The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  The old poet seemed oblivious of, or indifferent to, the embarrassment he had caused, and paused for no answer. “If we accorded her the reverence she demands, we might begin to recover something of the sacramental quick of life. We might come alive again to the tremendous symbolic dignity of things.” I watched him silence Bob with an imperious hand. “But perhaps you prefer to suck your thumb in the literally dia-bolic junkyard that such bright opinions as yours erect around themselves with – yes, I grant you – historically determined inevitability. If so, Heaven help you, for you leave me at a loss.”

  Nesbit had spoken throughout in measured tones, polishing his syllables like a lapidary. When he had ended, he looked away, as though in despair, and his eyes fell on me. “Darken,” he growled, “you call yourself a poet. Come. Instruct our friend in celestial dialectics. I doubt the fellow really knows what diabolic means. He’s cut off his roots, you see, and he won’t listen to a superannuated old fool like me.”

  I’d had more than enough of his pontificating, and liked even less his attitude towards Bob. I said quietly, “If I thought there was a shred of evidence for divine order in this dog’s dinner of a world, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so. As it is, I’d say that Bob’s red flag has more life in it than your sacred cow.”

  Loosening his tie, Ralph Agnew relaxed into an elegant velvet chair and murmured, “Touché.” There was a hint of requited glee across his stricken features. It brought to mind some plump senator settling himself in a good seat at the Colosseum.

  Nesbit sighed extravagantly and said, “Oo-la-lah!”

  Our eyes were fixed on one another. I could sense the other two men pegged on the sudden tension between us. Then Nesbit smiled and shook his head. “Forgive me,” he said, and I thought he was about to relapse into bleary lassitude, “but that remark,” he added, “betrays a lack of attention excusable only in the autistic or the drunk.”

  There was a retort at my lips, which I arrested when I saw the sadness etched into the latticework of lines around the old poet’s eyes. It offered a bleak complicity. It was as intimate in its way as that between headsman and victim at the moment when silver changed hands. Then we were all startled by a new voice in the room – duskily sonorous with an American lilt to it. “You being a pig again, Edward?”

  I turned and saw the girl standing by the French door, dark-haired, sallow-skinned, arms crossed at her chest as though she were hugging herself against the cold. Her fingers held the shawl in place, and her clothes concealed the lines of her body, making a bid for invisibility, but she drifted into the room like a cloud of loose electricity charging the air.

  “Laura, my dear.” said Ralph rising.

  There was little pleasure in Nesbit’s smile. “How gratifying that you’ve deigned to join the party after all, and in such striking style. No doubt everyone is savouring the brilliance of your observation, but it seems a pity to shift the focus at such a tantalizing moment. I was just about to discover why this young man is so intent on laying waste the palace of his mind.”

  The girl eased herself onto a leather pouf by the fireplace and said with no great urgency, “Why don’t you give it a rest, Edward? Leave him alone.”

  “He’s perfectly at liberty to tell me to go to hell if he likes.”

  Bob stepped back in unhappily. “I think Alex was only saying what I was trying to say – there’s no rational evidence for what you’re on about, whereas…”

  “No,” said Nesbit patiently, “I think he was saying rather more than that. Still, if it’s evidence the lad’s looking for, then evidence he shall have. Ralph?”

  “Edward?”

  “Louisa’s cards. Where are they?”

  Ralph grimaced. “Don’t you think it’s a little…”

  “Do bring them. It might be… entertaining.”

  The two men studied each other in silence for a time. They were of the same generation – children of the Great War, or of the late Edwardian summer that vanished for ever with it – but how different was the feel of their presences: Agnew refined, polite, the diffident English gentleman; Nesbit volatile and louche. Of the two I would have guessed Agnew the elder but, despite the spasm of the stroke across his face, there were moments when he appeared junior to the rumpled, experience-ravaged figure of the old poet – who fixed him now with a peremptory smile.

