The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  “I could see,” she told me, “that he didn’t want to believe and it really frightened me. It was much harder than with you. I mean, if you know something and the person you trust most of all doesn’t believe you… It’s one of the worst feelings in the world. I felt completely isolated and it brought back…” She faltered there, lifted her thumb to her mouth and was biting the nail. “I knew I had to tell him what happened after you left, and if he didn’t believe that then I was crazy.”

  “After I left?”

  Her already harrowed face wilted further. “About an hour after you’d gone,” she said, “…everything changed. It was the change itself that frightened me at first… after what had happened earlier, those first feelings… It had been like a lot of doors all opening at once – doors on the past, on the present, maybe on the future even. It was like space increasing round me. And then, out of nowhere, this feeling of everything closing down again. I was fighting it all afternoon. I tried to think of it as guilt – about Edward, about what I’d done to him – but it was crazier than guilt, blacker, as if there could be no possibility of meaning in it at all. I tried to do things to make it go away. Even opening the kiln didn’t work. I couldn’t think straight. The pots seemed ugly, lifeless. And then I was smashing them as they came out. I just smashed them against the bricks and threw them away. Then I had to stop. It completely overwhelmed me – the most frightening feeling I’ve had since…” Again she faltered, shook her head, eyes closed, until she recovered herself. “It was like fainting into blackness, as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the air. Like having the life torn out of you. And I knew that something terrible had happened. It had happened to them – this intolerable feeling of life being cut off from itself…”

  She broke off, at the limits both of language and her capacity to sustain the memory. Her face belied all argument. I knew – as Edward must have known – that this was real. Her fear was real, and it frightened me.

  “I didn’t know how bad it could be,” she was saying. “I had no idea. I thought I understood some things. But it’s terrible, Alex, it’s truly terrible. And now… what happened to Edward last night… It feels the same. I’m really scared that what I felt wasn’t just about the past. That it’s now. The disaster is now, and I’ve caused it.”

  When the bell rang that night, jangling throughout the silence of the Rectory, it seemed as though the very house had become an extension of his mind and was subject to the same convulsions. Other than the small sounds he made himself, it was the first noise he had heard for many hours, an alien invasion, familiar only in its plangent anxiety. At first he could not bring himself to answer, for the prospect of being called out on some urgent pastoral mission utterly unnerved him. He lacked the stillness to contemplate his own infirmity let alone attend to another’s. Yet he remained parson enough to know that only great need could summon him at this late hour. Should he fail to respond, the consequent remorse could only aggravate this already intolerable solitude.

  He caught a glimpse of his face in the hall mirror – a wild man with frantic eyes and hair ruffled in a standing mane. Hurriedly he sought to smooth its wisps between tense hands. The bell jangled again above his ears. He stared at the vibrating spring, steadied himself, and opened the door on the damply caped and hooded figure of the woman who had come between himself and his demons, between his duty and his heart.

  He stood at the door wide-eyed, unable to comprehend how she had stepped from the very instant of his thought to substance, here, at his threshold. Not a word was spoken. She might for a moment have indeed been a phantom conjured from his lonely mind. But there were raindrops dripping at her hood, and she was muddy-booted.

  “Miss Agnew,” he exclaimed, then immediately – her eyes demanded no less – “Louisa.”

  “I have departed the Lodge,” she murmured. “I could not bear to remain alone in the Hall…”

  “Your father?…”

  “Is alone… in his library. He will not ask for me.”

  “I am… alone here. The servants… I have…”

  “I know. I would not otherwise have come.” She looked up at him, for she had heard the reservation in his voice. “You wish me to leave?”

  “Dear God, I wish only to see you again, but…”

  “Then may I come in?”

  A moment longer his dark figure with the lamplight at his back blocked the door. Then he stood, uncertainly, aside.

