Emilia sighed once more. For a moment Frere might almost have believed that some hidden consummation was achieved, though he himself experienced no more than a vast emptiness.
Behind the door, in the hallway, the parlour maid heard the movement of a chair and quickly slipped away.
11
Meetings
I must have been halfway down the drive away from the Lodge before anger surfaced. I had no torch, an unreliable moon flirted among clouds, I was tired from the hot work over the kiln, from the swim and the tensions in the Lodge. Suddenly it seemed a long walk back to The Pightle, and as I stumbled through the dark, resentment grew.
I was angry with Edward for stoking his rage at my expense; I was angrier at Laura for her lack of consciousness. That she might have some neurotic need to hug the dubious secrets of her gifts – this was just about acceptable to me; that she should flaunt her body and – when accused of its implications – retreat into injured innocence was not. It was asking for trouble. Small wonder Edward had blown his top. And both seemed oblivious of the fact that I might have feelings too. In different ways I’d been used and abused by them both. The more I thought about it, the less forgivable it felt.
By the time I reached the village it was after midnight. Most of the lights in Munding were out, there was no shady blue miasma from the television screens, I expected to meet no one, but I hadn’t reckoned with the country hours kept at the Feathers.
Three men were standing outside the pub as the bar-room light went out. I recognized Bob Crossley and Bill Rush, the pigman. The other man I didn’t know. I could hear their voices on the still air.
“That’s as may be,” Bill was saying, “but if you ask me, it don’t make no odds who get in. They all find ways of partin’ me ’n’ my money and I don’t hev no say. I’ll stick with my ol’ porkers. They don’t say nothin’ but they got eyes and they got brains.”
“You won’t get things changed that way,” Bob answered.
“Things change in their own good time.”
“Not always for the best though.”
“Oh, I dunno about that,” the pigman cheerfully returned, “I hear tell there’s now a fruit machine at the Rabbit’s Head what pay out every time.”
“The Rabbit’s Head?” the other man put in. “Where’s that then?”
“Opposite end from its arse,” Bill chortled.
Amid general agreement that that were a good’n, Bob spotted me and raised his hand. I nodded and would have walked on, but he called, “Hang on, Alex. I’ll walk up the lane with you.”
I didn’t want company and it was unavoidable. Nor did I show much interest as Bob moaned over the difficulty of raising the level of debate in the village. I was pondering the pigman’s joke and the sardonic light it cast on my work with Edward. From a glad-handed fruit machine to the Philosopher’s Stone was no great step, and the chances of finding it about as slender.
“They never let you know what they’re really thinking,” Bob was saying. “Too scared of what might get back to George Wharton at Home Farm, I suppose.”
“Perhaps they just wanted a quiet drink?”
He grunted, sensitive to my withheld sympathy. We walked side by side up the dark lane, an old man wondering what this young man really cared about, the young man wondering what these old men – Bob, Edward – had to do with him. I felt beleaguered by their history, the sense that life had already been inventoried, the choices mapped. Both at odds with a world that had disappointed them, both in search of the new Jerusalem, they laid their conflicting claims on me, and right now I didn’t want to know about either. I hadn’t come to Munding to change the world; I’d come to get off for a while. I’d come here to be miserable, which – with some solitary practice – I could get really good at. I had a natural talent. I was thinking that if Edward was going to walk all over me, he could sort out that mad farrago in the muniments room on his own, and if Bob tried to box my conscience he might very soon get stung. I was thinking, Marcus, if twenty years from now you see a sententious look coming across my face, run…
“So how are things over at the Lodge?”
“Fine.”
“Doesn’t sound that way.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“Working you hard, is he?”
“We’ve been firing a wood kiln.” I took in his frown, explained: “Laura’s a potter.”
“Is that so? That’s not what I heard.” He waited for a question which didn’t come, then volunteered, “The gossip is she’s some sort of medium. Table-rapping… stuff like that.”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s all over the Feathers. Not true then?”
“I told you – she’s a potter.”
“And likes playing with fire? No smoke without it, they say.”
