“Was there another? Why didn’t you take it? Sooner. In time.”
“You’re making some very large assumptions.”
“They’re not assumptions. It’s what you told me yourself – through the card. You were speaking to yourself there, of course, but it seems that I was the more attentive listener. It’s high time you listened too. To yourself. To your best self.”
I sat in silence, glowering at the stream.
“All right,” he pressed after a moment. “Let’s put it another way. Your wife – am I to assume that you married a mere wanton?” And, when I didn’t answer, more softly: “I think you were asleep, my friend. Holed up. In retreat from the claims of life. Ouspensky said of the card that if men could see that almost all they know consists of the ruins of destroyed towers they might cease to build them.” He sighed, drew on his pipe. “You were asleep. You should be thankful that your wife had the courage to waken you.”
“She wasn’t doing it for my benefit.”
“Perhaps. But in my experience women rarely act from a single motive. Their intelligence is more sensitively diffused than ours.” He gestured across at me with his briar. “Somewhere, I suspect, you knew you could count on that.”
“If you’re right, why aren’t I more cheerful about it all?”
“Because you like the taste of your wounds?” he suggested. “Because you’re infatuated with the role of Aquitainian prince? Because your abolished tower once felt safe? Because freedom scares you? Because you have not yet recognized that you’re a lucky man?”
I gasped at that last sally. “I’ve lost my wife, my kids, my home. I can’t write. I can’t think straight. And you call that lucky! Who the hell do you think you are?”
He shrugged, knocked the dottle from his pipe and answered mildly. “An old fool who believes that we lose nothing that is truly ours.”
His words echoed on something that Jess had said to me. How free all these mystics were with “truth” and “truly”! How pious their cracker-barrel maxims! How would he feel, I wondered, if some sly wolf were to snatch Laura from his lap?
“But your question might be more profitably addressed to yourself,” he went on. “Who do you really think you are? And you should address it to your best self – not the injured ego for all its hogging of centre stage!”
He must have seen that if he taunted me further he would lose me, for he sighed and said, “Of course, you’re feeling dazed. Why should you not? You’ve been struck by lightning after all. It takes time to recognize that it’s a privilege to be singled out by the gods that way.” He raised a finger to forestall a sarcastic retort. “Think about lightning,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t only destroy – it fructifies. It energizes the ground for new growth. And those little figures on the card – were they falling or flying? Perhaps when the shock has passed, they will begin to savour life outside the tower. They might have felt safe in there, but it was a prison as much as a stronghold. Now that it’s down… well, they might recognize that they have become conductors of new energy back into the world of men. Tell me, have you been dreaming lately?”
Further dazed under this provocative assault of images, I said, “It feels as if I do nothing else.”
A nod of acceptance. “But do you remember your dreams?”
I recalled the bad dream of that first night at The Pightle – the band of crazy women, the humiliating ordeal to which they would subject me… Nesbit now sat in judgement on my deepest hurt. I decided not to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had inward allies. I shook my head.
“You should try. ‘In dreams begins responsibility’ – wisest words Willie Yeats ever uttered. How else can your best self speak?”
It was the third time he had used the phrase, and I disliked it. There was a Sunday-school ring to it, the odour of sanctity. It had no bearing on the old dark anarchy rife inside me – the rage, the hurt; my black menagerie. Plainly the old man had no idea what it was like in here.
“However varied our dreams,” he said, “they all have the same punchline. It is: Wake up! You should listen. And what of your waking dreams? Your daylight fantasies? Behind the adolescent lust for comfort and revenge, is there nothing else? No shoot of something new?”
The green image budded in my mind, became the Green Man – that mute, shambling creature, feral and furtive, arrested somewhere along the evolutionary line to man. Green as envy. As youth and its callow folly. He was there, watching from my own dark glades. I glimpsed him for a moment clearer than ever before, but then he was gone, slipped away, too canny to declare himself in public. No one’s Caliban but mine.
