Little though I trusted his smile, I could hardly refuse it. “As I gather it’s a rare event,” I said, “wouldn’t it be irresponsible of me not to?” His smile further puckered the manifold lines of his face.
“I told him that apologies are an endangered species in these parts,” Laura explained. “This is only the second I’ve seen. Perhaps they’ll breed.”
Edward stretched in a yawn. “Then we should all be in a sorry state. Sit down, Darken, for God’s sake – you make me feel like a small cripple. It lacks only the rug about my knees. Did you have a bad night? I trust you did.” And, before I could respond, “Laura, my dear, do you think – the wine?”
In parody of a slave girl’s obeisance to her sultan – fingertips reaching from a bent brow out to part the air before him – Laura stepped backwards a few paces, then straightened. “Try to be human, Edward,” she said, “or we’ll never see him again.” Without waiting for an answer, she turned towards the house. Edward chuckled after her then tipped me a confidential glance. “I’d be lost without her, you know? Keeps me sane. Up to the mark. Never have got you here on my own.”
“She’s very persuasive,” I agreed. “She suggested I might make you cringe a little.”
He affected a wince. “Wasn’t good, that business. Should have kept my mouth shut or seen it through. Never learn… The booze, you see? Not good.”
It seemed that the effort of contrition was genuine enough, however back-handed his enquiry about my night. In the drooping braces, with the absurd binoculars around his neck, he looked a harmless old man, wilted a little in bright sunlight. I said, “I think I might have been asking for it.”
“No doubt about that. You certainly were. And I should have followed through, but…”
He shook his head, scowled down at the binoculars and removed them. We sat in silence for a while. He seemed a little at a loss, as if, once belligerence was dropped, no alternative mode availed itself. I guessed at a lifetime of masks, of protective coloration to keep the world at bay. I remembered that moment of pained intimacy immediately after the card was turned – the suggestion that the turmoil it exposed was not mine alone. I began to relax.
“Found her in America,” he said abruptly. He might have been drawing my attention to a piece of Shaker furniture, proudly, with a connoisseur’s eye. “Something about American women, don’t you think? The real ones, I mean – not the corporation whores.”
Wondering privately how an intelligent American woman could tolerate such unabashed sexual bigotry, I told him I didn’t have much experience of either. He tutted, avuncular. “Recommend it. No moral sense, you see; only a sort of evolutionary appetite. It’s a libel, you know, that woman was made from Adam’s rib. Quite the reverse: man was entirely the product of woman’s sense of adventure. You should wound yourself on an American someday.” He winked and then, as a humorous afterthought, cautioned, “Not mine, of course, not mine.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not in the market for wounds.”
He quizzed me a moment through narrowed eyes. “I hope, dear boy, you’re not in the market for anything.” He made the catchphrase sound contemptible. “Unless, of course, you’re speaking of that ‘desolate market where none come to buy’.”
I recognized a quotation but had lost its provenance.
“Blake,” he supplied. “The Four Zoas. Read it. You might find it answers. Anyway, that’s the only sort of stall we run here. White elephants and wisdom. Stuff nobody wants. Never once made a decent killing all my days.”
I looked around at the spacious, sunlit garden, the vista of the lake, the elegant lodge at our rear. “You don’t seem to have done too badly.”
“None of it mine, dear man. All skimpoled from my good friend Ralph. As far as possessions go I’m angel-naked… a breathing testament that economic survival without compromise or capitulation is entirely possible.”
I wondered whether Ralph Agnew was content to view things so, but had no desire to cloud Edward’s humour. I said, “You’ll have to teach me how it’s done.”
“Bravado,” he answered. “Bravado in the face of all except Providence – in which, as I recall, you do not believe.”
“No more than in ghosts, I’m afraid.” The word elicited no more than a mildly puzzled response. I tried again. “Laura tells me you were a Professor of Parapsychology in the States.”
“Good God, no. Must have got the wrong end of the stick. That’s her field, not mine.”
