A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  ‘Yes,’ you said. ‘Daring.’ And we embraced.

  Yet within two terms of our moving to Trinity there appear the maggots, the grubs of your oblivion. Lapses of musical recall ambush you, your fingers jumble your intentions. Gremlins jostle your musical imagination. You are incredulous. When the diagnosis comes you are already beyond grasping quite what it must come to mean.

  Ah Marigold. By then I am half in prayer for the hastening-on of obfuscation. Direst of all are the splinters of clarity. Then you rail, my ambushed darling; in such wild despair you turn to me. ‘Things drop off,’ I repeat inanely. ‘We grow older. Things drop off.’ (You are not out of your fifties.) ‘You are surrounded by love.’ Whatever of you that remains to be surrounded.

  Then I pray for your oblivion.

  When you declare to friends that you are still composing, you believe it. I catch their eyes to share an object of pity – you …

  Ambrose’s glance thrown to me across the table in Hall implies something Christian is to be garnered from it all.

  What, Ambrose? That mischief which wheedles substance into non-being and time into shards, and what-might-have-been into a wraith of love?

  This is no Oxford that I ever knew before.

  My forest track has led me nowhere.

  There were you, my Marigold, in ‘real life’, capriciously reachable, will-o’-the-wisp, in mute inchoate plea. Blown memory snuffing one by one the candles of recognition of those you were bound to, who embodied you, components of your person. Out went the trembling flame of each of your children, and there was I alone in semblant recognition, I your love, sower of your body …

  Late into the morning you lie there on your bed. You have half-dressed, and then seemingly returned to bed. Your hair is brushed. Your eyes are closed and your mouth is turned down. Can I detect any rise and fall of the bedclothes, telling of breathing? Might you be without life? Such a possibility has me looking beyond your apparent lifelessness, the down-turned mouth (do people die in bed with mouths turned down? Or is a sign of disgruntlement a sign of life?) – looking through you, my spouse, to myself, to my own response to the possibility of you being gone – your being without being any more . . . in that now, if dead you are, this spouse, all is at last too late; the opportunity to love is blown, the whole redemptive thing for the birds. Somewhere I have failed you, and as you have shrunk away from me into infancy and diminished from spouse to patient to wraith, so what stands in for love is rote. I bend to kiss the motionless mask. It jerks aggressively aside. Go away! it cries, and knows it has dismissed me, me and my rote, more or less for ever.

  For what I have learned at that moment is that it is too late. Too late.

  Can a man pray retrospectively? Pray to replay a scene? Might such a thing not make for redemption even now?

  The solitary candle flame that does not die is a pair of praying hands.

  How you will say (piercing my heart) when I tell you of a dear friend of past times about to visit us Oh it’s a name to me. One by one I announce the imminent arrival: a childhood friend, classmate – your old duettist Marie-Elaine at the Royal College; our fellow medical missionary from Congo. You can recall no thread of mutual being. And when our caller arrives, indeed, your eyes surface as if from the depths of a well. A light of recognition is here, a bone-marrow gladness bereft of precision: for that hour you are younger by thirty years. When the visitor is gone, within minutes you will not know who it was that had come or if indeed any had come. The present moment has caged you anew.

  Where have you gone, my Marigold, Gold Mary? You are not all there. She who would be all core is all dross. Whatever claimed to be is might-be, whatever gave shape has lost dimension. Where? Where? Where? Oh leaves awhirl, where is your tree? The loss of the wood of the violin of the melody is this loss.

  The gifts flit one by one. After piano keyboard fingers falter (I notice, but you do not), then the fiddle fingers. Suddenly an entire piece returns to you, a chaconne learned with precision as a student, that precision counter-priming though you cannot tell me what chaconne it is nor how to summon it again, for it summoned itself. You who were never less than total in what you were and did have been selected for untotality, to be fragmented before my eyes as if an elbow had been jogged and a masterpiece of culinary art had been dropped into the scullery’s sink to swirl in bits. No person any more, Marigold, but a swirl of bits. My God, my God, for what is it that I may pray?

  Bits. Fragments. Fragments.

  Or it was as if what once was the fabric of you, fabric of creative artifice, has been secretly invaded that I dare not unfold it lest I gasp at what the moth-mite legion has done to it. For when you would summon your creative demon and fail you are left only wishing to die, only to die. So have you yearned for ‘months and months and months’, by your own testament from the caged present.