I looked up and saw that Nesbit sensed we had not been alone in those instants. “I don’t ask you to tell me about them,” he said.
“Simply to pay attention to whatever they have to say.”
We sat for a long time in silence.
Aware that, for all his sententious manner, the old man had been trying to help, I was gripped in a sort of shame. It was, I suppose, the obverse of my stubborn pride, and I was gripped rather between the two, in a vice of my own making. For half of me ached to pour out its heart, while the rest, charier, conscious that the cost might beggar all dignity, held that softer self in check.
I thought about the image on the card – the lightning, the toppled tower, the falling men. I tried to imagine them as fledglings and dizzied at the thought. I thought of what Edward had said of the experience it mirrored; of what Jess and Martin had tried in their time to say. Only through thought could the dam hold fast. And yes, I wanted to believe them, but I could feel the old atheism creep like couch grass through my mind. I wanted to be on my own and could find no gracious way to cut and run, and only the empty Pightle waited, with that envelope still on the mantelpiece. I wanted to be back in what had once been my home, with the children, in the time when our two names – Jess and Alex – had flowed from the lips of our friends in a single cursive polysyllable, and we were surrounded by what felt now like an antediluvian sense of peace… In which too, God help me, I could not really believe.
Edward grunted beside me and shifted his weight. “Talk too much,” he muttered. “Always did. Damn fool.”
“I asked for it.”
“Should know better. Everybody has to find their own way out of hell. Just don’t fall asleep there, that’s all.” At that moment the sky above our heads was seared by a jet aircraft flying at low level, murderously swift, and with so violent an impact on the air that even the grass around us quailed. Instinctively we both recoiled, then glowered up where its trail might have scarred an otherwise immaculate blue. Edward growled deep in his throat. “When eventually I form a government,” he said, “my first appointments will be Minister of Mirth and Secretary of State for Extramarital Affairs. There will be no Department of Defence but the Chancellor of Common Sense will see to it that every peasant is supplied with a bazooka for use on occasions such as this.” Awkwardly he swung his legs back over the brickwork and down onto the path. “Shall we go on round the lake or would you rather go back?”
I slipped down from the sluice gate and looked back at the lake. It would be a far walk round – too long now to continue alone in Edward’s company. Yet I felt unready to face Laura again so quickly with so much disturbed and unresolved inside me. Edward observed me uncertainly. “Listen,” I began. “I want you to know that I appreciate…” But he shook his head, shushed me silently. I saw that the gesture was not meant merely to spare my pains, and that he had more faith in my resistance than in this formal half-measure of assent. Still, both ways some sort of acknowledgment was made.
I cast about a moment longer, and remembered. “The wind-flowers. We didn’t pick any.”
“You don’t pick them,” he growled. “Pick them and they’re dead in half an hour. But we should look for some, yes. Might learn something there.” I watched as he walked away, hunch-shouldered, parting the undergrowth with his stick – old man again, and oddly lonely.
When I got bac
k to The Pightle I took the envelope down from the mantelpiece and opened it:
Dear Alex,
I know you think that words have come to an end between us so I’ll keep this brief.
I could wish for the kids’ sake that you’d left in a different spirit, but even before you disappeared Martin and I had already begun to see how wrong we’d been to try to keep you here. Though we’d never intended things so, it was – as you said the last time we talked – a bastard sort of half-life for you, and as long as you felt that way, none of us could be happy. Not that we’re entirely happy now. Marcus and Lily still don’t accept that you’re gone and very much need to hear from you. Martin has been marvellous with them, but he’s feeling miserable with guilt, and I…
Well, I’m prepared to pay the price that honesty exacts – my honesty and yours. If your truth is that you need to be away from here, out of touch, then I can’t blame you for that. Not any more. There is no blame. I simply want you to know that there will be no more demands, of any sort, from me. The children are another matter but, as far as I’m concerned, you have your freedom now. I suspect it’s what you always wanted.