I said nothing. Let him think what he liked.
“Well, I’m glad to hear one of them does something practical. What’s her work like?”
“I… haven’t actually seen any of it. The kiln was already loaded when I got there.” I sensed rather than saw the raised brow. “I should imagine it’s interesting. She has a strong feel for the natural world.”
“But not for the supernatural one, eh?”
“Bob, it’s not like you think.”
He nodded. “What is it like?”
Again I didn’t answer. “None of my business, I know,” he said. “But I’ve heard him talk, remember. He can use words all right, though I didn’t hear much more than words. Nothing solid. Nothing that Bill Rush or old Stan could get their teeth into. And over against what’s happening at Thrandeston it doesn’t amount to a row of beans. So what’s in it for you, Alex?”
“He’s my friend.”
“Which is why you’re walking home after midnight with a long face?” He shrugged at my silence, changed tack. “Listen, I’ve been trying to get in touch with you but you’re never about these days. There’s a meeting tomorrow night in Saxburgh that might interest you. A few weeks back, one of our CND group got himself selected as a Community Controller for Civil Defence. He’s just been on a training course – learning the hoops he’s supposed to jump through when the big bang comes. He’s reporting back to the group tomorrow. If you really want to know about playing with fire you should come.”
“I told you, Bob – I’m not a joiner.”
“I’m not asking you to join – just to listen.”
“I don’t think I could handle that right now.”
Bob sniffed. “Has it ever occurred to you that if we put our heads in the sand they get away with murder? I’ve even persuaded Neville Sallis to show his face. I told him that if the church stands for anything it should have the guts to look the facts in the eye. So what about you? Bring old Nesbit along if you like.”
“I don’t think he’d come.”
“Neither do I. That’s my whole point.” He hesitated, glanced quickly my way, and pressed. “Listen, Alex, it’s your future I’m talking about. Yours and the girl’s. It’s over for Nesbit and me. We’ve had our chances. But you…”
“Bob, I’m tired. I’m feeling pissed off. I just want to get to bed, all right?”
“This is one hangover we can’t sleep off. We’ve got to do something about it or one day we’ll never wake up. Is that what you want?” He waited for an answer and none came. “Well, if you don’t care about yourself, what about your kids. Or don’t they matter any more?”
“Sod it, Bob. Leave it out, will you?”
My retreating back was well past his gate when he called, “There’s a lift – seven o’clock – if you change your mind.”
I turned up late at the Hall the next day and Edward wasn’t there when I arrived. Unusually, however, Ralph was in the library, looking through the papers on Edward’s desk. He glanced up at my entrance, startled and, I thought, guilty. “I was looking for Edward,” he said. “Doesn’t seem to be here.”
“He’s probably sleeping off last night. We fired Laur
a’s kiln yesterday and then he… He drank rather a lot.”
“I see.” Ralph pondered this news, frowning. “Fired the kiln, you say?” He looked back at the desk and muttered, “He might keep me a little more in touch with things. Like to have seen that.”
“He was caught on the hop himself. Laura went ahead sooner than they’d planned.”
“Still. Might have let me know.” There was a petulance to his stricken features. They seemed to insist that the damned place was his, after all. Perhaps he’d had a bad night too, for there was something irritable in the air, and peeved. “Drank too much again?”
“Things got a little fraught.”
“Between the two of them?”
I nodded, reluctant to say more, and was surprised to see his face brighten. “Firing not go well?”
“It was okay, I think, but we all got tired.”
Ralph nodded, drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Well, mustn’t keep you from your work. Things to do myself.” Still flustered that I’d caught him spying, he offered a shy grin. “Husbandry, you know – the land. That’s what it comes back to when the shouting’s done. You can always count on the land – though I sometimes think Marx was right when he said that to entail an estate makes a man the property of his property.”
“There are worse fates.”
“True.” And now he was ashamed of his complaint, and perhaps by the effort to impress me with his cultural horizons. “I’ve been thinking. You must come to dinner. You and Edward. Include me in your conversations. I’d like that. Like it a lot. Are you doing anything this weekend?”
