As he himself still walked, still lived.
He was the child of disobedience. He was idolater. His tongue must turn to stone sooner than speak these words.
Had he been wrong then not to heed his wife, not to respond more completely to her complaints and grief, not to abandon this place where – he had known it from the first – disaster must come upon him, and to return to whatever sober and safe life they might contrive in Cambridge?
It was still possible.
It was still impossible.
He closed the pages of the prayer book, looked back at the words he had written earlier, shook his head over them, and took them to the fire. For a moment the flames burned brighter there. Then, with the poker, he broke the blackened remains to ash.
In the night outside, the wind gusted, and he heard on its wing the sound of singing from the Feathers.
“It’s empty,” I said. “It’s been empty for years. There’s nothing in there.”
Edward had already pushed open the iron gate to the Rectory garden and passed through. He turned now, glanced our way, and smiled. “You think so? Then take a look at Laura’s face. It seems she doesn’t agree.”
She stood beside me staring across the dark garden at the upper windows of the derelict building. Her face was like tallow. It was numb with dread; with the same terror she’d experienced after I left her alone at the Decoy Lodge. I reached out a hand but she flinched away.
“It’s the Green Chapel, Cambridge. Perhaps I should dress for the occasion.” Edward crossed to a holly bush, tucked the torch under his arm and, with difficulty, snapped off two green sprigs which he threaded through his hair, one above either temple, like green antlers. He side-lit his head with the torch and grinned at me. “Regrettably, I lack the whetstone to sharpen the axe’s edge. The noise was rather effective as I recall, but never mind.” He tapped the bulge in his pocket. I heard the hollow sound again before he said, “Are you coming – or must I add cowardice to the sins already heavy on your head?”
I summoned the resolution to meet his sneer. “Call it what you like, but it’s a very real concern for what’s happening to you.”
He gave a derisive snort, and turned to Laura. “Here he is then – the dreamer who was going to make all the difference. I don’t think he wants to know. Do you?”
Laura stared at him, and said nothing. I saw that she was trembling.
I said, “This feels fake, Edward. I think you’re big enough to carry your own pain, not splash it around like this.”
“Slippery,” he replied, smiling. “Very slippery. But it’s not me who’s in question now. You’ve started something, Cambridge, and it would appear you lack the guts to finish it. And as for this feeling ‘fake’ – I promise you, it’s real. The moment you decided to have your way with Laura – and don’t misunderstand me, I’m not whinging about that – in that moment it all became very real. You conjured powers there, sweet pie, and they don’t greatly care for those who practise coitus interruptus of their rites. So tell me – are you going to funk it again?”
We stared at one another to the exclusion of the whole world. It was akin to the moment long before over the Tarot card, but far more dangerously charged. I sensed Laura’s fear beside me, and was dry-mouthed at my own. Shadowed by the torchlight, Edward was a barbaric, barely human figure in the long coat, under those green horns, as unnerving as the masked priest at some savage initiatory ordeal. The three of us were frozen in silence – the dense silence of the East Anglian night in which there was nothing to be heard but the faint crepitation of the trees in the Rectory garden. The silence reached along the lane, across the churchyard and the water meadows. It inhabited the Rectory. It entered my head – a silence impossible in cities. It veered upwards between the stars.
Then Laura spoke. “Edward, I can’t go in there.”
“Your presence is not required,” he answered. “I told you not to come. Take the car. Go home.”
“Not without you.” Edward turned, dismissively, away. Laura’s voice was shaking as she said, “We’ll talk about it. We’ll talk about it at home…”
“Haven’t you seen it yet?” he said. “This is where words stop.” He sniffed, shifted his eyes to me. “Either he comes with me, or I go in there alone.”
“You’re wrong,” she pleaded. “You’re wrong about Alex, wrong about me. You’re wrong about Louisa. But most of all you’re wrong about yourself. I’ve never lied to you and I won’t take your lies now. I won’t even listen until I can feel you real inside what you’re saying. All I’ve heard tonight is death and lies, and it’s withering everything you touch. Is that what you want? Is that what you really want?”
