A Dark and Stormy Night Read online

  Calm.

  Who’s to say I’m yet forest-lost? Haven’t I known forests? Trusted and traversed them? Haven’t I read jungle tracks without a quaver of doubt?

  My villa buddies, your Simon Chance has proven directional logic.

  So what ails you, Bishop Simon? Musabuli, the pygmies named you: He who lifts up those sinking into the swamps.

  Don’t my legs work at my bidding? Do I have a moment’s concern for my bodily wellbeing?

  My sole anxiety in not finding my way back to the villa is at upsetting my companions in their nightly blow-out, the piggy-fest, the regular gargantuan snout-event. It’s only six o’clock. There’s still the better part of two hours to make it back: to turn up among them all before they’ve started in on frenzy … to drift in among them before they’ve awoken to my absence. Oh – there you are, Simon! We were just beginning to wonder …

  Two hours to go before they begin to wonder, before the flickers of the frenzy.

  Calm.

  Yet this hour or two matters. Minutes matter. I do not know my way back. By eight it’ll be well and truly dark.

  So be it! I am not afraid of dark. At around eight that they’ll all be closing in upon the salon at the approach of the conviviality obliviating the disaster of the day. Uppermost in their heads will be the latest on the global maelström, the worldwide money catastrophe spontaneously self-generating this very week.

  ‘Your gold, Julian?’

  ‘Price’ll double by the weekend.’

  ‘Have you been buying?

  ‘Of course.’

  The next thing will be the obliviating – the honking and grubbery, the five-courses and duo of vintages beading the brim.

  Only as they settle at the table will a voice remark, Where’s Simon? Nine heads turn, cocked rhetorically. Simon? Simon? Each will then awake (even with a flicker of relief) at this further distraction from the collapse of the outer world by so arresting a personal confusion: No one’s seen Simon Chance for hours and hours. He’s vanished into the dark wood – the single one among us who’s surely beyond the statutory call of making money.

  Oh my dear Lord. The moment for a piercing supplication? From a paid-up subscriber?

  Tell me, O light of my intellect: Who made this track I’m following just now: Beast or Man? And if man, what man, and why? Leading where, beginning where?

  If beast, ought I to be following it? The sole beast surviving here is boar. I’ve already caught sight of his spoor, his rootlings and faeces.

  If I am to follow your brutes and beasts, Creator-Lord, where will they lead me? Repeatedly there are tracks which speak of something’s passage. They lead me on, but only into deeper impenetrability.

  Come now, bump, directional bump! Why have you forsaken me? – you who were so dependable when I was young … in wilder, vaster, vastly darker Africa, when I was young.

  How did Dante Alighieri meet it – eh, Dante, long comrade – awaking in despair to find yourself lost just like this? How you got into it you didn’t know. Neanch’io. Dante. Ni moi, non plus. You pressed on, didn’t you, up the side of the beautiful mountain. (Little mountains are all around me, though none beautiful, this entire massif a clutter of tumps.) At once you were thrown back. Leopard, lion and she-wolf flung you back into the density of the wood, blocking vision – back into just such obscurity and density as of these cork-oaks, pines, sweet chestnuts, chênes verts, mimosa, saplings. And the brambles and wrestling thickets.

  This forest of mine is unremitting in every direction hectare on hectare, hour on hour. It can’t be any different from the Tuscan forests of your imagination, Dante.

  We get the Mistral and you some katabatic Alpine blast. A dark Mediterranean wood is a dark Mediterranean wood.

  So now: I’ve no fear for myself, for life, for death. None whatsoever. I can endure the whole night here in the forest. A mere Mediterranean September night, a few hundred metres above the level of a balmy sea, a bit chilly in the small hours … And anyway: once I’m obliged to admit I am lost, all I’ve to do is to get down, get low by any descending gully and simply push on – keep pushing on wherever the lowest ground takes my feet and I can get through, by whatever further forested dell succeeds another until this dense jumble of ascents and gulches yields a cultivated valley and the first vineyards: and the presence of men, and a dwelling.

