A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  I have silenced you. You have heard me. Silence overwhelms us.

  ‘With your fiddle,’ I dare to add, ‘you straddle the dimensions. You do let go into the truth, Marigold, the fiddle under your chin. What true human being can do otherwise? It’s the proper human condition. We don’t have a choice. We can contrive to duck it until we come to die. If we’ve left it that late, we know we’ve missed the point of the gift of life.’

  ‘Faith.’

  It is a murmur. You are gazing at that reredos, its elemental images, as if to accuse it. I have no sooner caught you than I lose you.

  ‘It’s the natural condition, Marigold. The motive of hope in the conscious being, the only durable motive. The human race, the conscious being. Why do we rejoice when a baby is born?’

  ‘Faith in … ’

  ‘Love. Faith in love equals hope.’ I have stumbled on the dictum. ‘Love is your quark. Person-love. Divine love. The same word serves: it cannot but serve both. What Jesus does for Christians is to personify love. We meet Jesus in the desert where hope is not discernible.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘The desert of nullity. Pointlessness. Which Silenus insisted was the logical state of mind.’

  ‘Silenus?’ And I tell you: Dionysus’ minder, speaking of Man as Mammon, only Mammon. And you follow half in mockery: ‘Your Jesus points the way … ’

  ‘Jesus is the way. He becomes the way for us, through discipline, through our submission, our acts of veneration. You already have the discipline in music. Quiet discipline. You too have the corpus of musical inheritance. I might call that the communion of saints – the whole inventory of musical discovery, musical wisdom. You perform at a high endeavour.

  ‘Jesus applied the Tao-term about himself – I am The Way. He gives it being. He responds to our situation of mortality amid the All. He lived a life in time amid the timeless universe. He allows us to be of it all in its entirety.’

  ‘What do you mean allows. We are of it whether we recognise it or not. Why bother with it?’

  You shock me. ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘You compose and perform. I preach and praise. It is the same requirement, the same impulsion from the centre of our being. I would say, of being, that very being which is the gift of all humanity.

  ‘By dint of consciousness we have to square that reality of participation in time and in eternity, in space and infinity. We must do this … by love, by art, by worship – in whatever combination of the abandonment of self. We need that truth, that wisdom, to live within, to belong to, to give expression to.

  ‘So Beethoven writes his last quartets out of deafness. So John of the Cross his erotic poems as God’s ravaged lover. There is that famous adage of a twelfth-century monk of how the love of truth, that truth, drives him out of the world, and the truth of the love draws him back into it. That is the sublime oscillation. My love of truth calls me to the Ituri forest.’

  And I begin to tell you how in a few parts of the world there persist communities which are uniquely symbiotic with the natural world around them as if symbiotic with the universe – communities living wholly within and upon their own Eden: the last of the hunter-gatherers … Chukchis and Inuits in the Arctic, tribes in Amazonia, in Papua, Bushmen in the Kalahari; the remnants of uncontaminated pygmy groups in the forests of equatorial Africa, each in their way of life and patterns of belief our ancestors of an Eden-innocence.

  ‘Before paradise was lost.’ Your intervention comes with condescension. ‘I hardly suppose you’re a creationist.’

  ‘It’s myth, the creation story, intended as myth, to tell a truth about the obligations of human attainment of consciousness, grasping the I and its equivalence of you.

  ‘A beast dying for its young is not saying I and you. It and its young are a single organism driven by instinct. A man making conscious choices has gone beyond instinct. He chooses this course or that course. The right one or the wrong one. Good or evil. Wise or wild. Rational – you’ll go for that – or irrational.

  ‘The intention of the myth of Eden is to place Man in the same ground as the Creator, where he cannot but belong, yet Man with his weakness and selfishness which consciousness obliges him to be aware of.’

  ‘Your pygmies, Simon, won’t be pre-Fall any more than the rest of us. They’ll have eaten your Eden apple. They’ll know about blame and guilt and fear of death. And if I’m wrong, they won’t need you.’