“I thought she was your student.”
He scried me with a canny glance. “She sat in on a course I gave there, yes.”
“On?”
His eyes twinkled. “Pushy young sprat, aren’t you?”
“Interested.”
“In an old man’s sacred cows?”
I winced at the reminder. Already it was obvious that Nesbit remembered more of the previous night than a true drunkard would have done. In the Lodge Laura pushed open a window and shouted, “If one of you two would move his male butt, we’d get to eat faster.” Edward sighed and fished for his braces. I said, “I’ll get it,” and walked across to the window where I was handed a tray with three cheeses, a butter dish and a loaf of home-baked bread, its crust neatly braided. “Human?” Laura asked.
“Human,” I smiled.
“Good. Can you handle this as well?” She proffered a carafe of wine and said, “I’ll bring the rest. Keep him sweet.”
The sun was high over the lake now, the day blue and drowsy, very still, no sound save the plash of ducks bobbing to take the bread we tossed them as we ate. Our conversation was light, a little desultory, but the silences were not uncomfortable – a quiet relishing of the day rather, and the way the light hung across the lake like a veil.
There were moments when Edward and I might have argued. He wrinkled his nose, for instance, to hear that I was a teacher as well as a poet. “Contradiction in terms, dear man,” he disapproved. “It’s not the least crime of our benighted education system that it seeks to deafen its pupils to the inward voices of the deepest self. The poor little buggers are persuaded it’s in their interests to neglect, to deride, even to deny them… doubtless because the teachers are dimly aware that nothing they themselves have to say is a tenth as relevant to the welfare of the child. And, of course, if the children were seriously encouraged to attend to these inmost promptings of the soul, they would immediately pull the schools down round their ears. And who could blame them?”
Not I, not that afternoon, dubious already of my own career, nor was I looking for an argument. Careful as I was with my words, it felt good simply to be in company again, with none of the formality that had blighted the previous night’s gathering, and none of the animus. Good too to acknowledge that – whatever reservations I still held about Edward – we appeared (as Laura observed) to have kissed and made up. I found myself remembering how his verse had once seduced my youthful imagination – all the more intriguing to the adolescent mind for its obscurities. It had long since lost its power to beguile, but one could only regret its decline from music into rodomontade. And then, the silence. It was a sad bankruptcy and, watching him bend from his chair to feed the ducks, I saw only a mild eccentric, taking pleasure in small things. After all, I had no real quarrel with him.
Laura had changed into denim shorts, their edges frayed at her thighs. Barefoot and long-legged she lay sprawled in sunlight. Edward smiled at her approvingly. His glance invited my appreciation. Then he reached out a hand to stroke her inner thigh. It was an affectionate rather than a lustful gesture and was accepted as such. Perhaps for that reason it left me conscious again of my own loveless condition. It seemed a long time since I had touched, or been touched, with such gentle candour.
I shifted my gaze and saw two swans beating down across the lake, a crisp light flaking from their wings. “Oh look,” I cried, but the others had already heard the thud of swept air.
“It’s Humphrey and Janet,” Laura said. The names see
med oddly drab for such majestic creatures, but they sprang from her tongue in delight, and her eyes were bright witnesses of that swift act of grace. Stately, frigate-like, the two swans sailed to where the ducks still squabbled among the reeds.
“We know them well,” said Edward. “They’re our familiars.” He reached for the remains of the loaf and got up to throw more bread. His baggy corduroy trousers were held a little high at the ankle by the scarlet braces. The shirt was rumpled at the waist. After a while he turned to grin at me. “There you have it all, Darken. Keep a swan’s neck and a duck’s back, and cast your bread upon the waters. You won’t go far wrong.”
