A Dark and Stormy Night Read online

  To that which we give the name of Love, be it of the flesh or of God, is it ever less than divine?

  In a space of mere hours, a life and faith in their entirety are to be re-lived by Simon Chance.

  One-time missionary and bishop, Chance had withdrawn in mid-life to research – and teach – his enduring mentor Dante, creator of The Divine Comedy. He is recently widowed, after the prolonged descent into dementia of his devoted wife Marigold, violinist and composer.

  To recuperate, he is invited by a life-long confidante, Clare, to her son’s villa in the hills behind St Tropez in southern France, to join a house party of old friends from their university days, each now reaping the rewards of their worldly careers. The reunion coincides with the collapse of global banking confidence – and the playing-out of Clare’s own loss of love.

  But on a walk in the forest of the Massif des Maures surrounding the remote villa, in search of a church abandoned centuries ago, Chance loses his way – in a ‘dark wood’, as once experienced by Dante. The night turns wild.

  Nor has Marigold been the only love of Simon Chance. The overwhelming liaison of his earlier life, pre-ordination, was with a student botanist. This very Evie, with her Parliamentarian spouse, is about to join the house party of Clare, her greatest friend.

  A vital element in that searing, abandoned youthful liaison is yet to be reconciled which this scholar-cleric Chance has come to be. Now it rises to confront him. Here is the binding and defining weave of this night, unraveling in darkness, storm and dawn.

  The working-through of the nature of love, physical and spiritual, in love’s innocence and purity, will redeem Simon Chance or destroy him. Or both.

  TOM STACEY (born 1930) has written fiction alongside his professions as newspaperman, publisher, penologist and ethnic campaigner. Starting young in Fleet Street, he was chief roving correspondent of the Sunday Times by the age of 30 and winner of the Foreign Correspondent of the Year award in 1961. As a newspaperman he reported from well over 120 countries, several repeatedly. His imprisonment in India (while covering the Kashmir issue) led to his involvement at home as a lifelong prison visitor and to his conception and devising (in 1981) of the electronic tag and to his championship of the tag as an alternative to jail and rehabilitative aid.

  As a publisher from midlife, his imprints created comprehensive works on countries across the Middle East and the Islamic world, the 20-volume Peoples of the Earth series (co-published in 14 languages), and The Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam. His imprints’ authors have backed or headed campaigns on counter-consensus issues.

  His co-habiting with the peoples of the Ruwenzori Mountains on the Uganda-Congo border in 1954 gave rise to his major novel The Brothers M (1960, published in Britain, the US and in translation). Thereafter, his whole-hearted identification with the Rwenzururians’ campaign for self-determination was vindicated by Uganda’s ultimate recognition (2009) of the people and territory as a constitutional ‘cultural’ Kingdom in Uganda. In this his later book Tribe, the Hidden History of the Mountains of the Moon (2003) proved to have paid a decisive part.

  He is a winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Works by Tom Stacey

  Novels

  The Brothers M

  The Living and the Dying

  The Pandemonium

  The Twelfth Night of Ramadan (under the nom de plume Kendal J Peel)

  The Worm of the Rose

  Decline

  The Man Who Knew Everything (first published as Deadline)

  Collected Long Short Stories

  Bodies and Souls

  Separately Published Long Short Stories/ Novellas

  The Same Old Story/ The Tether of the Flesh/ Golden Rain/ Grief/ The Swap/ Boredom, Or, the Yellow Trousers/ Mary’s Visit/ The Kelpie from Rhum

  Travel and Ethnology

  The Hostile Sun

  Summons to Ruwenzori

  Peoples of the Earth (20 volumes, deviser and supervisory editor)

  Tribe, The Hidden History of the Mountains of the Moon

  Biography

  Thomas Brassey, The Greatest Railway Builder in the World

  Current Affairs

  Today’s World (Editor)

  The Book of the World (deviser and supervisor)

  Immigration and Enoch Powell

  For Children

  The First Dog to be Somebody’s Best Friend

  Screenplay

  Deadline

  A Prefatory Comment

  by A N Wilson

  This is a beautiful book.

  The Dante scholar lost in a dark wood, the Bishop going into the darkness where God is. The man who has experienced love on so many levels, reliving his past before confronting the great Empyrean.

  This impressive narration isn’t just a stream of consciousness. It is well-crafted narration, it has a plot. Marigold is very vivid, but the other two women, Clare and Evie are also very distinct.

  Tom Stacey also conveys – mysteriously – the character of the other members of the house party: whom we never meet.

  Humour, humanity, passion are all here.

  A Dark and Stormy Night is a superb achievement.