  How perilous things were between them now. He assisted with the removal of her cape, and saw, when she turned again, how a raindrop glistened in her hair. Then he ushered her through into the parlour, and she sat down at his invitation, arranging her skirts with tense hands. He remained standing, wondering aloud whether he might offer her some refreshment, but it was declined. She smiled at his uncertainty, said, “I beg you to be seated, for I feel at some slight disadvantage if you stand over me so.” He did as he was bidden. The room bated its breath around them.

  It was some moments before they recovered their powers of speech and, as they did so in the same instant, they must disentangle themselves from the brief collision that ensued. He deferred. Hesitantly she disclosed the nature of her feelings on leaving the Lodge, and though these feelings were edited a little in the telling – the resumed formality between them seemed to require such discretion – he listened attentively also to the spaces between her words. She gathered strength, and went on to recount the painful encounter with her father that same day. Her confusions were apparent; Frere wore the face of receptive sympathy which he knew from previous experience assured his interlocutors that they might trust his patient understanding. Even as she spoke, however, both were aware that the Rectory was not the Decoy Lodge. They were no longer sequestered among dark woodland by the lake; they were in the heart of the village with neighbours all around; they were in the house he had shared with his wife, who might have reclined across from them now, watching, listening.

  Yet they were alone, and if Emilia was not present in those difficult moments, neither were the gods. It was only the two of them – a bewildered, married parson and a confused young spinster of the parish, both yearning now for what terrified them both. The air might shatter at a truly spoken word.

  He sought refuge from the irretrievable, striving for a detached yet concerned interest, for control. Somehow this thing must be controlled. She must forgive him, he tried, but he was unfamiliar still with the precise nature of the work on which she and her father were engaged. He would be better placed to understand her distress, and respond to it, if she might say more.

  She looked up in incredulous appeal, scarcely masking the pang of disappointment. Surely he must know? She met only a gaze of mild intellectual curiosity which would have frozen speech at her lips had she not seen also the unconcealable tenderness fretting at his eyes. Momentarily it encouraged her. She tried – how lamely – to speak of the Hermetic Mystery and its complementary relation to the Christian faith. She intimated at its vital importance as a remedy for the crisis of the age. She watched him nod, trying to comprehend. But what did any of this matter? Either they were it, or it was nothing. Even as she spoke, another, detached portion of her mind was listening. It shared his uncertainty. It wondered whether she had, after all, deluded herself.

  His fingers were at his earlobe now. Wanly she smiled as her heart went out at the familiar, bewildered gesture. She wanted to cross the great space of this green room, to kneel beside him, take that hand in hers, be held again, for she was utterly certain of her love, if of nothing else. And utterly unable to move.

  Then – in an instant of devastating clarity – she saw. The gift of love had been given, yes. Both ways it had been offered and received. It had become her life; in breach of all propriety, it had emboldened her to come by night to the house where she knew he waited alone; yet he could not rise to meet her and fold her in his arms any more than she could cross this final space to him. The limit had been reached. She must learn to
live with the knowledge that their love must remain eternally an inward thing, never to be expressed except as a modest sharing with the world of the radiance it lent.

  Yet it was so charged with power that the act of containment must soon prove insufferable. It was not to be borne. Her spirit refused to believe this love a mere Midas curse, turning the whole world to gold at its touch, yet rendering it impossible to breathe.

  It seemed, at that moment, to have turned them to stone. Neither was capable of the movement that both desired. They sat, like dean and student, untouching, saying nothing to break the spell that held them there. The further he questioned and the more she answered, the deeper the gloom that gathered about them. The words fell emptily like dropped tin trays. Mystery spoken thus became nonsense, noise, absurdity, until she could bear it no longer and her eyes were a flash flood of tears which left him astonished and distraught. He fished for a handkerchief and found none. Neither could he bear this grief. He stood, hesitated a moment, and then, relinquishing all but the present moment, he crossed the room to sit on the couch beside her, put a tentative arm about her shoulder and, as she fell against his breast, heard himself saying through a silent welter of tears, “Dear God, Louisa, however terrible the consequence may be, I love you so.”

