Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [135]
Next month, Joe tells Fred, they and the Canadians are planning to rent a boat and cruise on the canals. “It’s too damn bad you have to leave tomorrow, otherwise you could come along. It’s going to be great.”
“Yeh, it sounds like fun,” Fred says, thinking to himself that being confined for a week on a canal boat with the Vogelers and their friends, not to mention Jakie, isn’t his idea of great. While their opinion of contemporary England has improved, his has worsened. Everywhere about him now he sees all that they used to complain of: the meaningless imitation and preservation of the past, the smug hypocrisy, the petty regulations, the self-conscious pretense of refinement and virtue. London especially—like Rosemary—seems to him alternately false and mad. He wishes it were already tomorrow evening and he were back home where he belongs, though Christ knows nothing much awaits him there. Roo never answered his telegram; she’s probably off him for good.
Because of his height Fred is one of the first to see the Druids approaching up the path from the east: a procession of maybe two dozen persons hooded and robed in white, many of them carrying lanterns of antique design. At a distance, climbing the dark hill in the hazy moonlight, they are mysterious, even moving: numinous ghostly figures from the prehistoric past come back to life.
Joe and Debby suck in their breath, and Fred, awed in spite of himself, thinks a kind of prayer at the Druids and whatever supernatural powers they may be in touch with—in much the same spirit in which, as a child, he used to wish on a white horse and a load of hay. Make everything come out right, he whispers silently.
But as the Druids draw nearer, the illusion, like so many of Fred’s illusions about England, wavers and is shattered. At close hand these figures are undeniably modern, middle-class, and middle-aged or worse. Under their loose monkish hoods are long smooth pink-and-white English faces of the kind Fred used to see every day at the British Museum; they wear solemn self-conscious expressions and, in many cases, glintingly anachronistic spectacles. And beneath their long robes is an assortment of leather and plastic sandals, only a few pairs of which could pass even on stage as Early British.
The Vogelers don’t seem to be disturbed by these incongruities, or even to notice them. “Hey, this is great,” Joe says as the procession continues past them and forms into a straggly circle before the clump of trees that crowns Parliament Hill.
“Really pretty impressive,” Debby agrees; and in an almost reverent whisper she points out that many—in fact more than half—of the celebrants are female. Druidism is a gender-neutral faith; she read that in the Guardian.
Joe isn’t so sure. Maybe that’s the way it is now, he whispers back, but weren’t all the original Druids men?
Whatever the truth of the matter, Fred thinks as the Vogelers continue to debate the point sotto voce, these modern London Druids are patently phony and amateurish. The elbowy gestures with which their leader flourishes his ceremonial sword are awkward and unconvincing, and so are those of the two bespectacled women waving leafy branches toward the four points of the compass. The fragments of liturgy blown toward Fred on the night wind suggest an Edwardian rather than an Anglo-Saxon religious service; the manner of delivery reminds him of college productions of Greek drama. There’s something almost mad about them too, he thinks, as the Druids raise their lanterns aloft in semi-unison, chanting a hymn to what sounds like The Great Circle of Being in thin well-educated voices, and incidentally revealing a large number of anachronistic wristwatches and trouser legs.
Fred turns away, disgusted with this mummery, and with all the phoniness that surrounds