A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  Hence my Marigold, mem, came to compose her masterwork, Samueli, her threnody. Aüsu had peered up at me through the smoke and noise and ludicrous shades to tell me, amazed, This your lady is mbandua, witchery.

  And you Marigold, ex-witch, back in the clearing, have turned upon me in furious injustice … that I could have presumed to stand aside in that cave’s unpenetrated shadows to wrap myself in my God of Love. ‘This was love,’ you hissed; ‘and resurrection. Life. His is the aboriginal myth, Simon. It is the same gigantic story! Don’t they love their jungle? This is the Creator in his bounty. They are bursting with praise and thankfulness. They invoke his presence and speak with him and for him. Dixit dominus. They ask him to intercede when they are broken-hearted. Are you to confound them with your rules and rituals, and prelates and prayer books? Are you to drown their music in hymns? Jesus Christ knew nothing of the jungle. He went into the desert to hear the voice of God, they go into their cave, the belly of the Earth. What better myth have you to peddle them? They brought us in and disclosed their secrets … and you stand by watching and judging. How dare you, Simon!’

  I am bludgeoned into silence. Never have I known such an outburst. It is grotesquely unjust. For I am alongside you in my understanding. Your tears are unstoppered now. I bury my face in your shoulder as you retail all that I already know of your heart’s dilemma. My understanding of you is useless. It is as if you have come to know these Bambuti more intimately in your first encounter than I in my five months of sharing in the forest their daily lives. And so it could be.

  All at once your tongue breaks loose.

  ‘What is theirs but the God of Love? There is no place for words. They need no words for trust in their spirit of this forest. It is their universe. They live their spirit. The bark! The clay! The drum. Aüsu’s skins and grasses! They trust and share and thank for all that spirit’s gifts and speak his voice, their abanduas! They love the spirit of their universe. They invoke his powers of healing. What else do you do? What better? They entreat the bounty of his creation and rejoice in it. Your Harvest Festival, Simon. They sanctify it all – what more do you want? They consign to him the souls of their dead. Even Jasper’s soul. Aüsu sang of Jasper. You heard him. Who are you to deny them foreknowledge of a God of Love?’

  My God, Marigold, what words you found.

  ‘What do you purport to bring them with Palestinian myths? It’s nothing more than an elaborated version of the same entry by man into the presence of God and the fleeting sharing of his voice.’ The tears were shining.

  I am fearful that Samueli overhears you and shall carry the report out … that the Devil had got you and challenged me and my God and struck me down.

  So it had. The monumental futility reared up over me at my presence here among these people – this remnant humanity that could neither read nor write, whose only word for love was an utterance signifying union and who half-wordless were closer to their Creator than I could ever attain to. And they were the single pretext of my being in Africa where I had brought my bride and our first-born was sacrificed. A devilish stench chokes my gullet. Somehow you had got hold of the cardboard box of miniature wooden crucifixes which Samueli had insisted on bringing back with us, and somehow you had pushed that box into the embers of the compound fire beside us, and the acrid smoke of the smouldering paint was reaching me.

  It had begun to rain. Great drops from the canopy infinitely above hissed on the embers of Samueli’s fire. The futility of my life’s endeavour and my marriage had become one and the same and were spoken to me here in this jungle compound’s darkness at a site which no other man or woman who had ever cared about me could possibly locate. In such bottomless irresolution I wish to kneel and pray. Marigold the non-believer was speaking here for me who had presumed to bring the word of God in faith to a people of prior innocence, that very innocence Jesus Christ enjoined as his premise for entry into the Kingdom. She had been inspired by that same Aüsu in the civet cap and ankle-rattles and shades that surely rendered him all but sightless in the smoke of the cave, improvising in his fragmentary verses from the resurrection story I had embedded here in previous months when she was grieving our son.

  Was it not now for me to re-wind the entire narrative of man’s recognition of the power of love that brought man into being? – I to re-wind to nothing, other than this minuscule forest remnant of pristine forest dwarves, who will have vanished from the earth in fifty years?