  For a space there was no further motion, yet what had been intended as a gesture of comfort was already more than that. In crossing the room Frere had overcome immense resistances with an ease that astonished him; in speaking his word a new and irrepressible flow of energy had been released. The consoling gesture became embrace, the embrace a sudden confluence of need; the need beseeched completion in a meeting of their lips, and that the kiss itself was no more than the first quiet chord in an unpremeditated music was now entirely evident. Even then he might have withdrawn in confusion but she had passed beyond that possibility. Her mouth was raised again to his, and gazing into her eyes, he saw space enlarge itself around him like the unrolling of waters across an otherwise impassable sea.

  There was silence – a long moment less of decision than admission – then, holding his gaze, she released the clasp of his hand from her waist, and stood. Her fingers reached for the button at her throat, and quietly, without modesty or shame – as though she were at last proudly shedding the case of matter itself – garment after garment was laid aside until she stood naked there. Unpinned, the hair fell in a mantle about her shoulders. Her hands were crossed as if to hold it fast. Then she turned away, trembling a little, and stepped closer to the fire where she sat with her arms loosely gathered at her knees, and smiled at him.

  Though void of words to name it, Frere knew that a more than physical transformation had taken place before his eyes. He was all wonder now, for though they were here, in his house, he sensed himself more a stranger to this realm than she: and if, shyly, he too stripped himself as bare as Adam once was, it was an Adam shown the garden after his own fall. Yet, astoundingly, the gate stood open.

  His thoughts – for he lacked her facility to free the mind of them – dwelt much on paradise. These were its meadows and its vales, this the very fragrance of its air. From some moment long before, he recalled the presence of a snake – green-headed, crackle-glazed, and flickering its tongue. He marvelled now that he should dare to let it bite him so. Yet bite it did. He felt the swirl of venom in his blood, and might have fainted there, but then came power. It came as a sense of singularity, of having stepped, re-minted, hand outstretched, from the first chaos of things to where all manner of new joy was possible. Power then, and with that power a desire for the absolute perfection of this moment.

  He heard her cries. The arsenic-green walls of that still room in the Rectory swayed about him.

  Then it was done. He looked down where she lay beneath him, heard her breath, saw its rise and fall, the long, closed lashes at her eyelids, the torrent of hair intimately unfurled around the rapt brow, the soft folds of her ears. He saw the smile that seemed no smile at all but the serene composure of a face in which each muscle was so relaxed that the spirit might have quite departed from it. He saw the eyes open, the unfathomable wonder in that gaze, its welcoming…

  And terror struck.

  When she looked up, amazed, she saw him cowering across the room, holding himself.

  The only light in the Decoy Lodge was the one Laura had left burning; there was no sign of Edward. She telephoned the Hall again and, when the machine answered, left a message: “Ralph, this is Laura. If Edward comes by, have him ring me, please. It’s urgent.” Then we looked at one another, uncertain which way to turn, intimate only in our shared anxiety.

  “He’s probably out in the woods somewhere,” I said, “ – clearing his mind. I think we should wait here. He’s bound to come back.”

  “And if he hurts himself?”

  “He won’t.

  “You weren’t there. You don’t know.”

  In the silence of the Lodge we were almost whispering, yet the words might have come from opposite corners of the galaxy. Laura stood by a window, staring out into the night, withheld from me. Feeling responsible and useless, deciding that whatever else that meeting on the lawn might have meant, this wary distance from one another could not have been intended, I said, “Edward once told me that everyone has to find their own way out of hell. He said that the real danger is falling asleep there, and I can’t believe he’ll do that. Right now I’m just as worried about you.”

  She turned her head towards me, for the first time that night conscious of me as more than a man with questions. I tried to smile and added, “I also think he was right when he said you shouldn’t blame yourself. You were looking for what was real – trusting to it. We have to trust Edward now.”

  Her eyes appraised me for a long moment, the right one bloodshot and curled a little against the bruise; then she said, “You feel different.”

