Her father does not answer her – she is not even certain that he hears her words – but her own thoughts are already elsewhere. She is remembering the Collect for Easter Eve – those words which had been read in a voice other than Edwin’s, and with no great feeling, but she understands now why, even through the baffle of her numbed condition, as she had sat in the church from which the man she loved would be for ever absent, those words had stirred a premonitory tremor in her heart: “Oh God, who through thy Son, who is called the cornerstone, hast brought the fire of light to the faithful, make holy for our future use this new fire struck from the firestone.”
Our future use. For the first time since her world had ended – if vaguely still, and with a trembling spirit – she begins to conceive of futures. She had thought herself quite drowned in tears – though their agony had been a mortal agony, the body had refused to die – and yet a death of sorts, a death by water, had been undergone. She knew it, if none around her knew it. She reflects upon the words from the Easter Collect, and knows also that what is now required of her is a fiery passage back into the feeling world. And what is her book if it is not her Stone – a stone of fire, her shining flint, her firestone?
She takes her father’s face between her hands and lifts his gaze to hers. “It is now my own earnest desire that we shall burn the book,” she says. “There, at the Decoy Lodge, where all the hopes and fears invested in our work were first conceived, we shall make a burning ground together.”
Her father looks up at her, shaking his old head, unable to understand. “But the loss… It is too high a price…”
“No loss,” she says. “We only free it so.” She is smiling down on him, a smile in which immensities of sadness are comprehended now. “That is the price,” she adds, and then her expression changes. Her face may be no more than a place indifferently found by a ray admitted through the lozenged window, but it brightens with reflected light as she speaks – in a whisper so slight and wistful that the words escape his hearing – one final consoling thought: “People have burnt for less.”
Ralph woke me shortly before one in the afternoon of a calm Sunday. Even before he drew the cream curtains, I saw sunlight streaming through them and felt the June heat, but the sense of change was so profound there might have been a fall of snow in the night.
My first thought was that we must ring the hospital. Ralph had already rung and, having failed to secure more than a formal assurance that Edward was doing as well as could be expected, he had called the home number of a friend who was a consultant there. The friend had made enquiries and reported back that Edward was in reasonable shape physically but giving the nurses a hard time with his bad temper. “Apparently,” Ralph said, “he’s been insisting that he’s earned the right to be dead and deserves it. My friend suggested that severe heart attacks can sometimes cause personality changes, but” – Ralph tried to smile – “it rather sounds as though Edward is very much the same.”
“There haven’t been any more attacks?”
“No, thank God.”
“And Laura?”
“She woke very confused, but they’re satisfied with her progress and she’ll be discharged later today. Do try to relax – they’re both in good hands. I would have brought you the news sooner but I thought you should sleep… Also I was held up by an unexpected caller. Neville Sallis came by after Matins at Thrandeston. He’s only just left. Apparently his phone was ringing this morning with complaints that Munding Rectory had been used for rites of black magic.”
“What?”
“I believe the term ‘witchcraft orgies’ was used – and, if I know this area – I’m afraid that’s the story that will stick. As you can imagine, poor Neville was quite put out, and he didn’t find my explanations entirely satisfactory. It seems he already knew of your interest in Frere, and that caught me off guard a little… Still, I think I smoothed his feathers. He’s had rather a bad weekend of it… hasn’t been sleeping well after some meeting he went to.” Ralph took in my dishevelled features, shaking his head. “You must be hungry. Why don’t you get yourself sorted out – we’ll snatch a bite to eat, and then we’ll drive in for visiting hour this afternoon?”
“How are you feeling?”
“I didn’t sleep too well either… but what matters is Edward. I’m just enormously relieved that he’s still with us.” He sighed, went to the door, and turned there. “Alex, about last night…”
“It was a confidence,” I said. “I’m grateful for it.”
Ralph nodded, smiling weakly, then left me alone.
The phone rang while we were eating. Ralph took the call in his study and came back with a distraught face. “It was Laura…” He raised a hand to still my evident alarm. “She’s been with Edward. Apparently he’s dreadfully depressed. He doesn’t want visitors. He won’t see us, Alex…” I watched him sit down and push away the plate from which he’d eaten very little. “For my own part, I can understand it… but Laura asked me to convey the message to you. He doesn’t want to see either of us…”
I had not been prepared for this. Nervous as I was of the meeting, I’d been searching for ways to find touch with Edward again, to prepare the ground so that – if we were given the glimmer of a chance – something new might grow from the ruins. I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I knew that I had to try, and to be banished this way made everything feel hopeless. Only the news that his heart had suffered another attack could have come harder.
Ralph took in my distress. “It’s probably for the best,” he murmured. “God knows, neither of us wants to put him under further strain…”
“How was Laura?”
“Very tense… but then we’ve never been at ease with one another. She says she’s over the worst of the shock.”
“And she thinks this is the right thing?”
“She was rather insistent on it. In the end I felt I had to trust her judgement. She’s planning to stay close to him until he’s discharged. There’s a small hotel close to the hospital…”
“But that means a lot of time on her own.”
