A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  Yet, Evie, when in the end or the beginning you Eved me, that was far from inconsequential, far from closing. Our sin was ordained; seraphic and secret. None but Clare so much as had an inkling of the power of such wonder: she stood agape. Supremely alone we lived its wonder. Nakedness was our unique discovery. We were pre-birth, and hence immortal, in Eve-Adam union.

  Is that not so, my darling? None knew besides Clare. You and I could not have endured the talk of the town. We had no vows but the vows our bodies made. The scent of you wrapped us. Out of the bosom of innocence we loved in astonished innocence. Our joy defied comparison. It was we uniquely who had discovered what love was – each to become our nothing in the other, and thereby everything. For us to fall in love was a falling out of the dimensions such as mystics told of in words no less ours than theirs.

  Could we have known of the trap: the pit dug for us? I was reading the Inferno of Dante’s wild imagination during my final term while you still had a year to go.

  What of Paolo and Francesca, cursed by their bliss and blessing cursed? Could it be that our bodies could usurp the very purpose of our love?

  What when the body was spent and husked? Was body’s ardour to consume its owner’s love? What was this spectre of unmeaning? My tutor-priest Paul of Pusey House, within his vow of celibacy asks if I am not to marry you, and I hear my own voice in reply that we had not come together as prospective parents but as lovers. What involuntary response was this: whose voice has spoken it? I heard my own arrogance, my sheer self-satisfaction … as if any man of God was denied knowledge of what I knew. I catch the fleeting sadness of his frown as if he is seeing God’s design baulked by inferior vanities … as if a shaft of eros had spiked the creative endorsement of love.

  Truly our bodies had made their vow, Evie. Yet then that terrible impasse. The only spoken vow we would make was the parting vow. I was at sanity’s limit. If I was not to slide into outright madness it could only be by unchaining us both to re-possess that previous life we had each lived before all we had known in one another’s arms.

  In pale immobility you offered the proposition – pleaded, though you checked yourself – that we should take a long-Lent pledge of chastity, a ‘body-fast’ you said, for whatever penitentiary spell my Furies required of us … but that we would not break utterly.

  You listened to my silence.

  Then you said,

  ‘Is it Paul you have been talking to?’

  ‘Paul doesn’t even know we make love.’

  ‘Of course he knows.’

  I am gazing out from your first-floor window in your rooms at LMH onto lawns and river. When I turn you are soundlessly in tears.

  There was no acceptance: you were stunned. I gave no option of reprieve. I was at sanity’s limit, I did not know what had overtaken me. I chose to take your silence for acceptance, as if at a guilty verdict upon an innocent in the dock.

  What was I doing? In heaven’s name, what was I doing? The merest doubt cast on our love had always turned you silent – even a passing jest: that I had observed. Did I not know this? In love we had met and matched, and met-and-matched we were larks mounting. You were mischief, dare-devil, zest and all vitality; you were joy, you were peace. Our love inhabited our centre, ‘corolla’ was your word: modesty, pliancy, beauty; sacred fire and tremulous peace. Yet simultaneously it was that crimson bed of the sick rose. Suddenly – in a matter of hours – its unassailability was in fearful hazard, its peace fled, gone wild, innocence illusory. I, so full of fear, had stumbled into my own Inferno, the equivalent of death without the privilege of oblivion. We conjoining, that alone made all that counted life. Oh, we were lust, and proven beauty, and in our triumph nothing was loveless or alone. It had been all that earth required, until the day it cracked. I saw the fissure, and mesmerised watched it widen. What could I do?

  It cracked open, spewing, as if the physical brain of man by which mind and soul and heart had ever come to be recognised and honoured, worked upon and exalted was sludge, to be sponged off as nothing. For him who had known exaltation there was nothing now but madness, blindness, death. I was mad. Wilfully I had taken your answering silence as assent.

  Clare descended upon my rooms at Worcester in trembling dismay. She had received a letter from your mama in Oman. She had the letter in her hand, entreating enlightenment from one her parents knew as their daughter’s closest friend at Oxford.

  ‘What am I to tell them, Simon? That suddenly you have gone mad? Out of a clear blue sky? They are intelligent people, Simon. I know them. I’ve stayed with them in Dorset.’

