The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  I was in no hurry to go anywhere with Edward, not like this. I picked up the glass and sipped at it slowly, taking in the feel of him. He sat in the chair like a cold lunar shadow of himself, glittering and sinister. He found it difficult to look me directly in the eyes, as though an instant’s true meeting might displace the caricature he’d made of me and allow reality back in. I could feel his will in there, hating my youth, hating the fact that he’d ever admitted me to his intimacy; hating, perhaps, the image of himself reflected in my gaze. But at least he was speaking, not locked away in impenetrable silence. Somehow it must be sustained. It felt vital to keep him talking until that cold will broke, and the injured heart might be reached. Yet reason wouldn’t reach it, and sympathy neither. It would take an entirely irrational approach, a risk.

  “Wasn’t there another bargain in the poem?” I said. “Didn’t Gawain promise to hand over whatever he’d gained in the days before the second meeting?”

  Momentarily he squinted at me through narrowed eyes, then drew on his cigarette. “Well, we all know what you’ve gained, Cambridge. Nothing I haven’t had myself, so there can’t be much interest in that.”

  “There’s something else. Something you don’t know about. Something I think you need to know.”

  “Now what could that possibly be?”

  “I had a dream last night.”

  “Ha! Now there’s a funny thing. I had a dream as well. And so did Bottom once, poor fool! And my dream was somewhat like his in that it hath no bottom. Shall I tell you about it?”

  “Let me tell you mine first.”

  “No. I think we’re all much happier if you keep your dull little dreams to yourself. I should have thought that was obvious by now, and my dream tells you why. It’s a dream about how the world was made. It was made by a demented angel. Crazy with loneliness, he looked into a mirror and the mirror cracked, and thus the world was made. We can wander about picking up the pieces if we like, but all we ever see is our own face squinting back. Through a crack. Darkly. It’s a cold place, you see. A place of question and cold wind. And with such poor lighting that we can only see at all because the mirror’s back is black. It was a botched job, Cambridge. The Gnostics knew it. They knew there’s Gnothing for us here. So your father and mine would have been much wiser not to bring us here at all. They should have left us where we belong – out across that milky way which begins beyond the rim of the universe and ends between our thighs. But crazy angels that they were, they made us crazy angels too. And here we are, and we have a thing to do. Now are you ready?” He leant over and stubbed out his cigarette in a plant pot on the window sill.

  Laura said quietly, “That’s a betrayal of everything you’ve ever taught me.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think bed-swervers are in any position to deliver homilies on betrayal.”

  “All right, Edward,” I said. “I’ve listened to your dream, now you’re going to hear mine. And you’re going to think about it.”

  “I think not. Haven’t I just demonstrated that there’s nothing duller than other people’s dreams? You have humiliated me, young man; that does not give you the right to bore me. Time’s up. We should go.” He got up, patted the bulges in his pockets and crossed the room. “The torch,” he said. “Where’s the bloody torch?”

  Laura stood in front of the door. “Edward, this has to stop. You’re not going anywhere. Not like this. We have to talk.”

  “But I don’t have anything to say to you. It’s him I want.”

  “Isn’t it enough that you’re hurting me?”

  “Ah yes… your eye. Your poor eye.”

  “I don’t care about that. It’s you I care about.”

  “That, if I may say so, is a great mistake.” He looked round – “Ah, there it is” – and picked up a torch from a shelf by the door. “Now if you’ll let me through.”

  “Where have you been?” Laura demanded helplessly. “What have you been doing?”

  “Merely following your intuition. It led all the way to perdition.” He stared at her for a long moment, not in menace, nor with any degree of warmth – just staring, as if trying to recognize a dimly remembered face. Then his own face hardened. “Laura, get out of my way. I really don’t want to black your other eye.”

  She shook her head, refused defiantly to move. I saw his eyes narrow.

  I said. “Let him through, Laura. I’ll go with him.”

  “Not without me.”

  “There’s no place for you,” Edward said. “Not now. You’ve spoilt everything else, but you won’t spoil this. I told you, it’s a man’s game now.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. “All right,” she said coldly, “kill yourself if you like. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? And I can’t stop you. Not for ever. But remember – you’re killing me too.” Still she did not move.

  Edward held her stare for several moments. I was sure he must come back from whatever arctic region of the mind his thoughts had frozen in, but he leant forward, kissed her lightly on the brow, whispered, “No, that’s your choice. Entirely yours,” and pushed her aside. He opened the door, turned to me and said, “Are you coming?” then walked out.

  I glanced uncertainly at Laura. “I won’t let him hurt himself.”

  “You can’t stop it,” she answered.

  “I can try.” I walked out into the yard and saw the moon step out of cloud. Edward was sniffing the night air. I said, “I think I’d better drive.”

  “You don’t know where we’re going. This is my trip.” He opened the driver’s door and climbed in. As I walked round the other side of the car, I heard him curse and mutter, “Bloody keys.”

  A jingling sound came from the direction of the Lodge. Laura was standing in the doorway. She had put on a jacket and was holding the keyring.

