The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  The conversation drifted back and forth from the intractable issues of the age to more immediate examination of our personal experience – education, social conditioning, the tensions of marriage, the degree to which we took refuge from uncertainty in fixed systems of thought. Time and again we got stuck until one or the other of us made some admission that had the force of personal revelation behind it, and we were off once more, conceding here, asserting there, becoming firmer and deeper friends. It was contest not compromise, and it was more than words. I came away late at night, convinced that it must be possible – if there was time – to build new bridges between an affirmation of the spirit and a sane, social pragmatism increasingly aware of its own unconscious roots. I was aware too that all opposition would not be as tolerant and congenial as Bob’s, and that an immense faith was required in the power of the small.

  The next day I went across to the Hall to clear up the papers I’d left and found Ralph in the library. He was rereading Edward’s early verse, remembering the occasions from which various poems had sprung, and he was able to cast light on some of their surrealist obscurities. “He was always slippery…” he commented in a kind of sardonic resignation, “slipped through your hands like water. If he’s angry now, it’s probably nothing at all to do with you and me, you know… simply frustration that he’s failed to pull off a final spectacular vanishing act.” He took a silver box from his pocket, placed a pinch of snuff in the cruck of his thumb and sniffed it. When I remarked on the many images drawn from fire in Edward’s verse he said, “That’s his infernal angel at work. I used to think it rejoiced to see him burn. In fact, I’ve often wondered whether that wasn’t his real attraction to Louisa – that her work went up in smoke… The fascination of the flame.”

  “Do you know why he abandoned verse?”

  “No,” Ralph sighed, “not really. I’d already lost touch with him by then. We no longer had friends in common. I simply waited for the next volume to appear and it never did. I tried to ask him when he turned up here at Easterness.” He snorted, smiled. “Slipped away again. Wouldn’t say.”

  “He told me once that his sanity was menaced. He took cover behind Rimbaud but the feeling was real.”

  Ralph nodded but said nothing.

  “He also said that poetry wasn’t enough.”

  “Then we must believe him, I suppose. He tested other things to the point of destruction. Whatever it was that stopped him writing, it must have been terrible. I suspect there’s a death in there somewhere – symbolically for him, and perhaps literally for someone else. But I don’t know. Edward’s secret is known only to him.” Ralph smiled mournfully. “Not a coward’s secrets though. Not like mine.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, then glanced up at me again. “Shall I tell you a truly sad thing? When he first came here during the winter, he was trying to write again – verse, I mean. Didn’t tell me about it, of course. I wouldn’t even know but I went poking about his papers here one evening… Disgraceful, I admit. But it was a way of… feeling closer. I came across a sheet of paper so angrily obliterated that only a sentimental old fool like me would recognize that the scorings hid a verse, and that, if one held it against the light, the words were just legible.”

  “Do you remember them?”

  “Of course. I have them by heart. But I don’t think he’d want me to share them with you. Do you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I can tell you they weren’t very good. I quite see why he was impatient with them. But I was rather touched… What mattered to me was that he was still trying… after all these years. And what he seemed to be trying for was a new simplicity. He failed and – to my eternal shame – that failure was one of the things I threw in his face the other night.” Ralph winced from the memory, and there was a long silence before he said, “I’ve wondered, you know, whether this wasn’t behind his frustration during the past weeks… Not just the difficulty of the work on my family’s papers or the state of his unsatisfactory relationships, but his failure to recover the gift that you still have.”

  “I haven’t been able to write for ages.”

  “But you will. And Edward knows that. He must have found it hard to… what? Forgive you for it? No, not that. He’s not envious that way. But it must have sharpened the sense of his own sterility. There was a moment once – he was talking to me about Laura – trying to persuade me of her finer points – when he said that if he could still do with words what she was trying to do with clay, then everything else could go out the window.”

  “Even though poetry isn’t enough?”