  A Var habitant will emerge at dawn to be accosted by a solitary male stranger of indeterminate age, dishevelled, in a green shirt, rust-coloured slacks, trainers: suave, apparently English, seeking coffee, a crust and a way back somewhere.

  A plausible speculation.

  Calm, sir. Press on. Calm. You are not yet lost, not until you decide that you are. Use your head.

  Up to a mere half hour ago there was directional logic to the course you chose. You had set off on housekeeper Maïté’s report of a long-abandoned church she knew as a child. It was locked high in the forest on a certain summit south-west of where the villa stands, Maïté said no more than an hour or two’s forest tramp-and-scramble. It was run up long ago for a community of miners digging ore out of this iron-rich massif as lately as Napoleon’s wars.

  Were such miners the ‘Maures’ who have given their name to this massif? Surely not. This fastness would have derived its name from the people of before the dawn of history, when names were young.

  Maïté told she’d been taken to the forsaken chapel as a child by her papa twenty or more years ago. It was high-high, she insisted, haute-haute, and topped and sheltered by a craggy peak. From that open rock she had gazed upon the entire unrolling of the massif in every direction – southwards even down to the distant sea. I could see the wonder of it in her eyes these twenty years on. The church haute-haute had been de-consecrated oh, ages ago, and there was none to worship there now. Yet it was not yet a ruin, she insisted.

  This forgotten forest sanctum had given me my objective, an imp of motive for a hike. It is what Marigold would have expected of me. I have allegiance for anything once consecrated … I demand divinity in things, the solemn universal privacy. Marigold knew.

  God knows I’ll not reach it now. I’ve tried enough ascents on this tramp and found no more than bluffs and ridges, blind with trees …

  Haute-haute, Dante. To Paradiso. But you had one to guide you.

  You-all, up in your villa on another top, might you come later on tonight to speculate after all that I was indeed lost before I started out? This carefree companion of yours from old times, the odd man in, bereaved of his lifelong companion, as the comfort patter runs; Marigold, Simon Chance’s eccentric choice, mother of twins, lady of musical gifts abstruse and rare whom virtually none of you got to know – knew only of – whose music you never heard a bar of. ‘Remote’, you classed her; standoffish you thought in private if you thought at all as you scurried on with your own lives. How odd of Simon. You, Clare, were never reconciled to my having married Marigold. The Simon Chance you knew wasn’t the Simon Chance who chose Marigold to wed – Marigold the reserved, driven, demoned, self-caged … whom only I knew how to uncage and then but rarely. And then she was gone to mindlessness.

  Am I not correct, Clare? In my masque as lover, swain, you had me cast quite otherwise. You had me cast swaining your nearest soulmate at Oxford University.

  Yet even you, Clare, stopping to think, must see that however stark her contrast with Evie, my violinist Marigold and I found love, lived that love – in better in worse, leaning one on another, quelling pain, easing strain, assuaging sorrow, kindling courage, kindling music. Cleaving year upon year to banish darkness in a dark continent, she with her fiddle, I with my history of abstruse astonishing redemption, aspiring to a life of the spirit, of faith and works, saving lives, praising the gift of life. Oh we saved many a life, Clare, saved fever-bellied totos, victims of kwashiorkor, faraway. Mine was no parish priesthood in Northamptonshire.

  Now that Marigold’s gone from me and from this world, might you now be quick to link this forest-lo
stness to the final, final loss of the helpmeet who oh so capriciously made her life with me?

  You would still be on the wrong track. It was not life’s candle going out that bereaved me of the wife you never got to know. Bereavement stole in years ago, a silent intruder; a presence in the next room, hooded, uninvited. Thereafter, Grief haunted the home. Marigold’s actual death was less a death than exorcism, when the rag-doll that had been Marigold had ceased to twitch and the hooded familiar had vanished. I need to grieve, I wish to grieve. I am deprived of the ability to grieve.