  A Dark and Stormy Night

  Tom Stacey

  A Dark and Stormy Night

  Published by

  Medina Publishing Ltd

  310 Ewell Road

  Surbiton

  Surrey KT6 7AL

  medinapublishing.com

  © Tom Stacey 2018

  Design & Layout: Catherine Perks

  Cover: Taslima Begum

  ISBN 978-1-911487-25-8

  Printed and bound by Interak Printing House, Poland

  Tom Stacey asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

  CIP Data: A catalogue record for this book is available at the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  Explanatory Preamble

  The driven mind of Simon Chance, narrator, carries certain abbreviations and possibly obscure terms which occur on the page as they do in his thoughts. These include a scatter of Oxford University abbreviations: LMH for Lady Margaret Hall and BNC for Brasenose College; PPE for Politics, Philosophy and Economics; and OUDS for Oxford University Drama Society.

  The abbreviation CMS stands for Church Mission Society. BCB liturgy refers to (Cranmer’s) Book of Common Prayer.

  He is caught up by the mystical thinking of the Dominican Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327), contemporary of Dante Alighieri, of whom he is a devoted scholar. In a theological context is the Greek term eremia meaning a place of utter desolation, and kenosis – being’s divestment of the ‘self’.

  A reference to ‘Dorothy’ in Chapter IV is to the (Christian) crime novelist and Dante translator Dorothy Sayers.

  Quotations from the Bible spring up in the narrator’s mind. Most are from the Gospels or Isaiah. Fragments of poetry come back to him. Chapter VIII begins with his recalling Henry Vaughan.

  Later in chapter VIII Simon’s mind invokes Jesus’ injunction to the busy-bee Martha, unum est necessarium, a phrase meaning ‘only a single thing is needful’. In chapter IX two quotations from St Matthew occur, one from Isaiah, and another from the Song of Solomon.

  Chapter X includes three vital lines from the apocalyptic poem of Andrew Young, Out of the World and Back.

  Molimo, in the Bambuti (pygmy) vernacular, is the hidden shamanistic device to induce spiritual presence by eerie guttural amplifi
cation through a hole in a sanctified drum.

  In the Bantu vernacular, the term Mwamba denotes a single member of the Baamba tribe. Their territory is Bwamba. Wazungu means white people, and mzungu is one of them.

  Earlier, in Chapter III, the parable of Dives and Lazarus is haunting Simon’s mind. St Luke puts the story into the mouth of Jesus in chapter 16 of his Gospel, translated in the Authorized Version thus:

  ‘There was a certain rich man, Dives, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: and there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

  ‘And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

  ‘And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

  ‘But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed; so that they who would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.’

  for

  Henry Maas

  a man of letters

  ‘A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa;

  Ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle

  Si come rota ch’igualmente è mossa

  L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle –

  Power failed high imagining; but as if they

  were a wheel turning in perfect evenness my

  desire and my will were rolled by the love

  which moves the sun and other stars.’

  Dante: Paradiso

  I

  Who in our besieged house party will have guessed I, Simon, was lost before I set out from the villa itself? Which of you my old mates might suspect any such thing? Not you, Hedgefund Reggie, not Charley our Chancery silk. Bullion Julian our gold buff? Fergus the merger? I think not. Conceivably, perhaps, Sir Gunther, the odd one out, who could well require of himself to see through us English in our pretences … As for the ladies, might such a shaft of suspicion as to the state of my soul have entered our hostess Clare? – Clare, self-declared confidante in my bereavement, Clare with her offer of a distracting break in the south of France amid the ‘old set’ in her borrowed villa to provide the vital balm on my widowhood at last.

  What can you truly know, Clare, of the state of my soul? That the very justification of my life, all spiritual and intellectual endeavour, might require of me to be lost – to be challenged by some such challenge as confronted Dante, in exile, banished, bereft of his inheritance; bereft of the context of his life, his coterie, his stage to play on? Shall I in my isolation commit myself to make of love whatever of love remains within me?

  What – God knows! – am I doing here at all, with all these figures from my youth, if not to expose myself to my lostness, my self-deception, my sloth, my fraudulence?

  Yet I didn’t devise this forest-lostness. Heaven knows the havoc it will entail. Is a malign hand at work? A devil’s wager with whatever speaks for God? Amid the knock-on havoc of my getting lost, none of you will condone it.

  Wally, ah. Treasured Wally: the forging of your bond with me long preceded University where I bonded with most of you. Our bond was made in limpid childhood at eleven or twelve at school in the Grampians. You and I were the risk-takers. You and I dared. Secretly, recklessly. You are here with the rest of us in the south of France only through your Violetta being a sixth-form college crony of Clare: that slender chance …

  Might you have guessed, Wally, that I was seeking to be lost? Inviting kidnap by this forest under the assault of unanswerable questions, Why am I here? What am I doing in the uplands behind St Tropez, with a bunch of past comrades among whom I am little less than phoney … bereft of grief at his own bereavement of the wife who gave him her very being, bore his children, shaped her life to his?

  No, Wally. Not you.

  I am a man alone, confronted by an obligation to grieve he cannot fulfil. I gaze upon a space vacated by another of whose soul I am designated custodian. What absurdity is this? Who has the custodianship of another’s soul? … Marigold is a hollow, a vacancy, a skull a man picks up, turns in his hand, peers into the sockets of the eyes and has him questioning, Who might this have contained? What soul implied has flit? What monumental significance? What partner of its Maker? What the creative imperative that won the justification for the myriad of genes and impulses that this cavity contained? Its claim on immortality?

