The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

we were the only people there, except for a solitary figure sitting on a rock overlooking the ruins. I found it depressingly desolate, but this man above us seemed strangely absorbed by it. He appeared to be lost in his thoughts as he stared at the sea crashing on the rocks below. Then he caught sight of us. And instantly switched his attention. He couldn’t take his eyes off us. It made me feel very uneasy. He just sat there, watching our every move.

“Eventually I just couldn’t stand it any longer, so I persuaded Frank we should leave and find the nearest pub for a bite to eat. Then, about ten minutes after we’d sat down in the pub with our ploughman’s lunch, in he walked. He seemed much larger at ground level, as he stood in the doorway. He wasn’t tall, but he was well-built and muscular. Quite good looking in a sinister sort of way, even though he was prematurely bald. He smiled over at us as he came in, looked enquiringly at our table, then walked over to the bar. He appeared to be talking to the barman about us, pointing and looking in our direction. And when the barman pulled a pint of beer and put it down in front of him, he picked up the glass and came to sit at the table next to ours.

“‘Wonderful country this, isn’t it?’ he said in a broad accent from the other side of the Atlantic that took me aback. I remember wondering what on earth an American was doing in those parts. But I didn’t need to ask. He was one of those very forthcoming Americans who heap all kinds of information and worldly wisdom on you without stopping for a moment to consider whether you actually want to hear it or not.

“‘I’m looking for inspiration,’ he said. And he stared profoundly into the ploughman’s lunch that the barman had brought over, as if he wanted to reassure us that their conversation at the bar had been nothing more than an innocent discussion of the menu. Without waiting any longer for an invitation, our new-found American friend then proceeded to let us into the whole history behind his visit to Cornwall.

“He reached a large workman’s hand across the table and introduced himself as Bill Plattner. He was an artist, he said. Or a sculptor to be precise.

“‘You might not think it,’ he went on, ‘but I used to be a puny little runt at one time.’

“Actually, I have to admit that he had quite an engaging personality on the surface, as Americans so often do. But I was slightly disturbed by the way he couldn’t take his eyes off Frank. Well, in the time it took us to finish our ploughman’s lunches, we came to know practically everything there was to know about Bill Plattner – at least regarding what he considered the meaningful part of his life.

“He said he had studied art in California. And on his way into art school in San Diego every day, he said, he always passed a gym. One day, one of the men who worked there was standing on the door and started to make fun of him, told him he should take more pride in his own body, it was God’s gift, and all that kind of thing. And the taunting got to him so much that he was eventually persuaded to go inside one day and take a look.

“And he never looked back, or so he said. Apparently, he started working out every day, and took such pleasure in the fruits of his bodybuilding that it influenced the whole direction of his studies. And so he became a sculptor. He rambled on about the ‘unique interaction between my bodybuilding and my art’,” Ellen said attempting to imitate an American accent. “I had difficulty following him sometimes. But Frank seemed engrossed. And that surprised me, because he’s usually so dismissive of people like that.

“Anyway, to cut a long story short, he had spent a year of his studies in Europe, ‘doing Florence’ and that sort of thing. And on what he called a pilgrimage to the south-west of England (he was into Barbara Hepworth and wanted to ‘soak up some of the ambience that had inspired that wonderful lady’ as he put it), he’d been completely knocked out by the bleakness of the moors. Especially by the granite rocks that jut out of the hills. And the weird shapes they make – ‘born of fire and yet so cold’ he kept saying.

“In fact, he was so taken by the place that he decided to invest the proceeds of his first big commission in a small cottage on the edge of Dartmoor. I suppose he must have been quite a successful artist to afford that. And he turned it into a studio, where he worked for at least two or three months every year with the local granite.

“‘You must come over and see it some time,’ he kept saying. And his invitation always seemed to be addressed more to Frank than to me. ‘It’s another world,’ he said, ‘right on the edge of the moor. Bleak, depressingly beautiful. The west winds breathe this curious, almost silent susurrus through the grass, not a tree to be seen for miles.’ I remember those words to this day. Not so much strange as pretentious, I felt. As if he was trying to impress, trying to prove something.”

At that moment, Ellen recalled the peculiar verse that Frank was supposed to have written in the clinic – Pneuma, silent susurrus, whispers ancient legends of what might have been: Tristan in Tintagel for example. The words were etched indelibly on her mind. Not a day went by without her wondering what they could possibly mean.

“Would you excuse me for a moment? There’s something I must show you,” she said. And she left Marthe hanging in mid-story, as she went to fetch a copy of the piece