by Tom Stacey
The very circularity of my intended forest route would restore me to the abandoned forest church – if I were not already lost.
Regard, my friends, the superannuated prelate, widowed don, prayer-spent, wound out, pushing sixty and destitute of joy. Of course, I’m different from the generality of you. But different in any way that matters like Julian our bullion buff? The rest of you, these past five days since my arrival among you, you’ve been watching mesmerised the value of all that allows you to be what you suppose yourselves to be dissolve. Your portfolios of investments, hedge funds, your real estate – all haemorrhaging by double-digit percentage points each passing forty-eight hours. A week or two more of this and you’ll be as destitute as I – yet I out-destituting all since I postulate another order of value. I bank Truth.
When we were young, there was Simon Chance, one of the lads, a fellow rough-and-tumbler, quick-witted, idle, mischievous no less at Oxford than at the big school, game for whatever’s going – had I not an ear cocked for something inner? A singular voice?
It surprised you all.
Except perhaps you, Wally. For you and me there’s the childhood anamnesis to share from when we were eleven or twelve. You were spared the scourge of football because of your foot and I assigned to be your fellow rambler. You were with me when I found that ptarmigan chick, unfledged, yards from the snowline and exiled from its groundnest on the bald bleak heights overlooking the Ericht gorge which was out of bounds. We nursed it secretly on milk and pellets of bread. We made its nest in the pile of sack-race sacks in the sports kit store at Talladh-a-bheithe. We loved every fragment of that bird, we watched its down become feathers. Then it flew. Such was our inexpressible joy that Highland May! Something within each of us learned that very day to fly… A twelve-year-old at chapel at our prep school, Wally – you tone deaf, I a solo chorister: had you not already scented my other world? Did we not share it? You and I would swap our dreams, sorties of imagination.
In that Grampian wilderness of Rannoch I surely told you of the delectable vale that lit my secret imaginary life, my specific vision of this world transcended. From my high point of jumbled bens, there, suddenly far far below, light-drenched, a vale I knew to be of ultimate peace and bliss, a site of soul against the bank of a vast river of crystal water which curved away into a limitless distance, the site of soul on its exquisite shore lying some three or four miles ahead of where I stood and two thousand feet beneath me from the elevation of my high col. Beside the sheen of water I could make out with acute precision yellow rocks and verdancy. Arduous traversing of a wild tract of peak-studded uplands had brought me to this sight of beckoning paradise. There could have been no other route than that I’d chanced upon. I knew the astounding privilege of the sight being vouchsafed to me. This was the sacred destination of my being, stretching infinitely below me. And my being was also all being. To descend to it awaited some point in my future, an apotheosis to come – a descent by a confusion of clefts and rock-strewn cwms. Yet I hadn’t any doubt I would reach the place when it was to be ordained that I should.
Surely you’ll remember my speaking to you of this waking vision, Wally? In our gabled Highland bedroom on a summer’s night with the sun scarcely troubling to set? As children we took each other as we found ourselves. Life was full of discovery – our own: our comrades’. And of all comrades you were the last to be puzzled, years later, by a vocation having caught me up.
Vocation wasn’t a word either of us would accord much meaning as, after Rannoch, we grew into manhood by our diverging routes. You were to learn of the family business, buying and selling, money-changing, margins, profits, losses. Several years on you heard at a distance of the ordination of your childhood friend: you were not non-plussed. You were momentarily reflective of how otherly indeed can be two prep-school best friends – and preciously other as to the directions life would later carry them. You might have glimpsed a line of insurance against your world’s exposure as ultimately futile … Do you remember running into me once at Heathrow airport at the height of your spectacular entrepreneurial ascent? I was returning on leave from my dark Congo, and there were you in the baggage hall. You ribbed me For God’s sake, Simon, when are you going to settle down to a proper job? One of your enterprises was cultivating tea in western Uganda, not far from my mountains and my forest pygmies: I can’t help myself, Wally, I answer you; and you stop to look at me, sweetly incredulous. Yet you are soon to crash, and when you did you could not help yourself.