  I hear the briskness in your voice, an intolerance of cant.

  My response is inadequate: ‘They cannot but be closer to Eden … ’

  ‘ … which means wholly preoccupied by the requirement to survive … ’

  ‘ … with whatever savagery that may entail. Yes.’

  ‘Pre-conscious savagery. Therefore, innocent.’

  ‘They are not savage in the familiar sense. No gratuitous savagery. They’re shy and gentle. What we do in slaughterhouses would appal them. I don’t doubt we sophisticates have something vital to learn from them. They’re almost extinct.’

  ‘Yet you’re intending to Christianise them.’

  ‘Proper Christianity squares the Conscious with Innocence.’

  ‘Proper Christianity!’ It comes as a great sigh as if proper Christianity were ever possible.

  You would love me loyally in the teeth of my conviction and my fantasy. My Bambuti were indeed pre-Fall. No one had told them they were naked. If anyway they were children, they could not become ‘as children’. They hunted, they gathered; they lived, they procreated; they died. They had no space for good here and evil there. They had space only for what was there for survival. ‘Proper Christianity’ would not even save them as a community in their primality. Those proclaiming the divinity of Christ would bring them booze and clothes and prostitution, debt-slavery and AIDS. You and I had more to delve in them – their proper dark – than ever they might learn from my churched faith, run by their Bantu quasi-masters.

  I would delve the very bulbs of the innocence that Eve and her consort had lived before they knew that they were naked and warranted redemption.

  You loved me post-primal more than you intended, Marigold. More than you bargained for when I put it to you that you might join me as partner in my response to my ‘vocation’ of which the very word brought on a half-smile. Because you learned, as we all learn, that love is not conditional and not eradicable. It is not to be bargained for. It is not amenable to planning.

  You made me your true-love for the sheer perversity of the choice. In the social cosmos of your fellows Simon Chance had to be a toff, a genetic throwback, programmed as a Christian. You summoned the humanist and the egalitarian in yourself to match what I claimed as faith. Yet that love took root, and grew with its own delineation, for better for worse. Be it in the service of Bantu villagers at diocesan headquarters or of hunters and gatherers in the forest, I would preach my Jesus and you would offer music. Each of us would bring the written word. Somehow we each would ease the lot of equatorial Africa’s post-colonial needy, you in guilt at the imperial heritage, I in virtual honour of it. You were restive for challenge. Playing in the back row of the strings in a provincial orchestra and cajoling your friends into performing to tiny audiences what you composed was not after all to be your route to fulfilment. You were to take a risk.

  Your Dad, you said, would have approved that risk. The way you put it was that he would have condoned your marrying a public schoolboy and Oxonian from what was left of the landed gentry for the chance of making him ‘recognisably human’. You were paraphrasing his imaginary response in jest, and kept loyal to both loves, him and me.

  As memory leached from you, I was the last companion of your vanished life. In St Saviour’s you knew not where you were, nor who you were, yet it was I you still infallibly knew, as a recipient of your love, and provider of your grub of being amid the mush of oblivion. The currant eyes (now wild) for a moment see me as I am. A hand darts towards me like a prayer spurting.

  Love once given and received
is indestructible: that I’ve learnt.

  ‘My Dad came yesterday,’ you tell me. It was three weeks before the end. ‘We had a beautiful talk’ – he who surely loved you too, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Keele, gone from this world in flagrant suffering these 30-odd years, whom I’d never known but for the heady erudition that framed you.

  A beautiful talk, I echo. My hand is squeezed.

  In echoed love your Dad encounters me, he who had no time for God, no time at all. In the manner of your going, you made mockery of the Gerontian way of dying as did he.