  “My dear man,” Ralph gave me his wry, canted smile, “when Edward ceases to contradict himself – to be a kind of walking oxymoron – then we’ll know he’s breathed his last. And the world will be a poorer place.”

  On the Thursday morning a letter arrived at The Pightle. I recognized Jess’s handwriting on the envelope.

  Dear Alex,

  Thanks for ringing at the weekend. I know it can’t have been easy for you, and I’m sorry it went wrong – but there was more than one reason for that, which is why I’m writing now.

  I wonder if you’ve forgotten that it’s Marcus’s birthday on the 23rd? He was too proud to remind you, and I know it upset him that you didn’t think of it when he asked when you were coming back. We have to decide what to do about it now.

  Martin and I would like you to come if that’s what you want, and so would Lily, of course. But I can’t promise it will be easy with Marcus. I’m pretty sure he’ll punish you as he’s punishing us, and perhaps we all deserve it. On the other hand, I don’t know – he grows more like you every day so I suppose he could surprise us all. But it’s up to you. If you can let us know one way or the other, it would help.

  I’ve wondered about whether I should respond here to your mention of divorce. You’re right, of course – it’s the best thing now, and I’m grateful to you for bringing it up. But I think we need to talk about what it means for Marcus and Lily, and how we can carry them through it in the right way. I don’t think we can do that by letter, and I don’t think we should let it go by default. Will you make time for that? It matters very much.

  I promised not to make demands and I seem to be making them, but I think you’ll see that they’re not just for me. Also I’ve just read through this and it sounds colder than I mean. I hate this awkwardness, the loss of the old fluency between us. I wonder if, one day, we might be the good friends we should always have been?

  Jess.

  PS: Thinking about it, I’m glad you’ve chucked in the job. You were always a caged beast there, and I used to feel guilty about it… though how you plan to survive…

  Well, none of my business now.

  Love,

  J

  I went for a long walk that day, back across the water meadows and into the trees, and saw that the season of the Green Man was over now.

  Yes, I’d forgotten my son’s birthday; yes, I hated myself for it; and, yes, I knew I would go. It might be hard for Marcus to cope with a father turning up like a vagabond with gifts, but it would be much harder if I abdicated in action from everything I’d tried to tell him on the phone.

  The arrival of the letter was like a bell ringing “time”, for I knew that once I left Munding I would not come back. Return was not impossible – Clive had no immediate need of his cottage, but The Pightle had been intended only as a temporary refuge, and everything was changing now.

  It had changed. Somewhere among these glades I’d spied on an old man and a naked girl. Briefly I’d become the lover of the girl, and now she was my friend. I had made Edward my friend and I’d betrayed that friendship – doing the wrong thing in the right way, or the right one in the wrong way – I didn’t know which. I lacked Laura’s clarity there. But I had changed, and I couldn’t just cut and run this time. I couldn’t blame Edward for not wanting to see me; I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving without seeing him; and I would soon have to go.
If the sight of my face was still unacceptable to him, some other way must be found of acknowledging both the injury I’d done him, and the great debt I owed.

  I could write to him, I supposed, as I must now write to Jess, and in neither case would it be easy to convey my sense that the man who had come to Munding and the man who was leaving were not the same. Jess knew me so well that any new performance would have to be spectacular to impress her jaded eye. She knew also that words are cheap coin. Yet, if nothing else came of all of this, there ought to be some way to answer her hope that, one day – across that most difficult of divides, a misalliance – we might recreate the friendship I too missed.

  First we must talk about divorce. It was the old alchemical procedure –solve et coagula. The elements must be resolved into their separate identities before they could meet each other in the right way, and I knew something now of the problems posed by that simple formula. Still, for Jess and me, divorce might hold the possibility of renewal: but for the children…

  Marcus was seven years old, Lily four. They were infants, novices, from whom – however carefully we approached them – the doves of innocence were about to fly. Not for the first time I wondered whether Jess and I had come together in marriage only so that these two particular children might be born and suffer at our particular hands their first initiation into pain. Yet everything I’d learnt – everything I’d dreamt – insisted on a larger view.