  Your wish has been granted, Marigold.

  I pause right here in this forest to weep at my own unweeping.

  Where are you, Marigold? Did I leave you desolate?

  Where am I going? Quo vado?

  Wasn’t I scrambling just now a bit hectically, down by this dubious track through these interminable cork-oaks and Mediterranean pines and chestnuts?

  The less sure of where I am heading, the more frenziedly I follow the vagaries of this boar-run. And half that space until darkness will fall is already gone.

  IV

  Let us be calm. To have taken a careless turn in a dense unpopulated forest – what sin is that? I have a life to live …

  Oh, I confess spiritual dereliction. Lazarus and Dives, the doppelgänger of my dream don’t fit. Yet I, Simon Chance, am scholar, pastor of sorts, papa, grandpapa, I have friends, pupils, functions. I am writing a book to be read, admired and be of guidance. I have reputation and rank, which as an Anglican of breeding I don’t flaunt. The purple I arrived in is an outward show of faith serving him who shows it no less than the shown. The kit props faith. Let any strangers know I don’t deny you, Lord; your presence in me.

  Do I not have my very own devised acronym for meeting the emergencies of all that life may throw at a man – the vowel-less CLTH?

  Calm, therefore. C for Calm. Don’t I know worse humiliation than distracting one’s companions from their tummies and the mesmeric haemorrhaging of unrealisable wealth that served only to render them glad that they were not as other men. Welcome Calm to my heart!

  Yet, Calm. You are not here within. God knows. Calm Thou art Peace and Sanctuary. I have no access. Thou art the Still Voice. I cannot summon you. I cannot override sheer shame at my idiocy, at the ravage of my imagination detailing my disgrace. This pat acronym does not fool me. Calm, you have an entrance key to your high keep, and I have lost it.

  Love. L for Love. ‘Bounce it off the sky, watch where it lands!’ I would tell my Bambuti and they grin wild teeth at the image of Love swinging in the forest canopy until it randomly chooses to alight … My Dante writes of Love as a estate of the soul, not as any swap or wooing but a perpetual giving without any condition or selection, be it for these trees and their forest, or Death himself.

  What any more do I truly know of love, ultimate possession that does away with self, with this crude creature, ducking, diving, concerned not so much to love as to be loved …

  So T?

  T for Thanksgiving, at all times in all places. What scripture says, it means.

  At the entrance to the Death Camp, the forest-tunnel into Treblinka amid the snarling of the dogs, give thanks.

  At Golgotha, on the Cross, in searing despair, in blinding pain, nullification – give thanks.

  Is this what my perception of my pat truth puts me in reach of? God knows …

  H, now – my H – for Humour, for sister Humour is to serve by ridicule to puncture all the pretentiousness of species Man, our bullfrog presumption of being formed in the image of God. We, the forked beast! Hang on to my H, and grab thereby Detachment. Elevate the absurdity of our conscious species. Make a
ll fit for laughter? A mean refuge. My personal Commedia is a script for a Fool, for the wry smiles when a local headline reads Dante Scholar Lost in Dark Wood.

  Or shall I in this particular emergency elevate my acronymic H to Hope? Hope is built into Destiny and invites a vowel for my consonants, a circled mouth shaping the silent gelassenheit, the letting-go, the melting, into

  Faith.

  Faith in Love equals Hope.

  God, for Man, is love.

  Love’s essence does not alter by the measure of its letting-go-into. Heavenly, humanly, loin-love, self-abandon for thee my Lord; love’s essence is one essence. Calm is but the preparation of the setting for Love.

  Could I endure a week without the working of the Holy Spirit as love?

  A day? A night?

  This very night now closing on me?

  God forbid – to be blocked or barred from recourse to hope and prayer. In this strange forest where I am alien, the fingered branches and knuckled roots alike are in perpetual collusion. I the lost man am yet the vessel of prayer. Prayer is the soul’s blood. What fool says in his heart, There is no God?

  In this crammed wildness you shall locate me, Lord. In this petty disgrace. Here, now, Lord, I could halt on this non-track, kneel on this steep hog-run, strewn with twigs and confess and pray, however late for the dinner-table … ‘I, Simon Chance, loving Christ as Way and Truth, hear me!

