I stood, thrown, watching her leap back to the firebox. “Come on,” she cried eagerly, “I need more wood.”
So we were back before the firebox, exhausted and happy, and Laura had just shut down the kiln, when Edward came round into the yard again.
“We’ve done it,” Laura called. “Edward, we’ve done it. I’ve put it to bed. Be happy for me. Be happy, please.”
I gazed across at him, willing him not to wreck this moment. I could see the contention in his wrinkled face. Then an arm lifted, as though of its own accord, and came to rest on the crown of his head. He had missed her moment – he knew he had missed it – yet his eyes softened suddenly, and you could almost see the shadow fall from his shoulders as he twinkled down at Laura where she knelt before her dying fire. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, he said, “God bless you, my dear, I knew all along it would be all right. Come and give me a hug.”
Laughing, she sprang to her feet. He moved towards her, opening his arms, and I saw there were tears at the corners of his eyes. “Well done,” he whispered, eyes closed, holding his cheek against her. “Well done.” They hugged each other in silence for a long time. I stared at the mess of faggots round the hearth of the closed kiln, supernumerary now. Then I heard Edward’s voice. “You too, Cambridge. Come join this orgy of delight. You’ve earned a kiss.”
“That’s right,” Laura exclaimed, “I couldn’t have done it without you. Without both of you.” They each held out a free arm. Smiling, I rose to join them, and when they both pressed their lips to my cheeks I caught the smell of whisky on Edward’s breath. “What Nature leaves imperfect,” he quoted, “we perfect with our Art.” Then we were all clasped in a threefold embrace, Laura calling out her thanks to the sky. I felt Edward’s pressure at my hip wheeling the hug until the three of us circled in a scrum of affection. “Nature takes delight in Nature,” Edward whispered as we turned; then, a little louder, “Nature contains Nature”; and shouting then as though the triumph of the hour was entirely his: “And Nature can overcome Nature.” Laughing, we broke apart.
“I know what my nature needs right now,” Laura said.
“A feast awaits you indoors,” Edward answered. “The burgundy breathes. The chef has done his worst.”
“Wonderful. But there’s a thing I have to do.” She grinned, said, “I’m going to jump in the lake,” and she was off, sprinting and skipping, pulling her T-shirt over her head, round to the front of the Lodge. Edward and I stared at one another. A moment later we heard a splash and a squeal, more splashing, a flutter of duck, whoops of delight. A little blearily Edward laughed.
I said, “That sounds like a good idea.”
“Be my guest.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Should I?”
We were each held for an instant in the other’s dubious quiz. “You’re smelling a little high,” he said, “and we have no shower.”
“What about you?”
“I have already bathed my wounds.”
“Then…”
“After all, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
“She told you?”
“Laura tells me everything… eventually.” He sniffed. “Go on, for God’s sake. Let’s see what you’re made of.” He followed me round to the jetty where Laura’s clothes were scattered across the lawn.
“Come on in,” she shouted. “It’s bliss.” Her hair was loose, shining where it floated on the surface around her head. Smoothly she lifted her arms in a backstroke, then twisted the blur of her body and struck out into the lake with a fluent, practised crawl. Edward watched as I kicked off my shoes and socks, unbuckled my jeans and let them fall. I handed him my watch, stared at his grin for a moment, then slipped out of my shorts and ran out onto the jetty to plunge into the sudden cold shock of the lake. When I surfaced, gasping, the sky was intensely blue and I saw the moon, cratered and radiant, high over the tower on the distant mount.
We were some distance out in the lake when Edward eventually called from the shore that supper was spoiling. Until that moment no single glance had suggested more than shared pleasure in the lake by night, two friends at swim. Laura’s challenge to race back was uttered in that spirit, but she was the better swimmer and reached the jetty strokes ahead of me. She must have known I was watching as she lifted herself from the lake, water running down her long back, the skin glistening in the light cast from the house across the lawn. I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she swivelled to rinse the mud from her legs, then flexed her arms, swept back her hair to shake it, and the motion rippled through her body. She opened her eyes, smiled down where I stood waist-deep in water still – the smile itself a quick gasp on evening air – then she was upright, running along the jetty to where Edward waited with the towels. He wasn’t looking at her – he was looking at me, and there was a snakeskin feel to his face. It was the glance of an instant only. I tried to shake it from my mind as I shook the water from my hair, but I knew what that face felt like from the inside. It was imagining its own absence from the scene, and disbelieving innocence. As far at least as I was concerned, it did so with due cause.
And Laura?
I didn’t know. If she’d relaxed in her skin after the hot work over the kiln, she hadn’t flaunted it; not till that moment, and even then, had she been clothed, the smile might have signified no more than amused affection. But she was frank and inaccessible as a Modigliani nude, and I was back in the green glow of the glade – except that this time I too was observed.
