“Ah yes. She’s rather jolly, don’t you think?”
“Extraordinary,” I said. “What on earth is she doing up there?”
“I suppose it was a way of christening her,” Sallis suggested. “Missionary politics, you know. This too has been among the dark places. The best way to convert the heathen was to consecrate their holy sites. You must have noticed the mound? A lot of churches round here are built on them. Under the patronage of St Michael now – victory over the pagan serpent and all that.”
“But not Munding.”
“No, not Munding.”
“I was wondering about the name – Gypsy May?”
“Ah, I have a theory about that. I think May is a corruption of Mary, and of course there was more than one St Mary. Do you know about Maria Aegyptica?”
“The prostitute?”
“That’s the one.” Bob had pricked up his ears and was looking puzzled. “A rather unusual saint,” Sallis explained. “She was a temple whore in Egypt who worked her passage to the Holy Land, was converted to Christianity and ended her days as a mystic in the Thebaid. They say when she died a lion came out of the desert to bury her. She was commonly called Mary the Gypsy.”
“So you think the church was consecrated to her?”
“I wouldn’t say that. But the legend was popular in the Middle Ages, and with Gypsy May’s… er… posture… well, the confusion would have been understandable. The carving’s clearly of the old mother goddess. She couldn’t be entirely suppressed so some progressive priest blessed her instead, and there she sits. Good thinking really.”
“Like Easter.”
“Exactly. In fact, I’ve often wondered about the name of this place. Eostre, the old spring goddess, might be in there somewhere, don’t you think?”
“And none of this bothers you?” Bob asked.
“Why on earth should it? I wish there were more time to research it thoroughly.”
“But the Bishop wouldn’t approve?”
“Oh, I don’t think he’d mind, but the Mothers’ Union… well…” Sallis raised a dubious brow. “So tell me about yourself, Alex.”
Bob was drawn away into parish-council business by a fat-cat farmer in a hacking jacket. I chatted with Sallis for a while and disappointed him by saying I was sure I wouldn’t be in the area long enough to read my verse at a concert party he was organizing, and then endured an hour or so of trivial gossip with some of the other people there. My surly eye discouraged the approach of the more formidable ladies of the county, but I was growing desperate by the time Ralph Agnew came, puffing and blowing, to button-hole me. “There you are. Edward’s arrived. He’s in the library… rather the worse for wear. Do come along.” I might have been an indolent employee.
Clad in elephant-cord trousers and a woolly cardigan, with a touch of dash in the scarlet-and-green scarf knotted loosely round his neck, Edward Nesbit presented a burlier figure than I remembered from his naked appearance in the wood, but the iron-grey hair, the moustache and the disreputable Cretan-black glitter to his eyes were unmistakable. And that roué’s face, so lined it might have crackled when he laughed. He stood by a window, glass in hand, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, shoulders hunched slightly, as though a lifetime of listening through bar-room din had left him permanently stooped. The girl was not with him.
“Here he is,” said Ralph – to both of us it seemed. He made some introductory noises, murmured uncertainly that it was best if he left us to it, and slipped out. We stared at one another, dubious beneficiaries of someone else’s good nature, until Nesbit grunted and looked away. “Shouldn’t have come,” he said.
Did he mean me or himself?
“I’ve been told to keep you company.”
“Ralph’s idea,” he added in mumbled explanation. “Didn’t want to offend him.”
“I see. Me too.”
“Good man – Ralph.”
“I hardly know him.”
He cast an eye over me, wondering blearily from under which stone I’d come, then looked around for a chair, and slumped into it. “Drink?”
“I forgot my glass.”
“Use the bottle for God’s sake.”
I did, and sat across from him, under a suspicious eye.
“Can’t stand this sort of thing.” With the fingers of one hand he mimicked the empty yapping of mouths. “Tried to tell him. Probably disgrace myself.”