  III

  O you friends of mine up there in the Villa Les Maures, taking showers, splashing cologne, getting kitted up to re-assemble and re-review the debris of your expectations, be warned. Be warned. Within the hour you’ll be awakening to an absentee from the midst of you, a special one, of statutory detachment edged with purple, a make-weight for the golden calf (now visibly melting), one whose student values, such as they ever were, were surely no different from yours. Pause now, regard: you still have no hunch as to his incapacity to shape the bereavement to which your hostess alerted you. Meanwhile, he has disappeared into your adjacent wilderness.

  The other night in his dream your old friend – would you believe this? – was on a precipice lip, the sharp edge of the Great Gulf Fixed as depicted in scripture separating Abraham in Heaven and Dives in Hell. Indeed, I was wearing Dives’ mantle of episcopal purple, and there in Hell with all my fellow dons at Trinity, a gaggle grown fat and lazy and of irredeemable, complicit self-satisfaction. Just how wildly was I imploring the patriarch in heaven to send me Lazarus – ex-beggar, covered in sores, ragged at my gate. Yet Lazarus was also hunched in my living-room and was Marigold in disguise. So then it was Marigold in heaven, across the Great Gulf Fixed! It was she pleading to dip her finger in water and reach across the terrible void to cool my tongue: the tip – just the tip of her finger!

  Lazarus-Marigold had become a child of sheerest innocence.

  Oh but the gulf was too wide! The abyss too terrible! Communication unthinkable.

  When I awoke in disorder, the same unspannable chasm had become my guilt. I dream, I had gazed across at you, mouthing silently, but nothing now was capable of passing between us, not an exchange of eye, let alone the touch of a finger. I was now the one locked into a slab of greenish glass, peering through it to you. The ruthless tableaux of dreams had transposed the scenario of your nightmare.

  Look, Jesus, look on me in pity, how I – purpled-up – sumptuously fare, here now in the Villa Les Maures just as at High Table at Trinity year by long year. Each evening I’d flee across the road to College Hall from my pledged spouse’s flaking into non-being. Did I not long to sweep up those flakes and shards and bin them? No, no, no, I admit no such longing. You breathed, you spoke, you smiled, the button eyes ranged our living room to fix me in imbecilic trust.

  It was for me to enter my own kenosis divesting being of self, to provide you a twinned presence in a willed void.

  How is Marigold? stopping me in the Broad, in vacuous solicitude. I reply,

  The condition advances.

  Sounding cold, I add, She had a good day yesterday (not groaning aloud to be gone, not pleading to go home, not railing at inability to make her own music).

  It’s wonderful what you do, Simon.

  Do? Wonderful?

  Classic FM plays for you at table in the kitchen. There was recorded music seeping into your own room, to lull … lull-music to rise up and accuse you for playing no part. You demand it silenced.

  Of course you’ve thought of St Saviour’s, they persist in the Broad. Though it is expensive.

  I have thought of St Saviour’s, and more beside, Charis, Beverley, Willa, my pavement comforters, speculating what I have done to earn this. I am to have you put down? – consigned to a half-way grave, a bin of flakes and shards of what once were people? A costly elegant bin, another mini-industry of obliviation?

  When in the end I do consign you, my halfprayer is misshapen. Lord, furnish me with a vessel of recollection of this life-long helpmeet,

  maker of music,

  mother of our daughters and of a son sacrificed to the tropics.

  When the ambulance crew came to the flat across from Trinity to carry you down the stairs you had not descended for months I saw in your eyes a different quality from their blankness. They said,

  treachery.

  Oh … O God, behind that accusation, enfolding it, was beseeching Love such as rose, itself, out of fathomless depth in piteous defiance of her own extinction.

  You had only weeks to remain in this world. As if I didn’t know it would be thus. You died of accelerated emptiness.

  The darkening of this forest of the Massif des Maures is accelerating. The recollection of you which elbows out all the rest is the treachery.