By the time we came to eat, it was evident that Edward was already drunk. He ate little of the meal he’d prepared, but added more than half the wine to the mix of beer and whisky inside him. I tried to engage him in conversation about the analogy between pottery and alchemy, and Laura prompted him to share ideas that had long been familiar to them both, but he showed little interest. Self-consciously, I shifted the ground to literature, regretting that the emblems of alchemy were now too arcane to be of service to modern writers.
“If you’d had your eyes open,” he growled, “you’d have seen that such is certainly not the case,” and muttered “numbskull” under his breath. The charm – that demon glitter of narrowed eyes which had given the lie to all previous insults – was conspicuously absent. He turned to Laura. “The man’s half-educated. Barely that.” He downed more wine. Suddenly I was back in the presence of the unpredictable figure I’d met in the library at Easterness that first night, and as uncertain now as then.
“Who did you have in mind?” I asked.
“I didn’t have anyone in mind. I have them by heart, where they belong.”
“All right. But who?”
“James Joyce modern enough for you? Or is he old hat already? ‘The first till last alchemist’ – that’s what he called himself.” For a moment I thought his tongue had slurred the word, then I remembered Joyce’s fluent way with puns. “But I don’t suppose you’ve taken the trouble to read Finnegans Wake?”
“I had a hard time getting through Ulysses,” I responded as lightly as I could.
“See what I mean?” he demanded of Laura, who gave me a quick, apologetic glance, then looked down at the table.
“It’s been a marvellous day, Edward. Don’t spoil it.”
“Man asked me a question, didn’t he? Or made some asinine observation or other. Don’t remember now. I didn’t start it. Know that.”
“He was just making conversation.”
“And I was just responding. Or am I not permitted to speak in my own house?”
“Tell me about Joyce,” I said quickly, and found myself fixed by a menacing leer. Slowly his head turned from me to Laura. “With Laura’s gracious permission,” he said, sarcasm spacing the words. She sighed and looked away. Then he studied me again, breathing heavily, the corner of his mouth twitching a little. “Joyce knew it… chymical wedding, I mean. More than you’ll ever know. Listen to this: ‘equals of opposites, evolved by a one-same power of na
ture or spirit, as the sole condition and means of… means of…’” He screwed his eyes, pressed the thumb-knuckle of the hand holding a cigarette into his forehead, struggling to remember, then jerked his head up, scowling. The ash fell from his cigarette on to the tablecloth. “Laura, how’s it go?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes you do, dammit. You’re just being pissy with me. How’s it bloody go. Man wants to learn.”
Staring at him coldly, Laura completed the quotation: “as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarized for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies.”
“That’s it. Symphysis of their antipathies. Pure alchemy. Twentieth-century state of the art. Satisfied? Any wiser, you little Cambridge shit? And what about Yeats, for God’s sake? The Rosa Alchemica. Haven’t read that either, I suppose? What do they teach in crammers these days? Manage your own hand-jobs, can you? And then there’s Lowry – sweet, sizzled Malcolm Lowry. He tried. He tried. We’re talking men now. Real men. We’re talking burning ground. None of your navel-lint, tit-licking pen-fuckers so infatuated with the twitchings of the ego they remain sublimely indifferent to the obscene fact that their words are worth less than the flies tormenting the eyelids of an African child. And who gives a toss about litter-a-chewer anyway? Is that what you’re in this for? Scratching round our backyard for pickings to pad your lines out with? That it, eh?”
Laura stepped in to cover my obvious discomfort. “Please don’t do this, Edward.”
“It’s all right,” I murmured.
“It is not all right,” Edward snarled, and pointed an unsteady finger at me. “You stay out of this.” He turned on Laura, with a caustic grin. “Fancy him, do we? That the game? That what it’s about?”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Think I’m blind, do you? Old and blind. That what you think?”
“I think you’ve had too much to drink, that’s all.”
“Liar. Lying bitch.”
I could see the breath shaking in Laura’s voice as she said, quietly, “Edward, if you’re not careful, you might regret this very much.”
He stared at her, swaying in his chair, then all the malevolent rage seemed to collapse inside him. “Done it before,” he muttered. “Done it before,” He looked across at me with watery, beseeching eyes as if he had just told me the entire, intolerable story of his life. His hand was trembling, half-open, on the tablecloth. He looked at the cigarette, almost burnt out between nicotine-stained fingers, and stubbed it on his plate again and again until it was quite crumpled. He sniffed, and looked up at Laura. “You’re quite right, my dear. Darken” – his great, wrinkled head revolved slowly towards me – “forgive. Old fool, you see. The booze. No good for me. Pay no heed.”
“It’s forgotten,” I said, but my own hand was trembling a little as it reached to take the unsteady, hairy hand he offered across the table.
“Hope so. Didn’t know what I was saying.”
There was a long silence in which he sat, nodding, before he released his grip. His free hand reached for the bottle again, then pulled back. He beat the edge of the table with the flat of it – an old gorilla, caged – shook his head as though to clear it, then jerked uncertainly to his feet. The chair would have fallen to the floor had Laura not reached out to catch it. “Had enough,” he said. “Going to bed.” He lurched towards Laura, kissed the crown of her head, and mumbled, “Forgive, forgive,” into her hair.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“Yes, it’s all right. It’s good. It’s as it should be. All is for the best in the most impossible of worlds.” Then he smiled across at me, a doleful witness for his own prosecution, and shambled from the room.