The remark was offered lightly, and the moment itself would have been light enough except that I had taken advantage of Edward’s turned back to look at Laura, and as he turned he must have realized how intent my gaze. She was sitting up on the grass, one leg resting across the other, her weight carried on the slender arms flexed behind her, utterly immersed in the presence of the great cob swan preening itself by the edge of the lake. It was the first time I had really looked at her since that afternoon in the wood. She was closer to me now, known. Reclining there, she seemed unconscious of both Edward and me as she gazed at the swan, lips slightly parted, in profile to my angle of vision. I could feel her seeing the swan, and I too was deeply drawn into the act of seeing her. Her poise and rapt attention compelled it. Then Edward spoke and, when I turned to acknowledge his remark with a smile, I saw that he had not missed the effect of her realized presence upon me. One of his eyelids was flickering a little, and there was a sudden uneasiness to his smile that left me conscious of how exclusive of him was this new, sharply focused picture of Laura that had impressed itself on my senses. Then we were nodding and smiling at one another like puppet heads as Laura sighed and relaxed back on the lawn to deliver herself up to sunlight again.
Later Edward suggested that he and I take a turn around the lake. I looked to Laura, who nodded her head. Edward and I were to be alone. “Need to keep in shape,” he said as we moved off. “Too much time on my arse.”
“Writing?”
He merely shook his head, murmured, “Reading mostly,” and walked on through the small wicket gate out of the garden. The path between the rhododendrons and the lake’s edge was narrow. He strode ahead of me, swishing at the bushes with his ferruled ash plant now and then.
“And you?” he said over his shoulder. “You are working?”
“On and off.” The casual lie was no sooner out than I regretted it. It sullied the frank air. “Actually,” I said to his back, “I’ve dried.”
He received the amendment without surprise. His stick swept a fallen branch from the path. “It happens,” he said, and I was thinking myself a fool to expect further sympathy when he added, brisk as a doctor, “How long?”
“Weeks. Months now.”
“Scary feeling.”
“The worst.”
“There are worse,” he said. For two or three hundred yards he led the way in silence until, at a place where a riven oak leant towards the water, he stopped and turned. “That card… last night. You should think on it.”
“I have.” I held his stare a moment. “I’d like to know how you knew which one it was.”
“I didn’t. Not for certain.” He turned away again, walked on. “Keep your eyes skinned – we might still see wood anemones. Windflowers. Laura loves them.”
“Then… chance?”
“Never that. Not with the cards. But I shouldn’t have gambled. That was… braggadocio. Ego. The booze.” He sniffed. “Paid for it, of course.” He cast an almost shy, certainly rueful glance up to where I walked beside him.
“Which was why you left?”
“Felt bad. Memories. Knowing what it was like. That I should have kept my mouth shut… That there are times when it’s wrong to be right.”
“But you were.”
The path narrowed again. He pushed on ahead as if embarrassed by his admissions, relieved to sever the link, to show me only his back as he said, “Wasn’t too hard, of course. Written all over you.”
“What was?”
Without turning he placed his thumbs to his temples and waggled the antlered splay of his fingers. “The cuckold’s mark. The horns and the need to use them.”
“It was that obvious?”
“My dear man, even sainted martyrs make a public display of their pain. How much more then injured husbands feeling sorry for themselves?” Then he added less brusquely. “Besides, when you’ve worn them yourself…” He looked back at me, saw that I was still stinging a little. “It’s a kind of rite, you know,” he offered. “That’s why they do it to us… want us to change, grow up. It lops off the head, and once the head’s off there’s a chance we might learn to think with the heart. You have children?”
“Two.”
“Then you must truly bleed.”
He strode out along the narrow margin of the lake. I followed, staring down at the path, uncertain whether that last quick comment stemmed from genuine sympathy or out of a jaded weariness with the banality of it all.
