by Tom Stacey
Brute destiny has conjured this forest to call the bluff. Here hides an old barbarity, a destiny impervious to love, to the gospel Christ, his invocable peace, the context of thanksgiving. Here bides Evil awaiting its sway, indifferent to any plea of man, deaf to blandishments, the pomp and the pretension of the creature Man. In my bones I know well it is decided already that I shall not recover the route I came by, that I am to be captive here, that these aisles and cloisters are to vanish under shroud of dark, under another rule that has caught me up to play with me as it will. In my old rainforest when my little companions go hunting colobus monkeys in the tree canopy, they shoot their arrows and yelp their cries – wah! Eriah! – to separate a single monkey from the troupe. Once isolated, they know they have him, and pursue and torment him in his lonely terror until he makes and misses a dramatic leap. Then they have him, as this forest’s Evil now has me.
Oh my villa friends, how we suppose we play the world, deluded in the troupe, we who between us know how to turn a profit in a falling market, who will never be quite outsmarted since even when there is nothing else we have with us this man of God, one of us, Simon, to take the last trick; our broker-boy, the ultimate hedge. With this conceit, dear friends, this chutzpah, we have woken from half-sleep in his pit that Evil of sullen destiny. We have provoked him to do what he will to the monkey-man who got himself separated from the troupe on his primal forested ground, to take possession of him and make play with him, his blood and his body in its green sports shirt.
For you comrades up in the villa it’s now crisis and, as the Telegraph’s Business Section headlined today, you’re staring into the abyss. So too am I. Your Abyss was surely always there, yet only now do you find yourselves staring into it. Such is your brute destiny; I’ve left you to it, regrettably unavailable to provide salvation of a different order, my old ex-juvenile fellows of the ruling caste, the prospective great and good, suited and barbered, under layers of self-preservation, ranks, trusts, pensions index-linked, health insurance and share-options, titles and honorifics, gracious and grace-and-favour residences, intellectual slants and shibboleths, rote moralities, simonies and tax evasions, marriages and infidelities, divorces, separations, vaunted conjugal endurances; your fortunes, follies, vanities, rebuffs; sagged foreskins, withered dugs and squandered lusts; pilasters of the community, patrons of art, aficionados of the concert hall; arrivistes and aristocrats, bankers, brokers, wheelers, dealers, lords and landowners, Fergus, Julian, Reggie, Charley, ruined and rescued Wally and the unsinkable Sir Gunther, each spoused or re-spoused with his Henrietta, Jane, Philly, Pauline, Violetta, June … and hostess Clare, divorcee of distinction, paired for this occasion by a one-off bereaved ecclesiastic, scholar-bishop, a spiritual lush engaged upon the nth penetration of Dante Alighieri’s parable of infatuation.
May you stare into abyss, mine or yours. Mine is Hell, and its resident master the barbaric master of my destiny. He has found me out in this forest – no! he has inveigled me into this forest, lured me and misled me. It is no cathedral with naves and aisles and transepts, it is a maze and labyrinth, a vast entrapment, a catacomb of false alleys, dead ends, sumps, cloacae, not penetrable by any Grace of God, indifferent to men and wholly deaf to prayer. This is the sullen power my Bambuti knew was not assailable, but pocked and dark and masterly, biding his time to outlive love, deny salvation, stifle and snuff hope for man. My Bambuti knew him. All my life I had denied him. Now he has me.
‘Evie,’ Fergus accosted me: ‘that was your popsie from LMH. Evie Scrimgeour. Scrumptious Scrimgeour. Surely …’
All today I was out of kilter. Maybe because I am unreadied for Evie and her consort… Something could break loose … a wild havocking joy. This morning, Clare lifted the edge of my cover when she looked up at me a priest from her carrot-chopping, for her far from ordinary lunch. The awaited guest had shaped her life by first marrying, then abandoning her. Now he was dying.
Faith isn’t wrapped in packets, I put it to you, Clare. ‘We ecclesiastics – ’ I begin to gather myself – ‘have need of our own spiritual directors, no less than anyone else. Mine is a monk named Paul … On Sunday you and I will go to Mass together in Cogolin. Half-infidels. Seeking faith, two secret Anglicans.’