Edward was holding his head at an angle from her agonized plea, but at that moment a car came down the lane from the direction of The Pightle, headlamps illuminating the rosy brickwork of the Rectory and the ivy reaching round its window casements. It passed on, round the bend, towards the Feathers and out of sight, but for an instant Edward had been spotlit by the beams. What I saw was a pathetic old man with holly in his locks standing outside an empty house. Shorn of darkness thus, he was more grotesque than menacing, ageing almost visibly as he stood there, and – as his eyes met mine – I caught a kind of desperate beseeching on his face.
With the car gone, the dark returned, but its spell was broken. There was a silence, then Edward’s free hand reached up, took the holly sprigs from his hair and let them drop. The action seemed to cost him an enormous effort. For a moment he cast about, disoriented, then he said, “Take her away. Get her out of here,” and staggered away. He was making for the Rectory, alone.
Utterly distraught now, a hand clutching at her hair, Laura called after him. When he didn’t respond, she turned to me. “Help me. Please. I have to get him away from here.”
It was evident both in her face and her voice that her fear was not only for Edward. In this condition her judgement was no more to be trusted than his. I glanced back where Edward staggered down the gravelled drive like a man under compulsion, towards an arched gateway that must lead to the back of the building.
To drag him away or not? Either way was risky, but the dread had gone and in its place was a cold curiosity. He had a reason for bringing me here – a crazy reason, wrong, but words wouldn’t reach him, and if he wasn’t made to see that he was wrong… I heard the gate creak open and, as Edward disappeared into the darkness, felt certain that the real disaster – for all of us – might lie in not seeing this thing through with him.
“I have to go with him,” I said. “If you can’t bear to come, wait here.” I was halfway towards the gate when I heard the sound of Laura’s feet on the gravel behind me. Then the crash of breaking glass.
He was standing under a window at the back of the Rectory with a flintstone in his hand, staring in fascination at a small cut across his fingers. He glanced up at my arrival, an exhausted old man who had gone too far. Then he saw Laura at my back. Empty of his demons, almost weeping, he said, “Go away. I don’t want you here.”
I shook my head, said, “I’m not leaving you. You wanted me here and I’ve come. It’s an empty house, Edward. You’re coming in there with me and you’re going to see that. Then we’re going home.”
I saw the stone fall from his fingers, heard the breath panting out of him; then Laura spoke.
“It’s not just an empty house.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper on the night air. I turned to look at her, saw the struggle on her face; her voice gathered strength as she said, “But you’re right – we have to go in. We have to try to see it whole.” She brushed past me, stood in front of Edward and said, “It’s not just a man’s game. It never is.” Then she turned to me. “Can you let us in?”
Uncertain now, alarmed by Edward’s haggard condition, excluded from the resolve that seemed to have taken possession of her, I hesitated.
“It’s all right,” she said. “We can do this together.”
I saw Edward shaking h
is head, cursed beneath my breath, reached through the broken window for the catch, then shinned up and through into a dark room. I caught the smell of damp on my lungs, and turned back to demand the torch. Edward tried to resist but even his physical strength was failing. Laura prised the torch from his grip, handed it through the window, then turned to comfort him.
Oppressed by the gloom of the place, I flashed the torch and saw a large porcelain sink with brass taps jutting from iron pipe-work. Across the pammented floor was a hearth with a stepped brick chimney breast and, next to it, an old washing copper with a wooden lid. I’d broken into a whitewashed laundry room, cobwebbed now, and damp. The door opened onto a passage which led eventually through to the rear lobby, where I unshot two bolts and opened the back door. Laura came in, turned, and held out her hand to Edward.
“You shouldn’t be here.” His voice was hoarse and laboured. “I’ve been wrong… I’ve been very wrong, and I’m tired, Laura. Take me home. We should go home.”