Laura and I sat in tense silence, listening to the creak of the stairs. She opened her lips to speak. I said, “Don’t say it. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I really wanted us to be happy.”
“I know.”
“He’s impossible.”
“But he loves you very much.”
“He needs me.”
“That too.”
“And I owe him…” She closed her eyes, sighed, frowned down at the table where the ash lay like his spoor.
“Does this happen often?”
“It’s been getting worse.”
“Is that my fault?”
She looked up, puzzled by the question. “Why should it be? No, it’s not that. It’s… I don’t know. It’s happened before. I tried to leave him once when he got like this. In the States.”
“And he went to pieces?”
She shook her head. “I did.” When she looked up at me, there was a kind of glazed defiance in her eyes. “I left him because I couldn’t handle the shadow his expectations threw over me… the way he cast me as a member of his dream. I started to think he finally made it impossible for me to be myself.” Again the eyes were lowered. “I came back because I discovered that without him my head splits into a thousand pieces. I couldn’t work, couldn’t feel my way. Nothing made any sense.”
I tried to say that I understood, that I’d felt much the same way when I lost Jess. “But you came through,” she said. “On your own, I mean. Without Edward, I… There are things I can’t explain.”
“Try.”
“Look, if it wasn’t for him…” She had been prepared for none of this, stalled now, changed her mind. “It wouldn’t make any sense to you. He’s the only one who really understands.”
“He told me a little about what happened to you in the States,” I encouraged.
“About Hester?”
Immediately I saw that if Edward had mentioned that name it would have been deemed a great betrayal. “No. Only that you had some very confusing experiences…” I waited. Agitated, she made no move to change the course of the conversation or to end it. I took a further risk. “Who’s Hester?”
She glanced up warily, found nothing but sympathy in my gaze. “That’s just it. She’s not. Not any more. She was an ancestor of mine. She’s been dead longer than Louisa, but…”
I could feel the hairs rise at the back of my neck as I said, “You’ve seen her?”
She nodded, reached for a cigarette and lit it. “I used to. I used to a lot. Whenever things were really bad we’d talk…”
Had Edward told me this, I would not have believed. Even now, despite the patent honesty of her eyes, there was resistance.
“You see what I mean?” she said. “It sounds crazy, right? Well, I was crazy… sure I was, for a time. But not about that.” It was as though she was accruing power over against Edward’s earlier impossible behaviour, against my possible disbelief. “And not about Louisa either… Edward knows it, but he won’t hear. He thinks I’ve got it wrong and…” Her breath came in a shaky release of tension. “That’s one of the things that’s come between us. But – what I was talking about – he knows it’s not crazy. He knows it’s real.”
Whatever the crux of their disagreement, she was not about to disclose it. She had no such trust in me.
I said, “Why shouldn’t it be real? I only have to switch on the news to hear things a whole lot crazier than that.” I’d tried to keep my voice light, coaxing, but she studied me coolly as though she’d picked up my unspoken reservations and would not forget them. The expression on her face read my last remark as no more than a condescending gesture of patient sympathy such as she must have met many times before. Or perhaps she wasn’t considering my words at all, for she said suddenly, “I should stick to clay. That’s real.” And then, a moment later, “Oh God, I was a bitch to him today.”
“Come on, that’s not fair. There’s no point punishing…”
“Look,” she interrupted, “I can’t leave him too long. I know him – he’ll just be lying there miserable…” The appeal in her eyes was asking me to leave.
“You’ll be all right?”
She nodded, summoning strength. I saw the candlelit flash of the little star at her throat; saw t
oo that to contrive a longer stay would only put her under further pressure. Already there were shadows of exhaustion round her eyes. I pushed back my chair and got up. “Well, at least the kiln’s in good shape.”
She smiled, though wanly. “Bless you for that.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
“I’d offer to run you back but…”
“It’s okay. I like to walk.” I saw the mess on the table and said, “Oh God, the dishes…”
“Don’t worry. You’ve done enough. Really.”
At the door I turned to look at her.
“You don’t have to be haunted by the past – or by that abominable old sod upstairs. You’re alive here, now, entirely in your own right. No mother, no father, no ghosts. You’re a kiln-firer. A free spirit. I think it might be an excellent idea if you forgot about everything else for a minute and let me hold you.”
I might have said all of this, and I said none of it. I felt many things for which, in these confused circumstances, there were no permissible words. And it was impossible to tell whether her own gaze held anything more than the bewildered gratitude and regret that were clearly there. So I silently willed her to know that if life with Edward became insupportable, there was a place for her to come. Yet she would have been upstairs with the old man before I was out of the moonlit yard.
The Chymical Wedding Page 29