A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  I could not attend any such marriage. I might send a mere courteous refusal: it was to be just three weeks before my passing out of Cuddesdon and my formal ordination as priest of the Church of England. Yet I did not quite do that: I chose, did I not, Evie, to telephone your old home number – chose without reflection. And it was your voice that answered, you of the ‘five voices’: it was voice number one, brisk, assertive.

  ‘Who is this?’ – ‘this’, the newly fashionable American way.

  Ah. And you were alone. That I knew at once.

  ‘I wanted to congratulate you on your engagement. But I cannot come to your wedding.’

  A pause.

  ‘I understand.’ Already it was voice three.

  A further pause.

  ‘I reckoned you would.’

  ‘I needed you to know. There will be a lot of old friends. Oxford, naturally.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Now a longer pause.

  ‘Listen,’ you say. ‘May I not see you?’

  ‘How?’ I ask.

  These accumulating pauses.

  ‘I am thinking, London.’ There is that in your voice – the muted woodwind.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Sort of Friday or Saturday.’ The secret pianissimo of old swirled upon me. You name the adjacent dates. ‘I shall be in London buying things, checking wedding lists.’ The strings have entered. You say you’d be staying at your brother Eddie’s flat in Ennismore Gardens. ‘We could rendezvous there, in the evening,’ of the Friday, that was.

  Ennismore Gardens would not be more than fifty minutes from Cuddesden Theological College on the Berkshire border.

  ‘I’ll take you out to dinner,’ I say.

  ‘You can stay the night … if it’s easier.’ It was voice four. It has outflanked anything I might have said about the imminence of my ordination.

  Today her brother Eddie can surely no longer have that world-of-its-own top-floor studio whose huge window scans northwards to the green of the Park between the tree-lined ascent of the street. There Eddie lived in imaginative disorder. That evening he was not to be there; not arriving, not expected. You wore a black pencil dress, fitting mute with a bow – somewhere there was a bow – and that same scent which at Oxford we had named Francesca’s.

  At dinner in the little place on the corner of Trevor Square you replied to the question you could not but be asked, namely whether you loved your imminent lifelong partner.

  ‘Enough,’ you answer. There is a proximity of tears. Yet your eyes are also full of courage. Courage you always had, in both its shapes: pluck, and fortitude. You do not quail at challenge, least of all a challenge you set yourself.

  ‘He knows about us?’

  ‘That I had a regular date at Oxford – a man at Worcester. Yes.’

  In that quick glance, behind the courage I do see sorrow. (Just now, Evie, I have beaten sorrow into joy, as sword to ploughshare.)

  ‘You go to bed with him.’ I did not allow it to be a question.

  ‘Not a lot,’ you returned. ‘His body bores me.’

  That night, did we not love as angels? In the supreme exclusivity of bodily knowledge one of another and unassailable by Furies? Nothing was spoken: about ourselves, nothing spoken whatsoever.

  In that purification, Evie, was I ordained. That momentary angelic repose was a catharsis of what had gone before. Celibacy was now apt. All that while since Oxford I did not claim you, I did not crave you. You belonged to a previous mode of being wherein life was shared, was virtually created by us, which we had the right to make to disappear. It was as if you had died, or do I mean, each of us had died; yet somehow we had lived on, aware of a previous life while accepting that whatever we had known was irrecoverably other. Whatever I was with you, or you were with me, had been then and thus: we were writ in water, a shadow in the wood. So I wrote at the time. Subsequently not merely was celibacy apt but chasteness too. And not merely apt. I would have myself suppose I had moved beyond body and what body might bestow upon further negation on behalf of the domain of the soul in union with God: beyond all the draping of image and allegory. Beyond being! Beyond knowing! Thus the Meister spoke of that innermost dark and silence, the true ground from which the soul’s spark flies to illumine paradise … and not easily accessible paradise! What else was the source of my calling? There was that fragment of verse to which I would resort at Cuddesdon

  Where there was nothing there is God: the word

  Came to my mind: it might have been a flower

  Dropt from a rainbow …

  … such a flower of kenosis with which I was acquainted, in the exercise of obeisance. I speculated that my calling was to take the vows not of priest but monk, in conviction

  laying myself open to You

  laying my self open to your presence

  laying my soul in and upon You

  laying open to You in your nothingness

  in my depth and in my height.