“We can’t,” she said quietly. “Not now. We have to end this.”
“Laura, you don’t want to know…”
She turned to me, drawing her breath deeply, and said, “Give me the torch.” Out of the struggle with her fear she had won authority. There was an almost glassy calm about her as she took the torch and shone it through into the front hall with its closed, panelled doors and walls that were stippled with rising damp. I looked back at Edward who stood with one hand leaning against the door jamb, his breathing terse, gazing into the Rectory as into his own bad dreams. “Alex,” he gasped, “you have to stop her.”
“Why did you want to bring me here?”
“It doesn’t matter now. I was wrong… But she shouldn’t have come. You’ve got to get her out of here.”
Laura had moved away along the corridor, making for the stairs. She was no more than a shadow against the torch beam, and it was like watching a somnambulist – someone derisive of risk, pushing on into a darkness rank with the fungal smell of rot.
“I’ll stay with her,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t worry about me. Just get her out.”
Laura was already climbing the bare boards of the staircase. At each step the torch beam danced across the banister and walls – too small a light, I suddenly thought, to penetrate the past, which was itself a place where the mind might lose its bearings. I put a foot to the bottom stair and called after her.
Without turning, she gestured with her free hand to silence me, then took the turn of the staircase up onto the railinged landing. The sound of my shoes on bare wood echoed in the stairwell. I heard Edward panting along the corridor below and, when I reached the landing, saw Laura open a door and shine the torch up a further narrow stair which must have led to the old servants’ quarters in the attic. She closed the door without entering, then turned along the landing. Convinced that the higher we went in this derelict house the more perilous it must become, I felt a moment’s relief that she had declined the attic stair, but she pressed on, opening other doors, shining the torch into room after room.
She came to the back stairs which descended, I guessed, to the kitchen and laundry room where I had entered, and halted briefly as a call from Edward startled us both. Shaking her head as if to free it from distraction, she turned the torch on another door. I saw the light gleam on the brass handle. She turned it and had to push hard before the door jerked open. I was left in darkness, feeling my way along the landing towards her, and when I reached the doorway, she was sweeping the beam around the bare walls of a room too small by the standards of this vast house to be a bedroom. It might have been a study once. There were ashes in the fire grate still. In the far corner a length of damp wallpaper drooped from the picture rail.
“It’s like a mind,” she said. “The whole house is like a mind. It’s hurt and frightened of itself.” Then she sighed, glanced across at me, and for a moment I thought she was about to come out again, but she stiffened. I could feel the change in her.
“What is it?”
She lifted a hand as though to fend off my voice. Then – it might have been an intrusion from a different century – a car passed down the lane outside, its headlights swooping through the window, travelling across the ceiling as the car took the bend. In the brief radiance I saw a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling rose, and Laura beneath it with her eyes closed in a tight frown. It was the face of someone reaching for a difficult thought, or – had the eyes been even slightly open – to see across far distances. The room darkened again with the passing of the car.
“It’s here,” she whispered. “This is the place.” Another quick glance sought reassurance that I was still there. Edward called her name along the landing, and she frowned again, biting her lip. A moment later he was beside me in the doorway, a hand at my shoulder for support. His breath, short and stertorous, was the only sound.
“I can’t hold it,” Laura said. “It’s there but…” She gasped, looked across at us, said, “Shut the door,” and – when neither of us moved – the demand was repeated, fiercely. Determined not to leave her alone in there, Edward pushed past me. Hating this place, loathing its rank stink, yet sure now that, having gone this far, the thing must come to its conclusion, I too went inside. The brass knob was loose on its screws, and the door so swollen it jammed against the frame. It felt as though I was shutting out the air.
Laura stood in silence. Her hands were at her sides, the torch pointing to the floor so that her feet were brinked on its small pool of light. “I can’t…” She shook her head in frustration. “No, it started here, but…”
In a voice that was little more than a hoarse croak, Edward said, “You can’t see it because it shouldn’t be seen. Come away now. I can’t talk about it here.”
