The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  How did you defuse it? How did you stop the violence, the fear? I was back in the meeting at the Black Boys Hotel. I was back with the dream of keys.

  I looked at it again. Again it read like nonsense. But when my thoughts lurched back to reality, a voice – Edward’s voice – insisted that I take dreams seriously – however preposterous they seemed.

  Impatiently, as once working at the riddle so long before in the Lodge, I reapplied myself.

  The first thing that struck me was that the prime mover was a woman. She had taken control, as Jess once, and now Laura, had taken control. But this woman wasn’t Jess or Laura. It was no woman I knew. And no powerful political figure either. An ordinary woman, yet persuasive enough to win the confidence of the jealous male leaders and – which was absurd – talk them into giving up the most devastating symbol of their power. The Lady Alchimia, I thought, in twin set and pearls? Absurd. Absurd. What was I doing wasting time like this?

  Nevertheless a deal had been struck. The key to the situation had changed hands. However mistrustfully a deal had been struck between the male and female principles. Interesting! But having got the keys, why should the woman turn them over to – of all people – the Pope?

  I saw him smiling from the Pope-mobile, two fingers up, declaiming to the multitude, “Thou shalt use no contraception; thou shalt not commit abortion; and, no, thou shalt have no divorce.” No friend to women he. No priestesses in his church, only nuns. It made no sense. He was the archetype of male spiritual authority, the latest in a long line of dubious fixers that ran right back through Pius equivocating over the holocaust, the Borgias who were not notable for compassion, the burners of heretics, all the way to old St Peter himself who was… the keeper of the keys!

  Odd!

  And then it occurred to me that the present Pope was also a Pole – representative both of the Catholic faith and his particular nation, of a country pinned between east and west, where two totalitarian systems, one secular, one spiritual, were in deep contention. It was one of the places where the earth might end in flames. So the keys had been passed back not only across the sexes, but from the political to the spiritual domain. Edward’s thesis. The key to the situation was back in the hands of the male spirit.

  But it didn’t stop there.

  Again I was faced with the absurd. The Pope, supreme head of the most authoritarian church in Christendom, takes a look at the cushion and decides that his apostolic role as key-keeper is over. What’s more, he passes the buck to a protestant sect which, in its silent priestless gatherings, stands at the antipodes of the Roman hierarchy. Pontifex Maximus he might be, but that particular feat of bridge-building struck me as improbable.

  I remembered the two old ladies in the Black Boys Hotel – Quakers or not? What did I know about Quakers? They were pacifists, of course. They were followers of the inner light. They were a socially committed spiritual sect which seemed to have exercised a moral influence on the life of the nation out of all proportion to their numbers. I thought of Elizabeth Fry and the Cadburys. They seemed to have made a lot of money out of chocolate, which was dubious; still, they were pacifists. The keys should be safe enough with them.

  Except, of course, that none of this could happen.

  I woke to what I was doing, looked at my watch. Christ, anything could be happening at the Lodge while I dizzied my brain with a dream and did nothing.

  What had happened at the Decoy Lodge had unfolded horizons on the secret, most intimate yearnings of Frere’s heart. It had also – he knew it as soon as he stepped out into the darkness – been unforgivable. All that night and throughout the following day, his mind swirled in confusion. Daring to face no one, scarcely touching his food, he was faint from guilt and adoration.

  Had it been guilt alone, he might have managed with more composure. Guilt was his constant companion – they were cell-mates learning under compulsion to endure one another, and the fact was nothing irretrievable had occurred. But it was not guilt alone: he was consumed also by a reckless desire for the irretrievable. Desire and guilt were indissolubly linked, and each was a violation of the other. In the ensuing turmoil only two things were clear: that Louisa Agnew had become the very air he breathed, and that any further intimate relations between them were utterly forbidden him.

  Though again and again he did so, there was no need to rehearse the circumstances which defined impossibility – that he was married, a Christian, a clergyman; that she was virgin, one of the souls whose care he had undertaken, the beloved daughter of a friend. Not only the fabric of the social order, but his own vows, the sacred nature of the faith he professed and the specific commandment of God, all had but a single answer to his railings against fate, and that answer was righteous and unremitting: No, this is forbidden.

  He heard it, and could not believe.

  Belief evaded him, because never as on that night had he experienced so intense a certainty that he was in the presence of the sacred. The air itself had been numinous; from the moment he had entered the Lodge it had been so. He had striven against its power, had trembled there, until at last it was undeniable. And he was sure that this sacral quality inhered in her – that it was the crystallization of her open heart, her lucid mind, her bright exacting spirit. It was, he had come to think, the very condition of her being. Yet when, in tender awe, he spoke of this, she gently demurred. She would not have it so. Nor, she insisted, was it a figment of his desperate heart. What was sacred there inhered between them. It was the love into which they were now elect.

  He had heard and known it to be true. Yet such a love was an abrogation of every law that held the world in place; and she seemed not to see it. For a space that night he had scarcely seen it himself, so innocent was its touch, so vast the sudden increase of space it seemed to bring. It was beyond all choice. He had not made up his mind that this should happen. When he walked through the dark wood towards the Decoy Lodge, it was with no expectation of finding himself transfigured so. Why then had he gone?