One last word: I realized something right at the start of all of this – that once you admit the truth there is no ending. Alex, there have been other truths between us than the ones we face, and they too do not end. So, whether you want it or not, you have
my love,
Jess
PS: Meanwhile life goes on:
The police came round on Wednesday. They were a bit annoyed that you’d disappeared, but you’ll be relieved to know that they’re not pressing charges. I rather think that in the circumstances their sympathies were with you. Also Derek rang from the Poly. He needs to know whether or not you want the job back next year. Can you get in touch with him by mid-June at the latest?
Unaccompanied the letter would have brought all kinds of remission, but there were two enclosures: a drawing from Lily – a signed self-portrait with our dog, Bracken, executed in a rainbow of bright felt-tips – and another, typically laconic, letter:
Dear Daddy,
I hope you are all right. I am all right.
Love,
Marcus
The tears came entirely unexpectedly. I thought they had all dried.
Later I tried to write an answer. Not to Jess – I had been transparent to her for so long that she would expect no answer now. But the children…
Draft after draft lay screwed on the floor. The only simple things I found to say were lies, and lies they should not have. Finally I drew a picture of The Pightle with myself standing in the doorway waving. On the back I told them about the pheasant in the garden and the smoke I’d brought into the house. I told them that I needed to be on my own for a time, that I would be back to see them soon, and they weren’t to worry because I was safe and loved them very much. It was less than they needed and as much as I had to give. It left me feeling male and inadequate. But it was done.
I shook myself free of it, sat back and tried to take stock of what was happening. What, for instance, would Clive make of this dishevelled figure inhabiting his house? What, for God’s sake, had happened to my style? Where were the ironies now when I needed them, the studied cool with which my whole generation had sidled between cynicism and sentiment? If nothing in that wry detachment could pass for wisdom, there had been at least a fine, cavalier defiance. Its bravura was never entirely at a loss. It had salt.
I resented Jess’s pious certainty that she understood me. My freedom wasn’t hers to give: I’d taken it. It was mine. And anyway, nobody really wants to be understood, not deeply. Complete understanding would rob us of our private mystery, of the secret we keep even from ourselves. It would put out the light. Which was why I had a problem with Edward Nesbit now. He was coming very close.
I’d begun to warm to the man. I liked his oddball angle on the world. I admired his derision and his vanity. I was intrigued by Laura’s spirited mix of American candour and something more elusive, vagrant. In that hour together by the lake I’d begun to open myself again. We’d shared more than bread and wine in our silences. It may have been the place as much as the people – that flawless sky, the beaten-metal shimmer of the lake – yet even in that difficult exchange with Edward I’d felt myself nudged by the tide of things. But where? And now I was lonelier than if I’d never met them. Still more provisional. Restless.
I’d brought a small tinfoil screw of grass to The Pightle with me and had been saving it for the right time. I made up the joint with tobacco and a cardboard roach, lit it, and sat in the sweet stink, feeling time cloud slowly round me.
Whether it was because I was smoking on an empty stomach, or long unused to the effect of the drug, or whether my body had risen in fierce insurrection at this attempt to sidestep its grief, I do not know. What I know is that I was drifting swiftly from a bittersweet reverie of that afternoon when I’d first taken Jess by punt up the Granta (kingcups, candock, green river shadow); away from that, through the shock of her pregnancy, into the wedding; the labour pangs soon after (Marcus entering the world like a salmon at a leap); the post-natal tensions of that tiny house in The Kite, the move (financed by Jess’s parents at the news that Lily was on the way); and then the ups and downs of our years together, the adoration and the bitchy withdrawals, the rows and contrition, all slipping by, until Martin turned up after his disaster in Africa; and, eventually, the first quick green glow of suspicion, and the sudden gaping hole in my life…
I felt my life slide past me like a raft, the children receding, smaller and smaller, down the wrong end of a spyglass… space lurching away… And I was up and out the front door, heaving my guts in the darkened garden.