‘Secret?’ you echo. ‘With Victor and Evie?’
‘Victor is never secret,’ I acknowledge.
‘He’ll insist on church.’
You caught me on the hop, Clare. Next, you were assigning me to say Grace.
Your guest couple up from St Tropez – your Alpha bridegroom who, twenty-three years ago, walked out on you for a tall, faux-fair, ambitious girl-about-town with cheek-bones and a chic rapacity hangs on her arm as he settles at the great round table that Maïté’s lusty husband’s built for the very spot. From our hilltop patio the forest rolls twenty kilometres to the eternal sea.
I haven’t seen your Hugo, Clare, since your marriage day. And now his crab devours him. He took you down the aisle like an aristocrat. The commanding beaky features and the noble skull to which hair clings in clumps are sharply outlined. Your supplanter, past 50, still tall, cheek-boned and long blonde, in jeans and a lace shirt with looping necklaces, is withered about the mouth and haunted. She wears the title of her exiled lord that once was Clare’s due.
Succour this couple, Simon, if you are any man of God. Succour the grandson also. I have my priestly function! This Hugo will know of what I have come to profess. He could even yet be ready to receive whatever I might have to slip to the dying. At the right moment.
There was no such moment. The table-talk was typecast, wilful chaff without crack or crevice such as could be driven only by the overwhelming unmentionable.
O six-year-old mite inheritor of desiccated rank, what world awaits you and what afterworld! What will you remember of this grandpapa on lip of death? That he looks on you as justification of his having been? For all of us reared into our desiccated wisdom no more than scurry up and scurry down our barricade against the truth. How skilled we are, a scurry of sybarites, behind our barricade of verbal chaff, of drink and food, of snob-sunshine, snob sea-lane, snob snow-slopes, of cosmetic oils and garmenture, of motors, yachts, and of our very own elect referred to only by Christian name or soubriquet with whom one’s been of late or intends to be with soon in this vogue rendezvous or that. When it comes to the unbreachable exclusivities of la dolce vita, there’s strength in numbers, but not too many.
Spiritual succour, my lazy bishop?
Is this, here now, not the point and purpose of it all, under our canvas pagoda in the high sun of the azure coast, the lordly carpentry thoughtfully beflowered, the perfect little banquet, course upon course, our glasses plenished and replenished by the paid devotion of native Maїté and her kindred stream. Below our hilltop at its elevation of two or three hundred metres above the sea there rolls for mile upon mile my present forest labyrinth . . . In my Grace of a single spoken sentence I have given thanks to a Good Lord for having us live the way we extravagantly do and our having enough to lose in this banker’s abyss to justify frenzy at its evaporation.
Pink blandness brushes me. O the nauseous piety of my throat. God knows, an inner voice is summoning to our feast the tutelary demons of betrayal. Sickness, fear and death infect the rattle of our chatter as we sit gonflé at our meat. Do I sorrow for you all or sorrow at my betrayal of you? I cannot tell. You’ve done right by your own lights, dug no hole to bury your talents (talents you were bred, raised and schooled for): you’ve worked your righteous best to dodge the taxman and fructify the endowment. Whatever comes of this crash your obituaries in the surviving journals can be pretty well guaranteed their column inches, your heirs shaped and accoutred to repeat your own fleeting access to this small planet’s ranks of privilege among the species man. You’ve inherited an alloy of brains and savvy, got near enough to the top, hung in there and been generous sans risk. We’ve swapped the aristocracy for the meritocracy, name-change on behalf of the quick-footed. You will
still have won the rubber, pocketed the stake, and held off that extra little while for lifting the edge of the carpet to sweep death under.
I sorrow for you as I sorrow for myself, guiltie of dust and sinne. Friends, we share the sorrow of the labyrinthine hill of Purgatory. But here I have my own peculiar Evil to contend with.
The inherited banking fortune of Clare’s crucial guest, once so unassailable, will have slumped today with the global slump. Two wastrel offspring his present lady bore him in the flare of their romance have already depleted it. His freelance role with Christie’s of London, scouting among his fellow exiles all along the azure coast for priceless works of art they might after all require to pop – products of creative inspiration honed by the artist’s God-given gift that have turned into bags of money hanging on the wall: this Transubstantiation in reverse – such a role was at an end. (O thank you Lord for Music’s immateriality, none’s property but the soul’s!)
