“You asked me if I wanted you,” I said, “and I was honest. And I know it was you that I wanted. I wanted you last night. I’ve wanted you for a long time.”
I looked up and saw her shy from this intensity. One of her hands was soothing the other. She was looking down at the grass.
“You wanted to know what was real,” I said.
But the sudden soft confusion in her face already showed how little purchase even true words have unless they arise from, and are met by, a shared sense of the real. There was tenderness there, but not the kind I solicited.
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
“Our bodies were honest,” she answered. “I trust that.”
“And that’s all you feel?”
She lifted a hand to shoo a fly from her face. A long way away, like the sound of the heat breathing, a cuckoo called.
What I wanted to hear was easily said – it required no thought – but she was thinking. In the silence I was thinking too. I was thinking how tenuous her grasp on reality might be, of the way she seemed able to act with an oblivious disregard for consequence, as though there was no reality beyond her own experience. I was thinking as anxiety returned that, whatever had been happening in the Lodge, I might be, for her, no more than a means of precipitating drama in an arrested life, an unconscious adventure into change.
“I don’t want to say the wrong thing,” she said.
“Then say the right one. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Look, what you said… it means a whole lot to me…”
“But not what it means to me.”
She hesitated, looked away, dismayed to find herself under this unexpected pressure. “Alex… what was happening to me in the Lodge… It was tearing me apart. If you hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I would have done. But you were there. You had to be. It needed both of us. But if we get it wrong now…”
“And you think I am?”
She didn’t answer.
“For God’s sake, Laura, you just gave yourself to me. I’ve never known a woman give herself so completely.”
She looked away.
“Either that or you were using me.”
“I wasn’t using you,” she said quietly.
“Then?”
“We were used.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“I know.” She sighed, then looked back in an appeal for understanding. “But you were right – I did give myself.”
The omission was as eloquent as the quickly averted eyes. She was invoking factors beyond my comprehension, and I didn’t want to hear about them. They were no part of a sane world. To believe that she had privileged access to insights beyond my reach demeaned more than my intelligence. It underpriced the efforts I’d made to keep panic at bay during that phenomenal meeting. I was carrying an unrequited conviction that after such a plunge a man must emerge, however briefly, on paradisal shores, not find himself floundering in confusion. I looked away towards the lake where gnats scribbled themselves on the air –atoms dispers’d and dancing in the great Inane.
“Alex, I have to be honest.”
“Then what about honesty with Edward?”
It seemed that the thought had not presented itself until I posed it. His name cut the air. It closed her eyes.
“He’s waiting for me. Right now this minute. What am I supposed to do? Walk in whistling and say, ‘Laura and I have just had a remarkable experience – you might like to hear about it’?” I saw her wilt under the sarcasm, and softened instantly. “Laura, he’s no fool. He’s bound to sense something.”
I felt her thoughts move away and was imagining a further regression into unconsciousness, when she said, quietly, as though in reassurance, “But he won’t want to know. Not from you.”
“I know.”
The retort was charged with all the significance I could give it, but even as it hung unanswered on the air I knew its conviction spurious. Any true statement of what I knew must comprehend many confusing ambiguities: that she had given herself to me and not to me; that she had been at once with me and elsewhere; that I’d tried to resist the full exactions of the meeting I’d desired, and could lurch like a drunkard afterwards from ecstasy to anger, through devotion to sarcasm and back now through the muddle of it all to the disconsolate place where I said in a demand that was also plea, “Laura, I can’t leave it at that.” And that, at least, was true.
But with Edward’s name spoken, her focus had shifted. The perplexity was gone, and she was a pragmatist again. She gazed calmly across at me, said, “I think you’ll find you can,” and reached for her scattered clothes.
I watched in disbelief. The sunlight was bright on her body as she slipped the T-shirt over her head. I saw the thin white flash of the appendectomy scar. Then her face appeared above the blue folds and looked down at me. “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Edward.”
“I don’t just mean about him.”
“I know you don’t.” She bent, picked up my shirt and tossed it across to me, smiling warily. “But it’s my responsibility.”
“What about us? Don’t we have a responsibility to one another? Christ, for all I know you might be pregnant.”
The smile broadened. “You don’t have to worry about that either. But you’re right – we do have a responsibility, and if we act on it things will work out.” She found her pants, pulled them on, then reached for the dungarees. “You should get dressed.”
“You mean that’s it? That my feelings don’t count?”
There was an amused reproach in her glance as she pulled the straps over her shoulders. “Do you really know what they are, Alex?”
“Haven’t you heard anything? I told you, Laura – I’ve been dreaming about this for weeks.”
She gazed at me steadily as though at last I’d uttered the needful, clarifying thing. I was sure I’d got through. Then she said, “Perhaps you’re still dreaming,” and smiled.
I could have beat the earth in exasperation. Hating myself as I did so, I said, “I thought you were the one who’s confused about what’s real.”
“I was,” she answered unruffled.
“But not now. Now you know, right?”
“If I try to tell you, you don’t listen.”
