“Yes, but I don’t see…”
“Suppose you were right. Suppose that the real secret behind the burning of Louisa’s book was a sexual secret – a scandal – one that rocked her father’s Victorian heart. If it was that, and only that, then for Edward it was the end of a dream. It made everything meaningless. All those years were waste. And the way you found it out… intuited it… whatever…” My eyes shifted away from her gaze as I said, “He couldn’t argue with that. It was over for him. Don’t you see?”
I looked back at her, saw the bruised eye seem to squint for focus. She said nothing. “He’d locked himself in,” I said. “You were outside, looking for the real, and you found it. I think he knows that now and he can’t handle it. I suspect he wasn’t even hitting out at you – he was punishing Louisa.”
Laura sat for a long time in silence. She wore that bruise like a badge of her endurance, and I regretted speaking that last thought. It stole something from her as I had not intended to steal, but I was sure I was right. I watched her recollecting all Edward had said and done, assessing it in the light of this interpretation. Eventually she looked across at me. “You really think that?”
Her voice was flat, dull. “It makes sense,” I said. “I thought it was just us at first. I was so sure I could understand him from my own experience. But he’s larger than that. He’s taken bigger risks…”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean about Louisa. You really think that’s the whole of it?” There was a glacial calm about her now.
Uncertainly I said, “I was trying to understand Edward…”
“I’m trying to understand you.”
I was on trial and had not expected to find myself there – not by her. “Laura, I think it’s possible. I talked to Neville Sallis about Frere… following up on your intuition. He wouldn’t say anything. He knew, but he wasn’t saying. I think there was a scandal, and if the church still won’t talk about it, then…”
“A scandal.”
“I think that must be it.”
“And this is how Edward sees it?”
“I’m almost sure of it.”
“Then you’re wrong,” she said. “You’re both wrong.”
The statement was absolute, the confusion gone. Then, in sudden exasperation, she exclaimed. “What is it with you men? Why for God’s sake won’t you see?”
I was dismayed by the sudden anger. I’d been so sure I had the picture together; the evidence had gathered force even as I rehearsed it; I thought I was reinforcing her own position. Yet her response made the insight seem purblind.
“Laura, I think you have to…”
“Do you know how many times you’ve used that word? You think this, you think that. It’s like a leaking faucet – think, think, think!”
We were both still racked by worry for Edward; it left us both on a short fuse; and her expression – it seemed to say that if I was changing, I hadn’t changed enough – unleashed exasperations of my own. What was it with these women that they must have everything all ways, were unappeasable in their expectations? I said, “Isn’t it obvious what happens if we act without thinking?”
She heard the cold accusation in my voice, and tossed back her hair. “So tell me – what were you thinking yesterday?” And, when I did not immediately answer: “That it was too good a chance to pass up? That it was your lucky day? Is that it? Is that the whole of it?”
“If you were listening, you’d know that’s not true.”
“But I did listen and I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening here.” She drew fiercely on her cigarette, then glared at me again. “For a time yesterday – and listen very carefully to this, I don’t want you to get me wrong – for a time everything felt clear. Felt, you understand, felt! And I don’t just mean about Louisa, though she was part of it, she was there. I mean about me. I felt freed by what happened. It was like coming into possession of myself. For a time I felt absolutely sure of who I am, of why I’m here. And whatever you think that means you’re wrong, because you can’t know. It was obvious yesterday that you didn’t know, and if the feeling hadn’t been so strong, I could have wept for that. As it was, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when you came at me like you did. And the way I found that freedom – yes, if you like, there was something reckless about it – a kind of appetite for life, to be in it, of it, for it. After all the tension, the confusion, years of it – not just now, years before that – I felt single. I felt to be me. And not just selfishly me, on my own, but me as part of things, belonging here… given. I’ve been trying to hold on to that. Through everything that happened afterwards I was trying to hold it, to act from it, in the full knowledge that whatever freedom I’d found was conditioned by care – real care for everything else. Then when Edward first came back…” The ardour in her eyes was displaced by perplexed despair. “He was so gentle with me at first… I was sure he understood. I thought we’d be able to hold it together between us… that if we were true with one another…” She shook her head, her eyes closed, and when they opened again they were all tears. “It’s hopeless,” she said, “hopeless. It practically killed Louisa and it still goes on. It happens all the time. What are you frightened of, for God’s sake? What are you frightened of?”
Though it was addressed to all men, the question went through me like a spear. I’d been struggling for calm, for understanding, to make sense of what was happening around me. I thought I’d grasped it, that – intellectually at least – I was in control. But I was frightened, and not just for Edward. Laura’s impassioned reproach dragged me to dark ground where I was night-blind still – or where, more accurately, I saw just enough to realize how fathomless that dark might be. It was the realm of feeling and of dream, and I was afraid of my own dreams, of my own feelings. I was afraid of the charge they laid. I could think about them, yes; I could even try to act on those thoughts. But step beyond that brink and nothing held. You were in an unreliable region where – why not? – the dead might walk and speak; where reason might undergo a dissolution so complete, a man – as perhaps Edward had already found – could go quite crazy there. In such lunar territory we were bat-fowlers at best, stumbling about, struggling to keep our lamps alight because the moon could not be trusted.