“I know. But it seems to be what she wants. She can’t face being alone in the Lodge, and she declined my invitation to stay here. Edward will see no one else and she feels the need to be as close to him as she can. Also I rather gathered she has to sort out her own feelings…”
“She’ll need things – money, clothes…”
“We talked about that. She also needs their car to pick them up. As far as she knows, it’s still parked in the village.”
“It’s outside the church,” I said. “I could drive it in.”
“She’ll be waiting for you,” Ralph smiled. “Outside the hospital, at five.”
She was pale, a wan figure in the sunlight, scanning the traffic. Relieved that the appointment had been kept, she asked, tensely, if she might drive, and did so hurriedly, anxious only to get back to the Lodge, pick up the things she needed, and return. When I asked about Edward, she added little to what I already knew – perhaps because, like myself, she hardly dared to believe that he was alive at all, and was afraid that words might provoke a capricious fate. She dismissed my concern for her own condition, and when I questioned the wisdom of staying alone in a hotel, her mind was firm: Edward needed her; she must be close by, and with him for as much of the time as possible; for the rest, she preferred to be alone. For a time it was like talking to a stranger. And then – as we drove under sun-dazzled arcades of trees in full leaf – we did not speak at all.
Instead of taking the turn to the Lodge, she drove on through Munding and pulled up outside The Pightle. Only when her diffident smile expressed the wish to go to the Lodge alone did I recognize how far my own tension had been responsible for the atmosphere in the car.
“Listen,” she said, “I don’t know when I’ll get to see your friend – the one from last night…”
“Bob. Bob Crossley.”
“But will you thank him for me?… I was in no state last
night…”
“Of course. But I’m sure he understands.”
“And you, Alex. Without you…” She held my eyes a moment, then looked down where her hands gripped the wheel.
“Without me it would never have happened.”
She heard the self-recrimination in my voice and glanced back up at me, shaking her head. “You’re not to blame yourself. It can’t help.”
“It’s hard not to.”
“I know, but…” She faltered there and looked up in appeal. “Alex, I don’t think I can talk about it yet. I need time.”
I saw then that what I had taken for an almost cold distancing was the only way she had found to contain emotions that might overwhelm her. I wanted to hold her, simply, just for a few moments, but there was an inhibition in the air between us, like that of former lovers re-met, who remember the intimacy yet are no longer able to touch one another with the old freedom. So I said quietly, “I understand.” And then, sighing, “When you get back to Edward… will you give him my love?”
She nodded, tried to smile, and was on the edge of tears. “I don’t know if he’ll hear it… It’s as if he still thinks of himself as dead… is almost nostalgic for it. It’s why I have to…”
“You don’t have to explain.”
But once having begun to speak, the words would not be stopped. “Look, I know you must be feeling terrible… and I’m no help right now, but… I’m trying to hold it together – all of it. And it scares me even to think this way with Edward lying hooked up to that machine, but… I can’t believe that what we did was wrong… even after what’s happened. Somehow we have to try to see it whole. I think Edward needs us to do that. I think he needs it more than ever now. Do you understand?”
I nodded uncertainly, wanting to comfort her with agreement, but if things were to be seen whole, there was a darker side to acknowledge too. I said, “I can only speak for myself, Laura, and I think I’ve been wrong… Wrong in the way you said, because I was dreaming, but still wrong. Morally wrong.”
She shook her head. “It was necessary – all of it. I’m not talking about morality – I’m not even sure what that means. All I have is my feelings and I have to trust them. I’m talking about things coming to completion… of making room for everything that belongs, however confusing… and I only began to see it because of what we did… because you were there.”
I tried to hold the impassioned plea in her gaze, and again found that I couldn’t lie. “Laura, I wasn’t even with you there. Not really. The whole thing scared me half to death… I couldn’t control it, and so I was pulling away. That’s why I behaved the way I did afterwards, and there was nothing right about that.”
After a moment I glanced up to see the effect of my words, and found that she was smiling. It was a sad smile, affectionate and without reproach. A woman’s smile, responsive to the truth, and realistic in its adaptations.
“You didn’t pull away last night,” she said. “When I’d lost touch… was feeling scared… you decided to see it through, didn’t you?”
“And look what happened.”
“I know. But you weren’t to blame for that. Edward had got it wrong. What he’d found was real and terrible, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He knew the facts but he got the feeling wrong, so none of it made sense to him. All he could see was pain and injury and failure… but there was love there, Alex, and courage. There was a sense of deliverance through all the pain. It doesn’t deny what we were looking for, it confirms it.”
I very much wanted to believe her, but there was only one thing of which I was sure: that she herself had changed. Yes, she was pale and distraught still; the anxiety in her face was accented by the yellowish bruise at her eye; and what she was saying was not so very different from things I’d heard her say before. But the manner of the saying was different, and the quality of her conviction. Where a stranger might have heard only a scared woman seeking to rationalize disaster, I was awed by her sober willingness to persevere when everything appeared to have gone terribly wrong. I saw why she had been reluctant to speak, and why she had felt compelled to do so, for if Laura had always known the value of experience, she now knew more of its price. She spoke – and I heard her speaking – from its full authority.