It was like arguing with a mirage, and somewhere, with a falling heart, I knew that if the claims I made were sound there would be no argument.
“Alex, we don’t need to fight. It’s the last thing we should be doing.” There was no reproach in her gaze now, only tenderness. “I’m glad it was with you. I really am. But I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself. I just want to get the meaning right.” If she had been half-crazed inside the Lodge, now she was as sane as the light around her, and as calm. “Listen,” she added after a moment, “a few days ago something happened. It was a very simple thing but it stayed with me. Can I tell you about it?”
Chastened, preparing myself for some further unwelcome revelation, I nodded.
“I was in the big greenhouse at the Hall – Ralph’s gardener lets me keep some plants there and I like to look in on them every now and then. While I was in there, a butterfly came to rest on an arum lily. Its wings were white but for splashes of orange at the edges, and it had very fine, very delicate green veins.”
“An orange-tip,” I supplied, wondering what this had to do with anything.
“You know it? Well, the point is that the colours were exactly the same on the lily. A perfect match – the orange pistil, the white petals, the same filaments of green. Do you think the butterfly knew that? Or the lily?”
I looked up at her bemused, and said, “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But what I do know is that it happened at precisely the moment when I was there to see, and I knew.”
“So what does it prove?”
“It doesn’t prove anything. But there are symmetries. If we impose meaning on them, we unbalance them. We have to listen for it. I’m
listening, Alex. I’m trying not to miss any of it.”
The candour came from a place beyond earnest sincerity. It too proved nothing: was simply there. I could receive it or not. But her smile when she said, “Now stop pushing and put your clothes on,” was irresistible. It altered the air.
I stood up, said, “Come here.” She tilted her head, pursed her lips, hesitated a moment, but she came. I held her, felt her hands at my back, whispered, “You know I have to see you again? Alone, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
She didn’t answer. I pulled back to look at her face, and saw a hunted look about her eyes. “Will you come to The Pightle?”
“If I can.”
“You have to.” I smiled, pushed: “I’ll come looking for you if you don’t.”
“Don’t do that. Promise you won’t do that.”
“Then promise to come.”
“I will. I can’t say when, but I’ll come.”
I knew she was thinking of Edward, of the imminent consequences of her unquestioning trust in feeling. In that moment he was more present to her than I was. I felt a quick pang of jealousy, of which I was instantly ashamed. But, “Soon,” I urged.
“As soon as I can.”
She pulled away, as conscious as I was of the resurrection taking place between my legs, and wandered away towards the lake’s edge. I looked at my watch, frowned, and turned to gather my clothes. I was slipping into my shoes when she came back. As she reached to smooth down my hair, I pulled her gently towards me, a little dazed still by the speed of it all and the way my feelings had swirled from one extreme to another. The embrace was chaste but I could feel her tense in my grasp. Then she loosened my hands.
“Listen,” she said, “when you get back…”
I had been trying to put the thought from my mind, was wincing inwardly as she held me to it.
“Tell Edward I was right. Tell him to think in French.”
I found the shift utterly dislocating.
She smiled uncertainly. “It’s all you need… to get you through meeting him again. He’ll work it out. Tell him Louisa told me.” Then she leant towards me, placed a swift light kiss on my cheek, and turned away towards her studio. For an instant I was stunned, and would have made to follow her, demanding explanation, but she was gone round the corner of the outbuilding. I heard a door shut, the click of a Yale lock.
I looked at my watch again, cursed under my breath, and made, flustered and confused, for the skiff. My mind was so full of other things that I was well out into the lake before I realized I’d forgotten Edward’s papers. When I got back to the Lodge again there was no sign of Laura.
Recrossing the lake, mooring the skiff and, at last, entering the library, I understood what it means to be beside oneself. Edward, however, was so preoccupied with his studies that he seemed barely aware how long my errand had taken. If anything he was mildly irritated by the interruption.
“I’m sorry if I’ve held you up,” I said. “Laura came in while I was picking up the papers…”
I put the folder down on his desk and saw that he was looking at the same ancient volume which had lain open on the lawn at the Decoy Lodge on the day of the picnic. I thought it was the same illustration even, but then – despite my immediate dismay – I noted the differences. Under the heading CONIUNCTIO a man and a woman, both crowned, but wingless here, were making love. What’s more, they were making love on, or perhaps under, the water of a small lake. A little sun shone over the full moon, as the king lay over the queen, and all four faces wore expressions of orgasmic ecstasy.
Though I managed to restrain my gasp, I felt stark naked there. It was as though Edward had been poring over an image of Laura and me in the mirror of the crude woodcut. It felt a certainty that he must know. I could scarcely believe his rapt preoccupation.
After a moment he looked up and saw me staring at the picture. “The white queen and the red king,” he explained. “Quicksilver and Sulphur. There are some verses from Merculinus to accompany it. Look.” He pointed to the quotation on the page:
Candida mulier, si rubeo sit nupta marito,
Mox complexantur, complexaque copulantur,
Per se solvuntur, per se quoque conficiuntur,
Ut duo qui fuerunt, unum quasi corpore fiant.
