Frere dried. It was hot beneath the vestments. His knuckles were white against the oak. To go or stay? The summary crook of Agnew’s finger had indicated some urgency. Everywhere now, a whispering. In a hot trance the Reverend Edwin Frere stepped down from the pulpit and walked along the flags of the nave.
Outside the light was a falling blade. Agnew was crouched on the grass like the yogis Frere had seen in India, and the grass was luminously green. Agnew reached a hand inside his coat and took something from his breast. Something small, slender, mobile, that quickly wrinkled around his arm. It glinted, crackle-glazed and green as emerald. Still smiling, Agnew held Frere’s eyes. His fingers caressed the head of the snake, and it luxuriated beneath his touch. Under the blunt stub of its nose a thin tongue flickered languidly.
Nothing was said. No words were needed. The urgent matter was now. Both understood its nature. The question was simply whether or not the priest would allow Agnew’s snake to bite him.
Already he sensed what it would be like: the hot dart of the fangs, the swirl in the bloodstream, a singing in the ears, the interminable spinning seconds before…
There was a rime of sweat behind the priest’s ears. Agnew’s smile was an invitation, a summoning; a dare…
Edwin Frere lurched awake in a strange room.
In the thin light he made out Emilia stretched beside him. Below the little bonnet in which her hair was piled the eyelids were closed and the lips a little open. Frere was trembling. Immediately he thought to look to his wife for consolation, for if there was an absence of passion in their life together, there was much affection. Yet it seemed indulgent to waken one who slept so peacefully. He wondered at the simple human trust in sleep: how easily it was betrayed. One was consigned there to a world which derided far more than the laws of time and space. Again and again one encountered morally dubious figures – tricksters and faithless lovers who rejoiced in the old anarchy of things. So often one fell asleep in hell and, waking, dared not sleep again.
Quietly he slipped from the covers, crossed to the window and opened the curtain a little. Dawn was unfolding among the birches in the park at Easterness. The rain had stopped in the night, and under high banks of cumulus smaller pinnaces of cloud were scudding eastwards. Between them flooded a soft, drenched light in which the spinneys were dusky islands still, and the lake a dim hammered pewter.
He wanted to be out there. He wanted to look at the church alone.
By seven, when Louisa came down to the servants’ hall to discuss the day’s arrangements with Mrs Tillotson, the housekeeper, Frere’s dawn pilgrimage to the church was a matter of common gossip. He had been spotted from an attic window by one of the kitchen maids whose early duty it was to light the fire in the range and raise the dough for the day’s bread.
“And what time do you say this was, Tilly?” Louisa asked.
“Nelly says a little after five, Miss Louisa. The gentleman do seem a deal less partial to his bed than Parson Stukely were.”
“Perhaps he slept badly. You say he has not yet returned?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“And Mrs Frere?”
“Not yet come down, miss. Shall I tell Sarah to give her a knock?”
“No, let her sleep a while. The poor thing was quite exhausted. It’s a fine morning, Tilly. I shall take Pedro for a run in the park.”
It was Pedro who discovered Edwin Frere. Like all setters, he was gifted more with heart than sense, and having been kept kennelled the previous evening to shield the guests from his promiscuous adoration, he was delighted now to find the clergyman sitting on the stump of a felled oak and gazing out across the lake.
“Pedro, here. To heel,” Louisa called, observing the guest’s embarrassment at such passionate attention. “Pedro, get down. Get down, sir.” Only when she came up to them was she able to disengage the parson from the dancing dog. Frere waved away her apologies, but she sensed something deeply discomfited in the man.
“See, the brute has muddied your coat, Mr Frere. Oh Pedro, you are an ill-mannered cur. You disgrace me. Be off about your business.” The hound skulked, shame-faced, for a yard or two, then decided that was contrition enough. The outraged ducks were settling beyond his reach, but his nose would start some other quarry. Confused, Frere watched him bound away.
“I fear you did not sleep well, Mr Frere.”
