“Obsessed?”
“I’d say so.”
“What with?”
Bob shrugged. “Ask me another. But it shows. He doesn’t listen. If you watch his eyes, he’s always thinking ahead – not really in touch with the feel of what’s happening, too busy making his own case. You must have noticed.”
“But obsession?”
“There’s something there, something biting him. Doesn’t leave much room for ordinary folk like you and me – unless he has a use for us.”
I smiled at his concern. “I doubt he’d have much use for me.”
“You’re a poet, aren’t you?”
“And, therefore, by definition, useless. Edward would be the first to say it.”
“The girl – you don’t think he’s using her?”
“She seems very attached to him.”
“Of course.” Bob sighed. “I’ve seen something like it before – old men, scared by their own mortality, possessed by some visionary idea or other, and needing disciples… and sex. Young sex. To blow on the embers. It’s a way of colonizing – deceptive and self-deceptive. Sad really.”
“If I didn’t know you better…” I smiled.
He grinned back across at me. “Think I’m jealous, do you?”
“Well, she is…”
“Yes, she is. And I’m not yet past it. But I’m old enough to know it can be disastrous all round. And the magic bit… that business with the cards. Didn’t take it too seriously, did you?” A quick glance took in my shrug. “They’re murky waters, Alex. I came across a man once who’d set himself up as a ‘perfect master’ – claimed he had all the answers and persuaded a lot of people to believe in him. ‘Perfect bastard’ would have been more to the point. He came unstuck when it turned out he’d been having it away with all the women – secretly, conning each of them into thinking she was the chosen handmaid. You can laugh, but one of the girls ended up on a section order after she’d tried to cut her wrists.”
“Edward’s not like that,” I said with more conviction than I felt, then tried to lighten the mood. “Anyway, I can’t imagine he fancies me, and I think Laura can look after herself.”
“I’d say she was running scared. Father trouble probably. You may be right, but I’ll lay you ten to one it can’t last – Nesbit and the girl, I mean. Someone’s going to get hurt.”
“Isn’t that par for the course?”
Bob didn’t look at me, simply pursed his lips, then said, “It doesn’t have to happen, you know.”
“I think you were lucky, Bob.”
“I know I was. But people don’t have to go looking for disaster.” After a moment he added, “Will you be seeing them again?”
“I don’t know. I have an open invite to go back… But I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be about.”
I had the feeling he was about to say more – something avuncular, if discreet. I looked away. In the window the pale ghost of my reflection stared back. We were silent for the rest of the drive.
Bob had business at the Labour Party offices so I had a couple of hours alone in the city. He’d recommended a good second-hand bookshop which I found and liked. It was a warren of staircases and dusty rooms where the books huddled like refugees – displaced aristocrats fallen on hard times sharing the shelves with a motley crowd of paupers, special-pleaders, eccentrics and bores. I was at home amongst them. This was where most of my life had been lived. By the time I was twenty I’d married my mother with Oedipus, rioted with Mercutio, murdered an old pawnbroker in St Petersburg, seen eternity in a grain of sand before drowning at Lerici only to rise again on the third day and proclaim the death of God. And here I was now – cover battered, several pages soiled, others missing or foxed, author’s copy, signed and with a host of errata or what used to be called “faults escaped”.
I found a nice nineteenth-century edition of Catullus and passed a wry quarter of an hour savouring the acid that the young Roman had thrown at Lesbia in his hurt. I recognized that voice. Failing verses of my own, I thought it might oil the works if I tried my hand at translation. I bought the book and was about to leave when I was stopped by the complete Blake I’d spotted on the shelves. I remembered Edward’s tip and decided to take a look at The Four Zoas. What I found there was this:
What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song,
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No! It is bought with the price
Of all that man hath – his house, his wife, his children.
The words printed themselves on my mind with corrosives quite as fierce as any Blake had used in engraving his prophetic books.
Sod you, Edward, I thought, and baffled the amiable bookseller with a grim smile as I paid for the Blake too.
The air of Norwich was crisp and blue and bright, as though the city stood at altitude. I’d arranged to meet Bob by the cathedral and spent some time wandering around the cloisters where, visually at least, there was nothing between me and the Middle Ages. Those vaults had been raised in a time when poets were honoured and feared, when they were prized as the living memory bank of experience. There had been a time too when I was confident of a place among them. I remembered how the verses had flowed from my first ardour for Jess – how she’d divined the poet in me and made him thrive. Such adoration there had been, such expectation of the life between us. Even the rows, the bitchiness and spleen had given tongue. And where had it all gone? Given away, made public, finally spurned.
So what was Blake daring to say? Out of such loss what wisdom but bitterness? To hell with experience bought at such a price. Damn Edward and his electric towers… unless…
Unless somehow one could find a way to bring back home what had been so unwisely surrendered.
There it was: as though the thought had been striding the flagstones too, coming the other way to meet me. And, like all such realizations, once it was made it was blindingly obvious. So obvious I wondered how it could have taken me so long to get there.
In placing my centre of gravity between myself and Jess, I had invoked collapse. She had only to move and I was down. It was as simple as that. I had given myself away. In all senses I had given myself away, and I had to get myself back.