  VII

  How was it that after my ordination the aptness of celibacy, cathartic denial of the self, clouded? – the body now irrelevant or aloof.

  I would not be monk, yet I would be chaste and meanwhile work the world, the demands of ministry and also of the dying, the lost, those bereft of love, strangers to love, unknown by joy, beauty-blind, uncomprehending of my truth, Truth itself. Thus there gathered around me all the clutter of the this and that as Bishop’s chaplain and curate of Holy Trinity, the pettifogging functions. Petty, fogging …

  You got wind of my engagement. That surprised me. You wrote me a card, referring to Marigold as ‘your musician’. How did you know of her profession? At Oxford you’d speak of your flowers as virgin births while I spoke of melodies.

  Almost immediately Marigold followed me to Africa to be married in the mudbrick cathedral of St Paul’s, Kasese, on the Uganda side of that wild Congo frontier. It was across the frontier with the Congo in the vast Ituri forest that my prospective charges inhabited and delved. Relentlessly they were being encroached upon by Bantu, for ever creeping across the continent river by river from two thousand years ago, planting yams and claiming any land they could break the soil of. With their metal and their cloth they bartered for pygmy-trapped bushmeat and pygmy-gathered medicine. The Church’s Bantu priesthood and converts could not but look upon pygmies as an inferior species of creation beyond the redemption of gospel and the Faith. I knew well enough their exclusion meant their withering and dying from the necrosis of game reserves and tourists. The CMS had been casting around for an outsider prepared to reach them. That meant a white man. That was the challenge that caught me, a challenge to overlay primal innocence with Christian innocence. ‘That alone,’ I have told Marigold, ‘might save them from extinction. Don’t you see? It is a complex test of the faith I claim.’

  We are again in Holy Trinity. You say nothing and on the instant I wonder if what I am saying makes any sense.

  ‘I’ll be going out to Uganda’s border with eastern Congo in the spring attached to the regional Anglican diocese.’

  My church on Prince Consort Road is growing dark. The stained glass prophets softly glow high in the west windows. The place has remained held by a strange silence, poised for an intensity of worship. You and I have been speaking in a whisper. The nursery school beyond the north wall has packed up for the day. In an hour I will be conducting the eucharist, spoken in formal intimacy: a mere handful will attend.

  I get up to light four huge candles, two at each end of the altar on either side of two exquisite sprays of flowers of which I would once have required of myself to name each bloom.

  When I return to the row of chairs, you are sat very upright, gazing at the candles with that penetrating concentration that is your hallmark. It comes upon me that if I have failed to convince you of my African intention and its Christian premise – the fountainhead of what I have come to believe – it will augur badly. I need your approval. You have become compelling, a touchstone of my authenticit
y, as if my inner conduct requires this admirer’s endorsement.

  You turn back to me as if startled by my presence. ‘There you are!’ Beside you.

  I say, ‘People don’t come to Christianity by having it explained to them.’

  ‘That I understand. Something has to happen first.’

  I take your hand, your bow hand, and am reminded of the perfection of your skin and the astonishing precision of your fingertips. I ask if you would like to come with me to Africa when your course is complete.

  ‘Come with you,’ you echo in a whisper.

  ‘I suppose we’d have to marry. If you could bear that.’

  Our eyes have met, and with me shocked at myself we are on the point of an embrace. Lips have all but met when you shoot a glance at the altar and its leaping backdrop. ‘We are not alone!’ you hiss, blushing wildly and pulling back while gripping my hand with ferocity.

  I have frozen in alarm. Your eyes have dropped from the figure of Jesus crucified to the chequered marble of the chancel floor, ruthlessly hard.

  ‘You met your Jesus – ’ this was Marigold-the-defiant whispering – ‘in the desert. What made for this desert?’

  The suddenness of the change in you is like a blow to the side of the head.