“No, but…”
“Capital. I’ll talk to Edward about it.” Then he looked at his watch, sighed, and went off to count his barley or whatever farmers do.
When he was gone, I crossed to Edward’s desk to see what he’d been looking at and saw nothing more interesting than some barely decipherable notes on the stage of the alchemical process called the Nigredo. Motes of dust drifted down the beams of sunlight through the leaded window as they had done for centuries. Watching their progress, I recalled Edward’s voice drily enunciating a line from “that brilliant little cripple”, Alexander Pope – a verse that defined for him the vacuous cosmos of the Enlightenment: “Atoms dispers’d and dancing in the great Inane.” But the dust would continue to drift long after these old books that argued otherwise had crumbled to join it, long after it had stopped our mouths – powder from Humphrey Agnew’s wig, lint from Louisa’s dress, ash from an old man’s sleeve. I sat down at my desk, took more index cards from the box, and wondered why I’d come.
After a restless night, I’d lain in bed a long time remembering how the previous day had been before it turned sour, and the days before that – days when a modest content had seemed a possibility. When I thought about it coolly, nothing substantial had changed. In the hot afternoon, things had slipped out of proportion – Edward had got drunk, that’s all – but he’d shambled off to bed sweetly enough after his outburst, and Laura’s first thoughts had been for him. In different ways we’d overreacted. Blame it on the moon, the booze, the old anarchic impulses of sex that made antics of us all. Let the crazy day pass, I’d decided, and be friends again; for the prospect of life without their company was bleaker now than before I’d met them. It was an avoidable loss. So I’d come to the library, forgiving and forgetful, and the old sod wasn’t here.
I picked up the top index card. Under the heading LUNA, Noetic Aspect of, it contained a quotation from the Rosarium Philosophorum:
Nisi me interfeceritis, intellectus vester non erit perfectus, et in sorore mea luna crescit gradus sapientæ vestræ, et non cum alio ex servis meis, etsi sciretis secretum meum.
It was followed, in different ink and a less confident hand, by a reference to Louisa’s mystic brother – the first I’d come across for some time. I roughed out a quick translation:
Unless you kill me, your understanding will not be perfect, and the degree of your wisdom waxes in my sister, the Moon, and not with another of my servants, even if you know my secret.
I brooded over the result vaguely, irritably. It was like all the other references: you construed it, the syntax was intelligible, it was of a piece. In this case the Latin was more immediately comprehensible than the English heading: I hadn’t come across the word noetic before and couldn’t be bothered to look it up. Yet for all the light it shed, it might as well have been written in Sanskrit.
This alchemical prose made me think of modern packaging: you could see there were goodies in there, you wanted them, but nothing could fight its way through the filmy stuff’s contraceptive attention to its duty. The incomprehensibility of this particular passage made the work seem futile. This whole baroque hothouse of alchemical exotica had nothing to do with me. My tastes were simpler. I preferred the straight truth told. And the truth was that I’d volunteered for this chore only as a way of including myself in Laura’s life, and that wild goose was not about to be caught either – not by this handy, hatchet-wielding, already married scrivener who had once, in a previous incarnation, been a poet.
I stared out into blue day. Against the master’s strict instructions I lit the first cigarette I’d smoked in the library.
I was stubbing it against my heel when Edward came in. He took off his jacket, hung it across his chair so carefully he might have thought the wood must wince at the touch, then stood, solemn-jowled. If he smelled the smoke, he said nothing. Eventually I had to look at him. He was studying the map of his palm. When he glanced up, the bags beneath his eyes were the saggy webbing of old sofas. “About last night…” he began.
“Forget it, Edward.”
“Only wish I could. Behaviour… insufferable. Can’t apologize enough.”
“You did – last night.”
“Don’t know what possessed me.”
“The booze?”
“Yes, but… well, it’s not good enough, is it? I mean… abominable old fool, you must think. I couldn’t argue.” He sighed, looked round the library as at evidence of his own impossibility. “If you’ve had enough of me, I quite understand.”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?