  Their silence was contentious. Was Ralph finally tiring of his difficult guest, I wondered, or merely recommending a more gracious taste in entertainment? Eventually he opened his hands, Pilate-like, got up and excused himself a moment.

  Bob Crossley, the third man of that generation, but of another class, another less extravagant world, cast a quick uncomfortable glance my way. He wanted to leave, but said nothing. Having precipitated this clash with Nesbit, I could hardly make the suggestion myself. In this handsome room, with generations of portraits gazing down on us, Bob and I were stuck. The evening had turned perilous.

  Laura pushed back the hair from her face. “Edward, we should go.”

  “Nonsense, my dear. The fun hasn’t yet begun.” His eyes returned to me. “This will not, of course, be irrefutable evidence of the presence of the gods, nor yet of the existence of the prophetic soul. But I think I can promise you a small demonstration that there are things in heaven and earth that your entirely reasonable assumptions will not explain away.”

  The four of us sat in uneasy silence until Ralph returned bearing an elaborately carved wooden box. “Edward,” he said, “is this altogether wise?”

  “Of course not.” Nesbit took the box, placed it on a low table before the fireplace, patted the lid, then looked up at me. “Sit down, for God’s sake.” He indicated the chair of his choice, next to the table, across from him. As I sat, he opened the box, took out an oblong package wrapped in a velvet cloth of midnight blue which he unfolded to reveal an unusually long and thick deck of cards. “You are familiar with the Grand Tarot?” He spread a few cards in a fan across the table. Unfamiliar symbols that might have been illuminations from a medieval Book of Hours were hand-painted on them with exquisite care. Each motif shone against a golden ground which was itself textured with swags and furbelows, and the margins of the cards were inscribed with glosses in a tiny, cursive script. I saw arrangements of chalices and swords, and other cards bearing curious heraldic figures which had names capitalized at the foot. I saw LA COURONNE DES MAGES, LA PAPESSE, LE PENDU.

  “Only from Eliot,” I said, “The Waste Land?”

  “My major complaint against Mr Eliot – sweet, strict man that he was – is that he made use of the cards without taking the trouble to know them. In any case, I am not Madame Sosostris, nor is this an ordinary deck.”

  Curious, Bob made to pick up one of the cards, but Nesbit forestalled him. “I’d much rather you didn’t.”

  “Well, I’m going to have some brandy,” Ralph said. “Anyone join me?”

  “Excellent idea.” Nesbit collected our nods and passed them on to the host, then looked back at the cards. “These wondrous things have been in Ralph’s family for a long time,” he said, “but I associate them particularly with that splendid lady whose portrait you see by the window.” He indicated a heavily framed oil of a mild, very old woman who gazed into the room, untroubled, interested, with serene repose. “Louisa Anne Agnew,” he announced proprietarily. “As a boy, Ralph was fortunate enough to know her. He tells me the likeness is just. Note how she seems to gaze into

  That time when no more change shall be

  but steadfast rest of all things firmly stay’d

  Upon the pillows of Eternity.”

  His rich voice savoured the cadences.

  “Spenser,” Ralph supplied from where he decanted the brandy into snifters. “One of her favourite poets.”

  “But not among yours, I can see,” said Nesbit, looking at me.

  “Not particularly. So what do you propose? To tell my fortune?”

  Nesbit’s face crumpled with distaste. “Nothing so juveni
le. I merely thought you might not be averse to a small experiment.” As he spoke he sifted through the cards, selecting some, rejecting others.

  “What kind of experiment?”

  “Patience, dear man.”

  On the whole I preferred his earlier, less sinister taste for insult, but I watched, smiling, as he continued his search. Laura received her brandy, sipped at it, then looked at me. “You don’t have to take any of this, you know.” In its way her cool regard was more of a challenge than the words had been.

  Nesbit looked up from the cards. “Of course, if you’d rather not…”

  I was strung between two contradictory taunts: either way loser. I said, “Go on.”