Yet if one refused to go… if one refused to be there, to suffer the dissolution that came with full feeling, to undergo it… then was any real renewal possible?
I remembered how the loss of Jess had overwhelmed me; how I’d cut and run from the giddy baselessness of things, from the feeling that I might drown in chaos. I remembered the panic which had seized me when making love to Laura, and how I’d recoiled from it. I remembered the sense of loss which came with that recoil; the abdication to resentment, rage, demand. And still, after all I’d been through – because of all I’d been through – this dithering on the brink; which was, I realized, still absorbed in its own interminable business while a woman sat across from me in silent tears.
I crossed the room, crouched beside her chair, offered a hand to her shoulder and felt her flinch away. “If we knew,” I said, “if I could answer that, maybe we wouldn’t be afraid.”
“Then why won’t you learn?”
“We’re trying, Laura – me, Edward, all of us. If it was easy, if it was a simple thing, don’t you think we’d all be dancing? But the old ways of being male… they don’t work any more. The meaning’s drained from them. And there are no easy options, so we have to use our minds. It’s a precious thing, this capacity for thought. We have to use it.”
“To the exclusion of everything else?”
“No, not that. I know you’re right… that even to think well we have to tune our intelligence to the flow of feeling. And we get it wrong. Again and again we get it wrong, because the feelings hurt… they’re injured…”
“And that’s our fault?”
“Laura, the heart’s a complicated thing.”
“It’s simple,” she protested. “At heart it’s very sim
ple.”
But any poet could tell her that simplicity is the hardest thing of all. To marry thought and feeling, to let them flow together through the imagination in the full reach of its sympathy so that right words came like water from the rock – it might look simple when it was done but there was nothing harder in the world. And the heart might be no more than a simple pump keeping the flow of sympathy alive until it seized, but beyond that first essential duty its operations were endlessly complex, endlessly mysterious, or why else were we here?
“Laura, what might be light to you is dark to us. It comes hard.”
“But it’s necessary. You need it.”
“Yes.”
“Then why be afraid of it?”
“Aren’t you frightened now?”
“Yes, but not of that. I’m frightened by what you do with it… by what Edward’s doing with it…”
“Laura, we’re trying. We do try.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think you’d rather die.”
Her eyes were damp still but the tears had stopped, arrested by their own bewilderment. I was close to her, holding that gaze; we were both caught in a flow of sympathy that was also fierce resistance; yet it must have looked anything but that as we heard the latch click, turned our heads, and saw Edward standing there.
I stood up instantly. As Laura raised herself from the chair, I could sense the relief in her. She started to cross the room but Edward lifted his hand, pointed a finger, and stopped her in her tracks. The first surprise had vanished from his face. His eyes swivelled in my direction, narrowing. Beneath the moustache his lips curled in a derisory smile. It came at me like a splash of black paint. “I see you weren’t expecting company,” he said.
“Edward, Alex came to find you. I went…”
“Had he mislaid me then? Overlooked me somewhere?” He was wearing a long poacher’s coat, weather-proofed, an oily olive green, with the collar turned up at his neck, as though it was raining out there, or cold. It made him look taller than I remembered, more louche. I stood, weighing the perverse smile, weighing the possible words.
It was Laura who spoke. “Edward, I’ve been out of my mind…”
“I don’t think so,” he answered, and crossed to a stick-back chair where he sat down with his shoulders hunched, his hands in the large pockets of the coat. “I’ve been out of my mind. He’s been out of his mind. But you… No, I don’t think so.” His eyes flickered back at me. “Feeling good are we, Cambridge? Feeling like a man… like a green man, are we? All shaggy and wild and… what’s the word I want? Ah yes, instinctual.”
Before I could answer, he sniffed and looked away. “I gather you’ve been privileged with a mystical experience… a little Tantric trauma on the lawn. On my lawn.” He fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette packet. “Also that you were too stupid to make the most of it. But then…” – he struck a match, lit the cigarette – “against stupidity even the gods are helpless. So what chance was there for a blind old fool like me?” He coughed over the first full gasp of smoke.
Laura said, “Edward, we have to talk.”
“But I’ve heard it all, my dear. I’ve heard it all before, and far more elegantly phrased. What about you, Cambridge? Don’t you find they’re all much of a muchness – Laura, Louisa, Anne? I could list a score more but I’ll spare you the tedium. I mean, once they’ve got into their stride… once they’ve put the pincer-grip around your legs…” He grinned up at me like a malevolent elf. “But no… I forget. You haven’t seen it yet. All you see is Laura coming at you with the Rosa Mundi opening up between her thighs and you just can’t wait to jump because you have not yet observed the teeth.”
I steadied my breath, held his stare. “Edward, you can say what you like about me, but…”
“I lack the words, dear man. My dictionary fails. Perhaps you have suggestions? I mean, you’re the poet, aren’t you? You’re the one who dips his wick in ink.”
Laura glanced anxiously across at me. “Alex, I think you’d better leave.”
