The Chymical Wedding
Page 18
“To you?” I demanded. “Has it happened to you?”
She held my gaze a moment – her eyes in that light a dark lobelia-blue – then nodded, and looked away.
“Why is it,” Edward glowered at me, “that even when you’re asking questions I find it difficult to believe a word you say?”
“Because that’s the effect you have on people.” It was Laura who answered, and my own confusion evaporated in the hot glare of hostility across the table. “You make them so damn picky about their words they hardly believe themselves.”
“My dear,” said Edward, innocent, “I did not instigate this unsatisfactory conversation.”
“Look,” I put in, standing, “perhaps I should…”
“Sit down,” Edward growled. I didn’t, not immediately, and his head swivelled up to fix me in its stare. “Don’t flirt with me,” he said. “I don’t like it. It makes me feel old. If you have something to say, say it, for God’s sake.”
I looked to Laura, who was fingering the small silver star at her throat, tight-lipped. After a moment’s hesitation I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket, took out the sheet of paper on which I’d written the dream, and put it down on the table beside the whisky bottle, under Edward’s nose.
I might have been serving him with a court order, but he picked up the paper, unfolded it, frowned, then – in some irritation – looked around the room. Laura sighed, got up, crossed to the dresser where a red glasses case lay on an open book among the crockery, and returned with it. The case clicked open in Edward’s hands. He eased the wire frames gingerly over his ears – the lenses gave him an owlish squint – then looked at the paper again. I sat down, waiting. After a time, he pushed the glasses up onto his brow and rubbed the bridge of his nose between a nicotined thumb and forefinger. “You wrote this down at the time?” he demanded.
“No. This afternoon.”
“I thought as much from the literary flourishes. You’ve edited it.”
“It’s as accurate as I could remember.”
He grunted, dissatisfied. “Should have done it at the time.”
“At four in the morning?”
“Immediately. Whenever. Dreams of this order are too important to tamper with.” He must have noticed the glint in my eyes, for he added. “All dreams are.”
Relieved that I’d said nothing about the vain and frustrating hours in which I’d tried to turn the dream into verse before settling for this prose version, I watched him turn the paper over on the table and take a pencil from the pocket of his shirt. With a few swift strokes he made this drawing:
“The retorts,” he demanded, “they looked like this?”
“More or less.”
“Well, did they or not?”
“They were more elegant, subtler.”
“Gemini,” he said. “A double Pelican.”
“What’s that?”
His scowl was challenging, resentful, as though he could barely bring himself to believe that a dream of this quality had been wasted on an idiot. His incredulity appeared to have deafened him.
“You told me to look out for my dreams,” I said. “I thought you might be able to help me understand it. Particularly as…”
“Yes?”
“Well, as you’ve read, there was a moment when I thought the old man in the dreams was you.”
“Do you think I have nothing better to do with my nights than make guest appearances in other people’s dreams? It most certainly was not me.”
“I know. I saw it at the time. It was someone else. A stranger. But…”
“It was you.”
“No,” I began to explain testily, “I was watching the whole thing from…”
“It was you. Everything in the dream is an aspect of your psyche – not only the watcher. The church, Gypsy May, the theatre, the figures, all of them, male and female. Even the Pelican. Dear God, yes, even that.”
I was about to insist that the two lovers at least were identifiable – even while dreaming I’d recognized Martin and Jess with a wistful pang, and that memory had not faded – but Laura said, “Edward,” and there was a reprimand in her voice, an injunction on her face. Then she turned to me. “May I read what you’ve written?”
I shrugged, pushed the paper across to her coolly, yet in the knowledge that this was why I had come to the Lodge. It was her response I wanted. Even now, ruffled as she was, there was a candour about her that might tease when it chose but finally felt honest. Behind the enigmatic haze of her interest in the paranormal, I thought I’d caught glimpses of a trustworthy spirit. It was as unfazed by Edward’s excesses as by my own first surly reticence, and there was nothing of stupidity there, or acquiescence; rather an impenetrable thoughtfulness hanging on the air like scent. It exuded a quiet sensuality. I contemplated it in silence as Edward and I watched her read. Then she looked up at me, as if the days since we’d met had been a long, slow process of recapitulation and I was finally recognized.
“But this is a marvellous dream,” she said, and, for an instant, my heart was in my mouth with delight and gratitude. Then we were both aware of Edward’s stare. She turned towards him, smiling still. “Edward, you do realize…” She caught her breath, shook her head. “I think,” she said quietly, “that we should take this more slowly.”
The agitated twist of Edward’s moustache, the biting of his lip, relaxed in a long exhalation of breath. “You’re quite right,” he said. “Darken, I’m sorry. It’s just that… Damnation, at this moment I’d give my eye teeth for a dream like that.”
“But we have it,” Laura exclaimed. “It’s here. Alex has brought it to us.”
On Edward’s face bewilderment contended with mounting interest and a still reluctant scepticism. “You think?…” he said to Laura, who nodded, smiling. “It has to be,” she answered, and I was left feeling oddly included and excluded at the same time by this elliptical exchange.