  In those months which became years before I consigned you, I in my library down the corridor from you would be alert not for your call or whimper but for the carer’s key in the lock. It would be half past six, the start of the vigil, the washing, the feeding, the nightly masque of Encarnacion’s bustling cheer. You weren’t fooled. The images jumped and slid silently on the television screen. The fingers at the hem of the comfort blanket once so brilliant were a clutch of bones. You never spoke Encarnacion’s name, never quite knew who she was except as harbinger of the escape of me, the spouse, the vow-maker.

  I escaped to Hall, grief mangled dry of tears, prayers of intercession husked. In Hall I can turn quite riotous. Trenchering, quaffing, imagination on the high wire, I am Dives in purple and raw-skinned Lazarus in oscillation. My fellow dons long ceased their How’s Marigold? … – except for that evening when I arrive in Hall with my skull plastered. I tell them how you had smashed your violin down onto me like an executioner. I made light of it. The Furies, I tell them. They furrow incomprehension. Your Mittenwald has been the treasure of your life since you inherited it at twelve, the artificer of your craft, symbol of your creative gift, your fétishe which my God, you hissed at me, had made off with. ‘My’ God was your masked enemy until the doctor changed the prescription secretly administered by Encarnacion and we doped you out of conjured demons.

  That evening, I let on to none of my co-dons that it was after I had rescued the violin from the open fire in the grate that you seized it from my hands to make it a weapon, screaming I want you dead. Nor how I had fled bleeding into the bathroom to lock myself in until Encarnacion arrived. I emerged, still clutching the remnants of the violin. I could hear in my head the wonder of the sounds you had once drawn from that depths-of-the-forest instrument, the improvised evocations; inward, exploratory, ecstatic; most secret of yearnings and flashes of joy. My heart in that bathroom was as broken as the wood and guts in my hand. I could have silenced my colleagues into dumbness by the scale of your tragedy. That sacred instrument had come to be the single and supreme link with your fellow men. What you could draw from that violin and what you could improvise for it had become justification for your presence on earth. What that very instrument summoned in you was what had seemed to reconcile my returning with you to this Oxford of mine when I opted Trinity’s offer a lectureship in mediaeval Italian: Oxford so alive with music that you would surely find an ensemble to join and perform what you had composed.

  That was the way I put it, when I knew there was something other for me than the role of a West Country suffragan bishop of my inconsequential self-destructing Church, which I loved and wept for in ragged pity. My flock was scarcely flock but a gaggle of souls with clerical vows and functions riven by issues of esoteric concern to paid priest, as to the gender of those in high office and the sexual practice of certain incumbents. On neither issue did the gospel of the Son of God have bearing, nor on the relentless matter of the dispensation of diocesan cash and property which cluttered my desk and consumed my energies. Consider the lilies of the field, how they toil not, nor do they spin. I was not a bad suffragan bishop, striving but
blunted, exploiting gifts neither spiritual nor scholarly. You perceived this, Marigold – my privy irrelevance, my hollow office, after no more than half a dozen years of endeavour, when Trinity’s offer of reprieve was slipped in front of me: their looming vacancy for a Lectureship in mediaeval Italian literature. My Triple Essay had quickened my collegiates’ awareness of my sustained engagement, my lifelong armature, when the book was greeted with strange gratitude by a literary establishment taken to rooted secularity.

  I was touched, and the scholar in me was tempted by the space and grace to do research and write in the name of my Faith upon a specific Christian enlightenment in a given place at a given time, and its towering exponent, while the intellectual verve was still within me.

  Yet you, my Marigold: for you I sensed Oxford spelled danger. Oxford was your spouse’s prior citadel of privilege, his sealed inheritance, whose codes he knew and argot was conversant with. Once she had remarked You’re a different person, Simon, with your Oxford set. ‘They belong to a generation ago, my darling. The set.’ The old gang, Fergie, Reggie, Julian; Clare … Evie. ‘I will be at work on Dante the metaphysician, and supervising eager young things seeking new truth in ancient wisdom. Meanwhile, Oxford is full of music … ancient and daring.’