I’d met old poets before. They could be sweet as pie or venomous as nettles. This one looked uncomfortable, a little helpless now. I said, “I sometimes think there’d be less boredom in the world if people weren’t at such pains to organize it.” He nodded his agreement, smiling faintly, but said nothing. That was the other thing about them: they commanded the high ground; they could afford to wait.
“Ralph tells me you’re living on the Estate.”
“Over the lake.” His hand gestured vaguely at the window. I volunteered that I was in Clive Quantrill’s cottage but the name stirred no response, and the information no interest. I cast about for something that wouldn’t be swallowed up by the sign of the yapping hand.
He sniffed, looked away, and said, “I’m told you’re something of a versifier.”
“For my sins.”
“What’d you say?”
Under repetition the remark receded further into absurdity, as he’d known it would.
“Good God,” he said, “you’ll not convince me you’ve many of those to your credit. Not with a face like that. Look at mine, dear man. All seven deadlies writ large.” I could see the possibility of six in his stare, but Envy was absent. “If it’s sin you want to talk about…” A wave of his hand dismissed the subject.
“I’m always interested in listening to an expert.”
A hint of a smile, but he was not to be so lightly seduced. I began to understand why Ralph Agnew had needed a keeper for his friend, and resented the appointment. Unhelpfully, Edward Nesbit stared into his glass as though innocence were drowning there.
I recalled my adolescent fantasies of the glamorous young man who’d stormed London in the late ’30s, hat stuffed with images, scattering his wit like loose change and declaiming his verse to anyone who’d listen. Significantly, the aged Yeats had listened, and Eliot had respected a talent so different from his own. Had Nesbit been killed in the war, or drunk himself to death, the critics might have lamented the loss of his great promise. Less satisfactorily, the man had simply abjured the place on the public stage that his early profusion of verse had briefly won for him, and disappeared into obscurity. His Blitz Litany remained a standard anthology piece, but surveys of modern verse accorded him only passing mention now: a significant if minor figure whose spendthrift way with words had led to bankruptcy. It seemed they were right.
“I’ve read your stuff,” he said abruptly, eyes aimed my way a moment, then darting away.
I waited.
“Beautiful.”
Magnanimity was not what I’d expected. I concealed my pleasure behind a deprecatory smile.
“So beautiful” – he looked up, gimlet-eyed – “I wanted to smash it.”
Even in the shadows of the dimly lit library the impact of the remark must have been obvious. Yet he smiled in reparation, leant towards me, almost consolingly. “What you don’t yet understand,” he said, “is that poetry is not enough.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see,” he snarled.
“Then you’d better explain.”
He turned away again impatiently and dragged on his cigarette. His eyes closed in a frown – hunting a difficult thought, perhaps – then he stared at me again and made a wide gesture to the walls that slopped the whisky in his glass. “Use your eyes,” he said. “Look at them all.” Evidently he meant the books in their glazed cases. “Thousands of them. Thousands. And the one that counts… Not here, you see. Burnt. Up in smoke. Abolished.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. He looked around the room almost anxiou
sly. “Where’s Laura?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“I want Laura.”
“Do you want me to look for her?”
He eyed me suspiciously.
“She did come with you?” I checked.
“Of course she came with me.”
“Look, I’ll go and find her if you like.”
“Sit down.”
I did.
“Wanted to tell you something.” His mind seemed to be wandering, Just drunk? Or some more permanent insult to his cells? Surely not yet entirely senile?
“That poetry isn’t enough?” I reminded.
“Something like that.”
“It’s enough for me.”
“Then you’re asleep. Your tarocchi need shuffling.”
“My what?”
“Thousands of you out there, scribbling away. Metre-ballad-mongers. Petal-counters. Pen-suckers. All secretly convinced they’re God’s gift to English poesy. And it’s over. Finished.” It was an outrageous generalization from a personal loss. Had it been less absolute it would have been pathetic. Or was it merely perverse? For he was peering at me now, one eye closed, the other inviting and defying demurral.
“Is that why you gave up?” I said.
He drew in, and released noisily, a deep breath. “None of your damned business.”
“If you say so.”