  Oh, I had arrived at where I had begun – at where this phylum of the human race had begun: at that point of self-recognition where such recognition sought only to escape its attainment, by its chosen, desperate act of love.

  For where had we got to, since our race of creatures were all gatherers and hunters?

  Augustine wrote, All scripture is vain, because He is known only beyond language. Here in utter darkness and utter silence, in a place untraceable by the rest of man, in the nullity of endeavour and the irrelevance of purpose, shall my God declare himself to his creature whom he made unique by the gift to speak His name, yet who must abandon all his powers of speech if his Word is to be heard?

  What if we in all the universe of your creation, Lord, your thing Man was not present here, not so much as a vagrant, forest-lost, upon the sedimentary surface of the provincial planet Earth, to gather and hunt and seek Your face? How impossibly slender is this human thread, this remnant that alone can say God, say ‘Lord’, give thanks? The fire at my feet is gone; the forest and its utter darkness are without limit.

  Where are you of the prior innocence, my Bambuti, without whom I could not survive a week?

  What, God, could You have done without these children of innocence all these aeons of pre-history?

  Oh Marigold, my Marigold, who had entered in among them and won admission by your bow with its resounding void! When the pygmy daemon force had silenced me and the entire forest, and you and I—in shock – dismantled anew, took to our sleeping bag, with what abandon did you possess me, what savage joy!

  Indeed, Samueli could never be the same thereafter. No less could I. The twins’ birth confirmed the sacrilegious betrayal such as Samueli presumed. To the Mwamba Samueli what else was one or other of those twins but the Dark One’s semination? Yet our Bambuti, when they were to hear of your double birth rejoiced for us, Marigold, praising the forest and giving me a new name. For them it was they who had opened up your womb and made good the gift of new life. Thenceforward I was Father of the Cave Twins. I knew that if I had entered primal Africa for any purpose at all it was to submit not preach, learn rather than to teach, and offer back to them whatever doctrine I arrived with, as two babbas wrapped in bark-cloth.

  O you ancient Maures of this cleft rock cleft of mine and yours where you’ve admitted me. You accept me, don’t you, now that I am shriven? – you, and my Bambuti, my primal people. And now at last, here’s my Marigold. I hear your voice. They are the forest priesthood, Simon, these emulima-abandua, Aüsu, Moke, and the others. They interpret the forest’s spirit, they sing with its voice just like the singer of the Song of Songs.

  You see the tears on me.

  I am drowsy here, and fuddled beneath the storm. I hear the sacred song, Catch us the foxes, the little foxes… the ancient scripture of spoken love Oh my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock and in the secret place.

  And it is there in the depths of the forest, so we each knew, that our twins are conceived – in a sleeping bag you have wriggled into for the security of it at the fingers of first light under the mongonzo leaves, whether or not you have set yourself against conceiving again. You love me: without me would not wish to live, I hear again you telling me. Anything more there might be to say can be truly said in music only, music which renders words redundant …

  Are you now to allow me sleep, Marigold? And while I sleep, unfound and unfindable, condone? – you who in life here disallowed yourself a life hereafter?

  Was it indeed I who made memory take leave of you? who touch
ed the switch of your affliction?

  Was it I?

  X

  For how many years had I not seen you Evie, nor had knowledge of you beyond what Clare gratuitously had dropped at our occasional encounters? Then the Church of England in its jumbled wisdom elevated me to my Cheltenham bishopric and you, Evie, hearing of it, wrote to me by hand from Stourton Bassett, Dear Simon, a plain statutory Dear. Victor joins me in congratulating you on being made a bishop. Whatever will they think of next! – No, but I’m serious, and most impressed. As you probably already know, Victor is a Church Commissioner. With love from Evie. PS I enclose a picture taken just the other day with our Gyles: and there was a glossy coloured print, quite small, of you and Gyles, aged twenty-three or so, posing each with a racket, and a tennis net behind. There was no cause to show the picture to anyone else, nor the little note that accompanied it.

  It was many months later, tidying my middle tray in the study of our suffragan’s residence, that I chanced upon the letter in its original envelope and with the photograph inside.

  On my turning it over, blood ran cold.

