,’ Rolf smiled.

Geoffrey returned to yet more study of the wood, fearing a trick, that he’d missed something. He could find nothing.
It was an ancient wood, part of the original forest, enclosed in Anglo-Saxon times and thereafter managed in a typical way, coppicing for wood, standards for timber, for a thousand years.
In the 1780s the owner’s sensibilities, awakened on the Grand Tour and refined by his studies of the ‘Natural’ landscape school, were so offended by seeing the village (which of course long predated his house) between the house and the wood that he had a new model-village built out of sight beyond the wood, the old village razed, and the area landscaped as parkland. He also planted colourful exotics among the native species at the edge of the wood to improve the colour harmonies of the view from the house.
In the nineteenth century, the heavy hands of gangs of gamekeepers, brought in to retain the wood as the owner’s preserve led to pitched battles with the locals, harsh punishment, dark, sullen resentment.
In the 1940s an area of conifers was planted, but never harvested. 
Studies of records, maps, and on the ground, with metal detectors, potentiometers, divining rods, revealed a great deal – an iron-age burial, lime kilns, charcoal pits, an iron-making furnace, saw pits, a rabbit warren – but nothing of significance or value. After a week Geoffrey was certain there was nothing special about the place. 

He spent another week pondering the significance of Rolf, replaying his memories of their short meeting.
He was obsessed by the figure of the man, kept seeing him enter that common space, a red figure in the blue. Red-haired, red-bearded, a scarlet thread around his wrist, walking exactly like himself, and yet quite different. At ease. In possession, not of the place, but of himself. At home in the space he occupied. He had made Geoffrey feel muffled and confused. But still the sense of something in common. The red hair – was this Esau, the elder brother dispossessed by the younger? The scarlet thread – was that Zarah, who put his arm first from the womb but was preceded in birth by his twin? ‘Is this man, then, my brother?’ Again the contradictory desires: to draw him in, to admire him and put himself in his hands; and to eject him, to lock him out. And didn’t, anyway, Cain and Ishmael and Esau represent the line of nature, and Abel and Isaac and Jacob the line of grace, those with God’s ear? ‘I am the chosen one,’ he said with finality. ‘Rolf is a test. To allow him in would be to put at risk all I have created. He is the temptation to be resisted.’

The next day he caused to be erected a high and secure fence through the wood, on the agreed boundary. Satisfied, Geoffrey turned away from the wood, and forgot about it.

III

Years passed. Geoffrey was too busy, became weary, his life circumscribed, taken up, with nothing fresh in it. He dreamed of escape, saw the futility of that; he needed not an escape from his life but something new at its centre.

It was quite by chance – or so it seemed at the time, only later realising how inevitable it was – that he found himself one day, wife and child away for a week and he becoming more and more silent, alone, disconnecting himself in a way he hadn’t done for years, standing at the edge of the wood. He remembered, not the last time, the meeting with Rolf, but the first time, and the face in the sky. He entered, sought out the great beech, lay himself between two giant roots, as in a crib, and slept. 
He had found his place, the place where he could be alone, the place where he could dream.

Sometimes he would tramp for hours, in a labyrinth, round and round, this way and that, following a clue. Sometimes he would simply sit, in rapt contemplation, with more space inside him than he had ever thought possible. His wife, a wise woman, understood, was not jealous. And Geoffrey would return to the big house refreshed.

After a couple of soakings, he had a small summerhouse built.
Occasionally he would stay overnight, enjoying the way the wood settled down as it grew dark, as it gradually drew the night around itself; the night, with familiar beings sleeping and other, strange creatures, quite different, stirring into life, and the stars in a black sky; and the coming of dawn, from the first exact, realised song and touch of light, through to the full ecstatic livingness of day.