“Well enough. Well enough, thank you.” He flushed at the polite lie and conceded that he had been a little restless.
“This is a difficult decision for you?”
He was taken aback for a moment by this direct enquiry. “No one should lightly undertake a cure of souls, Miss Agnew,” he answered, but how pompous the words appeared against the fresh, early-morning complexion of the young woman’s face. One could only leave the soft breeze to scatter them.
Louisa wondered how far this man was victim to his own career. What would he have been like, for instance, if he had been put to sea rather than to the cloth? Switch his canonical black for a captain’s blue and he might swagger to devastating effect. Either way, he was clearly not yet himself.
“And did your prayers in church this morning clarify the matter?”
Frere looked down upon this young woman in surprise. “You know about that?”
“The good Lord is not alone in seeing every sparrow that falls in Munding. Your dawn devotions have been the gossip of the kitchen for the past hour.”
“I wanted to view the church alone…” He might have been confessing to some escapade.
“And did you approve of what you saw?”
Frere looked above the crowns of the beech trees for guidance. “Indeed, I had begun to feel I might be of some service here…”
Louisa waited for him to continue as she walked beside him. She saw the hand slip to his ear. She said, “Do I see a but upon your lips?” He stole a quick glance at her. “Some reservation?” she encouraged.
“It is a… It is not a…”
She smiled at his hesitation. “I see you have a fondness for riddles. But it is early still and not all my wits are about me. You must give me more of a clue or I shall never guess the answer.”
She felt his spirit hurrying away. Had it not been altogether impolite, his body would eagerly have joined it. “I fear it is something of which I am not quite ready to speak, Miss Agnew,” he muttered. “You must excuse me.”
Louisa stopped, puzzled, and looked around for Pedro, who was scurrying, nose to the ground, towards the Great Wood. Already too far to call and anyway he would not obey. “Oh dear! I seem to have lost my dog and you your enthusiasm, Mr Frere. Do you think we are in for a trying day?”
He glanced across at her face. Her skin was shiny in the light, and the blue eyes were tilted slightly, teasing his perplexity. From somewhere beyond his general grave humour a smile surfaced suddenly. It was like a fish nibbling at the air – a momentary spasm of the waters, then gone. Perhaps, after all, his gloom had been disproportionate.
“Is it perhaps that we are too rude a community for your taste?” The candour of the question was nicely calculated – no reproval in her voice, no sarcasm. She might have been asking about his choice of tobacco. It was his weakness, however, to imagine some offence taken.
“Good gracious no, Miss Agnew. Not that. Not that at all.” Having said so much, he saw that a larger explanation of his demeanour was now required; he was a poor deceiver. “It may seem a slight thing to others,” he ventured, “but I was examining the fabric of the church…”
“And wondering how much effort you must expend exhorting the parishioners to its upkeep?”
“Miss Agnew, you misunderstand me. I was pleased to find the church in excellent repair.”
“There is a small leak in the vestry,” she conceded. “Mr Starling has tried to repair it many times but it has proved recalcitrant.”
Frere waved a hand as though erasing her remark from an invisible slate. “No, please, do not concern yourself on that score.
The church is clearly well cared for…” This was a most disconcerting young woman.
“Yet something has discountenanced you,” she pressed. “Come, Mr Frere, I think we should be friends. You may unburden yourself to me, and then it will be easier when you confront the church wardens.” Again an encouraging smile. How fluently she reversed the conventional roles; but he could hardly share his discomfort with one of her sex. He was uncertain even how to speak of it to Emilia. He turned and walked on.
“You disappoint me, Mr Frere.”
He stopped.
“I have a name in the parish for a sympathetic ear. I promise you may repose your confidence in me.”
He turned again.
And blushed.
She stood, perplexed – amazed and amused by this sudden rubicund haplessness. Her mind was fleetly at work – what could it be that had so silenced him? Something to do with the fabric of the church?
Of course!
“Ah!” she exclaimed. “I think I have it.”
He looked down upon her, wide-eyed under raised brows.
“You have met Gypsy May.”