“He’s not going anywhere. Not yet. Not till I’ve finished with him.” His eyes had never left me. “The pity of it is,” he added, “I could have loved you, you treacherous little shit. I really think I could.” Then he did look away, the cigarette pressed to his lips. I saw that his fingers were trembling.
“Edward…” I faltered a moment as he looked back at me, brows innocently raised, like a man addressed across a dinner table. “You once told me that I’d chosen what happened to me. That whether I knew it or not, it was my choice. Well, I think you’ve been doing some choosing too. If you won’t listen to us, you should listen to yourself – to your best self.”
“Dead, dear man. Stone dead. Laura, have you offered our guest a drink? You should. He’s going to need it.”
“Your words, Edward,” I urged.
“I know. And they bore me. They bore me to extinction. Have you none of your own? Laura, make yourself useful. The drink.”
“You’ve had enough,” she answered. “You don’t need it.”
“Don’t tell me what I need. Just bring the bottle and shut up while this memorious parrot and I finish our game.”
“It isn’t a game, Edward,” I said. “It never was.”
“Oh, I think so.”
“Then if it was, you’ve won. I’m…”
“But it isn’t over yet.”
“As far as I’m concerned it is.”
“Oh no, sweet pie. It’s not that easy. You can’t walk out on this one.”
“I’m not walking out. I came here looking for you. I want to talk about what’s happened.”
He snorted on his cigarette. “Do you think I care about your little hour of splendour in the grass? Do you imagine that in the great sum of things the adventures of your tiresome cock amount to anything more than a puddle of spilt seed? Over which, if I may say so, it’s far too late to start crying now. What a sentimental oaf you are! Laura, the whisky.”
“If you want it, you’ll have to get it yourself.”
Edward released a heavy sigh, shrugged, then got up and crossed to the table where the whisky bottle stood by a single glass. He poured a large measure, left it there, and sat down again. “I told you,” he said, “it was for him. I don’t need it. He will.” And then, mildly, as if picking up the threads of a conversation, to me: “Do you remember the poem?”
“Which poem?”
“You know – the one which, typically, you couldn’t write.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Edward.”
“Yes, you do. The one about the Green Man. The one you couldn’t write because a better man had already written it a long time ago. I mean the Gawain poem. Gawayne and the Grene Knyghte.” He enunciated the title in impeccable Middle English. “You have read it, I suppose?”
“Of course I have, but…”
“Then you’ll remember the story – how the Green Man comes with his axe into Arthur’s court and demands a game. You can’t conjure up Green Men without playing their game, and you have to play by the rules. Do you remember the rules, Cambridge?” Again Laura tried to intervene, and again his finger silenced her. “Forgive me” – he spoke over her – “but as you haven’t the faintest idea what we’re talking about, I think you’d better keep your mouth shut. Our friend, on the other hand – he knows. He knows we’re not just talking books now. So why don’t you enlighten her, Cambridge? Why don’t you show her your stuff?”
“Edward, I don’t see…”
He sighed impatiently. “It’s simple enough, but let me remind you. The rules are these: if any of the knights is brave enough to lop off the Green Man’s head, he’s free to do so – on condition that he shows up for a return match at the Green Chapel a year later. Well, the odds look good, don’t they? There’s the axe, there’s the bared neck. One quick stroke – with a hissing breath Edward brought down his hand in a slicing action – “game over. So Gawain, rashest of knights, steps forth, takes the a
xe, and the head rolls. But what happens then, Cambridge? What next?”
I swallowed, said, “The Green Man puts his head back on.”
“That’s right. The game’s not quite over after all. Do you begin to see now? It’s a talking head. ‘See you at the Green Chapel,’ it says. ‘If you’re a man of honour, you’ll come.’ Are you a man of honour, Cambridge? Do you know the meaning of the word?”
“Edward, there are things you have to…”
“‘’Tis the finest sense of justice that the human mind can frame.’ Even that old windbag Wordsworth, who behaved not entirely honourably in his youth, knew that. Honour and justice, Cambridge. Do you see now why we haven’t finished yet?”
I held the derisory flash of his eyes, refusing to believe him beyond all reach. “Didn’t you once tell me that when a man’s head is off he might start to think with his heart?”
Edward snorted. “Well, he might, I suppose. He just might. On the other hand, he might not. We’ll have to see, won’t we? I have the axe. I have it right here.” He tapped one of the pockets of his coat. I heard the sound of something hollow in there.
Laura shook her head, distraught. “Edward, what is this?”
“It’s the key we’ve been looking for, my dear. I’ve found it. We needn’t look any more.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“You don’t need to. You’ve played your part. Consciously or not, you did it admirably, and now you can leave the stage. From here on in it’s a man’s game.” He turned again to me. “Well, old son, you took my head off all right. Neatly done while my back was turned. Can’t say I felt a thing at the time. But are you going to play by the rules now? I wonder if you have the balls.” He coughed over his cigarette, his eyes watering a little, and then, a sickly smile scarcely distinguishable from a wince passed across his face. “It’s my turn now. I have the axe. I know where the Green Chapel is, and you’re luckier than Gawain – it won’t take a year to get there. We can drive there in ten minutes. So if you’re half the man you think you are, you’ll drink your drink and we’ll be on our way.”
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