  I read on the back of the envelope and in your pencilled hand, Marigold,

  how proud your son would be if he could know

  Unsigned. Quite faint. Subjunctive. Unpunctuated. Awaiting my eyes, whenever, if ever.

  When had you pencilled those fell words, Marigold? The letter had been around for the better part of a year.

  And how did you come to write such words? Evie had so conclusively assured me in her garden, Only me. Now you.

  What on earth could have prompted, that faint pencilling? How could anything have leaked? By what instinct or intuition?

  The thought of Clare leapt into me, – that in years long past Evie may have let slip something about the prompt arrival of an heir for Victor, her ‘honeymoon conception’, perhaps by some glancing hint from Evie with a narrow look, binding Clare to a secrecy less than devout, or else a spoken pact of confidence whose rigour time could have corroded.

  I am in a cold sweat. Look at the wording of Evie’s letter – our Gyles. Yet how else in just such a reference to herself and Victor would she have dashed off a spontaneous note?

  The deduction your message carries, Marigold, is so lapidary, so implacable – the faint pencil, addressed to none, no date, no initial. It is as if my companion-spouse, bonded by vow, mother of our children, co-tolerator of all that a life together daily brings, has entered Evie’s letter like a sleepwalker and as to a sleepwalker there has been revealed an ancient secret of such devastation that your hand, in sleep, has required me to be confronted by its exposure.

  Then I see it. I have glanced back at the photograph of the two figures standing by that tennis net. There is the woman, ecce mulier, gazing into the camera’s lens with a pent vitality, as if the eyes were speaking to a certain other … while the young man alongside her is – is I at that very age: at that instant of the lens’ blink, unmistakably I in early manhood, on the cusp of university and real life, Francesca’s Paolo at the weaning. That is what on the instant you saw, Marigold. Inescapably yes, and at the same instant reading all else: the latent love, sleeping Eros, sleeping lord, whose rapture’s flame had not after all been extinguished. And reading how she, Evie, who on sight of the way the camera (most likely held by Victor) has caught the young man, could not bear to deny the boy’s blood-father sight of it too.

  What could I now do, Marigold, for you at the revelation of such a rapier wound – you who had loved me with your heart and your strength and the soul you’ll not admit to? You had sleepwalked into this, and in the daze of half-unawakened nightmare had pencilled your ciphered message, a whispered Miserere, a melisma emitted to the sky by a shepherd on a high rock half-blinded by his sorrow.

  What action was open to me, in whom you had placed your life in trust, for whom you had hazarded your talents? A blundering confrontation? A searing exposition, a zigzag analytical narrative? –oh yes, darling, this haply occurred (These things happen), at that age, in that concatenation, on the lip of being ordained and a solemn vow of chasteness. Oh!

  What would be left of us and ours among the debris of explaining?

  So I never saw that piercing note of yours. Into the drawer that smelled of sandalwood with the rest of ‘Private Correspondence’ went the letter and the photo and the unread version, in the original envelope.

  I did pray, Marigold. I spoke to none but God. I prayed.

  I prayed the boy, my son, this living soul in thankfulness. How could I else? And prayed his mother – her willed hazard with the pill. How could I else?

  I prayed our daughters born in their sac of substitution for that brother they could never know who were now subtly and secretly embrothered, the daughters nonetheless informed by what was never spoken, an epiphatic gnosis, fearful of encountering their father in the nudity of his superstition which saw them born orphaned of their sibling. In his cathedral sermon at the Christening Bishop Kule named them Anthea and Oonagh Mukirane, given to a baby born following a sibling that had died. Thus they had grown, perpetually assuaging the remorse of their mama whose secret burdens they read and read beyond not only my vision but her very own perception.