  Alone in his study at the Rectory, Edwin Frere sat at his desk by lamplight, his pen poised above the first of several sheets of paper. He was staring at the fire in its narrow grate, watching the flames as though entranced by them. After a time he sighed, dipped his nib in the inkwell once more, and began to write.

  If I commit these words to paper, it is because only so shall I know my thought; only so may I calmly reflect on it; and so at length win from this bewilderment some gleam of understanding. As a letter written from myself to myself it is penned in confidence; one which, once accepted, only flame can keep. The flames are waiting as I write. I warm my hand by them. Tonight it is very cold.

  A further period of long thought followed before he wrote again.

  In the beginning, says the Evangelist, was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God: the Logos; the great I Am, of which no predicate shall suffice. This I have believed.

  Now I remember also Hesiod in his Theogony, who tells us there that Chaos was the first of things, and then wide-bosomed Earth, dim Tartarus and Eros, fairest of the deathless gods.

  Thinking on this, confined between chaos and the word, I puzzle over what must once, and not so very long ago, have appeared an impossible question: how if both accounts are true? How if, in our distinction of things into the either and the or, we but perplex ourselves? How if only such an account which embraces both this and that – however paradoxical the conjunctions – how if only such an antinomian account can be complete?

  This she would have me believe.

  This the contradictions at my heart would seem to say is so.

  He put down his pen and went to warm his hands at the fire. He loathed the cold damp of this late winter, early spring. It chilled each thought. It left him still more deeply a stranger now inside in his skin. Only an immense effort of the will brought him back to the desk, for it was not just from cold that his hands were trembling. As if sipping on some rare, medicinal substance, he heard himself breathe.

  At that same moment in the Hall, Louisa sat in one of the two chairs drawn close to the fireplace in her room. Some minutes earlier, one of the chambermaids had mended the fire, which wa
s blazing warmly now and, though it was impossible entirely to relax, Louisa was relieved at least by the knowledge that she would not be disturbed again that night, for she too experienced the pain of contrary emotions.

  During the course of the day, her menstrual blood had begun to flow, and what she had taken previously as a matter of course now filled her with unfamiliar feelings. If she attempted to think about sensations that had, of their own deep nature, nothing to do with thought, they presented themselves as a commingling of relief and loss, though of the two the latter weighed more heavily in the ache about her breasts. And neither word was adequate. Relief and loss: like twin streams risen from a common source, they flowed throughout the flux of feeling she had now become, and of which her silent tears were the merest intimation. It seemed impossible that the room could be so entirely still around her. It seemed impossible that she could be so entirely alone.

  For two days now she had instructed herself in patience. It came with greater difficulty than she who had ever been at ease with acceptance could have imagined; yet no other solace for this grief availed itself. She was denied his company, and the company of others was no more than a gross intrusion on the tense state of dream in which she sought to recreate and understand that moment which had been the most liberating and, subsequently, the most deranging of her life. Once more confined in silence, her mind sought also to conceive of futures, and did so in full awareness of the risks it ran. Yet her powers of solitary reflection had become a hapless instrument, for solitude itself was the one inconceivable thing. It made no sense. It was as much a violation of her altered being as the closing of a cage around a full-fledged lark. Yet he who had shown her how those wings might soar insisted upon solitude – as if such a state were viable now for either; as if he, any more than she, could experience anything other than injury there.

  He must be suffering now. They were united only in their suffering, and perversely so, for the sovereign remedy for that pain was to be found in meeting. There was no solace in this patience with the unacceptable, only a malingery of grief. Some means of communication must be found.

  Louisa released the tight grip of her hands at the arms of the chair. She relaxed the dense armoury of muscles at her shoulders and her neck. She closed her eyes and concentrated upon the process of breath until its rhythms were no longer a matter of volition and she had become a vessel for the passage of air, a shell in which the sea might hear itself, rising and falling like the thoughtless tide.

  Carefully Frere wiped the nib on the brink of the inkwell and wrote down his thought:

  Living our human experience, learning to know ourselves, we disclose the variety and ineffable nature of Mystery. It is, rather, disclosed to us, and in that disclosure are revealed the contrary impulses at its heart. Thence comes responsibility; for either we must enlarge ourselves to embrace them, or they shall tear us apart.

  He pondered nervously on that for a time and then, impelled by the logic of his earlier thought, and by the inexorable logic of his experience, added:

  Or we must both enlarge ourselves to contain them and they shall tear us apart.

  His hand was trembling again. He put down the pen and lifted the fingers to his brow. The mind was a fearful thing these days. It had always been so, but more than ever now. It was his most intimate enemy and somehow he must try to make it his friend. Then he remembered whence that thought had sprung, and sat back, shaking, beyond all thought. The room dissolved around him.

  It was like the change that comes across the air with the chiming of a clock, but no clock had chimed. There was a sense of sudden warmth, and without having to open her eyes Louisa knew that she was no longer alone: he was sitting in the chair across from her before the fire. Without having to utter the words aloud, it was now possible to speak.