  ‘Jesus, who dared no definition of yourself, not even Christ. Jesus, who was word made flesh and, being word, not only was but is … Such self-revelation – it awed and appalled you … so that you could not but will your own death in the flesh, since what you were revealed as was scarcely sustainable as flesh. What are your inheritors to do now but work with every trick of beauty, music, verse, ritual, artefact, and dance to make our masque of your unworkable word? And still fall short, sinning in thought and word and deed by negligence, by weakness, by our own deliberate fault. I have left my quondam friends bewildered in their villa – my strangers-to-belief men-of-the-world who still look to me against their better judgment for succour as their vaunted substance evaporates into thin air and their fate’s ground is gone. Forgive me all of you! I will have made our hostess sick with consternation. Look on her, Lord.’

  Am I to kneel? Or to hurry on in the hope of repairing my foolhardiness? Any trust I had in my intended forest circuit is gone.

  Enough of childish cris de coeur! I could kneel to summon up a tin god’s intervention. What would my pygmies think of that? Yet when in equatoria I presumed to summon You, the Calm of my grander Christian presumption, you were counter-willing me tranquillity from within the interminability of their Congo forest itself.

  This very morning, there Clare you were alone in the kitchen, chopping carrots and onions for the looming luncheon, with its guest-of-honour who, now dying, had once abandoned you.

  Alone in that kitchen, Clare, you did not look up at my approach, yet knew it was I. You murmur, ‘Simon, I’m having trouble with my faith.’

  ‘Ah!’

  You have confessed uniquely to me. However close and secular an old undergraduate friend, I am now priest and mystically endowed … whose Ah! hangs limp in the air. What you need from me is the armour of faith.

  Might you not know, Clare, that Evie, joining us tomorrow, is custodian of my fraudulence?

  At last you oblige yourself to pause and glance up at me from the chopping board. I am ready with my penetrating gaze: my stock-in-trade theatrical technique: concerned, rooted, humorous, a gaze invaluable to priests. Counselling others, we know how we counsel ourselves.

  Yet God knows that if I am indeed now lost I am deservedly lost. I might more honestly have answered you with that opening stanza of the Inferno with troubadour Dante, half-way through his life waking to find himself in a dark wood, where the right path was wholly lost and gone. This morning I have little to give but that theatrical gaze and that weak suspended Ah! of ectoplasmic gravity.

  Go searching for Dante’s book, Clare, in Dorothy’s translation, somewhat flawed, maybe, biased … yet she with a mind of muscular faithfulness that has her accompanying both duos – Dante and Virgil, then Dante and Beatrice – on the trajectory of the soul. The book’s lying there open on the iron table on the patio outside my dépendance just forty paces from where this very morning you were doing the chopping for the dire lunch-party.

  I felt sick at myself, Clare, physically nauseated, that’s the truth of it, at my inadequacy in your kitchen. For lost is what I have become, in the dark wood, selva oscura, the right path lost. And Evie arriving tomorrow, concerning whom and me, the two of us, you will know more than I dare suppose; Evie your old confidante who will have wept in your arms because of me. Yet you this morning Clare are in full earnest in your appeal to me … It is I who keep the Faith shop, is it not? There’ll be some in stock, naturally… you caught my glance of affirmation: I, Bishop Simon, acquainted with sorrow. Scoured by bereavement.

  How much would you be wanting? …

  Ah, so. I hear you. And what quality?

  ‘Deny yourself … ’ I propose, and on the cue you complete what lingers – take up your cross, and follow Me.

  Such quality!

  What would our chums say? They would say, ‘Look, Simon, keep sensible; feet-on-the-ground. If we all went for such brand faith, top-of-the-range, how would the world go round? Your own alimony, Clare, your Family Trust, your son’s success in property (doubly spectacular after his papa’s profligacy), his villa here which you have borrowed for us all, your so very tastefully appointed flat in Paulton Square …

  It echoes in the head. Deny yourself. No villas in the south of France. No tennis. No sex, no shopping. No share portfolio, no subsidizing of the Church of England’s priesthood with hard-nosed investments, no spires, cathedral choirs, bolts of episcopal purple, no mission funds and Christian Aid amid the pandemics and the floods, the tsunamis, genocides and famines. It’s not the world Jesus grew up in, is it, Clare? Its population has grown a hundredfold since Jesus. Fifty-fold since Francis of Assisi. Didah-didee. So what lesser line of faith, Clare, might we settle for, you and I?