  I replied, ‘The Furies. They give no warning.’

  ‘What happened, Simon? You were so happy … blissful. Evie … you – equally.’ You are on the ottoman under my window, clutching the letter. ‘She says Evie can give no coherent explanation. You spoke of Blake … ’

  I had grasped at Blake in impending turmoil, at the Marriage of Heaven and Hell in its celebration of human energy and sexuality, at the Songs of Innocence and Experience.

  I quoted the strange poem, O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, that flies in the night in the howling storm, has found out thy bed of crimson joy, and his dark secret love does thy life destroy. ‘I know what it means.’

  You waited, Clare.

  I began, ‘The act of love … ’

  ‘In the crimson bed … ’

  ‘Suddenly it became a tyrant. An end in itself. An insult to all we had known. Suddenly. A tyrant. That consummation uplifting us, endorsed our joy. I can see no way out, Clare.’

  It was a grievous interchange. I added only, ‘Don’t let her go under. Like me.’

  Within days, my Evie, I was in wild subjection to the Furies, in a manner you could only know of, never know: none could know, not even tutor Brother Paul – I was finished off, fit for death: having done my studying I sat my Finals as an automaton of borrowed learning, and flit our university. Clare was at once your protectress: that I knew. It was a whole year later, on my return to London from Singapore, that you found me, Clare, and insisted on calling to see me. We were to meet at the Palio on Earls Court Road, near to my digs next to the Poetry Society. I approached our encounter with an ardent dread, unable to plan what I might dare speak of. In the event, it could not be of Evie, could it? You told me only that she would have scuppered her Degree ‘but for her capacity for constructive panic’.

  ‘By constructive panic are our fates determined,’ I replied. But few are endowed with Evie’s grit.

  I was drinking a vodka stenggah, Singapore-fashion. I did not enquire why ‘panic’ should still have been present a year after I had quit Oxford and disappeared far abroad. My mouth was blocked from asking of you anything about Evie. I could give you not the smallest message for her. You knew that, Clare. Even so you found space to say, ‘You took her to that island like Elvira Madigan and had walked with her into the woods and shot her, and then yourself.’ Then you fell silent, looking into your Heineken.

  And there that line of talk ended, as if by a bullet, or two bullets. Since I could not bear to hear anything of Evie we spoke of you and your lordly suitor who was dazzling you. I scarcely wished to speak of myself, and when you said ‘A career in advertising?’ I could answer only with an empty tremor of the head at the notion of a calling to inconsequence. My eyes were on your fingers around your glass of lager, fingers as precise as Evie’s by the precision of dismembering of flowers.

  What had I perpetrated, my Evie?

  I am brought up sharp in this black wood … stock still. What love-murder was this of mine, done in the impossibility of what we imagine for mortal love? Is it only now, here, in this place, an avenger has found us out, isolating me from the troupe, intent on harrying me to death.

  I am sick with alarm, motionless on this blind track. Yet each man kills the thing he loves. My insane conviction as to what was demanded of us became your acquiescence, in modesty and pliancy, until ‘constructive panic’ secured survival.
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  Stock still, on this track, quia amore langueo. O my Evie. How our betrayals never let us go.

  I sense the forest hunching. The way in is the way out. Such I taught myself, long ago. What did I mean? I hear another voice, faintly, Pour out, that you may be filled. It is Augustine. ‘Learn not to love that you may learn to love.’ Are you not, saint, speaking of love by supersession – losing self, emptying, kenosis, opening upon wonder? Did not your God, Augustine, give life to the lad of flesh and blood so as to trump it?

  What was once in me as prior wisdom stemmed from my boyhood, from a vision of a paradisial vista inspired by the Grampians opening upon a new innocence to become my superseding vow to Christ.

