The Once and Future King

Chapter XXIV

‘I can’t leave Elaine,’ he said.

Ector Demaris said: ‘Why not? You don’t love her. You are under no obligation to her. You are only making yourselves miserable by staying together.’

‘I am under an obligation to her. I can’t explain it, but I am.’

‘The Queen,’ said Degalis, ‘is desperate. She has spent a fortune looking for you.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘It is no good sulking,’ said Ector. ‘It seems to me that you are sulking. If the Queen is sorry for what she has done, whatever it was, you ought to behave generously and forgive her.’

‘I have nothing to forgive the Queen.’

‘That is just what I say. You ought to go back to court and follow your career. For one thing, you owe it to Arthur: don’t forget that you are one of his sworn knights. He has been needing you badly.’

‘Needing me?’

‘There is the usual trouble with the Orkneys.’

‘What have the Orkneys been doing? Oh, Degalis, you don’t know how it does my heart good to hear the old names. Tell me all the gossip. Has Kay been making a fool of himself lately? Is Dinadan still laughing? What is the news about Tristram and King Mark?’

‘If you are so keen about the news, you ought to come back to court.’

‘I have told you I can’t.

‘Lancelot, you are not looking at this realistically. Do you seriously think you can stay here incognito with this wench, and still be yourself? Do you think you can beat five hundred knights in a tournament without being recognized?’

‘The moment we heard about the tournament,’ said Ector, ‘we came at once. Degalis said: “That is Lancelot, or I’m a Dutchman.”’

‘It would mean,’ said Degalis, ‘if you insist on staying here, that you would have to give up arms altogether. One more fight, and you would be known all over the country. For that matter, I think you are known already.’

‘Staying with Elaine would mean giving up everything. It would mean absolute retirement – no quests, no tournaments, no honour, no love: and you might even have to stay indoors all day. Yours is not an easy face to forget, you know.’

‘Whatever it means, Elaine is kind and good. Ector, when people trust you and depend on you, you can’t hurt them. You could not treat a dog so.’

‘People don’t marry dogs, however.’

‘Damn it, this girl loves me.’

‘So does the Queen.’

Lancelot turned the cap round in his hands.

‘The last time I saw the Queen,’ he said, ‘she told me never to come near her again.’

‘But she has spent twenty thousand pounds looking for you.’

He waited for some time and then asked, in a voice which sounded rough: ‘Is she well?’

‘She is absolutely wretched.’

Ector said: ‘She knows it was her fault. She cried a great deal, and Bors told her she was a fool, but she didn’t argue with him. Arthur is wretched too, because the whole Table is upside down.’

Lancelot threw his cap on the ground and stood up.

‘I told Elaine,’ he said, ‘that I would not promise to stay with her: so I must.’

‘Do you love her?’ asked Degalis, cutting to the root.

‘Yes, I do. She has been good to me. I am fond of her.’

At their looks, he changed the word.

‘I love her,’ he said defiantly.

The knights had been staying for a week, and Lancelot, listening hungrily to their Table news, was weakening every day. Elaine, sitting at the high table beside her lord at dinner, lived in a flow of conversation about people whose names she had never heard and about events which she could not understand. There was nothing to do except to offer second helpings, which Ector would accept without interrupting the anecdote of the moment. They leaned across her and talked and laughed, and Elaine busily laughed too. Every day Lancelot went to his turret at sunset – she had tiptoed away when she first found him there, and he did not know it was a discovered rendezvous.

‘Lancelot,’ she said one morning, ‘there is a man waiting on the other side of the moat, with a horse and armour.’

‘A knight?’

‘No. He looks like a squire.’

‘I wonder who it can be this time. Tell the porter to fetch him across.’

‘The porter says he won’t come across. He says he will wait there for Sir Lancelot.’

‘I will go and see.’

Elaine detained him as he went down to the boat.

‘Lancelot,’ she said, ‘what do you want me to do with Galahad, if you should go away?’

‘Go away? Who says I am going away?’

‘Nobody has said so, but I want to know.’

‘I don’t understand what you are talking about.’

‘I want to know how Galahad is to be brought up.’

‘Well, I suppose in the usual way. He will learn to be a good knight, I hope. But the whole question is imaginary.’

‘That is what I wanted to know.’

She detained him once more, however.

‘Lancelot, will you tell me one other thing? If you should go away, if you should have to leave me – would you be coming back?’

‘I have told you that I am not going away.’

She was trying the meaning of her words, as she made them, like a man walking slowly over a bog and feeling in front of him as he went.

‘It would help me to go on with Galahad – it would help me to go on living – if I knew that it was for something – if I knew that one day – if I knew that you would be coming back.’

‘Elaine, I don’t know why you are talking like this.’

‘I am not trying to stop you, Lance. Perhaps it will be best for you to go. Perhaps it is a thing which has to happen. Only, I wanted to know if I should see you again – because it is important to me.’

He took her hands.

‘If I go,’ he said, ‘I will come back.’

The man on the other side of the moat was Uncle Dap. He was standing with Lancelot’s old charger, now two years older, and all his accustomed armour neatly stowed on the saddle, as if for a kit inspection. Everything was correctly folded and strapped in the proper military place. The habergeon was rolled in a tight bundle. The helm, pauldrons, and vambraces were polished, literally by weeks of polishing, to that veneer or patina of light which is to be found only on things bought newly from the shop before they have been dulled by household cleaning. There was a smell of saddle soap, mixed with the unmistakable, personal smell of armour – as individual a smell as that which you get in the professional’s shop on a golf course, and, to a knight, as exciting.

All Lancelot’s muscles made an emphatic sortie towards the feeling of his own armour, which he had not seen since he left Camelot. His forefinger felt where the handle of his sword would use it for a fulcrum. His thumb knew the exact weight in ounces which it would have to exert on the near side of the fulcrum. The pad on the inside of his palm lusted for the gripe of the hilt. His whole arm remembered the balance of Joyeux and wanted to wag him in the air.

Uncle Dap looked older, and would not speak. He only held the bridle and displayed the gear, waiting for the knight to mount and ride. His stern eye, as fierce as a goshawk’s, waited on his charge. He held out the great tilting helm silently, with its familiar panache of heron hackles and the silver thread.

Lancelot took the helm from Uncle Dap, with both hands, and turned it round. His hands knew the weight to expect – exactly twenty-two and a half pounds. He saw the superb polish, the fresh padding, and the new mantling set behind. It was of azure sarsenet, hand-embroidered in gold thread with the numerous small fleur-de-lis of ancient France. He knew at once whose fingers had done the embroidery. He lifted the helm to his nose and sniffed the mantling.

Immediately she was there – not the Guenever whom he had remembered on the battlements, but the real Jenny, in a different posture, with every lash of her eyelids and every pore of her skin and every note of her voice and every articulation of her smile.

He did not look back as he rode away from Bliant Castle – and Elaine, standing on the barbican tower, did not wave. She watched him going with a still-struck concentration, like somebody who, shipwrecked, gets as much fresh water into the little boat as possible. She had a few seconds left, to make her store of Lancelot that must last her through the years. There would be only this store, and their son, and a lot of gold. He had left her all his money, enough to bring a thousand pounds a year for life – in those days a huge sum.