  Yes, Emilia had counselled that Miss Agnew was a charitable friend, and he had been sorely in need of friendship. He had remembered his wife’s words and acted on his promise. But he must be absolutely honest here, for nothing less would answer before the stern judge at his heart. There was more. It reached deeper.

  There could be no denying now that since they had first met in the Hall – from the very moment perhaps when he had heard her sing – Louisa Agnew had been, for him, a person apart. She was special, of another order, of another world almost. And it had not been her beauty alone that so distinguished her, though he had never been blind to that. Indeed, so intense had been its effect upon him he had scarcely dared look her too long in the face lest his susceptibility betray itself. With the same evasive tact he had tried to avert his mind from thoughts of her, never recognizing – fool that he was – how the effort required for each corrective withdrawal spoke to an almost magnetized condition. So in going to the Lodge that night he had been drawn by an intimation that, alone in all his parish, Louisa Agnew was the one person of importance to the survival of his soul.

  It was evident now. So expert had he made himself in the concealment of his true feelings, they had become inaccessible under layer upon layer of pretence, and would have remained so had not recent events precipitated a geological convulsion in his being. His world had crumbled in the quake, but there, among the ruins, this buried treasure was revealed. Yet he would swear on the book his thoughts profaned that he had not gone there in search of it. It had possessed him. And it remained a calamitous impossibility.

  These contrary truths were tearing him apart. They were – and he quailed at the blasphemy – the cross on which he was now nailed. And, for his unworthiness, he was nailed like Peter upside down. How else to account for this total inversion of his world?

  But this was disproportionate. He was no biblical apostle, faithless or otherwise. He was an insignificant Anglican parson overwhelmed by the clamour of his soul. If
Satan had taken an interest in him, it was a minor diversion only, a crumb fallen from the communion plate, not to be gloated over, not to be missed. Thousands had fallen so.

  He must try to keep his head cool.

  But how to do that when every fibre of his being lurched between ecstasy and dread? He had been wise at least to insist that they not meet privately again; that, yes, they must treasure what had unfolded between them but they must not presume on it.

  And what a lie, what a pious lie that was!

  Had she known it even as, reluctantly, she agreed? Had she known that everything in his heart must clamour to live out that joy? To shout of it? And there was no one to whom he could even murmur it save her.

  Should he break his own edict then and return to the Lodge? If perspective were to be restored, it could only be done between them, and perspective must be restored. Eros and agape were not to be confused, for only disaster could result from such confusion. He must go to her. They must speak of this. They must…

  That was to play with fire. It was to disguise recklessness as sobriety, not even deceiving himself as he did so. He knew the power he would encounter there, the power he would bring with him. He knew it, desired it and feared it. No, he must fight this out alone. Apart from normal intercourse of parson and parishioner, he must avoid her – though simply to think of placing the communion wafer between her lips brought his heart to his mouth.

  Until he had brought this tumult under control, he must not see her at all. He must see no one, for the effect of her touch must announce itself like a sign to any observant eye. He would betray himself. He would betray her. The parish was full of eyes. Even the servants in the Rectory were not to be trusted. He must be alone.

  With fine, untypical calculation, he saw that it might not be difficult to convince his servants that he had decided to enter a brief retreat in preparation for Easter. It was Lent and his needs were simple. He was capable of providing his own frugal meals. Quickly, while the resolve possessed him, he gave his servants leave. They would be paid in their absence, of course, and they must not concern themselves for his welfare: he wished only to be alone with his soul.

  Surprised, but not displeased, the servants left the house. Its silence closed about him.

  I told myself I’d wait till nine; then I’d ring the Lodge to warn them I was on my way. It would still be before dark, and the nights, I knew, were the worst of it. I’d hold it together here until nine, and then I’d act.

  Throughout the afternoon I dug. I’d done nothing that Clive had asked me to do in return for the cottage, and it was late in the season, yes, but I found a fork in the shed and dug. The ground was hard, the couch grass rampant. When you pulled at the roots, almost always a shred snapped off, slunk away into the soil to breed again. Like evil in a fairy tale, never quite extinguished. Perhaps because its energy was needed, I thought, because an entirely happy ending would be untrue. It would leave the lovers iced like figures on a wedding cake, pretty but sterile. The Garden needed snakes.

  I turned up earthworms. They wriggled in the sods, blinded by the sudden light. A blackbird joined me, a few spits away. He was my overseer. He had uses for my labour.

  I remembered Ralph talking about husbandry, thought about the difference between husbandry and rape; about Gypsy May, earth goddess, each comer’s whore and mother. About the male desire to possess, exclude trespassers, conquer and control – Napoleon in Wellington boots. I thought about my own futile efforts to assert rights of possession –my wife, my house, my children. I thought of Edward struggling for ownership of Laura, become Giant Holdfast now himself, and whatever he did, no matter how he raged, nothing would alter the facts.