  At Oxford I had inhaled the odour of inferno. To save my life, Evie, to save my life I had let go of you. And now I’m with my fellow autobiographer Dante Alighieri, caught up in this very labyrinth of trees. I too knew Beatrice in the flesh, knew as nakedly as Mechtild of Magdeburg knew God, to meld in singleness that shared innocence of nakedness. In each and every one of us there is but one true paired singleness. Mechtild granted singleness to God, with God: let me not gainsay her. Abelard paid with his testes for divinising the coupling body. I had gelded myself of the nakedness of love, Evie, for no perceivable cause but that its consummation had consumed us; suddenly no longer realising us but nullifying, making rag-dolls of us. We had loved and must now, all at once, make a pact of love’s immolation. You wept. You survived. We went where life would take us.

  But now – look now, where life has brought me … to this house party of our ancient acquaintance, the Decameron refugees from a world in wild disorder, and you on the point of joining the party, including in particular myself, in the company of the obsessive Florentine poet as dragoman exploring whatever in human love may ascend to the divine. Just how much did you know, my Dante, in the life you lived and were challenged by? What of life-in-the-flesh got you to recognise the promise of eros as of holy provenance? Its unconditionality – that no longer are there two – a woman, a man – but one flesh, as Paul put it? No hem, no seam.

  Such is the Gelassenheit we had the trick of, Evie, knowing one another, letting-go into the melting, suddenly, by glance, touch and lip, sealed at the instant of now and ever by joy and sleep. We can’t unknow what we have known. Wonder tells.

  Dante, my touched genius, you write of love let loose from flesh, inspired by flesh to be lifted beyond flesh. So we presume for the figure of Jesus in whom the two of us proclaim faith. The solvent of faith is love, person to person, in the exercise of wonder.

  Whee-ee-ee – here’s the wind again, this time without relent. Wha-w-aaw – lashing us, Evie, twisting and torturing the scarcely discernible trees rooted beneath where I cower below the canopy. The high limbs of these corks protest like flagellants swishing and buffeting this way and that way. The chataigniers of a hundred feet loop like siege-engines amid the racket. This is the devil’s Mistral, cold from the north.

  We shall outlive all this, Evie, you and I. Look how we are stormed and counter-stormed. We hunker down beneath this tempest and its cold and fury. We are one another’s protection: together in our forest we are indestructible. There’s no fear in love; not in perfect love. Here we prove you, John, amid the ritual assault by loveless anarchy upon the rooted domain of animate earth. There is a mortal complicity here, darling – God’s own earth defiant at his unleashed rage.

  See how the forest dances and ducks in its battery of storming, a furious ecstasy! Leaping, lunging, orgiastic in riot and ruckus. Limbs that age has weakened crack and crash, entire trees come down, the allotted centuries of umbrella pines and chestnuts snuffed. It is the demons’ yearly purgation, the ungovernable descending on this forest from permanent snows as from the soaring Ruwenzori of my own acquaintance, and its alien gods.

  Here in this massif is no lightning and no Ruwenzori thunder to herald rain and hail. On my entire perambulation since mid-afternoon I’ve seen and heard no water at all. Nothing is known to me of the patterns of weather here beyond the wind’s name, Mistral, Masterly, –but that it brushes the Alps and sweeps south by the valley of the Rhone, bringing no rain.

  I too am likely to be parched before the master of this place has done with me.

  After that terrible vow of quittance, Evie, not bearing to think of you nor even for you – what you went through – I was in blackness, a hollow, acting my days through, Chancing Simon Chance. Abelard, Paolo … and which uncounted others? Now this Chance, he needed to be d’ailleurs, somewhere else, like the French poet. He responded to an advertisement for a job in Singapore selling fertiliser. From that remove for two rootless years he watched his friends settling into their structured professions, laying the ground for future security and distinction, and glazed linen and sedate advancement to the obituary columns by way of the law, the merchant banks, ancestral acres, real estate and Lloyds of London. Politics was seldom any more for gentlemen, and the Foreign Office had gone dull.

  When back in Town, insouciant, and shallow – yet not dumb, not friendless, and surviving by writing advertising copy – I’d meet up with Wally for an Italian meal. He was buying little companies to boost and sell, or strip and merge this with that. He was excited and a hero to his Violetta for his flare. Joining me at the Palio he’d bate me, ‘When are you going to do a proper job?’