  “I knew that you must come.”

  “It was impossible to sustain the separation on which I so foolishly insisted.”

  “Not foolishly, my dear, but, yes, impossible. I too have found it so.”

  “And it was not your choosing.”

  She sighed then, smiling. “But then, in some things, we are now beyond all choice.”

  “That is true,” he conceded, “but only in some things, and everywhere else choice is waiting for us, and with no great patience. My dear, there are lines which must be drawn.”

  Her heart quailed at the gravity in his voice, but she strove for lightness. “I do not think I believe in lines. Look as I might, I can find them nowhere save in constructions of the mind.”

  “But you know very well what I mean.”

  “I know what you are.”

  “I am a man, Louisa, and it is choice which makes us human.”

  “That too is true, but choice has much to do with listening.”

  “To what?”

  “To the gods in us, for they too make us human.”

  “I have a great fear that they are utterly indifferent to our humanity.”

  At these words they might, for a moment, have been adrift in space, his statement was so cold and airless – except that it was touched too with the breath of human pathos. She strove to recover confidence, to be true both to the impersonal dimensions on which his words had opened and to what was true in her. “They have their own needs,” she said quietly. “They are larger than ours and perhaps more terrible. We must be careful therefore how we answer them.”

  “And we must choose, surely, which of them we answer to at all?”

  “Or is it rather that the gods choose us? You must try not to take too much upon yourself.”

  “I feel it is my duty to receive it all. For a time… the other night… I sought refusal. I was afraid. I had a terror of transgression, and – deeper still than that – of the price my actions must exact, and not only upon myself. But I know now there is no escape from that except into oblivion.”

  “And perhaps not even there.”

  “That may be so. But there is a thing that weighs more heavily upon my mind.”

  “Then share it with me.”

  There was a long silence in the room before he sighed and said, “I have listened to you, my dear. I have listened with more tender attention than ever in my days, and so you must hear my entire presence in the words when I say what I must say.”

  She heard her heart beating as she said, “Which is?”

  “That whether we choose among the gods, or whether the gods choose us, each has their rite, and once the choice is made, it must be undergone.”

  She was silent then, listening for the meaning in his words, and the effort was almost too much for her, for in her deepest heart she wished to consider none of this. She wished to be free from the intransigence of words, which must always prove too dense, too earthbound. Were they not both creatures now of dream, who might pass through language as less happy shades might pass through walls? Yet she could feel the resistance in him as he said, “Even those who serve only Mammon will, in their more honest moments, tell you that.”

  “But they are only men… only male. They could not serve him else. And you, my dear, are more than male, as I myself am more than female now.”

  “I cannot speak to that.”

  “I think if you will free your heart you can.”

  “Free it,” he exclaimed, “when it is bound as on a rack between a sense of what is sacred in our love and an unremitting knowledge of its sin? We are illicit, Louisa. This is an illicit love.”

  “Illicit love?” she said gently, smiling, struggling for calm. “I think, my dear, that must surely be a contradiction in terms.”

  “Which is the very rack on which I find myself. There is nothing which more deeply confirms my sense of what is sacred here than the knowledge of my own unworthiness.”

  “I too feel that. But it is not the only knowledge. If we were indeed unworthy, surely we would never have been elected into love? Can you not take comfort there?”

  “Can you? Are you too not racked by this intolerable loneline
ss?”

  “We are not now alone.”

  “Louisa, we are always alone.”

  “I do not believe that.”

  “However deeply our beings may have touched one another,” he said slowly, “whatever knowledge of the sacramental unity of things we may have been briefly blessed with, we are also always alone.”

  “It is not true.”

  “Reach out to touch me then.”

  “I already have. I am holding you. I feel your presence warmer than this fire.” But even as she spoke, the room grew colder round her. She opened her eyes and saw that the chair across from her was empty. The breath came quickly to her lips. She must calm herself, be still. Quietly she must summon him back.

  Alone in the Rectory, Frere scratched the nib across the page:

  As Idea knows itself in man, and man knows himself through Idea, so Mystery knows itself in woman, and woman knows herself in Mystery. Male and female they were created; for the idea divested of mystery is empty, and mystery unshaped by idea is formless.

  He hesitated for a moment, wondering where this might lead, but the thought dissolved inside his mind, became a hot chaos flooding everywhere. She was mistress both of Idea and Mystery; he master of neither. As if the action might itself build dikes against the flood engulfing him, he returned the pen to the page and scribbled:

  As I now am empty and without form, and therefore neither idea nor mystery, neither male nor female.

  For a time he stared at that in horror. Either it was nonsense or it was true; or it was both nonsense and true; and what salvation for a mind in such confusion?

  Only in the unquestionable clarity of her presence did meaning now inhere. Only because, in the tumult of his passion, he had permitted them to come together, did chaos overwhelm him now. He had banished himself from her company that order might return; yet, apart from her, in this insufferable solitude, there was no order, only an internecine conflict between the anarchies of feeling and of thought – from which now both heart and mind recoiled into an agony of fear.