As for the rest of you with whom life was shared at public school or university or both, breaking in on maturity – oh yes, I have discerned these decades later a curious strain of gratitude. One of your own, Simon Chance, whom you’d known in the blood as you were taking shape – here was the self-same fellow investing not in the gilded pit but some quite other fairy ring of Weddings, Christenings, Funerals, Thought-for-the-Day, and Christmas Carols to welcome the birth of One to be judicially murdered for the threat of his truth … who would return mysteriously to life to trump mortality. You’ve all picked up the puzzling mythology.
I am woven into the backcloth of your growing up. This arras you can’t discard. We are all in our weaves together. We’ve all knelt in chapel, all heard Grace intoned, invoking thankfulness for life. Yet what your chum Simon Chance’s subsequent vows expect of him would be scarcely comprehensible to any one of you … except (at moments) Clare; Clare confidante of Evie.
So up at the villa I am the pale custodian of the hedge against your world of supposed reality being exposed as unreal. One of you, our arriviste Sir Gunther, distinguished, rich, déraciné, Zurich-born, must suppose himself immune from any need of a pale custodian. Because Gunther Brunner has arrived, readymade a grandee of his adopted England, who has taken Clare’s chum Pauline, lately of St Hugh’s, an aristocrat’s daughter, to replace the first wife he grew too English for. His Englishness is of a higher carat than we ourselves would dare to claim and is enough of a sphere of being in itself.
Not one of you has an inkling of the daily orisons I maintain in secret in my dépendance; how in the lower garden by the tennis court I pray. How my vows endure. That which the darkness cannot comprehend endures. Once it reflected joy, that same joy Dante came to know and kept him writing, kept Dante on his progress on to Paradise by the hand of Beatrice. I don’t disown my Credo nor jettison the chance of escaping this dark wood.
You old friends are variously on the gilded treadmill in the golden pit, generating wealth for the noble sake of generating wealth. Children of God, you have nodded to him at the weddings, christenings, funerals and the rest, furrowing kindly at the unworkability of what it proposes. Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. Whatever next! What next? Can any such injunction sustain a civilisation? A market? A bourse? Next week’s provisions for the family table? We believe in One God, maker of money, which paid for our fees to attend the ancient seats of learning where these comradeships of ours were so worked that all these years later we’re still woven into the same arras.
Your religious life, Simon Chance, is the luxury extra. Be reminded. Yours is the costly ointment from its alabaster jar smeared on the head of your Jesus as his murderers close around him. Judas had a point, grousing that the money would be better spent on the hungry. These past few days, our real world has been in demoniac descent onto the Gadarene rocks. We foregather at our drinking hours and sumptuous meals heady with disbelief …
Today our very special guests were late. Could it be that they had hit the rocks and died?
We were assembled in our villa above the forest for our pre-prandial obliviators. Our Telegraph had been brought up by Maïté’s husband from Cogolin, nestled sleepily below among its vineyards. The newspaper was instantly dismembered. With taut courtesy each in turn – Fergus the merger, bullion Julian, hedgefund Reggie – snatched apologetically for sheets of newsprint any one of which would be carrying its own take on the
scenario of finality … Page one. Leader column. Business Section. Interpretative article by the current economic high priest. Each column of print assuaged the ravening for doom for a few brief moments. Even Sir Gunther himself, secured and index-linked, sneaked a glimpse, though he’d rather it was the Guardian whose heart bleeds visibly. Wally alone, busted by the last big crisis, held aloof with nothing much to lose.
Oh, impatience for Armageddon! When war is declared the suicide rate plummets. Yet another bank is to be snuffed by the twist of events – can it be the Brothers Silberberg, stanchion of the universe? Nothing is sacred; none shall go unshriven. The C of E’s pension fund is but another House of Cards. Our cathedrals will stay upright in their decay, staring out as from Easter Island for God knows what.
O sackcloth, O ashes.
As for me, in the face of this version of death I am not so much afraid as terminologically intrigued. I too could be swept away – my Church, my rank, my scholastic role …
We await our guests.