  You can’t know, friends, how a man responds to his wife in the husk, to the joke usurper of her who was once bursting grain, spurting music. He would love the husk as grain on behalf of his God who loves all that He has made and unmade. He postulates love, a love they knew, and finds it there while the demon reels her back into infancy. He humours her with babba-talk, distracts her with baubles, jollities. He brings on the clowns. He makes the house a dolls’ house. He shapes for himself an inanity to mirror hers. He is a man being widowed by stealth, bit by bit as her own synapses of recognition, memory, grasp, are stealthily coated …

  Is that other any longer present? Has Love any purchase? May a man love the human space Love once occupied?

  This was she he vowed to love for better, for worse. Year upon year vacancy leached the substance of her being. There, there. Sweet bond of love. Month on month the railing desperation – I don’t know who I am. At five in the morning: I don’t know who you are – from within her solid glass enclosure, unshatterable, impenetrable, a nightmare wideawake, at five in the morning.

  Lord, look upon this your child that has been dragged back out of self-command into the terrors of infancy.

  Wait.

  Out of this infancy there self-spins a thread of infantile trust which is exclusively ours. Such pristine trust is yet of life, yet of joy. In fleeting indestructibility such a thread outspans space and overrides time. It is a moment’s thread of sheer melody as of a violin which he alone can draw forth, yet a thread self-spun no less of him than her.

  Such infant trust is of an innocence that is pre-dementia and pre-guilt. In these silken moments she has a beauty to which his eye alone can attest. No matter how long the preceding passage of madness, how cruel the waters of oblivion, here is melody spontaneously released, the eyes kindling and a hand pushing forth as if into nothingness yet finding … his!

  All will be well, and all manner of thing will be well and innocent after all.

  What did you know of any of this, old friends, as word reached you of Marigold Chance’s insanity? Which of you paused?

  By sheer slackness of imagination even the best of friends have strength to bear one another’s misfortunes. I’ve held nothing against you Clare, let alone Wally and Violetta, that not one of you chose to call on me as Marigold’s vacuity took up residence. You knew, but you chose to stay away. My mediaeval Oxford hideout was unexposed, hiding what it had to hide. By that same slack token it will have occurred to none that what affects me now is no recent grief but an inability to grieve.

  None of you was at hand to hear the silence at the end of that interminable emptying of being when the breathing stopped; not one of you at hand to hear that silence. There was none there across the room to regard the survivor with his incapacity for grief as he gaped beside a heave in the bed; beside the thing waiting to be boxed and made ashes of.

  I didn’t expect it; no blame, old friends. No complaint. We don’t do death these days. Just a box, a vibro-organ and a disposal: a little industry little spoken of, with a long face in the job description. The afterlife went out with the waltz. Don’t pause, chums, to consider what that interminable closure had left sitting there in a metal chair on the linoleum in silence under the power-saving light: the interminable terminated.

  Which of you could know of such protracted inability to reach across the abyss and slake a crazed isolation with two drops of recognition?

  This is I, your husband, lifelong, for-better-for-worse, your children’s seed-sower, investor of your body with a meaning.

  Good Ambrose begged to put Marigold on his prayer-litany of the sick at Trinity’s evensong, Marigold Chance, among that miscellany of our Oxford acquaintances with known affliction. I held him back because this was one of ineluctability, whose alleviation was its own advance. I framed my motives for declining Ambrose’s offer. While she still had capacity to express a want, it was to die. The only honest petition in the throat of the prayer was to die. Shall that be our eucharistic entreaty, Ambrose, in your ecclesial throat?

  Let it be God’s decision, Simon. It is for us to pray.

  None of you has seen, none of you has known. Evie alone will have perceived something, darkly, through her own dark glass in me – perceived how guilt might lie amid the elusive grief …

  Get a move on, now. Standing here vacillating won’t get you out of this.

  Marigold, genitrix of our little line; carapaced, riven, conduit of inspiration from the other world of music, where are you? – you who went on loving me despite. Does soul keep you reassembled and in peace passing all understanding? Requiescas. May you rest, my gold Mari, in the ever-living rest of how it might have been. There’s music to reunite us, and the joyful expectancy of music now that you have a hold on your evanescent being by release from creaturehood. Amid the music of spheres, your shattered fiddle’s restored. One who was my Dante’s contemporary, that Meister, reveals the no-thing which transcends the created being of the soul, not in contact with created things, this no-thing sharing the nature of discerning deity. How it is one in itself and has naught in common with any thing.