Dubiously his eyes swivelled to check the claim. “Then we are… still friends?”
“What do you think?”
“Dear man.” He quizzed me with contrite anxiety. “Deserve a wigging, I know.”
A wigging!
It was impossible not to smile. “Edward, I accepted a long time ago that you’re a perverse old bastard.”
The glitter was back in his eyes. “But that’s too kind. I’m a recreant ingrate. A cullion. A contemptible zed. An earthworm even.”
“I’ll stick with perverse old bastard. What about Laura? Has she forgiven you?”
An arm, gangly as an ape’s, was lifted to his head. “She took it in surprisingly good part, all things considered.” He looked away: subject closed.
“Has she opened the kiln yet?”
“The kiln? Oh no, too hot still. It takes time to cool down.” Then he grinned at me. “I’m a fortunate man, Cambridge. Luckier than I deserve. I mean, look at you – no ill-will showing, hard at work already…”
“It is half-past eleven. Also I’ve just turned up another Mystic Brother reference.”
“You have?” A brief frown suggested that this might be a regrettable development. He took the card and studied it. “The Rosarium again.” He twitched his jaw as though sucking on a hollow tooth and muttered, “Can’t be right.”
“What can’t?”
“Laura. She hasn’t got her mind on it.”
“But she has ideas?”
He glanced at me over the card, was about to say something, then appeared to change direction. “Look, if you don’t mind, I think I’d better take another look at the Rosarium. I suppose I might have missed something.” He wandered off to the shelves, took down the volume he sought, and settled at his desk. Situation normal – so normal that several minutes elapsed be
fore I realized how deftly his extravagant mea culpa had sidestepped serious consideration of the previous night. The ball was back in play, the game resumed. Only an oaf would make heavy weather of it now.
An hour or so later, I saw him fidgeting among his papers, agitated. Then he went through into the muniments room, moved things about in there, and came back scowling. “Damnation.”
Remembering that I’d caught Ralph at Edward’s desk, I said, “Have you lost something?”
“Not lost – left. The rest of the cards – the other references you found. I took them across to show Laura the other night and I’ve left them there.” He cast about again on his desk. “Really don’t want to leave this now – I think I might be on to something. I’ll have to ring her and ask her to bring them over.”
“Won’t she want to stay with the kiln?”
“Probably, but this could be important.”
“Why don’t I go?”
Edward looked up. I expected a suspicious frown and found none. “Would you do that? You could take Ralph’s skiff. He won’t mind. They’re on my desk in the sitting room. Green folder. It’d be a great help.” He picked up his pencil, scribbled something down, then turned back to his book. I was already on my way out when he looked up again. “Laura’s in her studio. Don’t bother her, there’s a good chap. I know she wants to be on her own when she opens the kiln. Okay?”
I rowed into the light of a clear day such as blessed that spring. The wake glittered behind me. There was a blue hush above the Mount, the trees all birdsong. Again my mood swung. I recalled that I might have been stuck at the Poly, prising an interest in literature out of dozy students, waiting for the bell and a cigarette. Instead I was here, at liberty, answerable to no one. Edward might be incorrigible, the work pointless, but I’d tasted freedom. I breathed it in with the light. I liked the lake smell, the water gurgle beneath the keel, the rowlock’s squeak. I liked my little ship of fools.
In those moments I felt that nothing really mattered, and felt it without cynicism, for it stemmed not from disappointment but from a kind of renunciation. It was a renunciation of desire made possible by that noble day. I stilled the oars, drew deep on the air, watched the light shimmering about me. There was no need to push and fret. Wherever things were going, I was first person singular, uncompromised and needing no complicity. This singularity was to be prized. It was an act of secession akin to the feeling that had possessed me under the stars that first night at the Lodge, but calmer, less aggressive, with less of the lone wolf about it. It was a quiet distancing from the claims of the unquiet heart, and if there was a secret, I thought, then this must be it – this freedom from constraint, the effortless capacity to float on life like a varnished skiff.
The Chymical Wedding Page 37