  “Good. I promise it won’t take us long, and then… we shall see.” For a moment longer he searched the deck. “Ah, here she is. Now, I think we are ready.” He counted the cards he had chosen and stacked the others neatly beside the box, then looked back to me. “There are things known to you alone – things in the privacy of your past from which the rest of us in this room are entirely excluded. Agreed?”

  “Of course.”

  “Nothing, however, is secret from the cards. Predictably you asked if I was going to tell your fortune. I could have done so, but it would not have served our purpose. As the future is not yet with us, there is no way you could have known whether what the cards had to say was true. Not tonight at least. So I am going to perform the exact reverse: I am going to foretell your past.”

  “There’s no great mystery about that.”

  “Then you must be a singularly dull young man – which, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I do not believe. Now be silent. All you have to do is take these cards and shuffle them patiently. Take as long as you like, and while you are doing it, concentrate upon your recent past. I do not mean yesterday or the day before, but that recent moment which seems to you to be charged with the most significance for your personal destiny.”

  “Why only these cards? Why not all of them?”

  “These are the Major Arcana, the Trumps or Triumphs. There are 22 of them, though only 21 are numbered. The other is the zero card. Le Mat. The Fool. The Joker of the deck. Now shuffle please. And concentrate.”

  I found the cards too large to shuffle like a normal deck, so fumbled for a moment then began to rearrange them one or two at a time. My mind, however, was not where he’d directed it. I was wondering about lines of communication. How much had Clive told Ralph about me? How much had Ralph passed on to Nesbit? Also, by their own admission, both had read my verse: to another poet there were clues enough within and behind its ironies and allusions. But the very recent past? No, that was not there, not even a hint of it, for I’d been too blind myself to see it coming. But Clive certainly knew enough – a discreet hint to an old friend in Norfolk, the suggestion that he might, in the circumstances, keep an eye on me? And what about Bob? How much did he know? How much of a gossip was he?

  I saw that my life might be more public than I cared to think… that this business with the cards might be no more than an elaborate charade.

  “That’ll do,” I said abruptly.

  Nesbit nodded. “Good. Now I want you to select a card and lay it face down on the table without showing it to anyone, including yourself. Good. Now give the rest to me.” He took the remainder and added them to the discard pile.

  “Pick a card, any card…” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  “And you’re going to tell me what it is?”

  “Either that or make an utter ass of myself. An interesting moment don’t you think? Two brittle vanities at stake over a single card. Much riskier than gambling for money, for more than the ego is riding here. The question was: is there or not an order in the universe, an order beyond mere causality? I say yes, you say no. At the moment the odds are all on your side. You shuffled. You picked. I haven’t touched the card since. I did not look at the discards, and there’s nothing to distinguish the back of this one from all the others. Agreed?”

  I looked down at the simple floral design printed there, and nodded. “So what is it?” I demanded. “The Fool, I suppose.”

  There was silence in the room. Ralph and Bob were staring at us in fascination. Even Laura was attentive now.

  “No,” said Nesbit, a finger crooked at his lip, his head shaking slowly from side to side, though there was nothing remotely drunk about him now. It was as though he’d entirely sloughed off his earlier feckless state. His eyes were shining like surgical instruments. “No,” he said again, “I think what we have here is The House of God.”

  The card lay between us, the eyes of the entire group on it as though it were a trapdoor through which, in a puff of smoke, a summoned genie might appear. Tense still, aware that the moment was – must be – absurd, I flipped the card.

  Before I took in the picture I saw three words neatly capitalized:

  LA MAISON DIEU

  I heard Bob say, “Good God!” and laugh.

  The oldest trick of all, pranked out in fancy dress, and I had fallen for it. There had been no gamble. I didn’t know how he’d done it, but of course this was the card Nesbit had predicted. Yet, in its way, my own guess had been quite as accurate: it should have been The Fool, for there I sat, sweating in the ass’s head; yet damned if I would bray.