  I walked through the woods thinking about marriage – about the way we settle for an intimate conspiracy of two against the world, or a sad compromise of disappointed hopes, when – with a little patience, a little more self-knowledge – we might discover mystery made flesh. This was the directive of my first big dream. It pointed inwards and outwards at once. Somehow the ring must be held between our conscious choices and the dark imperatives of dream, for they would settle for no less. I wondered whether Jess and Martin had discovered this for themselves, were holding on to it throughout the difficulties they faced. But that – in Jess’s tactful phrase – was not my business. For me, for now, and probably for some time to come, the chymical wedding must remain an inward process, and one that my children would severely test before I could look for fresh connections with the world.

  A thought occurred which would have been impossible when I first walked in these woods: that the growth of self-knowledge might bring an increase of freedom, but the more one had of both, the less one had, it seemed. Smoking, I leant against the silky green trunk of a beech, and saw that someone had carved two sets of initials there a long time ago. A lover making this tree his book. Unmarried and childless. Still inside the dream. Then an aircraft roared across the roof of the wood, and I was startled to fury, shouting what the trees could not shout, that I hated the bloody weapons, I loathed and abominated them, but the plane was already far away and, even more than distance, the noise of his own engines deafened the pilot to my shout. So, for a time, there was nothing that this silly sod below could do but quake.

  Eventually the walk brought me through the glades towards the Decoy Lodge. I hesitated, uncertain whether to go down. It felt like indulgence – a wallowing in nostalgia – to invite the feelings that would meet me there, but not to meet them would be an attempt to close accounts too soon.

  The Lodge was locked and oddly bereft of life – no washing on the line, the old car absent from the yard and – when I peered through a lancet window – things tidied away inside. It might have been waiting for new tenants. I walked round to the lawn, over the innocent grass where Laura and I had made love, and looked around me. No ghosts, no presences. Not even – I winced wryly at the thought – the gamekeeper watching among the trees, a shotgun under his arm, wide-eyed. Whatever else, we had provided hours of conversation in the Feathers! One day, I hoped, Edward might be able to laugh over all of this.

  I went down to the jetty and was surprised to find the skiff tied there. Edward must have rowed back from the Hall after the confrontation with Ralph, brooding across the dark lake with Tom Horrocks’s case-book in his pocket, and Frere’s razor. Had he really meant to come looking for me, I wondered, or had my unexpected presence in the Lodge tipped him over into that darkness? Unless we met again and found a way to talk, I would never know.

  I stepped down into the skiff and sat in the stern, staring out across the lake. The two swans – Humphrey and Janet – glided on their own reflections, preening themselves, dripping their elegant necks beneath the dappled surface. A breeze fretted among the reeds.

  I took a notepad from my pocket, and my pen. I had meant to write a reply to Jess, but I found myself thinking of words for Edward. Poetry, I thought. Poesis – a word that was originally derived from the sound of water. I stared and stared at the lake. And, after a time, I began to write.

  The sun was well past the meridian when I stood up again, and I was hungry. I walked back by way of Laura’s studio and looked in through the windows for the first time: cool, whitewashed walls of wattle and daub, a line of plastic buckets with bags of clay stacked beside them, a workbench on which stood a small blue turning wheel and a neat array of tools. There was a high stool at the bench and a battered old armchair was placed beside her view of the lake. I saw a collection of pebbles in a dish of water, a swan’s pinion feather, and the salt-stained piece of driftwood we had found on the beach. A cork pin-board was covered in sketches and photographs. Mostly they were of flowers and trees, but there was a polaroid snapshot of a handsome, rather Nordic man with an arm around a dark-haired woman who smiled uneasily at the camera – Laura’s parents presumably, standing in the garden of their clapboard house. I saw only one alchemical image: a photocopy of an illustration from the Mutus Liber in which the adept and his mystic sister worked at their furnace as Laura and I had sweated once over her kiln.