  Thus also it was, within weeks of that discovery of mine, that the twins came to me each from their distant homes with what they had begun to observe in you: those odd lacunae in memory. It was Oonagh first who mentioned, on the phone from Australia, that on her fortnightly calls by phone you seemed quite to have forgotten what had been talked about at length on the previous call. Then Anthea at her East Anglian University remarked similar lapses. ‘I think Mum isn’t making perfect sense, and isn’t aware of it.’ Then all at once a cluster of recent confusions and petty absences of mind – teaching appointments overlooked, gloves left behind, her car abandoned at a pupil’s home while she came home by bus. Marigold was assuming a disquieting shape, a stranger in the room not precisely noticed hitherto, unpredictable, with an occlusion of recall that might have been haphazard or somehow devised to put away, out of reach, suspicion of life-long, love-long duplicity. Could this be a willed confiscation of memory that might come to corrode the entirety of you Marigold?

  Marigold?

  I phone Oonagh and hear her tell me what she, as a student of Public Health, knows of dementia, its manifestations and symptoms. I cut in to ask whether her Ma had spoken of any shock, a hidden grief …

  ‘What do you mean, Dad? Hidden from you?’

  ‘Oh, Oonagh mambusia. You know how she can let things secretly gnaw at her … ’ Oonagh was the closer to you by virtue of living at such a distance.

  ‘I sometimes feel, Dad,’ she said, ‘you don’t know where Mum is coming from.’ In the gender-jargon of the day they presumed to lay their parents on the dissecting table. Such was adulthood. The love of God had no workable meaning for either twin. And Anthea was to ask me – Anthea, for whom Africa was ever my own self-serving aberration: Do you never imagine, Dad, that Mum could will forgetting?

  Would to God, now, I am permitted to enter that pristine nothingness, of being without selfhood, such dispossession as I had dared aspire to as an ordinand years ago in the discipline of my retreat. That was the very citadel of spirit which I had permitted Evie to storm in spontaneous innocence.

  What man of God am I? Am I now to regain it? Here in this hoghole, against the breccia left by this massif’s last true inhabitants, forgotten Moors marooned on European soil? I am their revenant priest of the order of Melchizedek, hunkered and cowering from the shrieking storm.

  Would to God I am permitted to enter that pristine nothingness, the vital polarity whereby loss of life – of memory, will and senses – is the price of saving it. Would to God I am admitted to the nullity of that pearl of verse

  Where there is nothing, there is God. The Word

  Came to my mind, it might have been a flower

  Dropt from a rainbow.

  May that nullity lie in wait with love resembling th
e fisherman’s hook that was the perception of my Meister. Once the hook is taken, God is sure of his catch, twist or turn as it may.

  Nothing brings a man closer to God than the sweet bond of love. He whom this hook has caught is caught so fast that foot and hand, mouth, eyes and heart and all that is his, belong only to God.

  If it should be that a man and a woman have accepted love for one another, how will that love be sustainable and inviolable? How shall it not be spent, evanescent, substantively nil? Its truth, Evie, forming and in-forming us on our quitting childhood, is to alloy like bronze the gift of its invention in the ancient fire which is God’s love.

  Ah. Let me sleep in this hoghole, sleep on to awake into another world where all these things are comprehended and condoned and raised to that plane where one love does not annul any other but is the equal medium. We hear of heaven. We and Jesus speak of life eternal.

  There is no case to plead, nor cause. There is no case but that very condition of Man which men cannot but attribute to you, Lord, and no cause but that single Love which cannot but flow from you, Creator.

  We in our hides and burrows, our murked crevices, in the depths of any forest and the night, beneath the rage of any storm, shall love the Lord our God with all our mind and heart and strength, and shall love each other of flesh and bone and blood as our selves. That love is One, Heaven knows. We your creature by this fluke of knowing who we are, know of our isolation and encircling death, and so know also you, Lord: You enter revealed upon the plane where you preside, sharing with us your loving presence. That happened and was witnessed and believed. God knows, they died for it as had You in Jesus. Your cowering creature of this very day cannot but claim uniqueness, grasped and sustained by Love which uniquely and for ever and ever is total, holy, without limit or qualification.

  As with you, Lord, so with creature. Any person worthy of the embrace of Love is sacred too. This love we speak is One-for-One, each rising to the other with the reciprocated urgency of joy in abandonment of self. If ever a man sees himself as One, or a woman likewise, he or she Loves One other. We are not God, yet indeed are in Your image. If we love any other we love as God loves us.