A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  For you I pray. Lord have mercy.

  Truly I am unsuited to return to the house-party I have disrupted. I am unsuited to share six days there with you, Evie, acting out a masque of acquaintance desiccated by the passage of time amid my Fergies, Reggies and Gabbies, Julians and Charleys and Sir Gunther and his very English Pauline with her quick wit and small-talk at this brink of the disappearance of the world-as-we-have-known-it.

  God knows, the soul will out. Evie is of the soul, and soul has me here. If Evie and I are to re-encounter, it shall be in this forest; and here souls are stripped naked as ever bodies were for you and me, Evie.

  My soul would be also thus with you here, my Lord, in your stormed church-forest, yours and mine, with our boars and my brilliant beetle of dazzling dark, our needle-shafts of brother sun, our sister wind, the hooped defiance of your trees, the gleaming leaves and riotous fungi, reversèd thunder, the incessant beauty of your presence.

  Let us keep our innocence, Evie, and our Love undefiled. Now all is clear to me, Evie, as I watch my beetle in its pool of sun. At that terrible descent of the Eumenides upon us at Oxford, it seemed that to save ourselves we were to abandon the baby of our own making in mid-winter on a Theban mountainside. That infant’s name, I tell you Evie, was Innocent. Ours was the pristine love that heaven makes, whose innocence was its validity, beyond all things mammon. This love belonged to the world in that you and I were in the world. To run out of innocence and see our love demeaned and traduced as was Abelard’s and Paolo’s was unbearable. The single compulsion, the vivific grail, named Innocence, has shaped my destiny. It is that cup of which Dante sipped with Beatrice. It is that which I was born with, which gripped me as a child at Rannoch, drew me into the precarious study of the Divine Comedy and the Beatrice of my discovery and to the altar of Christian faith and my mission with the Bambuti of the forest. In that grail love reposes, in it truth known as transcendent peace. It is a gift that Man alone may receive, in brilliant paradigm of human love. Look, look, this truth speaks joy. This is our ingot inheritance, from You. This grail. This cup.

  Evie, Marigold: listen, listen. Person brings to person what You made, one-to-one. Hence our first commandment, loving You. Each of our beings and bodies and our creative flights are but brokers of the love that governs Your universe.

  My ascent is steady here, as if I have stumbled upon a long-neglected track to draw me up … I scarcely have the stamina to keep at it. My legs are half-obedient, yet a capricious energy has taken possession of my will. Ma lietament a me medesma indulgo / La cagion di mia sorte. Joyously did Dante, too, yield to me the turn of his tale. For as the track rises, it is joined by another faint route that has climbed more steeply out of the ravine to my right. Once again I seem to be among random breccia of antique habitance and human workings, scarcely detectable and deeply overgrown, as if marooned folk had gone to ground up here, readmitted by the earth.

  Is not sweet rest awaiting also me, Lord? Yet You urge me on. Here in ever higher ground the trees are spaced more openly and, more free of undergrowth. The forest’s gloom is less. My hint of a track takes me round a knoll to the left, and looming beyond the trees no more than fifty strides ahead there comes into view what is unmistakably the dark high wall and turret of a stone-built church.

  This cannot but be what Maïté spoke of, a mere ninety minutes’ brisk excursion from the site of the villa so she said. It rises seventy feet amid its trees. Beyond, the forest continues to mount, and the glow of sky there speaks of some kind of summit, surely the summit’s supreme pinnacle.

  Drawing near, I see at once that the little church’s roof has held intact, or is kept so by blind loyalty of surviving Christ-believers. I move round below the blank wall of the south side to where the apse should be. Is this not still your place, Lord, where once was praise and music? I would enter and offer prayer. I have reached this sudden testament, the metaphor of stone and tiles that once held and worked as prayer to be their vehicle and vector of truth which cannot deal in words written, spoken or even sung. The deconsecration has trapped truth, poised here on this highest place to await its ransom by me who has ascended by the route of a life to its remote forested eminence. Here the metaphor defiant in stone of a faith awaiting this very ransom I have brought and am, Simon Chance, priest and servant.

  Here at this further end, cistus blooms where sun pours down, and the ground seems to have heaved in counter-sanctity to collapse the edifice where it once enclosed an altar. For your house here, Lord, at the upper end has been demolished and, thus truncated, the building re-assembled and sealed off with no sanctuary at all.

  It is stripped of all claims to sanctity. Here is a low oak door let into the rebuilt wall. The door is locked. Can I enter?

  I cannot.

  This then my destination – where destiny has brought me, and I am awaited.

  The only window, of plain glass, is small and high up in the turret wall that first met my eyes. I shall circuit the edifice. At that end that first met my eyes is a kind of niche or open-sided chimney in fashioned stone running the full height of the church and capped by a tricorn of tiles. Beneath this tricorn I can see a bell is hung, still on its axle. From the bell’s cradle a cord dangles to a height of seven or eight metres from the flagstones where I stand. That bell could broadcast my presence and summon those who will be searching for me: my companions of the villa and my early life and now perhaps joined by Evie.