  Julian was into the money-broking scramble at his newfangled computer network twelve hours a day, amassing tiny percentages on gargantuan sums for Warburgs. Reggie was after me to snatch a share with whatever I could lay my hands on in his latest fund with Panmure which could scarcely fail to double by Christmas. Charley was eating his dinners at the Bar. ‘The law,’ he’d intone, ‘looks after its own and it takes no risks. It lives off the risks of others.’ He was already a member of Brooks’s, middle-aged and not yet twenty-four, already going to fat. And I, God knows, I was half the man I was three years before, who had loved the woman Evie. A half-man, with no calling.

  I grasp a tree in the riot of the tempest, as the stark truth grasps me. Of the two great injunctions – love God, love neighbour – the second earns authority only by virtue of the first. I have lived this long and now I have it! The truth of the love is in its unassailability, its indestructibility, its unconditionality. In passion it is sealed. Evie neighbour-in-love, co-melder in my arms, makes this truth in no other manner than that of the holy love whereby creation entire comes to be: our bodily passion, made true by reflexion of Your ardent dispassion. By this recognition are we redeemed.

  Here is my hand on the rugged skin of this cork-oak. See, Lord, your own hand in the gratuitous embedding in the cycle of reproductive life the phenomenon of love by the mechanism of gender: she receiving, he giving, by polar acclamation. I love you! That gratuitous bequest to your species revealed uniquely to mankind.

  In this intensity of forest darkness, Evie, I see at last the two commandments in interplay such as would have saved me from the Furies.

  Unless I love you first, my Lord, whether knowing so or unaware, I cannot love any other in love’s truth.

  True love leaps from the wonder of innocence. We knew that very wonder, Evie. When we met at the trees’ end beyond the lake at Worcester we seemed to know the place already. Each knew the route the other had come by, a gift of prescience. We seemed to know that something was expected, and when we knew we loved neither of us was surprised but merely glad this was the place our blood remembered a thousand years since we were children first. The ancestral innocence was God’s, first God’s as gift, opening to whosoever shall love in wonder, joy and beauty recognised.

  Yet when suddenly and secretly that holy innocence is blinded, when upon an instant the truth of love is betrayed by flesh to the unseen enemy, when sheer body has surreptitiously usurped the divinity that two bodies had presumed to seal in the act of love, then is a lover at the terrible mercy of the Furies. The body informs the soul. The Flesh has paired with the Devil after all, and the Devil entertains no
innocence, no wonder. In culpable innocence I had led us into our égoisme à deux. Into the crevasse called self had I hurtled, locked in embrace.

  What sermons does this bishop preach himself, in the howling storm! Now, now, now do I perceive what cast me into that crevasse of annihilation; how in my innocence and because of it I was blind to sight of Him who had brought us his gift of wonder, frankincense and myrrh, and had forfeited for ever recovery of it. Evie, we were so young and urgent.

  How could we be aware that the wisdom of innocence is to be exposed and stifled by the wisdom of experience? Yet now that strain of prior innocence, that inkling, creeps back upon me, out of the remoteness of childhood. Wally, you and I were eleven, amid the unconjurable beauty of Rannoch and still undiscovered Ericht, when in my vision I was gazing down upon a vale of paradise from a remote ridge-top, the panorama of unassailable serenity drenched in sunlight and a yellow lakeshore along a sheen of water disappearing beyond sight: the place I knew to be the soul’s destination. It is as if now, my Lord, that in the savage forest I am thinking back to what I had supposed irrecoverable.

  Since entering school, had I not sung in choirs? Now I was again singing. What choirs sing is the inherited faith, as love and awe and lamentation interchangeably. My Augustinian pilgrimage, secret and unwilled, set me on the path to priesthood, the path to a second innocence, a primal trust.

  My Bambuti said, Trust the forest and it will repay your trust.

  You will have somehow known, Evie, of my vocational itinerary: it will not have astonished you; it may even have flattered you.

  So then it was you sent me – had me sent, you providing your list-assembler my name and old address – the formal invitation to your marriage, embossed in cursive script, in its vellum envelope, to a landed figure of the Tory party, Member for some piece of Warwickshire, already forty-something and you not much more than half his age. One knew the fellow’s name. A grandee county marriage with a mate high-chested on his territory.