He frowned, puzzled. “I met no one, Miss Agnew.”
“On the south wall,” she said, smiling, “above the windows?”
He felt the blood in his face.
“Gypsy May,” she said, triumphant.
He was astounded to find her less embarrassed than amused. “It is,” he muttered, “a most extraordinary feature,” and could see no delicate way to pursue the matter.
“In this part of the kingdom, yes. I understand such curios are found more commonly in Ireland where, Father tells me, they are called Sheelagh-na-gigs. There is, however, one other example in the eastern counties – on the church at Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire.”
“Really? I do not know the building.”
“The carvings are of Celtic provenance, I believe,” the young woman persisted as though they were discussing an entirely innocuous matter. “Or perhaps older still than that. There is something positively aboriginal about her, don’t you think?”
“Indeed.” Frere was incapable of thought.
“Poor May has become nothing of more account than a bogey to frighten naughty children. You must not let her mortify you, Mr Frere.” She gave him a quick, elfin smile, then added – and the clergyman could not entirely conceal his shock – “I am rather fond of her myself.”
He struggled for composure, jerked the chin a little higher on his neck. “I would hardly have thought it a figure to inspire affection.” He was determined to keep to the impersonal pronoun – they were talking about a stone slab after all.
Louisa studied him, head tilted again in a wide-eyed glance, demure, yet with a faintly derisory curve to her lips. “I have grown up with her,” she answered simply. “Perhaps to a newcomer she must be somewhat startling.”
“Indeed,” he said again.
They walked on in silence for a while. The flight of a mallard returned Frere’s eyes to the outer world, and he observed with relief that it would not be long before they entered the parterre garden to the rear of the hall.
“This prospect of the park is very gratifying,” he said. She acknowledged the diversion with a nod. “You are most fortunate in your home, Miss Agnew.” It was necessary somehow to fill the silence between them.
“Yes, Mr Frere, I have many blessings and I am far from unconscious of them.”
As they came to the small iron gate, he opened it and stepped aside to let her enter first. She halted in the gateway between two vigilant stone lions, and turned to face him, holding the brim of her bonnet away from her face. “Compose yourself, Mr Frere. I fear you will find other ladies in the parish quite as dragonish as Gypsy May, if certainly more proper.” She paused, smiled, and added, “It would be a great pity if you were to allow any of them to drive you away.”
He stood, dumbfounded by her frank smile – utterly other than the grotesque staring head of Gypsy May, where the image squatted, high on the church wall, naked with drooping dugs, and both hands holding open the organ of her sex, as though she were about to drop a child in labour, or as though she might engorge a man.
Then, suddenly, as if she had realized the inner reaches of his discomposure for the first time, or some tardy awareness of how far she had overstepped the bounds of strict propriety was rising within her, a reticent shadow fell across Louisa’s face. It was like a modest fan raised briskly to her lip. She twisted the little button at her throat, then turned on her heel and drifted along the paved path with so smooth a motion that she might have been walking on water rather than on stone.
3
The House of God
Mellowed with lichens, the stone lions kept their vigil still across the prospect to the lake, and the parkland could not have greatly changed, but Louisa Anne Agnew was no more than a small marble tablet to me, and Edwin Frere only one among a list of incumbents’ names in the church at Munding, when I went, reluctantly, with Bob Crossley to the gathering at Easterness.
As soon as I saw Bob in his suit and tie, I knew I’d taken too literally Ralph Agnew’s promise that this was to be an informal affair. Yet when I suggested I go back to The Pightle to change out of my jeans, Bob wouldn’t hear of it. Nor would he lend me a tie. “No need to make concessions,” he said. “You’ll be a breath of fresh air, and Ralph won’t mind. As the local gentry go, he’s all right, and if any of the Range Rover Brigade are there it’ll do them good to bump up against a free spirit.”
“I note you’re wearing a tie.”
“And this,” he countered, flourishing the CND badge at his lapel. “Make the buggers think, says I.”