  Am I man enough to scale this exterior chimney and sound the bell, and get back down again to earth?

  No Bambuti would have been daunted by such a challenge. Bare-foot and bare-backed they would have braced the body between the chimney walls and mounted inch by inch by flexed shoulder muscles and flattened feet to the height of the bell’s cord.

  Do I dare? Is my body up to such a feat? To summon Evie?

  Yet first I am drawn to ascend to whatever summit of forest may await beyond and above this rump of a church, perhaps to view from that eminence the massif’s vast distances in all directions and even gather a clue to a route out to habitation and human presence.

  By a precipitous ascent among thinning trees I have reached an open summit of bald rock. This pinnacle seems at my approach a place known to the kingdom of beasts, like the lair and citadel of a great cat, lithe, swift and streaked, a puma leaping there and unassailable. Or else, in previous times, a sacrificial platform for a pagan line of stone-flaking men. On my surmounting this venerated elevation my gaze is accorded sight of a created universe given which offers hope and declares release. The panorama of clefted forest spreads below me as far as any eagle’s eye can see – to the south-east at twenty miles the apron of a misty sea.

  Now I have turned to view north-west.

  I am stunned. Here before me and below me some three to four miles distant a sight so familiar to my mind’s eye comes in view that it must be playing me tricks.

  Not so! No tricks. There, far down, beyond a sun-drenched vale stretches a sheen of still lake-water, and a shoreline of yellow rock or dune and exquisite verdancy that I have known since boyhood. Farther, and imprecisely, the delectable landscape bends away and vanishes beyond the reach of any eye amid its own bliss.

  It is the terrestrial reality of my childish vision, the site of paradise, of which I was accorded precognition forty years ago!

  I cannot credit this. I demand of myself if I have grown heady and deluded with hunger and exhaustion. Yet here below me without any doubt lies the half-distant vale and its placid lake that I was once vouchsafed, and here’s the pain of my lifted toe-nail. It is all as real as the empty tomb, given to me this moment as if it all was awaiting my ascent.

  I am entranced. This is where I should be, Lord, and where you have brought me out of small privation; it is where to make my daily orisons and pray my mantra of self-emptying. Surely it is for me to re-consecrate the church just beneath my summit, and refashion it a cross where memory may intersect with love.

  This loft
y precinct and its revelation were pre-ordained. That half-distant strath of delectation awaits me in the due hour.

  And now? Now, it is well past noon. How they must be scouring for me! Evie herself among the searchers

  Exhilarated, I begin my descent to the deformed church in its tilted grove. How did it come to be built? Maïté said that in past times these hills were dug for iron ore. Through some gesture of pious enthusiasm the place of worship must have been built for the labourers’ salvation. Even yet this building must still be receiving a modicum of care.

  Stripped of sanctity it belongs to the world of remnant men. So still do I; though I would re-consecrate this place. I can hardly transform myself into its anchorite, to hunt and gather here. Yet entering the glade, I already know it as holy. The high clean sun has set it aglow in perfect silence. Beneath my feet, from where the chancel would once have risen, it is as if the ground has turned over in its sleep and collapsed the artifice of worshipping man. I drop to my knees in sheer thanksgiving for the joy of love that I and all created life can give back to the Lord of Love. Here around me in our sanctuary of sunlight are all my fellow creatures, each leaf, stalk, blade and frond in their collective hush and whisper, and none but hath his noontide-hymn, each oak and thicket and black beetle doth know I AM.

  In such certainty now, at the foot of this chimney below the bell I am to summon those who seek me, and summon Evie. I review how to reach the cord and sound the bell. The three-sided chimney has the width of a doorway. I shed socks and trainers. I shed my shirt. I attempt to brace myself horizontally for a perilous ascent. Theoretically it is possible. I am ready to lacerate my back and upper arms. What is a mere twenty feet of rock chimney to a young fit climber? I am neither young nor fit: I am elderly, and weak of muscle. I have ingenuity and will, and faith.

  I begin upon an alternative posture, I replace my trainers, tightly laced, and using the rough-hewn stone of the building for grip I prop myself, facing down, diagonally across the chimney’s walls. This fiercely strains the muscles of the arms and abdomen.Yet ascent is possible. I rise five feet and fall back to the ground. I begin anew.

  Now my agility surprises me. A divine hand is lifting me. The strain on my arms and guts charges me. If I fall, this church will be reconsecrated by the blood of a priest. I am succeeding. I have the frayed cord in my teeth and, firmly braced, yank it. The bell sounds forth. I can go on sounding it by the movement of my head. My holy bell must be audible from a mile. I summon Evie. I summon irresistible love; she shall hear me first, she whose smile is not with teeth but only eyes, in secret, and in a tremor of the lip.

