A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  Shaded from the high heat of the afternoon, borrowing time in a borrowed villa on its random eminence in a borrowed forest, we of vast heritage of civilisation, of elevated schooling and scholastic accolades, university degrees and ecclesiastic designations, did greet our death-fingered guest and have to offer him on his journey hence these summations of our life’s attainment. Chard with mussels done in cream.

  Here is an abyss to stare upon, eremia, desolation without feature, that very further void that I am trained to fill with my Faith, my Hope, my Love. Faith in Love equals Hope. Yet who is it whom the Devil now makes play with? It is I. He is my incubus. This past night in dream, he led me onto a low-ceilinged gallery, a deep horizontal fissure along the vertical rock-face above the void. I could not stand upright. The rock floor of that gallery was tilted at a steepening diagonal towards the drop into nothingness. My nightmare did allow me to squirm down to that precipitous lip … and to discover how indeed the cliff fell infinitely without projection or crack or handhold. Yet I could make out a virtually identical horizontal gallery corridor scoured out of the rock-face twenty metres beneath me, where I knew there to be trapped just such others as my self. But where I lay belly-down at that perilous edge, the least movement to squirm back up to the gallery’s inner wall would have me plummeting to my extinction.

  I woke in that vertiginous alarm bereft of faith in any love to equal hope. I woke in the presence of designing Evil.

  Vividly I perceive Evil to be present in this forest, holding sway. It is he of a prior savagery who is guiling me, intruding his authority, precisely to impose my destiny. I am fearful of this pervasive power. The trees are in conspiracy to usurp the One to whom I made my vows and pledged my life, in whose name I pray Thy will be done. He’s made my prayer a parrot. Listen. Whose Will? The will that took our son from us, Marigold and me? That will that took the child’s mother from me and from her own being particle by particle?

  A will of the God of Love?

  Some God! Some Love!

  For a fleeting episode there was Jesus asserting Love. When one of his semi-literate acolytes dubbed him Son-of-God he did not dissent. How might he know who he was? We take this non-dissenting as his assent. We had our avatar for a year or two, a goddish healer to touch, be touched by, break bread with, wonder at, hear from him stories of a superior ethic; he loving enemies, accosting his ‘Father’ for attention, forgiveness, protection from backsliding, from the Evil One, from Death the destroyer. Water went to wine and wine to blood and blood to life sans dimension.

  What metaphor is this? What fantasy? What strained delusion, induced hallucination, coming back to life, inviting the finger of the doubting acolyte to probe the savage wound in the side of a body mutilated in hands and feet. The finger never did its probe. The acolyte only said, My Lord, my God.

  Be thou my vision, O Lord of my Heart, be all else but naught to me save that thou art.

  You are not here in this forest. What is here is feckless Simon Chance, with his tinsel rank in a contrived Church, in the presence of his own destiny, synonymous with Evil, of which he is afraid, on the brink of darkness in an alien forest of vast extent. He has ducked out of a phoney refuge from a world of economic implosion at a villa occupied by those of old acquaintance among whom it was his duty to stand out as a vessel of truth and fount of ultimate hope.

  I’m afraid. I am alone. I am in alarm. I am no longer sure I am still up to roaming this forest through the night. A bit of a pot has crept up on me lately: I catch it in profile unawares in the bathroom mirror – belly-slack creeping up since Marigold’s incarceration put paid to our Pennine hikes, tethering me to the vigil.

  VI

  Evie.

  Evie.

  Were you to be here, Evie, counter-spirit. Here in this pagan forest, to juxtapose this demiurge.

  At this very moment I will be ensconced in your mind. The clothes you have packed for these few days you will just now be choosing for me to be aware of. The books you have picked will be such as to prick my interest. That unexpected novel. Some new voice in poetry. A biography that assails the unassailable or a new gloss on the medieval vision . . . Berdyaev. Soloviev. What you used to call my high tarns, my spirit’s comfort.

  Your email read: If I promise not to panic, it will help me not to. So I am promising!