“But I’ll tell you.” Again he made me wait. “Je ne sais plus parler,” he whispered. “Ma santé fut menacée. La terreur venait.”
“That was Rimbaud’s answer,” I began. “What’s…”
“Better poet,” he interrupted. “More reason.” And then, louder, “And it’s too good for the likes of you.” He emptied his glass, reached for the bottle again, unsteadily. I poured a measure for him.
“You’re a gentleman,” he said. “In my cups, you see. Pay no heed.” Then he beckoned me closer to his face as though about to share some drunken confidence. I leant cautiously towards him, saw his face approach mine, eyes glittering up from under his brows, then he planted a damp but surprisingly tender kiss on my lips, and slumped back in his chair. “English poets have kissed one another from Gower onwards,” he mumbled.
“And will,” I declared.
“If there’s time, dear heart, if there’s time.”
For a moment there was a frail bond of sympathy between us – two poets in a darkened library while the party went on around us. There we sat over a bottle, surrounded by people who, for the most part, couldn’t care whether we penned another line or not; for whom Edward Nesbit was a curiosity, like an eighteenth-century anchorite paid to look picturesque in a parkland grotto, and I, nobody in jeans. Once more I was overwhelmed by the futility of the poet’s craft. Perhaps after all he was right.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “It’s about a country. A country where, after centuries of shame over their base animal nature, the people thought they’d finally broken free. Suddenly it was all body beautiful, capito? Sex was everywhere. Everyone wanted their share. Appetite and sensation were the order of the night. Are you with me?”
I nodded, amazed by the sudden lucidity of his voice.
“And then something entirely unanticipated transpired. At the centre of their foreheads the men began to sprout horns – single, cartilaginous little horns. Like unicorns, you might think, but without the grace, without the mythic majesty. No, these horns were stubby little spigots right at the centre of their brows. In some, inevitably, they took the shape of pens.” He smiled at me, sulphurously, again. “Being an educated young man, you will, no doubt, have recognized them already as secondary pricks. And what fun they were! Giving head took on a delicious new twist. Also, unlike the true generative organ skulking between the thighs, they carried with them no risk of pregnancy. Everyone could be as horny as they liked and all that was e-jac-u-lated from these splendid little temple stopcocks was a thin thrill of ideas, a harmless spurt of ink.” He sniffed, downed the measure. “The only pity of it was – and some said it was a small enough price to pay for so neatly ducking the inflexible laws of generation – the only pity of it was that when they tried to make love the damned things got in the way.”
I laughed, as much at the doleful expression on his face as at the story. “It’s a true story, damn you,” he growled. “A true story. And I need to pee.” He got up and staggered out of the library. I waited a longish time, and when he didn’t come back, went out to look for him.
In the panelled hall the party was dispersing, hurriedly. I saw Neville Sallis, pale but beaming as he dismissed Ralph Agnew’s apologies. “Water off a duck’s back,” he was saying without conviction. “Really. Don’t give it another thought.”
“He can be… difficult, I’m afraid,” Ralph persisted.
“Poetic licence, no doubt. Not every day one meets a sacred monster.”
Ralph saw me over Sallis’s shoulder and excused himself. “Look,” he whispered urgently, “could you find Laura for me? She’s out in the parterre I think.”
“What’s happened?”
He shook his head. “Edward’s through there with Bob but he wants Laura. Do you mind? My fault really. Should have listened to him. Be a good chap?” He turned back to the rest of the departing guests as I slipped out, wondering why, behind its apologetic mien, a certain kind of breeding should command instant obedience.
There was no one in the garden. I followed the path to the lion gate and looked across the park. I could hear the plash of ducks among reeds but the lake was no more than a thin glimmer in the darkness. Swift pangs of sound quivered across its surface – the small cries of moorhens and the muted klaxons of Canada geese. A few stars ticked mistily among cloud. She – Laura – the girl, presumably, whom I’d seen with Nesbit in the wood – could be anywhere, and I wasn’t about to shout.