Laura drew in her breath quickly and raised the torch high enough to illuminate his face but not to dazzle him. “The thing you brought with you. You said it was the key.” Edward shook his head and drew away. I saw a rim of sweat glistening at his temples. Laura held out her hand. “I need it. I can’t get through without it.”
Diminished, shrinking upon himself, Edward leant against the wall. “Come away. I’ll try to tell you…”
“But you don’t know. You haven’t seen it all. You couldn’t have been like that if you’d understood. Give it to me, Edward.” As he turned away from her, looking in appeal at me, she said, “You’re trying to protect me from something you wanted Alex to face, and it won’t work that way.”
It was hard to tell in that uncertain light whether the pain in Edward’s face was more mental or physical. Either way, he was vulnerable, old – older than his years. Without the support of the wall he might have fallen. For a time a silence empty and cold as the room around us was accented by the friction of his breath; then he seemed to summon strength, turned on his shoulder, still leaning against the wall, and said, “I’ve been in hell, Laura, and I’m trying to keep you out of there. You can stand there in your ignorance and tell me that I’m wrong, but I’m telling you there are things you don’t even begin to understand. I haven’t turned my back on anything. I’ve looked at it. I’ve stared it in the eyes. And it won’t hold together. It’s the mirror – what I said about the mirror. It’s cracked and the crack runs right through everything. And once you’ve seen that – once you’ve looked through the crack – you know we’re capable of absolutely anything, and nothing makes any difference. It can’t be mended.”
“I don’t believe that,” she answered softly.
“Because you haven’t seen.”
“Then let me see. If it’s the truth, why protect me from it?”
“Take my word.”
“I took your word before. It was a better word.”
A wince passed over Edward’s face. “A dream, Laura. The last illusion. And it’s over. I’m tired. I’m tired of all of this.”
“I know. But it’s not over. Not yet… And in this moment I’m stronger than you. Let me take it from you
.” She held out her hand again.
Edward’s face was ash-grey in the torch-light. “It’ll tear the heart out of you.”
“If you can’t do that,” she said, “nothing can.”
“God damn you then,” he snarled in sudden fury. “See for yourself. See what we can do.” He reached into his pocket and took out a thin black box. At first sight it seemed nothing more harmful than a case for a musical instrument – a flute perhaps – but it was too short for that, too narrow. Trembling, Edward threw two small brass claps. The plosive clicks were loud in the empty room. Then he turned away, fumbling in the darkness.
The breath hissed out of me as he turned to face us again. He was holding a cut-throat razor by its ebony handle, the blade extended, glinting as it turned in the torchlight. “Do you see now?” he demanded. “Do you see now where the dream ends?”
He held the razor upright, close to his own throat and, in that small room, within striking distance of both hers and mine. The blade gleaned what little light there was, an incision on the darkness so fine and morbid that it seemed to make the dark complete. Sick with the fascination of the thing, numb with apprehension, I stared at it and saw the possibility of all three of us lying in our blood in that dark room.
He had wanted to bring me here alone. If my stupid, contentious pride had let it happen, he would have brought me here into this derelict place, and the blade would have been between us. And when I looked into his eyes now, I saw that he too did not know what might have happened next. We are capable, he had said, of absolutely anything. Even in that moment, with Laura gasping beside us, he was still uncertain, as though the blade might have a will of its own, ready, at a wrong word, to wreak havoc there.
No word was spoken.
Old man, young man, rivals and friends, contemporaries in love and pain, Edward and I were frozen in that intimate exchange. He must have seen the incredulous question in my eyes, and neither in words nor yet in action could he bring himself to answer. The blade quivered in his hand. Otherwise everything was motionless. Whatever it might be, the next thing had enormous leisure in which to decide, with cool detached curiosity, whether or not to happen. Then Laura reached out her hand.
The Chymical Wedding Page 53