  In the crude language with which the sexual life seemed cursed, I’d had Laura, and it had left me wanting her. She was not to be had, not unless she chose to give herself, and she was not about to give herself to someone who behaved as I’d behaved. That love had been absent from my love-making was evident in the very nature of my response. I’d behaved in much the same way as Edward must be behaving now, for in the matter of the heart it was no great leap from the petulant demands of post-coital possessiveness to the blacking of eyes. It was all depressingly male – not only my responses then, but the way I tried to think about them now. It brought the delicacy of a mechanical digger to the subtle realm of feeling. It lacked grace. It shunned the willingness to live with risk, to trust the unwritten promises of care.

  I put my foot to the shoulder of the spade and saw what must have long been evident to an outsider’s eye: it was time I grew up.

  I dug till the blister on my thumb was raw again. Then I waited. Waiting felt like a part – a very slow part – of growing up. But I waited like the box in the Post Office, red alert shifting to black.

  Though the image was disproportionate, it felt scarily apt, for the box was the black hole in all our heads. It occurred to me that if there was such a box here, in Munding, then there must be one in every village – every hamlet’s hotline to hell among the groceries and the greeting cards, the bottles of boiled sweets and the notices about social-security benefits.

  I wondered if Edward knew it was there. I wondered how he would interpret its symbolism. He had been looking for a key; I had tried to help him; and I had found only the box. That and a dream of keys. About which – again it was as if Edward stood at my shoulder insisting – I should think symbolically.

  I had half-begun to do so when I looked at it the last time. The woman and the Pope I knew about. The keys were obvious. So what about the Quakers? What did Quakers symbolize?

  Porridge Oats.

  I saw the fat grin on the Quaker Oats packet, scowled, shook my head. The flippant mind jamming the waves with static. Think again.

  Why were they called Quakers?

  Because they quaked.

  Why did they quake?

  Because, I remembered, they were moved to speak.

  In the silent spellbound meditation of the meeting house, sooner or later someone would feel compelled to speak. And not simply because they had something to say but because something demanded to be said through them. As, it seemed, this dream insisted on speaking now through me.

  I’d had something of the same experience at public meetings – the tension between wanting to keep silent, inconspicuous, and knowing that something must be said. It happened at difficult moments, when you were least sure of yourself, yet certain that the thing should be said. You quaked. It was a little like the birth-pangs of a poem. It clattered and banged until the words were out, and even then it didn’t stop. It was what was happening to me now as I was torn between the contrary impulses to dismiss this dream and to engage with it; to wait here as I’d been told to do, or rush headlong down the lanes to the Lodge. One quaked.

  It was – it occurred to me – like the forces at work inside an alembick, threatening to blow up in the alchemist’s face unless those warring tensions could be reconciled. So that was it – people who quaked were alembicks. They were Pelicans. They were members of the chymical wedding.

  With that realization I saw how the whole dream was elegantly structured around the tension of opposing forces: male, female; capitalist, communist; secular, spiritual; Catholic, Protestant; hierarchy, equality. It was a dream about conflict and reconciliation. Of fission and fusion.

  It was about holding together. If we were to find a key to the explosive condition of the world, it could only be done by holding contraries together. That was the key.

  It was also obvious.

  For a moment I recoiled from the banality. It was like saying, “You really should love one another.” Of course we should, but we don’t.

  Then I saw what was not so obvious: that the holding together could only be done by quakers. And that meant not only the Society of Friends, however aptly named, but men and women everywhere who were prepared to quake. For quaking was what happened when you endured inside yourself the tension of divisive forces. It was what happened when
you refused to shrug them off, neither disowning your own violence nor deploying it; not admitting only the good and throwing evil in the teeth of the opposition, but holding the conflict together inside yourself as yours – the dark and the light of it, the love and the lovelessness, the terror and the hope. And as you did this, you changed. The situation changed – though whether it changed enough was another question. Perhaps a meeting of quality and quantity was also needed. Perhaps, in the end, what mattered was how many people were prepared to quake this way, for such quaking spirits were the keepers of the keys.

  I woke from this trance of thought to find myself conscious of a beating heart. I saw it quaking in its blood – the auricles and the ventricles, the right side and the left, the upper and the lower chambers pulsing together – like the interlaced retorts of my first big dream.

  Edward had called it a glimpse into the thalamus – the bridal chamber of the brain. And perhaps it was. But I saw it differently now. I saw the retorts as a hologram of the heart. I watched as the bright bulbs of glass melted and fused into soft, muscular flesh, beating blood-red, alive and palpitant, and I wanted to share this dream. I wanted to share it with Edward.

  A knock came at the door.

  “What is it?” Henry Agnew demanded, loathing all the world and wishing only to be left alone.

  “It is your long-lost daughter. May she be permitted to come in?”

  For a moment he sat in the silent library, eyes closed. Then he sighed, removed his spectacles, and got up to open the door.

  In a simple dress of grey watered-silk, she stood, holding her arms behind her back, looking up at him uncertainly. He was confused by her eyes: there was delight and anticipation there, but also, he thought, at the corners, above the fine bones of her cheeks, a glimmering of tears. Instantly an answering blur started to his own. “My dear,” he said, “it has been so very long.”