Suppose Edward was right – that it wasn’t possible to lose what was really yours? Suppose there was a difference between surrendering yourself in meeting and… whatever it was that I had done? Suppose that the real self was inalienable? And what if that was what Jess had been after – a restoration of myself to myself – however uncertain and ruthless her intuitive act? What then?
Standing in the cool shade of the cloisters, I raised my head, looked up and, from the centre of a boss where the ribs of the vaulting surged to meet, I saw the face of the Green Man grinning down.
The Pightle was no longer empty. It was crowded with my thoughts.
What I had surrendered to Jess was female: so much was clear. I had insisted that she be it, do it, for me, on my behalf. I needed it, and she was it, so I’d needed her. I’d called it my love and without it I was a shell. Yet, once deprived, I understood only the kind of passionate rancour to which Catullus had given immortal voice. I could relish every poem of his that screamed out “Bitch!” between the cadences. I wasn’t proud of my translations, but they were my business, peculiarly mine. Working at them was an oblique twist of the quest to bring her back. Not Jess, but whatever dream of woman I had squandered on her… though not fruitlessly, for Marcus and Lily were there, the product of our meeting. Uniquely, irreplaceably themselves. Were they the sole reason for our marriage then, its only final justification – whatever pain inhered in that strict thought? Or was it all far more subtle than that, more elusive, like the dream of woman dancing a dance of veils between my senses and the real?
Certainly, until I let go of Jess – let go of the loss – there could be no clear space for something new to enter. But how to do that? You can’t simply make up your mind. I tried and found that the mind was a blunt instrument
. It couldn’t cut water, and water felt closer to what woman was. Water and also, when occasion demanded it, cold stone. I thought of Gypsy May on the church at Munding – each comer’s whore and mother. No, not funny. Not funny at all. Voracious. Immolating. To be feared.
Catullus had known and feared her, or whatever equivalent was worshipped in the temple of Cybele on the Palatine Hill at Rome – so close to the house of Clodia Metelli, the Lesbia on whom he’d wrecked his heart:
Great Cybele, Mother Goddess, Dindymian Queen,
Let not your fury fall on Catullus’ house;
Drive others mad, trap others in your frenzied toils.
The passage was already scored in my copy of the book. Some other man, some other fool, had trembled there before.
I found myself thinking mythologically. It was the old, old story: the king slept or went to war; when he woke or returned it was to find his wife in love with another man. He saw he’d foolishly divulged his secret weakness, but the realization came too late for there was murder in her heart, and he saw it only as his head was off. But then – as Edward had suggested – once the head was off perhaps you might start to think with the heart.
With such strange and untypical thoughts I kept myself awake far into the night.
And then:
Stepping through the darkness I approached Munding church. Something queer had happened to its proportions. There was something very odd about the porch. When I looked up I saw that Gypsy May was no longer a small stone figure half-lost among the flints. She had grown enormously. She straddled the church, and the porch was no longer a porch but the wide-held maw of her cunt, through which – a mote at a minster door – I was inexorably drawn.
When, slowly, as at the turn of a dimmer switch, the darkness yielded to a faint red light, I saw that I had entered an underground laboratory or operating theatre. It was raked like an auditorium. I stood at the top of a steep descent of pew-like benches and looked down. Far below, two shadowy figures were at work behind a table crowded with apparatus – test tubes, bell jars, crucibles. At the centre of the table two glass retorts, curiously shaped like hourglasses, though more bulbous in the lower than the upper chambers, were clamped together in such a way that the slender spout from each upper chamber was inserted into a flanged aperture on the lower chamber of the other, and sealed. The single, circulatory vessel thus formed was glowing with an intense ruby heat. This was the only source of light in the room.
Even as I watched, it seemed to gather in intensity, and the colour of the light was changing as it flowed around the system, becoming iridescent, glowing rainbow-like but brighter in the surrounding gloom. The two figures were bathed now in the full spectrum of its radiance so that I could make out how strangely they were dressed – the man in a full frock coat of the seventeenth century, peruked under a wide-brimmed hat, with a lace jabot at his neck, and at his side the woman was smocked and long-kirtled, her hair bunched in a white mob cap. As though expecting me, the man looked up from the retorts and, with a brisk crook of his finger, summoned me down the central aisle of the auditorium. For the first time I noticed the acrid odour on the air. Apprehensively, half-afraid that I was to be the subject of some dubious experiment, I descended the stair and stopped a few paces away from the glowing retorts.
The old man smiled at me. For a shocked instant I thought I recognized Edward Nesbit’s wrinkled features beneath the wig, and looked to the girl, expecting to find Laura’s features over the seventeenth-century dress. But it was a momentary illusion only. These were strangers out of antiquity; not of my time, yet oddly familiar. Both turned their heads, directing my attention away from the now dazzling retorts to the hidden source of their energy: naked in the shadows, two other figures, a man and a woman, were making love. Gently. In passionate innocence, as though entirely alone in a dream of their own, and unobserved. Even before I saw their faces, I knew who these lovers were.