  The answer you got was in the old style, devil-may-care, Our promises were always kept. Even so I took care to define our roles in the masque. We are, as always, the best of old mates from Oxford, even dated one another under the spires, three decades ago.

  Half of a grown-up lifetime, Evie, my Evie. Before we knew better than not to cleave, one to the other. Your Victor, I daresay, is not in the practice of noticing or at any rate not noticing what might as well not be noticed. Would he ever catch the half profile of a fellow guest and see there one of devastating recognisability?

  For this Victor of yours has arrived where men seek to arrive – where without you he would not have arrived. You are the jewel in his crown of papier mâché.

  These next six days, that’s all, all we shall have had. Six days, that’s all, as overlapping guests. Six days to keep our heads, enact our minor major roles, were not the ruler of this forest to have taken me hostage.

  Either of us could have dissuaded Clare from this holiday frolic. Or we could simply not have agreed to come to the villa at the same time. I left it to you, Evie, to decline … but you did not decline. All that fell to me to do was say to Clare – not write, but say on the phone – ‘if Evie’s game, I’m with you all at what sounds a pleasure-dome, Clare.’

  ‘We won’t have you holing up at Oxford with Dante and your gloomy Russian theologians, nursing sorrows.’

  We hadn’t spoken till then, Clare, in the three months since the Royal College’s ‘In Memoriam’ for Marigold and the performance of her Threnody by her one-time fellow students you never knew. You had murmured even then of your taking over your son Colin’s swish villa above St Tropez in September for a gathering of your own.

  There was no telling just at that time – was there, Clare? – how Marigold’s death would play out within me. As ever you were thinking of others. But you couldn’t tell then where the shekinah-soul might seek its peace and light. Who indeed could tell? With what rude instinctive tact have you proceeded! When your invitation turned up on my screen you simply copied me the message you’d e-mailed to Evie and Victor to whom you’d proposed the period of September 8 to 21, to which you’d nonchalantly appended I’m planning to invite Simon Chance, recently widowed, from the 2nd to the 14th.

  The ‘recently widowed’ would be for Victor, as also the surname. Coming from you to Evie, mere ‘Simon’ alone would have meant no Simon but Simon Chance.

  Your absence, Evie, from Marigold’s obsequies didn’t mean news of her death had escaped you. There had already been that note on plain writing-paper headed only ‘Stourton Bassett’ in your own hand, S – Clare tells me that your dear wife’s long ordeal is over. I think I know of this complexity and depth of grief and I dare to share it just a little. – E.

  From Clare’s copying ploy I acquired your email address, Evie. Now by email I could tell you in perfect blandness that I intended accepting Clare’s dates. The eighth to the twenty-first. Today was the seventh. I promise not to panic – over what has lain between us, Evie, unresolved.

  Clare sensed a hermetic impulsion. Neither I nor Evie would dare admit to the indestructibility of love until one of us came to be widowed. What alchemy is this, Evie, with your old confidante Clare, that she should sense beneath the hide – beneath the crust – what we require to believe ourselves to be, if the living of one’s life is to remain manageable.

  Need I swear to myself on what I hold holy that there’s no collusion between the two of you on this? There’s not a scintilla of calculation in you, Clare. You sensed. But also it was your will to find out whether the magnitude of what you had witnessed in Evie when we were amid the dreaming spires co
uld indeed prove illusion; ephemerality; an infatuation. For you, Clare, needed to believe in Evie’s love for me. Evie set the marker for you as to what love could be. That was Evie’s role with you: to set you markers. That was the big one you’d not attain to, and somehow knew you never could or would. You would hurry past that region of human experience in your friend Evie. Yet all this while you have needed to know, however vicariously, that this love was – would always be – authentic: that, at Oxford, when it struck crisis and struck us dumb, it was unfinished.

  This is the hidden impulse that has had you bringing the two of us back together on this foreign soil. You also are complicit with us within the hem of the cloak of this illimitable wood that smothers the Villa Les Maures.

  ‘You need fresh vistas, Simon,’ so you said, ‘but among old friends.’