Fergus, you of such brave aims, I overhear you ringing to annul your flotation on the London Stock Exchange of the Chinese consortium you have so assiduously constructed. With such grace do you let the whole thing go! In a matter of hours, indeed of minutes, the earth beneath has moved and rendered pointless the shaping imagination and unrelenting endeavour of months and months. You have encountered a Will that nullifies all for mice and men, and by that Will’s ancillary grace you submit.
You were never one to bother God, Fergie, doing your PPE at BNC. Yet here’s this grace in you, a spring of saving grace. The whole thing – the city’s manifold endeavour – is a game, a monstrous charade. Let the merger go. Ta-ra.
Let the world unravel. Let each day’s fragment of history be overcome by the next’s … Don’t we see, Fergie, Reggie, Julian, Charley, how events are devoured by history and its media as if by locusts? Nothing survives but stubs and stalks. The locusts swarm in, darkening the sky. Tomorrow, today’s news shall be yesterday’s misfortune, and yesterday’s news is nothing but where the locusts were.
Friends, it is you and you that fill the headlines and crave the column inches, you the bankers, investors, legal eagles, citizens of distinction, of authority, bulwarked and bucklered. The news has swept upon you and devoured your husbandry, your portfolios, discretionary trusts, endowments and safe havens; your reputations, elevations, laurels of honour. O Ozymandias.
O Almanac de Gotha, O Directory of Directors, the High Priests, fat cats and Sadducees. Friends, sub-friends, chance comrades, merger Fergie, bullion Julian, Chancery Charley, hedger Reggie, old pal Wally (who has foresuffered), Sir Gunther Brunner – dare you look to me for some other motive for your endeavour upon earth than getting on top and staying ahead of the game, the money game, the status game? Dante declared the mountain of Purgatory held e nulla pena no other pain more bitter ha piu amara, than for a life of avarice. You shall not love the world or the things in the world, John told us all in words which will not go away. Dare I repeat it for you? Dare I gaze back to you as it might be ancient John clinging to the threads of his life, dictating his last brief letter to the ‘children’ of his fading heart and whisper on to you that truth?
Would that I could dare.
I have not retreated into the desert for my restitution, to any cavemouth, to cup my solitude and silence in empty hands beneath a juniper. I’m in the pots and pleasures of the rich, the cord of the habit frayed, cord of the one-time missionary of Jesus who’d trek through the Ituri rainforest to bring God’s word of love to bark-clad innocents in a doomed endeavour.
This superannuated suffragan bishop of the C of E, scholar of Dante, recently widowed, has lost his way in the forested massif of Var, some miles west of Cogolin, to the dismay of his hosts and ridicule of the natives. No such man can come back to his fellows and show them a further reality.
V
Look how the big hand of my watch is already at the vertical! The hour is seven and nightfall imminent.
Take stock, fool. Here’s a track long unused yet seasons ago roughly opened out for a 4 by 4 vehicle. No one’s ever stripped the cork-bark from these oaks: it’s too deep in the forest. If peasantry from surrounding valleys made such a trail it would have been only for their boar-hunt when they surge forth in mid-winter to massacre every furred or feathered thing of innocence and beauty in celebration of their humanity. Else it’s to serve fire-fighters if the forest catches fire as I have heard it devastatingly can.
Physically to escape this forest is a doddle. Can I not follow this very track’s route to some superior track and so on, out? Yet it at once disappears in undergrowth. So then, all I have to do is stick to any descent where rainfall flows when it flows and so escape the maze. But it’ll be late into the night and leave me heaven knows how distant from the villa. And the forest of my lostness will have followed me.
Man of God, creature of idiocy.
At the first dwelling I chance on, I’ll knock up the wide-eyed habitants.
‘Vous êtes d’où?’
‘C’est une maison qui s’appelle villa Les Maures.’
‘Villa Les Maures?’ A rough brow furrows.
‘Au fond de la forêt. Au sommet d’un colline.’
‘Vraiment?’ Bronzed puzzlement. ‘Je ne connais pas.’
‘C’est vingt minutes en voiture de la petite ville de Cogolin.’
‘Ah. Et vous voudrez la téléphoner?’
‘Je ne connais pas le numéro.’
‘Rien de numéro?’ No number at all? Residual sympathy evaporates.