  The Meister’s words are here in my head. By his bleaker Northern route he tracks the soul to that further Presence, a strange and desert place, rather name-less than possessed of a name, more un-known than known: the negation of negation. You would have me pre-bereaved, Meister Eckhart, beyond grief because beyond creaturehood where the very authority of the givenness of love is in its transcendence. So you required of us, Meister. So it was you told us we should live in a way that the whole of our life is love.

  Yet to whom shall this love be expressed? And how, how? We are but creatures, Meister. Fleshed humans. Conceived in flesh. What would you have of us in bereavement, in guilt? Were they right after all to arraign you for heresy, Meister; for requiring too much of us in the name of that God which is nameless, nichtgott, non-God; nichtgeist, non-Spirit; nichtpersone, non-Person?

  We have not reached you, Meister … your level.

  God knows. Not yet. We cannot find Him by the glassy sea, in one perpetual light, one equal music.

  Only now, in our godless age, might we re-approach you who outflanked us centuries ago. You found the soul of man, Meister, this soul we are, in the embrace of the Creator prior to His ebullitio, His bubbling-forth demiurge, conjuring soul, beauty, music.

  Oh Mari-mine, is such a place your allocation? And I to seek you there, where the beauty here in earth will have been transcended by what is otherwise eternal?

  God forbid. In that music is here, it is because it was always here, in this earth.

  As the affliction stalked you and the demon took possession, you would cling to me as if to existence itself. You were that child of Schubert’s mounted behind his father at full gallop through night forest, mein Vater, mein Vater. How you would blurt to me in your shards of clarity that you no longer recognised yourself, that you knew you were not the same person you once were.

  Can you now see me, Marigold, scrambling through this night-threatened forest in flight from my own emptiness?

  ‘I cannot compose … I have the skills, there’s nothing there.’ The fingertips accustomed to make your music now clamp the temples. ‘Nothing. I am so regretful.’ Such a tidy word. ‘All I want to do is die.’ Fingertips disorder your hair.

  My fingertips take your wrists like culprits, to take them into custody.

  ‘I have wanted to die for months.’<
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  An hour earlier I would have had you in a capsule of oblivion, even laughing. For you, every moment is always. Hence now, tears in paroxysms.

  Your practice had been to stride the banks and eyots of the Isis on your own, generating music in your head, jotting down a phrase or a chord or a rhythmic pattern in your strapped notebook.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do with all my skills. My ideas go nowhere.’ You cling to me.

  ‘You have me,’ I comfort. ‘We have each other … And all those compositions ready for countless performances. For ever and always, darling.’ I make some old clowning antic.

  ‘It’ll pass,’ you say, meaning the creative impasse.

  It will not. It will not.

  And then I mourn you, those measureless months and years: they will pass, as everything passes, the parade of vanished opportunities, truth by the glimpse … My riven Marigold, for whom I am trustee of your gifts – gifts of God’s inherent music, his spheres made personal in you, for you, by you.

  I will marry this man, you said, since he honours music. We met in music. He is a man of honour, a man of what he calls God; I will be wife to him, helpmeet, whatever he seeks to undertake, in sickness and in health; for better, for worse. As this manual saith.

  The vessel is broken at the wheel and the shards scattered.

  II

  Present Lord, I am halted on this track. And where on earth is this track taking me – the track of my feet and my recent recall?

  Not to any abandoned church’s recorded vista of a twenty-year-old childish memory. This corner of wood looks unfamiliar and alien.

  Setting Sun, you are scarcely discernible through the foliage. You are hiding within an eerie sky that’s been thickening and swelling since morning…

  The density of the atmosphere bears on me. I sense the weight of it.

  Vaunted bump, my old interior sextant, Simon Chance’s very Ariel! Have I taken you for granted too long and you have quit my service? Which way have I been moving in this past hour? East or west, north or south?