The air was sweet. I took in a few cleansing breaths and would have turned back, but I heard a small rasping noise somewhere in the gloom. It was repeated four or five times, quickly, unidentifiable, until a feather of flame appeared twenty yards away in the shadows at the water’s edge. In its brief glow I made out the profile of a woman’s face lighting a cigarette. Unaware of my presence, she was sitting cross-legged at the shore end of a small jetty that ran out into the lake. As I walked towards her, the moon stepped out of the cloud.
“Laura?”
She turned her head, frowning.
“It’s Edward. There’s been some sort of upset. He wants you.”
“Upset?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“You mean he’s insulted someone?”
“I suppose so. The vicar, I think.”
“That figures.” She turned her head away but made no other move.
“Ralph asked me to find you.”
She gathered a shawl closer about her shoulders and stared intently out across the lake as though her attention was drawn there by something more interesting.
“Are you coming?”
She drew on her cigarette. “When I’m ready.”
“I think Ralph would appreciate it.”
“He can handle it.”
The indifference of the soft American voice irritated me. I said, “Edward’s pissed out of his mind. You should take him home.”
She looked back at me, mildly surprised by my tone. “Sounds like he got to you too.”
I shook my head. “But I don’t much like being used as watchdog and errand boy.”
“Then why are you here?”
Nettled, I answered, “You don’t make any concessions, do you? Either of you, I mean.” She shrugged and looked away.
Detesting the stupid, liminal figure I’d become, I went back to the house in a foul mood, and heard Edward’s voice perorating through the open French door. With the taste of blood he seemed to have gained his second wind, or perhaps the dispersal of the party had freed his spirit. Either way, he was now in full rhetorical flood.
“Consider the history of History itsel
f,” he was saying, “a gradual degeneration from the sublime dream-time of myth into heroic legend; an even more rapid and much more dismal decline into patriotic fiction; and then finally – God save the mark – into Economics. And there’s a bastard foundling of the academic mentality if ever I smelled one. One, if I may say so, my dear… dear?”
Bob supplied his name.
“Yes, dear Bob, one that an intelligent soul such as yourself should hesitate to inflict on a free spirit as the iron hand of necessity. It won’t wash, dear man. If what you call history has any value at all, it’s merely as an object lesson in human stupidity, against which even the gods themselves are helpless. Which brings us back to the ground we should never have left in the first place – sacred ground. My old heart faints at the thought of the utopian palace of conformities you’d have us build upon it. At best I see it as a hideous, co-educational public convenience. At worst – a secret policeman’s dream.”
“That’s the old Tory line,” Bob returned. “For my money we either remember the past or repeat it. History shows…”
“If history shows anything, it’s that a great deal more than memory is required to avoid the recurrence of calamity. It requires – I think you will agree – some spark of insight into the darker operations of the human soul. And for that we shall need a more luminous exercise of the imagination than your naive materialism has to offer. Speak to me from your best self, dear heart. Recall your glassy essence.”
Bob had the air of an earthquake survivor – patient and dazed beneath the fallen masonry, but managing a gallant, good-natured smile. “I don’t think it’s my materialism that’s naive.”
“And I don’t care what you think. It may be our common misfortune to live in a vast supermarket of opinion, but your particular brand loyalties are no concern of mine. What interests me is what you know. You call yourself a materialist, but do you know, for instance, what matter is? Have you given the matter any thought? Have you tried taking the word back to its roots? It goes right back to Sanskrit and doubtless beyond. Push through the fissive nature of matter, penetrate to its roots, and where do you find yourself? Not, I assure you, in the kingdom of the Leptons and the Quarks, but in the black hole of the Magna Mater. Yes, the Great Mother herself, and it is a terrible thing to fall into the lap of the living goddess. Now there’s a thing we might do well to remember. Isn’t that so, Ralph?” Nesbit nodded briefly at his host who had entered from the hall and was pouring himself a much-needed drink as he listened in resignation to the soliloquy.
The Chymical Wedding Page 6