‘Rien de rien.’
‘Et le nom du propriétaire?’
The blundering Englishman in his green shirt confesses in broken French he hasn’t the least notion as to what name his hostess’ son has the property registered for any listing of phone numbers. Quite likely a nominal company protects Colin’s incognito.
The peasant grape-growers will give me a corner to doss down for whatever is left of the night. In their own good time they’ll ferry me to Cogolin. At the gendarmerie they call off the alarm and deliver me with a French shrug to the Villa Les Maures and present Clare with a bill for the aborted search. For within a few hours the alarm will have gone forth, police alerted. ‘Un de nos invités est perdu dans la forêt. Un homme.’
‘Quel age?’
‘Moyen. Un peu gris. Pas trop ancien.’
‘Il s’appelle?’
‘Chance. Comme chance.’
‘Et ce monsieur Chance: comment il s’habille?’
‘Une chemise verte, nous croyons.’
The system rallies. The more it rallies, the vaster my ignominy, the more voluble the apologies from my house party after their ruined dinner and dreadful night, when I’m dumped back.
Meanwhile, at 9 a.m., someone will have met Evie and her booming Victor at Marseilles airport . . . Simon has disappeared.
In the lost hours I shall have shrunk from heroic victim of unknown misfortune to laughing-stock. And Evie? What might she suppose? That her approach pitched me into mindless flight?
Are we negatable, Evie, by caprice, by folly– you and I? Yet it was you who in your e-mail at the approach of this encounter whispered the word panic, and I who brushed it aside.
Listen, Evie, listen. If I am to be briefly lost, such a mischance befalls anyone, any time. A deceptive fork in the forest track, a clouding of the sun. Yes, yes: I ought to have been carrying a compass, a phone, a number in my head. That was a little absent-minded – no worse than absent – sauntering off in green shirt and cotton slacks, one-and-a-half euros in one pocket and glasses in the other.
So what option have I but to follow this track down, keep on till far into the night and walk out somewhere? Maybe thirty minutes of daylight remain to me and another ten until absolute darkness. What track will then be discernible? There’ll be no moon with this queer high murk, no comfort of a fleeting, feminine moon. Chaste moon is banished.
Yet in this last light I c
ould still retrace at speed the virtually trackless route I have come by and pick up a directional clue. I might still intercept the by-road that links the villa with Cogolin. Surely I have a chance of making it back to the villa by midnight. …
Be smart. Be lucky. In full darkness it’ll be impossible … and if I fail I’ll have delayed by several hours my emergence from the forest by means of the first alternative . . .
Here I hesitate on the steep descent scarred by immemorial deluges. It is silent and airless. Not a dark leaf of these brooding cork-oaks quivers. This entire forest is expectant. It is in league with an imminent future.
As for this scurrying, fretting body of mine, the stuff of its inhabitant is to be put to the test. I shall have it retrace its steps with its lifted toe-nail even if the last part of any such circuit will be in pitch dark. If that fails, Dante Scholar Lost in Dark Wood is the awaited headline.
But they won’t be chuckling into their apéritifs up at the villa. A ruined dinner is a ruined dinner. There will be no leading on of the Fool to have us rise above it all.
My feet with lifted toe-nail shall indeed attempt retracing their steps so far. Hurry now, hurry.
I shan’t succeed. I am to be assigned to this forest. This crisis is destined. This cup will not pass from me. This forest is my destined nemesis. Regard these trees before they disappear in blackness. See the aisles they make, cathedral precincts, sanctums, sanctuaries. Here I am to be lost, to find myself if such is to be granted. Here choices must be made, here only inner light will replace the encroaching dark. I am half-way through the story of my life, like Dante. Six centuries ago life was shorter. Today drooling middle-age hangs on to its middleness so as to shroud finalities. My fellow ecclesiastics and I wrap ourselves around in roles and reputations, our Africa committees, with scholarly conclaves, coteries of College, freemasonries of this sort or that, each with its rituals, some with their vestments. They comfort, they cushion, they obfusc, easing the passage of one day to the next. What comforts us most surely is our own voice sounding sagacity.