He began to imagine a real house in the wood, something entirely his own, an expression of himself, a confirmation.
Perhaps a mediaeval keep, built of dark stone, ivy-covered, with with a moat and drawbridge, lancet windows, and a circular staircase winding down into the depths and spiralling up to a high-reaching tower.
Or a Modernist master-work, all horizontals, split levels and glass, proportioned to the golden mean, cantilevered out over a waterfall, built around a great tree growing up through the middle, and with a Japanese garden of raked gravel and rocks.
Maybe a house of glass in the form of a regular solid, that in some lights would disappear entirely and at other times would glow like an enormous cut jewel.
A woodcutter’s cottage, with a twisted chimney and mossy shingles, and hollyhocks and roses to the eaves, that deer and witches would visit.
Or a log cabin at the edge of the known world, at the beginning of the ancient, endless forest, Hercynia, from which he, the first settler, could ponder the forest ways and, rather than plotting its destruction, gradually learn to enter and live within those ways.
So many possibilities. An enjoyable game. And a pleasant surprise for him to find his imagination so freed.
But a game. For at quiet times, when the chatter of imagination stilled, and he felt as if his body was dissolving from around him so that he became perception, a neutral I, then he knew that what he wanted was a house entirely without references, that represented what the wood was to him: solitude and independence.

So he had an autonomous house built. With its cellar of rocks, its variable-angle wall of triple-glazing, automatic louvres and blinds, insulation, heat pump, wind generator, water turbine, methane digester, wood-burning stove, banks of batteries, it was the finest, most complete example in the country.

Through it, he grew closer to the wood.
For although the house was autonomous in relation to the outside world, it resonated like a tuning fork to its precise environment. He became ever more attuned to both the generalities and the nuances of natural forces: the temperature of the water flowing through the solar panels, the strength and direction of the wind, the life of trees as he learned to manage the wood, the earth when he made a small garden. When the wind blew he imagined where it came from, pictured energy winding into the batteries as vividly as a key tightening a spring. When it rained he felt the earth absorbing the water, knew that exactly two hours later the stream would fill and the turbine spin faster.
At work he was a node in a network, a point located and defined by numerous strands of relationship, fastened into a global web that never slept but whose activity rose and fell like a tide with the passing sun, a decision-maker among uncountable decision-makers, a player among many players. And in his family he had a role, an ascribed status, a given place. He resented neither of these situations. But neither gave him what the wood gave him.
Alone in the wood, how he lived was determined by local geography, micro-climate – rain a mile away didn’t nourish his plants; and each of his actions had consequences that bore directly upon him – for if the axe slipped, it was his finger that was cut. He began to feel, for the first time, the outlines of his own being. It worked well, this careful, autonomous solitude at the centre of a busy life. And then he saw the girl.

At first a glimpse so fleeting that he wasn’t sure he had seen a face or not.
The second time she confronted him on the path, legs apart, arms akimbo, staring defiantly at him – and then, before he recovered from the shock, skipped away, moving quickly, like a forest creature along secret, familiar paths, swallowed up first by greenery then by silence. It left him angry at the intrusion, furious at her flight, swishing at the vegetation with his heavy stick and shouting, in impotent rage: ‘Hey! Come back! Come here this instant! This is private! You have no right! This is mine! Do you hear? This is mine!’ His voice echoed in the silence, and then there was nothing; until, as he listened, he heard the sound of a distant motorbike being kicked into life.

He could not get her out of his mind. Crotch-tight jeans, heavy boots, knotted blouse, the stance of one who doesn’t give ground easily, a red mouth that had tasted much, maybe too much, but tasted, eyes without fear. The following week he expected her, waited for her. She did not appear. Nor the week after. Was it because he’d shouted? Hardly. Maybe he had been a game she had tired of.
He was forgetting her, having placed her in that sad, tender place we reserve for ‘might have beens’, when, thinking about his tomatoes, he strode round a bend in one of his favourite paths, and walked into her hanging body, setting it swinging from the creaking rope.
The rope tight round her neck, head askew, face bright red, tongue lolling, eyes staring. She swung slowly, heavily. He stepped back, reached forward, stopped, stared, whispered, ‘No. Please. No.’ He wanted to fall to his knees and beg. The top button of her jeans was undone on the roundness of her belly, her navel. Urine darkened the denim.

And then, with a sudden agile movement she unclipped the harness, landed lightly at his feet and with a leap cartwheeled away crying, ‘I’m alive! I’m alive! Catch me if you can!’ and was gone.