How the grass of class withereth, its flower fadeth. The young wastrels bear the name of the bank chosen by royalty, as does their mother, while today’s scion, fugitive peer, their father, is named now after an ancestral corner of the land he spurned to reside in wary exile in St Tropez. Thither he bolted from you, stunned Clare, and hence did that first son you gave him choose this spot for his Mediterranean villa – to reach toward the father he scarcely knew as he grew half-orphaned into manhood back in England. He’s not here, yet he it was who devised today’s meal as a terminal reconciliation between those who bore him. Your comportment, Clare, was to seal the absolution. With what style you pulled it off. This will have been Faith’s last brief essay, before his coffin bears him hence.
The child, grandson, dynastic strand in long cotton trousers, is led in to glimpse and be glimpsed by him whose mediaeval honour will hang on him. He is curious and indifferent.
Dear Clare, any tranquil memory of today’s lunch party (vital and mortal, meticulously staged) is to be another casualty of the post-prandial idiocy of this other guest of yours. I can already tell that the attempt to retrace my route has been as unavailing: as I feared: nothing of my passage since my turning back has been familiar, and nothing remains of any ‘north’ or ‘south’.
Dear Clare, everything about your marrying your find so swiftly after your coming down from Oxford was right except that nothing revealed to you whether you loved him or marvelled at him. He was so right, so awfully and eminently the catch your widowed mother dreamed for you, and so responsive to your breathless adoration.
Minutes after your exchanging vows at St Paul’s Knightsbridge it was Reggie whose whisper pierced me as we drifted into the Berkeley:
Can it last?
All is healed up now. Oh we English are so skilled at the cosmetics of conjugal scars. To scar elegantly over such trivialities as ripped up vows and lacerations of heartbreak is an attribute of breeding. At today’s table, no wounds gape. Reggie, twice divorced, sits beside Clare’s looped supplanter. Our talk is of the betrayal of the England we grew up in, of which of course we are exemplars. Our conversation skirts the slump like the plague and sticks to our ex-nation’s more protracted blight: its moral collapse and in particular the failure of the Church of England to rectify the soullessness of the masses …
My companions stop … the opinionated ladies, and Charley, Julian, thrice married Reggie with his pre-nup cover against another disillusionment: suddenly they are looking at me. Even Wally and Violetta. Sir Gunther in pursed detachment.
‘Why is this, Simon?’ say you, Clare, in mock challenge, to redeem their own lapse of awareness: this bishop in their midst, holy in his green shirt.
‘You mean’ – I counter – ‘why the failure of the Church to convert the masses in the name of a God most of you have long given up acquaintance with?’
‘Oh, come, Simon,’ says a voice. It is Wally’s. ‘This is no time …’
‘I’m rather fond of our local Anglican pastor here on the coast,’ puts in his dying lordship in his patrician tones. ‘He lives with his boyfriend but he’ll have us address him as Father, which I consider cosy if a shade incongruous.’
‘The C of E,’ a spoiler bowls his googly (it is Reggie), ‘wouldn’t dare give us the line on buggery.’
‘The Church,’ I hear my voice, defending my corner, ‘defends the love line, where there is true mutuality.’
‘One must differentiate the orifices … ’
‘The hazard with the homosexual fad – ’
‘You think a fad?’
‘ – is equating any kind of erotic impulse with love. The act of love is an act of complementary self-loss. Even sacrifice.’
‘Goodness me, Simon.’
Goodness me.
‘So no wankers,’ sums up our guest of honour.
‘Pas devant!’ Clare commands, and her supplanter glances across at her.