For an informal gathering it was also large, but the evening was warm and we were able, thank God, to spill out through the French windows onto the terrace from where you could see the lake glimmering in the dusk and envy all things wild.
“So glad you could come,” said Ralph Agnew with more than mere politeness – he seemed almost relieved. He was a burly man, older than I’d expected – around seventy I guessed – with a well-groomed gloss of silver hair, and would have been handsome still but for the asymmetrical twist to his face. A mild stroke must have permanently disturbed its stresses, and now the narrow lips lifted towards the downward slope of his half-closed left eye, and his speech was slightly slurred. But the overall effect was roguish rather than paralytic. “Someone I want you to meet,” he said. “In fact, to be perfectly honest, that’s what this whole shindig’s about. I’m counting on you to keep an old friend at ease.”
“Who would that be?”
“He’s not here yet… probably still stiffening himself on Scotch. Bit of a shy bird, you see. Poet. His name’s Edward Nesbit.”
“Edward Nesbit?”
“You know him then?”
“I know of him, of course, but…”
“Old friend. He’s staying with me here. On the Estate. At the Decoy Lodge.”
“That’s extraordinary.”
“Why so?”
I was about to say that I thought he was dead, but pulled up in time. “I mean, nothing’s been heard of him for years.”
“Been lying low. Abroad mostly. Anyway, when he turns up, I’ll introduce you. Look… if it’s not too much to ask, keep an eye on him, will you? Should have plenty to talk about. Got my own hands full, otherwise wouldn’t ask. Not at his best at this sort of thing, you see. In the meantime Bob here will help you to meet some people. Right? By the way, your last book… enjoyed it. Touch of the true flame there, I thought. Clive has an eye.”
I stood mumchance, in slight shock, as I watched him make off to greet newcomers. “So what was all that about?” asked Bob.
Edward Nesbit, I explained, had been among the half-legendary poets of the ’40s and ’50s, one of the more flamboyant denizens of Fitzrovia, a colourful and dissolute wordsmith whose early promise of grandeur had burnt itself out into silence. Nothing had been published under his name for years and, in the
gossip-riddled world of the poets, so little had been heard of him that I had assumed him dead.
What I did not say was that it had been Nesbit’s work that first turned me on to verse. I was fifteen at the time, restless in the drab, secular desert around me, and his poems had seared across my sky like a prophetic shower of meteors. It had been a cold day when I woke to the realization that, in my own first efforts at verse, I was aping the idiom of Nesbit and his contemporaries with no access to their experience. Later, at university, where I lost my god and found a social conscience (however well-guarded behind some glassy ironies), I had come to prefer a cooler one of descent, but I had never been able to hear myself dismiss Nesbit’s work as “cryptic bombast” without feeling that I was fouling my own first springs of speech.
To learn that he was here now, and that I was expected to shepherd him through a gathering that had already left me half-cataleptic with unease, was to receive a summons from my own dead youth.
It was a moment before I realized that someone else was at my shoulder inviting attention. I looked up to see an eager, youngish man in glasses, sporting a thin white tie over a black shirt, and was surprised therefore to hear Bob introduce the Reverend Neville Sallis, current Rector of Munding and three other parishes. His beam embraced me with interest. I presumed that the absence of a dog collar announced a liberal theology behind the smile.
“I was telling Alex about the goats,” said Bob.
“Oh dear, that story,” Sallis shrugged, not greatly discomposed. “Can’t seem to get away from it. It should be explained that I was a mere novice at the time. I had no idea that people would take the business of separating the sheep from the goats quite so literally.” The joke had a well-used air. “Fortunately things are a little more forward-looking at Thrandeston.”
“If you regard nuclear bombers as forward-looking.”
“Now you won’t draw me on that one, Bob.” Sallis smiled amiably and turned to me. “Shall you be at Munding long? It’s St Mary’s turn for Evensong on Sunday, if you’re so inclined.”
“No joy there, Neville,” Bob answered for me. “Alex’s only interest in the church is Gypsy May.”
The Chymical Wedding Page 5