  “So my wife tells me. I was phoning her when you came this morning.”

  She received this information, nodding, lips slightly ajar. “Something’s changed… in you, I mean.”

  “I hope so. Look… your eye… Shouldn’t we do something about it?”

  “It looks worse than it is.”

  “How did it happen?”

  She sat down then, a hand at her temple. I lit cigarettes for us and, after a time, seeking relief from tension in narrative, she described how Edward had recoiled from the first shock of her revelation into silence. He wasn’t arguing with her any more, not trying to substitute his own explanation for hers. Nor was he at all sensitive to Laura’s distress. Eventually he had retreated to the bedroom and, when she sought him out there, shouted at her to go away, to leave him alone. He came down later, unspeaking, in a state of furious gloom, and then began to drink. He sat, ignoring her approaches, drinking his way down a bottle of whisky, and then, when she tried to touch him, hit out with a violence that knocked her to the floor. Laura was dazed by the blow and when she recovered he was gone, out of the house. She found him sitting on the jetty, trembling. At her approach he collapsed into tears.

  Neither of them had slept that night. Laura stayed with him throughout, trying to talk to him, trying to make him speak. He remained unreachable, lurching between incoherent extremes of feeling – laughing sometimes, grimly, to himself – and at each lurch descending deeper into a trance of despair. There was one moment when he looked across at her with eyes so malevolently cold she might have run from the room had he not spoken then, and what he said was, in itself, frightening. He said, “I feel evil. I feel absolutely evil.” But the mercy was that he had spoken it, for the sense of evil seemed literally to express itself, and then, for a time, he was capable of only tears.

  It had been mid-morning before he fell asleep, and Laura too was drained by then. She was afraid to leave him but dreaded that I might come looking for her, and knew I must be kept away from the Lodge till this was over. As I wasn’t contactable by phone, she’d driven quickly to The Pightle while Edward slept, only to find me not there. Ed
ward was still sleeping when she got back, and she sat for a long time, waiting for him to wake, hoping he might be reachable again. Then, without intending it, she too slept. She woke, hours later, to find him gone.

  “I’ve seen him in a bad way before,” she said, “but never like this. He could scarcely breathe at times. He was fighting for his breath as if his throat was blocked, and I couldn’t do anything but try to hold him. He’d hardly talk at all and when he did I couldn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. It was about other people… to them sometimes… people I don’t know, the past, things he’s never talked about. And he wouldn’t explain. He wasn’t really talking to me. A lot of the time it was as though I wasn’t even there. Just this chaos of feeling, as if his whole life had collapsed around him, and nothing made sense.”

  Then, like the lid of a box clicking shut, I saw what should have been obvious from the first – that this wasn’t just to do with us, with Laura and me, with sexual betrayal. Edward had worn the horns before. He knew how to use them. Though they might for a time play pitch and toss with anyone who got in their way, he was familiar with this savagery as the first, primitive stage in the renewal of feeling. He knew it and had tried to act from the knowledge, but it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked because this was more than a matter of mere cuckoldry.

  “Do you remember what he said about the Tarot card? About the tower – how it represented both my past and his future?”

  “I’ve thought about that, but…”

  “I think he got it wrong,” I said. “The lightning wasn’t us – or, at least, we were only a small part of it. It didn’t really hit until he realized you were telling the truth about Louisa.”

  “But he never accepted that.”

  “I think he did, Laura. We were talking about it earlier that day, and he was trying to rationalize it away. I could see him doing it. It was as if he couldn’t afford to believe that you might be right.”

  Laura was still dazed from exhaustion, and her frown showed only bewilderment. “Think about it,” I pressed. “He’s staked his life on trying to understand the alchemical secret. After poetry had failed, after whatever else he’s been into, this was the key, right? Alchemy became the obsession. And this place was his best chance – perhaps his last chance – of unlocking it. He was sure that the Agnews had kept the tradition alive, that Louisa had the key.”