“Do you understand?” she asked quietly.
I understood for her. For myself, excluded from her experience, there was only one truthful answer. “Laura, I just don’t know.”
I heard the intake of her breath, saw the fingertips trembling where the palms of her hands rested on the wheel. After a moment she said, “So what are your feelings now?”
“Shame. Grief. Anxiety.” The words were out without thought. “I’m ashamed of the callow side of myself that’s been so preoccupied with its own hurt it doesn’t know how to relate any more. I’m ashamed of the way I behaved with you, of what I’ve done to Edward, and that I couldn’t be truer with either of you. I’m filled with grief and anxiety for him… He won’t see me now and, God knows, I can’t blame him… but it feels as though he were my father and he’d died before I found a way to say I loved him. It feels as though I only ever learn anything about myself through the hurt I do others. And as long as things stay that way, I’m a million miles away from knowing how to live…”
There was silence in the car. Outside I heard the calm, throaty call of a wood pigeon among the chestnuts. Through the window I saw the sunlight warm on The Pightle’s thatch, the roses climbing against white walls: a small enclosure; elfin space; briefly, magically mine; and not mine at all.
“And those feelings hurt?” she said quietly.
“Yes.”
“So what are you doing with the hurt?” And, when I didn’t answer, “Holding it,” she suggested. “Being true to it. Letting it change you.”
I glanced briefly across at her, and saw the smile again.
“Then it was right,” she said. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For the confirmation.”
Bewildered, I held her gaze a moment longer, then looked away. “It feels as though all I’ve done is add my troubles to the ones you’re already carrying.”
Her hand reached for mine and rested there. “Does it really feel that way?”
I looked at her again and saw how much of the nervous tension had passed from her. Her question calmly insisted on the real, and there was encouragement, a candid affection, in her smile. It brought a wan smile to my own face as I shook my head in answer.
“I think you’ve stopped dreaming,” she said. “I think we can be friends now. Loving friends.” She leant across from her seat to kiss me lightly on the cheek. I held her for a time, saying nothing, feeling the warmth of her, the brief simplicity of our being together there.
A few moments later I was out of the car and she was gone.
I was left waiting, each hour fraught with anxiety until, on the following Tuesday, I learnt, with a relief as great as if I too had been reprieved from a capital sentence, that Edward’s condition was no longer considered critical. Relief came as exhaustion as much as thanksgiving, and as the knowledge, for the first time fully accepted, of how completely we are at one another’s mercy.
When I rang Laura at her hotel, I gathered that there had been no great improvement in Edward’s emotional state. For much of the time he was still remote in depression, and otherwise crotchety and ill-tempered, as though taking exception to his own recovery. Any certainty that Laura had felt in the car was gone from her voice, and when I tried to encourage her, I met only a weary gratitude for my care and an insistence that she was best alone. She described her own condition as thoughtful, and would say little more. My own first relief became worry again.
With the intention of prodding me from gloom, Bob invited me to a meal. He too had been thoughtful, for by now all the gossip around Munding had reached him. He’d heard George Bales’s account of what he’d seen on the lawn of the Decoy Lodge, but – possibly because he’d thought it inevitabl
e all along – he made no heavy weather over it. The other rumours bothered him more, and not because he believed them but because he was having a hard time conceiving what possible truth they might distort. With the food eaten and some of his home brew inside us, Bob released his questions now.
As honestly and completely as I could, I tried to answer. I told him about my dream and how its images had undermined my own first scepticism about alchemy. I shared what I had learnt from Edward about the contemporary relevance of alchemical symbols to the confusing processes of personal evolution. I told him about Louisa Agnew and her father, and how Edward had been convinced that their lost work might have crucial light to shed on the crisis of our own time.
With greater patience than I might earlier have expected, Bob listened. His dismay after the meeting in the Black Boys Hotel had left him receptive to any evidently serious effort to think about the intolerable questions it raised, but he was a practical man, unimpressed by symbolic dimensions when the brutal facts stared him in the face. “That’s all very well,” he said eventually, “but at the end of the day you won’t change anything till you’ve changed the social structures that govern the way people think.”
“And who’s going to do that, Bob?” I asked. “What sort of people are going to do that? And is it just a question of thinking? What about imagination? What about feeling?”
By a vigorous statement of his own position Bob required me to refine my own, and it came hard. Like that of the alchemists before me, such conviction as I had was grounded more in experience than reason. It had been nourished by dreams, which are elusive and ambiguous at best, and not the sort of testimony that carries public weight these days. I felt a little as women must sometimes feel trying to hold their ground against male logic – that the terms of the debate were not inclusive enough, and that there were values being discounted and ignored. Delicate values, ones that found it hard to speak their word. There were moments when I might have lost heart except that I felt to be arguing as much for Edward’s sake as for my own.
The Chymical Wedding Page 57