  Listen to this bell above me! It is summoning more than searchers for a vagrant priest but all the unseen long-gone people of this massif, back to their sacred place. It is but a stump of a church, yet perched here in wild strain and pulling with my teeth with the rhythm of the bell’s swing, I know that I am making it anew a place of worship. Here is the swell of its organ and the raising of the people’s voices. Listen. Out of the deep I have called unto You, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. I can hear the growl of the organ within. I can hear amid it the growl of my Bambuti’s bass bamboos. Then what is this descending? – this ode of Jasper’s threnody, this sublime motif of his mother’s strings fluttering in octaves to redeem the tears which any life makes necessary; rhapsodic and redemptive, such being the very purpose of life’s gift: that we should be bought back, brought back, out of the wail at our birth – be risked and ransomed, lost and found, Dives and Lazarus, re-bosomed from high. It is what my ears now hear, reversèd grief, the incanting of redemption heard and here acknowledged on behalf of every soul. I am poised so perilously beneath this primitive campanile. Within this granite space in its high forest the Holy Spirit is abroad and the sleeping Lord awoken by the astonishing role that it has raised me up to seize. All love is rendered one, and floods me, floods me.

  My arms shudder at the weight of my body. And my mouth releases the cord for me to listen to the triumph of truth I have engendered in the people’s throats. As I know His hands to have borne me up, so He will surely bring me down: there can be nothing to fear, I have pealed the truth. I allow my mouth once more to snatch and yank the bell-rope, and in the paean of praise I fly. O get me wings …

  There are faces over me, voices. A figure looms upon me, bends and kisses my mouth. This is Love. It is a flame shooting through my body. On the instant I know the power of my limbs to be restored. I get to my feet in wonder; in joy I lean back against the wall of the deconsecrated church. And there are angels.

  From the report submitted to L’Officier de Police Judiciare, Région de Cogolin, Var, by Maïté Duchamps, housekeeper, at Villa Les Maures.

  We heard the sound of the bell when our group of five was still some fifteen minutes’ tramp through the forest to the abandoned church of St Sulpice. We stopped to pick up the distant tolling. My companions were Mme Clare C—s, M. Walter Fawkes, Lord Goodenough and Lady Goodenough who had arrived that morning by plane from London. It was in M. Fawkes’ presence that I recall telling the Bishop of the abandoned church I had been taken to as a child. M. Fawkes knew what sort of an invitation such a site would be to a man of God.

  All the other search parties had been despatched in their allocated directions.

  Lord and Lady Goodenough had arrived at the Villa Les Maures after the other parties had been despatched. Lord Goodenough had unpacked a green sweater with shoulder-patches. Lady Goodenough was wearing the same slacks and shirt she had worn for the flight from London.

  We halted to listen to the bell. I said, ‘C’est lui.’

  I produced my whistle and blew it. There was no response. But the distant tolling was audible for a full minute. Then it paused.

  After a few seconds it momentarily resumed.

  Now we hurried on. I led the way. The track was a barely discernible but took us up its final ascent and the church came into view.

  At the head of the company I exclaimed, ‘Il est tombé.’ I had seen the body instantly, twenty metres distant, at the foot of the niche in the church’s western wall below the bell and its rope which reached only to six metres from the ground.

  The Bishop lay crumpled on his side, naked above the waist, facing away from us, the upper arm flung forward across the flagstone. Blood oozed from the skull. The upper back was lacerated. A green shirt was to one side. Coming closer, we saw the mouth and eyes were open. We judged him dead. M. Fawkes muttered, ‘Oh mon Dieu.’

  There was no movement of breathing. Mme C—s was bending down as if to listen for a heartbeat. She shook her head. M. Fawkes repeated his muttering.

  Lord Goodenough advised, ‘Be careful moving him.’ And then, ‘In case his neck is broken.’ Lady Goodenough beside him was evidently moved.

  Mme C—s straightened up and said, ‘I don’t think he’s breathing.’ She seemed about to weep. She looked at Lady Goodenough, who was stock still. I saw the pallor on her. M. Fawkes had moved to the feet of his friend the Anglican, to gaze upon the body.

  The other three (M. Fawkes being apart) in the dappled sunlight, were standing in a narrow triangle, half-facing one another, not knowing who should take the next action. The gash to the skull was entirely visible from where we stood. I now knelt beside the body.

  I said, ‘Il est mort, l’évêque,’ and crossed myself.

  M. Fawkes said to himself, ‘How can this be?’

  Lord Goodenough now addressed M. Fawkes. ‘He was the father of my boy Gyles.’

  This I did not understand.

  But Lady Goodenough moved towards her husband. She placed her arms around his neck and buried her face upon his chest. Mme C—s laid a hand on each. In this manner they stood, locked together, each weeping without restraint.

  May I recommend the replacement of the bell rope and the re-consecration of this church.

  finis

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