Edward’s frown deepened, then he seemed to take some sort of decision. “Darken, I’m sorry about this but Laura and I need to talk.” He signalled that they should go through into another room. Now Laura frowned, unwilling to move. Edward got up, and I was caught between them. I said, “Look, I’ll step outside a minute,” and when I saw that Laura was about to demur, added, “Really, I’d rather,” and got up and let myself out into the garden.
There was a cool breeze out there, a fresh eastern night, very black, against which the constellations were fretted, sharp and brilliant – the Great Bear prowling, Venus twinkling under the thin sliver of a moon. I heard the sounds of disagreement indoors, then Edward looked out after me. “We won’t keep you a minute. I promise.”
I didn’t care. They could take all the time they liked. I had stepped out into the night as into my own principality. I knew now that, however obscure the dream, it had taken me through into another place. Watching the shades of Jess and Martin make love there had somehow consigned them to themselves. At a deeper level than conscious intention I felt I had finally accepted the fact of their togetherness, and I’d shed the poison of it. I was single again. Lone wolf. What was done was done. Over. What remained was a hunger for new beginnings.
For less time than it took to smoke a cigarette I stood out there under the star-bright night, relishing its taste, listening to the moorhens and the coots, oddly detached from whatever consternation my arrival had caused indoors. Edward’s rudeness didn’t bother me. I was amused rather that my dreaming mind seemed to have turned the tables on him. Nor, in that moment, did I feel in need of interpreters. I had invented the dream; now it was reinventing me. I knew from the quality of Laura’s first response that this was real. For the first time in weeks I felt good about myself.
When Laura called me in, I turned from the lake to the Lodge with an amused, ironical curiosity about what awaited me there.
Edward’s manner had changed. There was still a hint of suspicion in his face but I had the impression of a man under orders to behave himself.
I decided to make things no easier for him and kept silent.
“I saw it immediately, of course, but…”
“Admit it,” Laura interrupted, “it took you by surprise.”
“I’m not denying that… Accounts in part for my clumsy response. The thing is…” – except when he was drunk I had never seen him so incoherent – “I don’t care to talk too openly about our work, for all kinds of reasons. I wouldn’t be doing it now if… Well, Laura thinks I should and, God knows, I’ve reason enough to trust her intuition. She seems to think that you’re… involved.”
“Why else is he here?” Laura asked. “Why else the dream?”
“Involved?” I repeated, the word no less dubious on my lips than on Edward’s.
“Yes.”
“In what?”
“Our work,” said Laura.
“Which is?”
“…not easily explained,” Edward answered. “Like your dreams.”
“But you’ll try?”
“Yes.” Edward sighed. “I’ll try.” He closed his eyes in thought a moment, and when they opened again they were bright with defiance. “Listen. You brought your dream to me tonight because it puzzled you, right? It was a riddle to which you had no answer. A mystery.”
I nodded uncertainly.
“All right. Let me answer your riddle with another.”
Both Laura and I watched in surprise as he got up, went through into the next room, and came back after a moment flourishing a sheet of paper. “Here, see if you can sort this out.” He thrust the paper in front of me. I picked it up, quizzing the now mischievous glint in his eye, then looked at Laura. She too was smiling in sudden comprehension of what Edward was about. They were together again, and I the outsider. “It’s the name of the game,” he said. “It’s what we’re doing.”
I looked down at the paper and read:
My name contains 6 and 50, yet has only 8 letters. The third is a third part of the fifth which, added to the sixth, will produce a number whose sum will exceed the third itself by just the first, and which is half of the fourth. The fifth and the seventh are equal, so are the last and the first. The first and second together equal the sixth, which contains four more than the third tripled. Now, my lord, how am I called?
I read it through again in complete bafflement, then looked up. “You made this up?”
“No, it’s from an old text called The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Laura, fetch him some paper. He’ll need it.” Smiling, without protest, Laura did as she was bidden.
“I have to work this out?”
Edward nodded.
I looked back at the cryptic sentences. “Look,” I said, “is this really necessary?”
“Essential.”
“Maths was never my strong point.”
“Simple arithmetic, dear heart.” Edward handed me the pencil. Laura put a clean sheet of typing paper in front of me. I was expected to play.
“The answer’s a name?”
Again Edward answered with no more than a nod.
“And it has eight letters. But all the clues are numerical. A code presumably?”
“Like your dream,” said Laura. “All the best things come in code. You have to work for meaning.” There was challenge in her eyes. And mine is a competitive spirit. I applied myself.
Having reread the conundrum, I made a line of eight dashes and numbered them below. Then, after a moment’s thought, I bracketed the fifth dash to the seventh, and the first to the last.
“More whisky, I think,” said Edward, and refilled our glasses. He was almost jolly now. Now that things were back on his terms, I thought. He sat across from me, grinning.
“Roman numerals?” I suggested, for I had seen that the six would give me the letters V and I, and the fifty L, but Edward’s smirk offered neither encouragement nor dissent. I was on my own.