  Something more comfy, workable. What did you ever mean by Faith?

  Better to come along to evensong with me in Trinity chapel for the good old BCP liturgy, harmonies uplifting, soaring and subsiding, lambent and beguiling. We’ll murmur a plea for the sick, the bereaved, the mind-blown – there’s always plenty to pray about. Thence to Hall, with me, mere Lecturer. Hear Grace at speed in nasal Latin to justify the roast (with trimmings), and apple charlotte (and cream), a battery of cheese. Consummating port. High Table for High Priests and their guests. Annas and Caiaphas, and their guests.

  Isn’t it for me to reciprocate your hospitality? It’s my function, as quasi-theologian, quondam bishop, to fare sumptuously, be clad in purple. You know the form at Oxford, Clare, and you know I’ve never let go holding you in reflected affection, as Evie’s confidante.

  Listen, all of you up at the villa: let me blow my cover. Soon enough you’ll be responding to my disappearance with exasperation. Let me tell you now: Your old friend Simon Chance, Right Reverend, is not merely no better than any of you, he is grotesquely worse. Amid the panoply of his cloth, his rank, his calling, recognise him as fraud.

  Did he ‘glory in his tribulation’ over Marigold?

  Was there that in him which longed to be shot of it?

  Did he co-suffer Marigold’s entombment? Could he bring himself to so much as dwell upon it and give thanks. At all times in all places? Here was suffering the imagination would not make space for. Which of you my friends has heard the sound of weeping that none is meant to hear; so solitary, so desperate, so loveless, weeping in a chamber – a cave – of such infinite darkness that its walls retreat as they are approached? It is a cry which the crier knows cannot be responded to whether on earth or in heaven, and yet a voice I heard – and near I yede /in great dolour complaining tho:/ ‘See, dear soul, my sidès bleed
,/quia amore langueo.’

  Ah, Marigold, long pard, the other warmth in the bed – my ears and heart did catch that throat’s despair in the long months that followed diagnosis. What novelist could dream up such torment? By its own definition such amnesia is not imaginable amid the clutter of our faculties. A cry trapped by and in the pit of pits.

  My old dutchie, companion-in-life, to whom and in whom vows bound me. When in my arms, rocking, and there came forth from you the repeated plea I long to die, I was not to pray that you should live.

  The reeling back of your being into infantilism and tantrums was not any source of charm.

  The discovery of what life might have been is made when life is being dragged away.

  Listen, friends, this old student friend of yours (classmate, team-mate, messmate, mischief-mate) when you went into the City, the Law, Politics, the Civil Service, the running of your inherited estates, into all busyness of business, eccentrically proceeded quite elsewhere. He responded to a calling no less, astonished at himself. He heard a voice Whom shall I send? ‘Send me.’ He spoke of it as a ‘post-imperial’ vocation with the adjective intended to forestall the chaff about the white man’s burden. The soul sought those who had never heard of Jesus: to whom the primality of this Jesus might be unfolded amid the primality of those submersed in their natural world.

  Simon to the Pygmies?

  How puzzled you must have fleetingly been. A calling. As if there was that authority to issue any such calling! Whom shall I send? – send to carry innocence to the innocent … to define innocence on innocent soil, enshrine childhood for children and by enshrining save childhood’s elimination.

  The days of the white-skinned missionary were history. Already for at least a generation it was ‘our’ Bantu faithful bringing the gospel to fellow Bantu. They warranted the fervour. The Jesus-god would blind the Evil Eye with love. But who would reach to hunters-and-gatherers clinging on in the intimacy and darkness of the forests, a lesser species of creation in the eye of any Bantu Christian? It would be left to one eccentric whitey, mzungu, scarcely known by Africa, to engage in such an endeavour. Send me, craving a prior innocence, craving their nearness to Eden where the knowledge of good and evil was still locked in a thousand species of plant and grub and creature. Send him who craved a rooting and a rootling for his own faith and function in the pristine world bequeathed to man by God, and craved the resurrection of his sister’s love-child, lifeless in his own hands.