  How much of the truth dare I expose to myself, let alone to you? You know next to nothing of my time at Oxford, nothing more than that I had studied Dante, and had what I presumed to call a girlfriend.

  I take cover in a part of the truth. Of what predicated my own void I cannot speak. I reveal only one thing that spurred me into seeking the bond with Christ.

  ‘My sister,’ I begin falteringly. That there were just the two of us, she knew, how we were always close, Lucy and I – Lucy looking to me for the boundaries of her very self when the family split. I was always the definer, even when I was five and she two. We’d grown up familiar with a sort of C of E Christianity, a Mrs-do-as-you-would-be-done-by line of conduct. We were never doctrinal subscribers. It was patently half-myth – the story – with the snake-oil of eternal life thrown in. Father imbibed it as a child and never questioned it. What we had ran in the blood, the Tory party in the kneeling position.

  ‘Lucy had a boyfriend at seventeen. We knew his family pretty well. We played tennis, rode each other’s horses. At twenty she was formally engaged. He was twenty-four. She got pregnant, then he dropped her. I was in Singapore and came home. Lucy had an abortion – at four months, almost five, made legal only on the grounds that she was suicidal. I was a formal witness as to her state of mind. I was at her side, in the Hammersmith hospital. In the ward the nursing staff avoided looking at me. I saw the foetus they had been obliged to kill. This was to have been my niece. My unworthiness as a brother pierced me. I was no source of clarity, no source of strength. I had no reserve of courage. I was pretending. I began making my living writing advertising copy – women’s lingerie and Mars Bars. The more highly I was regarded the more disgusted I was at the abuse of any capabilities I had. The lingerie copy was crafted to make the frills and chiffon alluring enough for more young women to get pregnant and be betrayed.’

  I was stopped there by a stab of honesty. Did I not know about betrayal!

  You caught my eye.

  ‘So I went back to Dante. You could say, Dante came back to me. I took a room in Wakefield to return to my old tutor. Paul is a monk. He was attached to Pusey House when I was at Oxford, following the Augustinian discipline. Now he had joined Mirfield’s Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire. I found myself reading the Commedia as if entering the mind of Dante was a matter of life and death. Then I discover Paul to have long held to the Christian story as metaphor – my word, not his. He spoke of “divine algebra”. He was hardly concerned as to historicity: for him, faith on the part of his namesake Paul and the apostles, and all who have followed, validated the figure of Christ as an exposition of Truth for ever – truth with a big T. Brother Paul was speaking of the gospel story as the algebra through which to work the Truth he breathed as faith. Paul does breathe his faith: the gospel is his oxygen. Jesus saw himself as parable, taught in parable, lived and died as parable. You may call it art. Paul would say, “We in life are all players in the great allegory which Jesus realizes and transcends.” He renders Man unique in all creation.

  ‘For me the implausibility had floated away. Jesus stood forth as a living reality. I had converted, Marigold. It took my breath away. It was as if a prior wisdom had had the veil snatched away: a pristine revelation, utterly simple.’

  There we were, side by side at Holy Trinity, I retailing my secret innermost narrative for the first time to anyone, innermost narrative to a non-believer.

  You’re still gazing at the floor. You say,

  ‘Your life changed … ’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In a day … ’

  ‘In an hour.’

  ‘An hour!’

  The vast unspeakable secret of our Christian Church had been spoken. It taught metaphor. So it had ever taught. Gospel truth that spun its metaphor like a silkworm out of its Truth Inexpressible. Your head makes a tiny jerk. ‘Not truth at all! … but metaphor.’

  ‘Was it ever any different?’

  You are speechless.

  ‘God is a word. Which he does not seek. Yet in the unwanted word man can alone encounter him.’

  I have lost you. It is a risk I must take for my own faith’s sake.

  ‘God takes form for the sake of man. It was always like this.’

  ‘So he sent Jesus.’ This is you telling me: I can hear the words surprise the speaker.

  ‘To make the relationship real,’ I say.

  ‘In time? In a place?’