I knew the latter was possible. Marriages vanish like disposable waste these days, and because they are not entirely bio-degradable, their relics litter the land. It had struck me when I’d tried to share the news with Clive. It upset him, yes, but what can you say? We’d quipped laconically around the facts, sealed them in irony, because no one, least of all a poet, likes to be caught mouthing the platitudes that spring so promptly to the lip for such occasions. Yet the fact remains: however well-trodden the path to ruin, our own calamities are never banal. To me this was not banal. The pain, grief, rage were virginal. To think of it still made me reel – the first brutal shock of Jess’s confession; then the hours spent in ever more futile wrangle with her, the kids in tears upstairs; and, later, the ghastly, fumbled three-way negotiations in which she and Martin tried to explain themselves, while I, rank with the injustice of it, turned the pair of them on a sharp spit. He was my friend, for God’s sake – a guest in my home, invited there in his own hour of need, and to do this, to me, at that moment, when he must have seen I was struggling myself…
And I’d been dunce enough to listen – what choice was left? – to take in dazed seriousness their protestations of care for me. For love, they’d said, like liberty, was indivisible, and somehow, together (ha!), we’d find a way through, we’d make things work.
Then the long nights listening. The lonely dark.
Edward noticed I’d stopped in my tracks. He turned, took a few paces back to where I stared into the shallows of the lake. “I know,” he said quietly, “I know.” The face which had mapped the seven sins the previous night was now a catalogue of remembered woe. But one could be ruined by sympathy, and, anyway, after the event the solace of the uninvolved always seems overblown. If my stomach still turned turtle to think on these things then no more than a rueful smile must show.
Edward studied my smile for a moment then answered it, though not necessarily in collusion, and the brisk twitch of his moustache made him fat Puck of pensionable age, still entertained by mortal folly, except that he too was not exempt.
“So that was the cuckold’s card?” I said.
Edward smiled. “Not only that. Look, the sluice gate’s just a few yards round the bank. Shall we sit down there?”
The air was nimble over the rush of water where the lake drained to a small swift stream. Edward leant his ash plant against the brickwork of the sluice and heaved himself up to sit dangling his legs above the water pouring from the arch below. He fished a blackened briar from his pocket, then a tobacco pouch and matches.
I climbed up beside him and lit a cigarette, watching the stream wrinkle through green wilderness towards the Munding water meadows. Somewhere among the trees a woodpecker yaffled derisively. Edward listened, smiling, then gave a little snort, and glanced sidelong. “You want me to follow through?”
The question, like the choice, was open. It was clear
he had no investment in my answer. Any thought that he had designs on my mind was mere solipsism. But the offer made me conscious of my loneliness, and that, alone, I was getting nowhere. I said, “Why did you call it The House of God?” It was assent enough.
“That doesn’t matter. Not yet. What matters is what you make of it.”
“The symbol?”
“And the experience it mirrors. I don’t just mean the hurt. I mean the shock, and why you chose to incur it.”
I said, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea. It wasn’t my choosing.”
“I see. You were the innocent bystander? The passive victim? The poor me who can think of nothing better to do than bawl out the unanswerable Why?” Whatever warmth I had fancied between us seemed to fade as he added, “I don’t believe it.”
“Then why call it shock?”
He savoured the edge in my voice a moment. “The shock of recognition?” He shrugged, looked away. “Towers invite the lightning.”
“I thought an Englishman’s castle was supposed to be his home.”
He snorted, impatiently this time. “Listen, then be truthful with me. Even though you’d never seen it before, when the card was turned you recognized it. Right?”
Almost against my will I nodded.
“How could that be?”
“You tell me.”
“Because it was yours. You’d chosen it.”
“I didn’t know which card I was choosing.”
“Just as you didn’t know you were asking your wife to shatter the dreary tower you’d built around yourself, I suppose?” Edward shook his head. “I doubt that you’re as ignorant of your own dark side as you pretend. I asked you to be truthful with me. Think again. You knew what you were doing – you got what you wanted, didn’t you? The tower was down. You were out. Free.”
“I didn’t want to be free,” I snapped, then took in the wry lift of his brows. “Not that way,” I added lamely.
The Chymical Wedding Page 12