  I walked round the shed to look at the kiln and was startled by the ruin there. Bricks from the kiln door had been stacked neatly enough among the muddle of split timber with shelves leaning against them, but all around the ground was littered with shards of smashed pottery. So much had happened since that I’d forgotten Laura’s state of mind on opening the kiln, but here its relics lay in pieces. Vandals might have been at work.

  As Edward must have done before me, I knelt down, picked up shard after broken shard, trying to piece them together as though the world that had existed on the day of the firing might be made good again. So much entrusted to the flame, and so much ruin. For a time, once again, none of it made any sense.

  Bob came round to The Pightle shortly after I’d got back. “Laura rang earlier,” he said, “but you were out.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s okay but…”

  “Edward?”

  Bob waved his palms to calm me down. “They’re both all right, but apparently she’s had enough of him playing the voice of doom. She’s talked to the nursing staff and they all agree he needs to reconnect with life, and that he might have to be pushed. Laura wonders if you’ll go in to see him this evening.”

  “Does he know about it?”

  “She says he’d only get worked up if he did.”

  “I’d like to see him. I need to… But if he still doesn’t want to see me…”

  “We talked about that, and she came up with what I think is rather a good idea. She thinks I should go in with you. Cushion the blow. If you’re agreeable, that is.”

  I thought about it, saw the advantages and the disadvantages, and that the former might outweigh the latter. “It might make things easier… if you really don’t mind.”

  “Oh, I warmed to the idea. I was rather looking forward to it. I’ve only ever seen him shooting off his mouth or speechless, and” – Bob grinned – “I feel I’ve sort of got shares in him now. I want to find out if it’s a good investment.”

  “So long as you don’t expect gratitude.”

  “Laura warned me about that. I’ll settle for a good argument.”

  Though Laura looked tired when we me
t her outside the hospital, her smile had none of the tension I’d expected. She seemed cheerful even, and amused by my trepidation when she announced her decision not to come into the ward with us. “I was with him earlier and I think he’s seen enough of me for one day. He might behave himself if I’m not around. I’ll wait for you here.”

  Bob and I joined the small crowd of visitors waiting admission to the wards. I took in the antiseptic smells, the anxiety and the relief around me. Everyone else seemed to know where they were going so we were left surveying the array of beds, screens and machines until I spotted Edward at the far end of the ward. He looked up, frowned, glanced away, then pushed a notebook and pencil into his bedside drawer and turned to nod at my greeting, old and frail.

  Bob said, “We represent the world. You’re supposed to connect with it.”

  There was a glimmer of a smile.

  “Do you remember Bob?” I said. “You met him that first night at the Hall.”

  “You called me a naive materialist,” Bob prompted, “and a builder of public conveniences, as I recall. We’ve brought you some grapes. Can I have one?”

  Edward made a weak gesture of largesse with his hand. “You have me at a disadvantage,” he said. “I’m in the embarrassing position of owing you my life… I’m afraid I don’t quite know what one does with a debt like that.”

  “One forgets it,” Bob answered immediately.

  Edward studied him for a moment, then said, “I rarely repay debts but I never forget them.” A touch of the old spirit was there, but the voice was weaker.

  “It wasn’t a forgettable experience,” Bob conceded. “You’re the first person I’ve kissed in nearly ten years.”

  Edward smiled. I began to relax, ventured to ask how he was feeling.

  “Feeling?” He was still finding it hard to look at me, and his eyes wandered around the ward before he seemed to remember that he had been asked a question. “I suppose I should know. I mean, we’re all experts here – in the heart and its problems.” He looked back at me through slightly narrowed, embarrassed eyes. “Not a nuance of ventricular fibrillation escapes us. Ask us about myocardial infarction and you will receive a lengthy answer. But ask me how I’m feeling and I’m at a bit of a loss…”