  O skull, O Marigold. Five weeks in earth. An echo-chamber, long rehearsed at becoming nothing, dementia-scoured. A vessel of extrusion. O Marigold of the declaration If I did not have you I would not want to live. I would not be alive. Yours is not a hollow I can overlook.

  How shall it be re-occupied by all you were? Music; memory; all, indeed, of myself that you’d dare receive … with whom I had preserved the thread of devotional exchange to the final moments of life.

  My grief’s rehearsal dragged on and on. When the curtain rose, nothing was on stage. When we buried you, we buried rags of history, scraps of composition, musical wisps. O skull. How do I mourn you? At your funeral we were going through a programme of motions. We the quick were cremating a simulacrum, a dolly.

  Only you, Wally, will think no less of me at finding myself singled out, stripped to the buff and bolted into the pillory – to all others an object of worthlessness and fatuity whose private parts and white skin and pat existence are to be done with – just another human body, albeit breathing. Its white skin (they may come to notice) is imprinted with countless words which are already fading in this Mediterranean exposure, and warped and stretched into illegibility. Simon Chance, Bishop.

  Wait, wait! Among the bystanders at the foot of pillory shall be Evie. She knew the skin with her own skin and, hence, can never unknow it – knows it with her skin and lips, knows it in sleep and in the mutual loss of her and that other body’s very self in the consummation of what man has no other name than love.

  A man’s skin renews itself every few weeks, they say. Yet Marigold and I learned in Africa of the unexpected unity of epidermis and cerebral cortex. And the skin’s memory cannot be expunged.

  Of all this lot in the villa I am the last to get himself lost, heaven knows, in either sense. Simon Chance, suffragan Bishop, no less. A man of God, trained and salaried to have answers to these questions of eternity-and-now and death-and-life which our villa’s tight company of the Recognisably Successful hadn’t yet had time or occasion to delve at depth, not at least with the due diligence they would insist on for lesser investments.

  If club-footed Wally stands apart, it is not because he was more spiritual than the rest of our fellows. Certainly not. Nor because the spectacular bankruptcy of his conglomerate several years ago has disqualified him from the rat-race. It’s because our friendship’s lines were drawn in childhood when no line is drawable between what is of the spirit and what is not. When word goes round that I’ve gone missing, he’ll be standing to one side with that childhood look of his which says one of us has gone too far. It was what we uniquely shared, going too far.

  Meanwhile, lost I am. Forest-lost.

  Actual setting-out was about 4 p.m. Already it’s – what? – nearly ten past six! Just fifteen hours before Evie joins the house party.

  Am I genuinely getting lost right now? Of all God’s footmen, me?

  The shame of it. I’m emphatically the wrong person. Someone remarked this very lunchtime when I let drop my intention to walk. Don’t worry about Simon. (It was Clare herself.) He’s a qualified explorer. Jungle-mis
sionary.

  Just so, Clare – a quarter of a century ago. Another life, another history.

  The layers of our lives, Clare, never quite let us go, do they?

  Calm, then. Calm. Too early to say I’m literally lost in this selva oscura, gloomy wood as you, Dante, had it, straying off into your shattering excursion to become full-blown Man, virtually redeemed, by a route that took you into Hell’s own depths.

  You had Virgil soon to guide you, then Beatrice to inspire, spur you on to paradise.

  Virgil, wisdom; Beatrice, love.

  What species of vessel am I for Wisdom or for Love? I have you, Dante. And a soul uncleansed by proper grief; and a body vile, well past the half-way mark of mortal life …

  Is this frenetic light-headedness of mine what you too knew of, my Dante? Unworthily. This same teasing elusiveness of any route through or back? – back to where one is recognised, the conceits and smugnesses and petty graft and grime … from where a man can set off anew and get it right? Or not back at all but on into deeper lostness, into more ferocious challenge, catastrophe. What inner conduct do I owe to you, my Dante?

  You, poet, you invoked that dark wood to wrestle out the reality of your lostness. I am in the reality of this dark and lowering wood, this topographic entity, named and shunned. You will have me confront my being, in a pretty panic, in a very literal dark wood.

  Selva oscura. Massif des Maures, Département du Var. Fifty kilometres east to west, thirty south to north. Massive, and Moorish. Amid ghosts of Moors on the soil of grand Europa.

  I will not trace this mess-up of mine to the imminence of Evie’s arrival in our midst – in my midst. I am imputing no sly influence invading the present with our past. A man can get lost in a forest.

  Yet I haven’t the least desire for it! No such impulse whatsoever, neither covert nor overt. I am not alarmed at Evie’s arrival. I acknowledge no devil conspiring to have me pick a stupid track and misjudge true direction at the imminent proximity of a figure ineradicable from my being since I entered manhood. I dread the ignominy. That is all.