  You cannot have intended as ‘vista’ this malign forest on a moonblanked, starless night, all expectation gone of reaching the villa this side of morning! And suddenly, now, with that prospect evaporated, with no contriving any consistent route to any other human habitation in this imminent inky blackness, no conceivable coherent course to take until the sun rises again on this lost place, to escape these trees interminable (subservient to the demon of their chaotic terrain) – the realisation descends upon me as a whirlwind sweeps an oak … that you, Clare, have known what Evie and I have not admitted to ourselves – that she and I love each other beyond any means of measurement, and for ever. You have been acting not from knowledge or calculation, but from divine perceptive instinct.

  I stop, I touch a holm-oak’s crusted trunk; my knees tremble and I am sitting now, here at its roots. And this tree, and in the face of its master, I clutch this secret which you, Clare, have exposed to us – to Evie and to me. It has lain and lurked, inadmissible until this strange moment lost in the labyrinth of this forest!

  Are we not amazed, Evie, you and I, at this vast truth’s exposure to us? Buried so long ago, grown over, the site of it forgotten, the spot untraceable! It is as if, when the whirlwind strikes, a great oak topples and under its wrenched roots is revealed the gleaming chalice.

  Here it lies, vivific Evie! Even as I sit on this steep ground beside the ragged holm, the self-same treasure-truth visible only to me and to you, a chalice-Excalibur. For this is a grail that is defence against the present Evil. It is beyond the imaginative compass of your spouse across the room (pottering about for what to take with him on this little holiday with your old Oxford crony Clare). He can’t trouble us. You have been true to him in his fashion, Evie, and always will be, nearly two decades his junior and lighting no fires in you. He has his world, where you play your part to perfection, so competent, decorative, au courant, everybody’s names on your tongue and their bits of flattering significance at your fingertips like canapés. You have given him Gyles as heir, your womb declining further impregnation. You’re protective of his self-esteem, and fond of him. Don’t dare be fond of me. Keep your fondness to nurture Victor’s fondness for himself in ermine.

  That tremor of panic of yours was at our secret being exposed not to him but to ourselves. Yet now it has been revealed, this golden chalice. On this instant I know myself to have the weapon against the force of evil that has made a hostage of me. I have this demon of despair at bay. If I am to be destroyed it will not be without a fight. Perfect love, a voice of wisdom says, casteth out fear. I have no fear.

  This moment at which I know fear to be gone from me, ho! … there is conjured out of nothing, out of darkness and silence, a rush of wind, barbarous and shrill, that has me hunched in astonishment against a trunk. In thirty seconds it is gone again to silence! What does this portend?

  A mistral girding itself?

  Summons to be done with me?

  Now with no trace of daylight left, the darkness is impenetrable and black the very sky. Should I now get low, follow my elementary ploy of keeping to the lowest ground, pressing on, to attempt escape by any route from whatever the forest can visit upon me? Yet I know that is not simple. These dry gullies are so thick with vegetation and fallen limbs that to walk in virtual blindness in dense growth is the surest way of putting out an eye.

  Advance, with a hand before the face. I am bucklered by a cup of gold.

  I sense a fall in temperature. There is a whispering of branches, challenge mounting.

  Here is your hand unseen in mine, Evie … The daemon of this forest will have seen it. Yet nothing outwardly will have changed from this exposure. The distance between Oxford and Warwick will have grown shorter. We may not rush to bed, my darling, you and I, though Eros will deny us nothing. Nous aimons chacun l’autre. C’est la vérité, c’est vérité. You hear me, Evie – I lower my voice, not raise it. We love one another, you and I, melting beyond the presumption of human loving. And listen, Evie – hear me on what is known anew to us and to the savage master of this wood: this re-admitted love has ungelded faith in God and by means of its admission embraces all. I am restored to a lost ability … Marigold is whole again, and truly to be mourned for what she has ever been and ever striven to be.

  I am astonished. You, Evie, by your enchantment in this black forest, you have clad me in the armour of love in the faith which makes for hope. Thus armoured I can invoke unprecedented healing, wholing, pushing back the devil of this place. It is behovely. Out of desire in our dark garden we become one flesh. It is behovely.