  I stared, not at the card, but at Edward Nesbit. I was filled with the cold thought that the old fraud should have his moment of glory if, to console himself for the loss of his true gift as a poet, he so badly needed it. He should have it, and taste to the full my contempt for its emptiness.

  Nesbit’s eyes were closed. Where I had expected to meet a smirk of triumph I found instead the distracted gravity of an invalid. For a moment I wondered whether he’d even seen the card, whether he was eking out the spurious drama. But no, he had seen it. He knew.

  “Clever stuff,” Bob said, “but I don’t see that a card trick proves anything very much.”

  Nesbit opened his eyes. “There has been no trickery,” he said. Then looked up at me.

  I saw, with sudden dreadful certainty, that he was telling the truth. This was all happening, and it was real. No trick. I felt a kind of fatality loom between myself and the old veteran of pain across the table. It was an almost tangible presence, like a veiled figure in the room.

  “Don’t look at me,” he counselled gently. “Study the card.”

  I held his gaze a troubled moment longer, then looked down again, more closely, at the card. It portrayed a tower struck by lightning. The bolt, elaborately stylized in curlicues of vermilion and gold against a livid sky, had hit the parapet, which was dislodged, about to topple. The tower was in flames, and two figures were falling through the air. Had it not been for the inscription there was nothing to indicate that Nesbit had named the right card.

  Then, as I stared at the image, for a terrifying hot instant I became it. The body of the tower was my body. I could feel the riot of flame within. The toppling crown of the parapet was my head lurching away into space under the impact of that excruciating stroke from the sky. Beneath me everything familiar had begun to keel and slide, and I was falling – not a free fall, but that sickening, bottomless plummet with which one sometimes jerks from sleep. And Jess stood across from me again, her white face that of a frightened stranger now as, with cold unreachable lucidity, she broke her dreadful news.

  I was no longer at Easterness, but there in what had once been my home, the kids asleep upstairs, my heart a faltering donkey engine as, finally, irretrievably, in words as plain as they were devastating, something was stolen from me without which life would no longer be supportable. And how rapidly things had teetered into travesty. Wronged kings might have acted thus, or madmen driven to a frenzy of despair – but me? All measure, irony, restraint – the qualities to which I’d pinned my stance – were gone. My language became coarse and platitudinous. Only in insult had it range and flexibility. Even physically I’d felt myself altering as my nervous system trembled out of
control. Wife, children, home were vanishing, and when I’d looked in the mirror I’d seen Agamemnon’s mask.

  I could feel the sweat on my palms, struggled to collect myself, looked up and away. And caught Laura’s eyes. She was playing with a twist of her hair, waiting, lips slightly pursed in – what? Mockery? Disdain? No, there was another subtler message in those unremitting eyes. “I tried to warn you,” she might have been saying, “and now it’s too late. Well, somewhere inside yourself you were asking for this. Use it.”

  “Are you all right, Alex?” It was Bob’s voice.

  I nodded, swallowed, and looked up at Edward Nesbit.

  He averted his eyes, frowning in what seemed an agony of self-recrimination. He might, suddenly, have been very ill.

  “Laura,” he said, “take me home.”

  4

  A Disagreement at the Rectory

  Of the small circle gathered about the breakfast table that first morning at Easterness only Edwin Frere knew how violent the shock had been when he gazed up at the crude dawn-lit figure of Gypsy May. Indeed, Sir Henry and Emilia were quite unaware of the incident, and though Louisa Agnew was sensitive to Frere’s discomfiture, she had ascribed it to too prudish a sensibility and therefore made light of it. This was perhaps as well, for even under the patronage of a general ignorance, Frere was finding it hard to attend either to the ladies’ chatter or to the bones of his smoked herring. He was trying, silently, to come to terms with his confusions – among them the dread that Miss Agnew might thoughtlessly let slip some further reference to their meeting, though such an embarrassment now seemed unlikely. But the day was scarce begun and already it had proved unreliable. Shock had followed quickly upon shock, and Frere could not confidently contend with more.