He looked up into my face where I strove for an expression of dispassionate scholarly interest, “Enfolded in the bliss of their copulation, they dissolve into each other as they approach the consummation – they that were two made one now, as though they were of a single flesh. Right?”
I nodded.
“But look at this.” He pointed to the margins of the text where, in a faded sepia-brown ink, three letters were inscribed: FMM. “Hadn’t taken it in before today,” he said. “Obviously Louisa wrote it there: Frater mysticus meus.” He smiled almost sheepishly up at me. “I owe that to you. Would have come across it sooner or later, of course, but the fact is you found it.”
“But where does it get you?”
He screwed up his nose, twitched his moustache. “Can’t say yet. It’s an emblem of the chymical wedding, of course. It’s got to be close to the heart of the thing. Must tell Laura about it.”
“I’ve got a message for you.”
He looked back at me, irritably – expecting, it seemed, some unwelcome intrusion from his domestic life.
“She says she was right. That you should think in French.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She said you’d work it out. She said” – I took a deep breath – “she said to tell you that Louisa told her.”
Edward took off his owl glasses and looked up at me through narrowed eyes. They were also, I thought, suspicious. “She said that?”
I turned uncomfortably away. “You don’t think I’d make it up?”
He put both elbows on the desk, held his head in his hands – the tendons were tense and gnarled among the hairs – and stared down at the woodcut in a frown of concentration. “She can’t be right,” he muttered under his breath, and then, louder, as though in challenge, at me: “It’s too literal, dammit! She’s got to be projecting.”
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on.”
Edward did not avert his gaze. I felt as though the smell of sex was still on me, grass in my hair – which, it suddenly occurred to me, there might well be. In my confusion I hadn’t thought to check. It was too late now.
“We had a row the other night. Not last night – earlier.”
“She told me.”
“It was about this – in part, at least. That was what it turned on – this mystic brother business.” He sniffed, shook his head, scowled down at the book again. “Laura’s convinced that Louisa was emotionally involved with a man. Not her father. Someone else. She thinks it became the most important thing in her life… that somehow it lay behind the conflict over the book.”
“Isn’t it possible?”
I winced under a withering glance. “Louisa was entirely devoted to her father and their work. The references she makes to the young men around here – in the journals. I mean – they’re funny, satirical, scathingly disdainful. She was amused by their antics, that’s all. Annoyed by them sometimes. There isn’t a shred of evidence of any emotional involvement.”
“Apart from Laura’s feelings.”
“I’m sure she’s projecting. On just about everything else I trust her implicitly, but this is nonsense. It’s Hollywood. It’s romantic novels. Louisa lived from the spiritual intellect. She was too aware of the symbolic dimensions of the Coniunctio to get confused by the other thing. Anyway, apart from her father there wasn’t her intellectual equal in the whole damn county. I just can’t see it.”
Whatever else she was doing, Laura’s stratagem had worked: Edward’s thoughts were more than a century away from the present moment. Until much else became clearer, it felt wisest to keep them there, but even as I said, �
�She seemed very certain,” it occurred to me that the past too was now treacherous ground.
Again that penetrating glance. “What exactly did she say?”
“Only that she was right and you should think in French.”
“And that Louisa told her?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” I snapped.
It was true but it was beginning to be a lie. And then, as I thought about what had happened, it became one. Can’t you see, you damn fool? I was thinking. Isn’t it obvious. It’s you who’s wearing the horns now. Use them.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to snap… It’s just that…” He looked away, screwing his eyes in concentration again. “She must mean about the mystic brother. It can’t be anything else.” And then, after a moment’s puzzling: “My God!”
Jumpy as I already was, the exclamation almost had me out of my shoes.
“No,” he said, shaking his old head, scowling. “It’s not on. It can’t be.” He threw me an incredulous glance that was almost malignant – the messenger blamed for the message.
Heart in my mouth, I asked, “What?”
“The French for brother,” he murmured, scowling still.
“Frère?”
“Frere,” he said. “Edwin Frere.”
Sticky and agitated, and overwhelmed with a kind of grief, I sat at my desk throughout the afternoon, trying to decide. I kept glancing across at Edward where he sucked his pencil over the Rosarium, grunting every now and then when he was driven back to the Latin dictionary. Lunch had been silent torment as he mulled over the implications of the pun and dismissed them. It was a relief to get back to work, but I accomplished nothing. I ran and reran the tape. Fast-forward, rewind, hold. What had really been happening there? Was it more, or less, than an aberrant excursion into the twilight zone? More to the point, why had I let it happen at all?
Because I wanted it. Because more or less consciously I’d been lusting after Laura for weeks, and the hectic glamour of the moment had been stronger than any thought for the consequences. And that meeting on the lawn… the forces I’d encountered there. Sexual or supernatural, their reality revoked all question. For a few timeless seconds they’d plucked me out of my head and plunged me back into dream, back into the light of the retorts. A light subtler than electricity. Not chemistry but chymistry. Coniunctio. If that was what ghosts brought, I was for ghosts…
The Chymical Wedding Page 39