  Totus tuus sum. We have lived too long with our Creator’s treasure buried. Let there be lust, that there may be love. For thus the race of men is made. In lust’s love is our being. Here is the bonding of the poles, female and male, in mutual amorality, mutual despoliation, surrender, melting of self. This is the rightful bestowal, the rightful impulsiveness, the blind green snake that squirms and is despised and lives in and by concealment and bruises the heel. Without green lust we shall unlearn the principle of love and unlearn life’s peaceful motive.

  There is no righteousness without our sin committed and admitted, no light without this dark embraced, no hope without all ambition drowned by consummation, no wholeness without nothingness attained, no spirit without body celebrated by faith in love.

  Three indeed are present in this threatening wood – Evie, I, and the daemon of this place.

  What is that sound now, like a distant surge?

  It is wind rustling, high up among the summits of these jumbled peaks. And now it’s here, fierce among the compliant treetops that flank the gully where I am crouching from the cold. Instantly it has swept these trees and is already gone … and yet a bigger, further, sound is persistent now and swelling. It is Satanic forces mustering.

  Evie, Evie, for those first dismaying weeks after we had met and were transfixed by love at that Bullingdon ball, were we not chaste? Our chaste restraint was in devout ratio to the force of the wonder. What was this thing? This totality of possession? This command for which anyone might surrender life? You had turned nineteen – and I at twenty-one already unchallengeable as to manhood in full Adamic flower.

  Right now, here, in this menacing forest, we are rediscovered afresh in chaste innocence.

  Clare, you were already my chosen companion at our table for the ball to come after the end of Hilary term when one of our group’s quartet of girls dropped out and word went forth for a replacement: that very evening I was escorting you at the term’s end OUDS production of Cymbeline at the Playhouse. At once you had our requirement.

  I’ll bring a friend. You trust my judgment.

  Of course. Who?

  Another botanist. On my staircase.

  Ah. Reading flowers. She has a name?

  Evie.

  Of the garden of Eden.

  Just so. But fully clothed. She needs her circle widened.

  My raffish band …

  She’ll take the risk. She’s no family in England. They’re always faraway and on the move. Dad’s in Shell.

  That was your brief to me, Clare: as Tristan was briefed to ready Isolde for marriage to
another, or Paolo to entertain his brother’s bride by sharing ancient tales, I was to broaden a first year student’s circle.

  Your thrusting mama, in Parliament and widowed, was not going to leave her only child on any shelf or imperfectly matched. She had propelled you into the social whirl, populated your world with the best of the crop, among whom I was scarcely to be counted, being unlanded and untitled, as she once carelessly reminded me at a tennis party on the Horsham circuit where you and I in our teens biffed balls in school holidays. Yet you were drawn to me, Clare: I made you laugh, you thought me reckless yet contrarily ‘felt safe’ with me, you said, joining me at Oxford in my second year and latching on to me as your steady. With your new-found fellow disciple of Botany and Biological Sciences on the same staircase at LMH above the meandering Isis, you sought to encircle a disciple of Italian and the Classics and Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante.

  In that Beatrician inspiration with which your companion possessed my inner being on first encounter, the brief had gone with the wind. Here was one, of immediate allure, unaware, in whom diffidence veiled daring and linking them humour which awaited another’s sharing … and melting. By the instantaneity of mutual recognition, that other was surely to be I. Our eyes met, and knew. Our eyes spoke for our lips. To know was to love … The flicker of guilt at your confidante’s upstaging of you who had brought us together that Spring night amid the Chiltern hills was made to vanish by your sheer generosity … Look, Clare, now, at this endowment of yours: how natural, how instinctive, how a further three decades and more of life and death and the wisdom or unwisdom of experience your constant generosity is by way of reuniting us.

  Then, virgin to virgin, we three shared the wisdom of innocence. It was Evie you counselled: ‘We cannot lose our virginity twice’ – so Evie quoted you to me. And when you did lose yours, Clare – so inconsequentially with that South African rugby fellow from BNC – a membrane was pierced that left you closed, perhaps, for ever.