Eyes have scanned for the child. Neighbours tilt bottles to top up glasses, then their own. They are frowning back at me, re-cast among them on the instant into the higher order, Melchizedek’s, no longer one of a rank of professionals at this or that – tinker, tailor, lawyer, gold buff, hedger, banker, entrepreneur, but priest, endowed from elsewhere. I hear myself remarking that Mankind loves God and God loves man as other. The Church is Christ’s bride and he its groom as object to object, willing surrender, each for each …
My voice comes from far away. It carries no conviction. Yet you are all attending, as if indeed I might presume to be your Meister. ‘Origen of Alexandria –’ I tilt my little flask of wisdom ‘– by his own description, kissed and was kissed by the Lord’s Word as a bride is kissed by her lover. Together they unify the otherness of gender.’
‘Vive la différence’ – it is our suffering guest again, he nearest Death, scrutinising in his glass the lees of his life. His first wife and her supplanter are impaled by a gaze of wordless dismay, our company pierced by an awesome silence.
Is it here, is it now, that I am to open for him the gate of everlasting life?
The silence roars in my head to reverberate as in a chasm. I am Peter in the courtyard, ripped of the guts to proclaim the truth which defines me.
Far below, remote and infamous, the sail-speckled bay. Around its pencilled shore the celebrated ecstasies of Sybaris now. There rages plague. Money-blood gouts. Buboes ooze. We have admitted this tainted fugitive, whose birthright was a bank, into our alien midst. Here the parabola of his life is closing upon its asymptote. He is not to be judged by me, neither he nor his lady: they were in pursuit of love. Yet which of us would not elect to die at home? Here is exile. What meaning has this piece of Mediterranean littoral for us English? Does he sow or reap here? Speak their language in his villa? Hold dear any crony native to the place beyond his butcher or his gardener? He was bred for another shore and an inheritance he abandoned, and on the brink of eternal newslessness hungers for gobbets of gossip about those he bid goodbye half a life ago.
I take his leave beside his Mercedes in the driveway. There he stands with his thin hand on the shoulder of his first son’s six-year-old, on whose other shoulder rests the hand of Clare. This was for the photograph which Clare had staged as the concluding ritual. As for me I have failed him in my duty and my function as already I had failed his first wife in the morning, and have surely failed those others of the outgrown circle of my youth..
When I lit out on this forest walk it was half in flight.
Half-running now. There is habit here, and habitation; these tracks: a prior presence. Look – another rule is here, not knowable by me precisely yet another ordinance that is alive to my intrusion. Ruffled, perspiring, confronting what is to be deemed Evil in wilful frustration of me; him as yet unseen who has my destiny in hairy hands, impervious to love, blind to prayer, to what makes man Man; a king of his own dark kingdom in wait for one of us of soul to blunder in, to snare his human victim, mock him in his ecclesiastical conceit, this Grace-sayer. Are not his pieties fortified by his late lunch, his duck done
with apple poached in honey, his chard with St Sybaris’ mussels in cream, the rack of cheeses, navarin des fruits, and two or three or forty finest wines, the Dives-divine?
You have got me, Devil, me a rare one whose thighs are not yet withering from disuse beneath a ballooning belly. I can hear your silence in this motionless black wood, silence exaggerated into assertion that you are the master and I the intruder, at your whim and your command. You may not, shall not, pray, Simon, bishop. There is none but I to pray to and I am blind to prayer. You have no companion in your fear and isolation as you roll in darkness down the torrent of your fate which is to be ever more hopelessly lost in this forest, my domain into which I have already led and drowned Marigold beyond redemption, beyond the reach of any supplication. This is the outrage that she knew. This horror upon you now is what she knew. There is no way out. It is your turn to submit to me.
C’est la vie. The day thou gavest, Lord of illusion … is ending.
Each in our riviera shirts, slacks, sunhats, shades and espadrilles, the formulaic kit for the bitch-goddess, apt for the season, assembled at our villa in this massif heaped behind St Sybaris because (being that much smarter) we will, like Boccaccio’s fugitives, dodge the others’ plague. The Devil of these woods holds up his mirror. What chaff we are. What little mounds and curls of shit.
O mortal Catatonia, O evaporation of treasure-on-earth! O spent lives! O withered thighs! O villa in the South of France! O house in Town! O Eaton Square apartment, O place in the country with ancestral echoes, O ownership of acres, O plausible function in the Square Mile, O seat in Parliament, O public role in the arts or, at a pinch, governance of the Church of England: enfold me as one with you.