I came back, white as lime, and dragged myself to bed where I lay for a long, bleak time. There was no moon. It was dark, thick dark in the bedroom. And, inside me, blacker, I think, than it had ever been. I was shivering at the cold and dizzy blackness of it. Not even in the worst moments with Jess and Martin had I known it so. Not in the black rage of the brawl at the college dance, nor in the chill aftermath. It felt as though I’d vomited up the last thin shreds of light. What was left was nullity.
Then, as if in confirmation of this final clarity of dark, I heard the drone of aircraft overhead, flying out of Thrandeston on a midnight sortie. Merely keeping their evil hand in, or for real this time? There was no way of knowing but to wait. Either way, regardless of my existence, or of my children far away across the country, the obedient young men up there would execute their duty. The sound throbbed around me like an emanation of the dark. Its voice.
Things could not continue so. In the emptiness of The Pightle I was unravelling again. I might dwindle to a jelly there.
Monday was market day in Saxburgh and I was short of supplies, so I walked into town and found my way to the auction ground. It seemed that half the county had come: a throng of farmers and dealers and housewives, shrewdly eyeing the livestock, picking over the dead stock – bales of wire netting, sheets of chipboard and asbestos, the furniture and pathetic bits and pieces drawn from houses of the dead. The air was fat with the warm smell from a fish-and-chip van, loud with the shout of money. Florid auctioneers quipped slick jokes as they knocked down the lots. Deal after deal was struck, stuff changing hands, bids made and regretted, roof-racks loaded, trailers crammed, as though time itself was up for grabs and Want waiting at every door.
After the stillness of The Pightle, the hush of the woods, I felt an almost agoraphobic panic among the throng. What was the need of all this clutter – the dubious TV sets, the ugly Formica tables, the painted pine cupboards that would be stripped and sold on, the job lots of lockless keys and tin boxes filled with junk? Yet this was it – the human community in focus, jostling for gain amid a muddle of stuff. And with a sense of occasion, as though everyone was tipsy on the fraught air. Odd to think of these dead objects moving around the country from one niche to the next as if in quest of some specific destiny. An
d people could spend their lives this way, producing nothing, merely moving it on, or accumulating, to what satisfactory end? And who was I to judge, mesmerized in the middle of it, owning almost nothing now but the clothes I stood in, and lonely as a stone?
In the shed where fresh vegetables were sold I saw Laura, tall among the circle of buyers, bidding for a bunch of irises. Parcels of leeks, parsnips and carrots were held in the crook of her arm. Presumably Edward was somewhere about, but it was she who held my gaze again, joking with the auctioneer, taking an expatriate’s delight in local colour, adding to it with the bright garments she wore, un-English, slightly brash. It would have been simple enough to sidle alongside her, to offer a hand with her load, to pass the time of day. It wasn’t shyness that stopped me but some more obscure resistance. And she was too involved with her purchasing to notice me.
I slipped away.
That nervousness in Saxburgh bothered me. Even crossing its streets had begun to feel risky after Munding’s quiet lanes. I needed to connect with the world again, so when Bob Crossley told me he was driving into Norwich that Wednesday and offered me a lift, I decided to go.
Bob was interested to hear that I’d seen Edward Nesbit again, and mildly amazed that some effort had been made to apologize for his outrageous behaviour.
“I think we caught him at a bad time,” I said. “He was very drunk.’
“Some such thought had occurred to me.”
“I don’t think it was typical.”
Bob eyed me dubiously. “Sounds as though you’re developing a soft spot?”
“He’s an abominable old bugger, but…”
“You like him.”
“He intrigues me.”
Bob sniffed. “He’s different, I’ll say that much. But… I don’t know. I’d be careful if I were you.”
“Why so?”
Bob pondered a moment, watching the rear-view mirror, said, “I’d say he’s obsessed,” then scowled as a car overtook us too close to a bend. He changed down, giving way. “Damn fool!” The remark, I saw, applied to the driver, not Edward.
The Chymical Wedding Page 13