  ‘And in eternity. And infinity.’ It is the grand encompassing parable of the Church. ‘When I unveiled it as metaphor, I could believe.’

  Our silence is pierced by the cry of Jesus from the cross of the great window that governs the church we are alone in, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabbachtani! Why my God hast thou forsaken me? – the cry of destitution crucial to the revealing of the truth Jesus was and is dying for.

  No one before has ever spoken to you in this sort of language.

  ‘It cannot be otherwise – because of the mind of man, the tools we are restricted to. We deal in what we call Truth. Words and things aren’t enough on their own. They must be allowed to escape dimension through what they signify.’

  ‘Jesus was a historical figure.’

  ‘Yes. A troublesome preacher they decided to execute. His life story in real time became parable.’

  ‘He came back to life.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. The evangelists all make that point. In a manner of speaking. He walked through doors.’

  ‘What manner of speaking?’

  ‘A manner of experiencing, a manner of seeing.’

  ‘Of seeing?’

  ‘It is hard to doubt the genuineness of the apostles’ encounter with Jesus after the crucifixion. They spent their lives preaching the resurrection. Several died for doing just that.’

  She could hear me endorsing my faith.

  I never sought to convert you, Marigold. It was as if I needed you as my own vessel of disbelief. I would, rather, bring you face-to-face with what has others letting go into belief.

  ‘Put it like this, Marigold. Any thing in the throat of the speaker begins as a sound, a noise. From that noise the mind conjures an image of an object. An idea, maybe. A story. What gives an object its actuality is what it signifies. The truth of anything exists for the receiver of that truth. For her. For him. Whoever has been vouchsafed that truth by means of metaphor. Look’ – and I tug at a piece of my cassock – ‘my metaphor. The metaphor of my cloth.’

  The great window resumes its contemplative presidency.

  ‘And Africa?’ you ask quite meekly.

  ‘That was to come. Later. What was fixed in me was the simplicity of the revelation. The mighty proxy. I couldn’t let go of that. Then purely by chance – grac
e, we would say – I heard of the opportunity to go back to where mankind began: that first garden, discovering himself to be naked, aghast at what it entailed for him.’

  ‘The nakedness … ’

  ‘On the acquisition of consciousness. The terror of his isolation. The I. The mortal I which must go mad unless … unless one falls down in worship, declares one’s love, one’s gratitude for the gift of creation.’

  ‘Music.’

  ‘Man alone, of all species, engages in creation for its own sake. God, and Man. So music. The drum. The melisma. The song. The dance. The scored rockface, scarcely accessible, the graven image, the painted image. Worship. Love. The beauty of the truth of self-release, self-sacrifice. Jesus died for it, for the beauty of his love for us. And so the stunned joy of the resurrection. This is no banality.’

  Silence holds us.

  ‘What became of Lucy?’

  ‘She’s in the Priory.’

  ‘A nun?’

  ‘With a habit of drugs.’

  My jest was inept and unintended.

  Marigold, Marigold – how ardently in Bantu Africa you learned the tribal instruments! With what inventiveness! The men watched you uncomprehendingly. They knew only the lap-top harp and two-stringed enzenze and tuned bow and only as accompaniment to ballad whose meaning was beyond you and often ribald. Instrumental music was for men, and their women did not know what kind of person, so contained within herself, had come among them.

  Beyond, across the frontier and across the river, in the interminable forest, my pygmies were to conjure wilder sounds, quite other intensities such as would leave their mark for ever.

  At our great marimba of tuned logs, laid out on parallel banana stems above the compound’s patch of communal earth, you did not dare squat down among the men to go at it hammer and tongs, rippling improvisation across the compound. You did not dare. None of the African women performed on the endara-marimba or dreamt of doing so. But once when you looked across at that all-male music, which could go on for an hour without a break, it was with a glance of exalted guilt at the temptation to join them, let yourself go into the intoxication of it all. And at that moment you were instantly alluring, vulnerable, inviting, on the brink of self-revelation, suddenly exposed to a force you could not control or command: a counter-force to that you had striven for and which had won your fellows’ respect.