I played about with the idea for a while and got nowhere with it, so I abandoned it for the little I remembered of algebraic equations and made no significant progress. No matter how I tried to get a purchase on the clues, the only conclusion I’d reached after several minutes’ thought was that, if we were not dealing in Roman numerals, then the sum of all the numbers would be fifty-six… which might be useful if I had seven of the answers and needed only the eighth but was otherwise unhelpful. Also there was an ambiguity in that second sentence which bothered me.
I took off my jacket. Then sucked on the pencil trying one fruitless hypothesis after another. The fifth number, for instance, was divisible by three, and if I could identify it I would have the third and the seventh too. But was it six? Nine? Twelve? Fifteen? Any, and more, were possible. There was no way of cross-checking and no clear route open to further deduction. Either I was missing something obvious or this was a maze with no entrance.
I put down the pencil.
“Is there some problem?” Edward asked mildly.
I smiled. “I have the feeling this can’t be done.”
“Your noble predecessor, Christian Rosenkreutz, managed to do it when the riddle was first presented to him by the lady whose name it conceals.”
“Then he was brighter than me.”
“Certainly. But the problem was not solved by the rational intelligence alone.”
“Then how?”
Edward eyed me sardonically. “He knew very well that certain problems are only solved through special acts of grace. As he was not too proud to beseech one, he had the good sense to ask the lady for more help.”
Unruffled enough to recognize another clue when I heard it, I turned to Laura. “Well?”
“Not exactly gracious,” she smiled, “but I’ll give you one of the numbers.”
“Which one?”
“That’s up to you. You only get one so choose carefully.”
I examined the riddle again, conscious of the vehement heat inside me, that my pride was now at stake. A moment’s consideration revealed the most profitable option. I asked for it.
“Nine,” said Laura.
Thereafter, with a little ferreting among the words, the rest was indeed simple arithmetic. I looked at the line of numerals. None over twenty-six, therefore probably a crude alphabetical cipher. I transposed the letters for numbers and found myself looking at an unfamiliar version of a familiar word.
“The lady’s name,” said Edward.
And, quite obviously, not only that. If this was a lady’s name then she was a figure from some queer medieval allegory. It represented something else – the thing that Laura and Edward were doing. But – for God’s sake…
Like the account of my dream, the word lay there – an intriguing object of dubious use, a relic. But I remembered the antique figures from my dream, the ancient, acrid laboratory…
Stalling for time, I said, “Why the riddle? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to tell me?”
The question must have smacked of youth’s specious patience with the oddities of age, and it was immediately clear that Edward had no taste for such simple expectations. I saw sarcasm shaping at his lips, but Laura said, “It’s a bit like dreams, Alex – if the meaning was immediately obvious without having to work for it then we wouldn’t value it – in the same way that none of us really has much use for good advice from other people. We have to make it our own through experience. There was a point to the riddle. Edward was…”
Edward was not about to let someone else speak for him. “Look, you have just demonstrated to your own satisfaction that in some matters unassisted rational effort is not enough. Am I right?”
“But it was set up that way.”
“Exactly. Once Laura gave you the key there was no problem. But the key could not be teased out of the clues because it had been deliberately omitted. The rest was self-sealing – like the retorts in your dream. To unravel it you needed som
ething else – something that was not written down and could not be manufactured by the agile mind on which you appear to pride yourself. You had to find a new, humbler relationship to the problem, right? You were, in fact, dependent on direct oral transmission from an adept – someone already in on the secret.” There was no satisfaction in this explanation, only a further weary sigh, as though whatever pleasure he’d taken in the game had long since faded.
I looked back at the answer to the riddle, then up again at Edward. I said what I saw: “You are serious about this.”
“I’m a serious man, dammit. There’s no time to be not serious. I’m impatient with everything except the truth. I’ve got no time for cleverness… no use for it. I’d rather keep silent than waste my breath…”
The sentence might have ended “on fools”, but Laura curtailed it. “It’s not a game, Alex.”
“Not only a game,” Edward corrected.
“Then what?”
Laura looked resolutely across at Edward, an appeal for patience. “Tell him,” she said. “Tell him you know exactly how he feels.”
Edward shunned her eyes. The index finger of the hand on the table began to tap. The other hand masked his scowl. I heard it rasp across the blue-grey stubble of his chin. “It’s true,” he muttered. “I too am looking for a key to unlock a mystery. So far there has been no special act of grace.”
Laura shifted in her chair. I caught a further exchange of glances before Edward arched his brows again. “Laura seems to be of the opinion that your arrival, and that extraordinary dream, may provide it.”
There was a silence. I looked across at Laura. For a moment, aware of my gaze, she avoided it; then she looked up, decisive. “Listen – we’re doing some research together here… into something that happened to the Agnew family last century. We’re trying to find out as much as we can about it because we think it matters. We think it has a bearing on things that have gone badly wrong in the world… that it might offer some hope of a way through.”
“And it has to do with my dream?” I had seen the tension between resolve and vulnerability in her eyes, heard it in her voice, but it was hard to keep the incredulous edge from my question.