Wistfully, with a strange absence of surprise or bitterness, I watched until the two figures began to fade. All that tender energy was gathered now into the still. The old man nodded, took the hand of his companion and then, with a final imperious gesture, indicated the shimmering radiance of the glass.
“This is the one true philosophical Pelican,” he announced – promised? warned? – “and none other is to be found in all the world.”
6
Approaches
As the arrival of correspondence was not a frequent event in Louisa Agnew’s life, she was surprised to receive two letters in the space of a few days, both of them from her brother. The first had been little more than an affectionate postscript to a lengthy newsletter written for joint perusal with her father. The second was unusual, and had been penned only because young Henry was deeply disturbed by his father’s cursory reply to the first.
I have long been reconciled (he wrote) to father’s indifference to my career, and I shall not pretend it has not been hurtful. Nevertheless I confess my breath quite taken away by the enclosed response to my latest (perhaps ill-conceived) effort to persuade him that my role in these turbulent times is not entirely without significance. My first thought was that he had outdone himself in his resolve to make plain his derision. My second was more alarming, and it is that which prompts this hasty confidence.
Read his letter, dear Lou, and ask yourself whether I am not justified in my suspicion that father has begun to drift quite beyond the pale of sensible discourse. I begin to fear it may be so, and if the thought greatly concerns me, it is not least for your own welfare.
I know of old your capacity for patience and forbearance; know too that it may have done you greater harm than you yourself readily apprehend. Therefore I insist: if all is not well at the Hall, I must be informed at once. In particular I seek your immediate assurance of father’s continued competence to manage our family’s affairs. Though my duties here remain onerous, I shall, if occasion requires it, come down to Easterness with all possible dispatch.
You will remember my good friend Charles Mortimer. He sends you his kind wishes and often asks after you. I believe he regrets (as I sometimes must myself) that your life should be so entirely circumscribed by the whims of a tiresome old man.
In much dismay Louisa unfolded the enclosed sheet of paper. It read:
My Dear Son,
have received and digested yrs of the 20th ult. It confirms my expectation that in the boardroom of Hell there will be increased satisfaction at the annual report.
Yr affectionate father,
H. Agnew
Louisa’s first response was a relieved smile, for she immediately recognized a brisk exercise in bubble-pricking. Small wonder brother Henry was nettled… to have written at such eloquent length and receive such meagre return! If only he would not wallow in his glory so, for whether the issue was insurrection and the fall of kings in Paris, the unsatisfactory government of Spain, the frequent resignation of Prussian cabinets or violent discord in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was ever at pains to impress upon his family that Lord Palmerston did not have to look far for sound advice. Sadly, the effect was to make her brother appear only slightly a less self-regarding ass than Mr Mortimer (whose kind wishes Louisa could happily forego). Then too there had been his vehement account of the Chartist agitation in London. Aware as she was of the human anguish behind that chapter of afflictions, Louisa had hardly been able to restrain a smile at the thought of Henry and Charles needlessly barricading the windows of the Foreign Office with bound copies of The Times.
And yet… there was something troubling in her father’s reply. Louisa herself had occasion enough to complain of his taciturnity: when the mood took him he could be a man from whom even monosyllables must, like oakum, painfully be picked. But this letter to an only son – one of whom he was prouder than he might readily admit… It was disconcertingly brief and dour. Grim even.
Unlike her brother, Louisa had an instant understanding of its burden. In her estimation, as in her father’s, the gra
ve questions of the age reached fathoms deeper than mere policy. The real battleground for the future was not Paris, Baden, Vienna, Venice or even London itself: it was that of the beleaguered human soul. As, of course, it had always been, though the present crisis was grave indeed. Yet when she looked at the grim little letter again, when she remembered her father’s recent fits of spleen, his morose presence at dinner, his complaints of sleepless nights, she realized suddenly – and it came like a chill at her heart – that this was a battle her father might himself be losing.
She brought his tray of tea to him that day. She had included an ample slice of his favourite blackberry-and-apple pie – the last of the year, for the Devil had spat upon the blackberries the previous night – and as he ate she chattered inconsequentially. Then, against some resistance, she persuaded him to take a turn in the park.
Once outside she encouraged him to speak his anxieties, refusing to accept his first gruff demurral. “There is something troubling you,” she insisted, “and you shall have no peace till it is out between us.”
Henry Agnew sniffed the autumnal air like a badger dragged into the light of day. He saw a resolute glint in his daughter’s eye, one which would allow no easy retreat. Something must be said to satisfy her.
Yet much was omitted from his grudging confession. He made no mention, for instance, of his recent fears for his health. There had been no significant return of the pain that had frightened him, and he saw no point in alarming her unduly. Nor did he admit to the grave doubts that nagged at him through the empty hours alone: the growing suspicion that the prime obstacle to his progress was something unregenerate in the dark places of his own soul. He had battered his brains and could find nothing to obstruct the free flow of his knowledge if it was not some obdurate flaw in his own character, but the nature of that flaw he was reluctant to examine too closely… certainly not here, aloud, in his daughter’s company. Still, he must say something, and to complain of the difficulty of his self-appointed task would appear mere bellyaching. Only after several moments of anxious thought did he hit on a theme that might answer.
The Chymical Wedding Page 14