by Tom Stacey
You saw me catch that glance of shameful thrill and all that lurked behind it, the long narrow road of striving, of keeping to the beat, the imposition of being white among blacks, of apology for belonging to the dominant culture that had already outgrown the facile convictions that had first brought the white man here and to whose rituals and sanctimonies the natives so childishly cling. In that glance I glimpsed the maenadic beauty I had sensed in you at our first encounter caught up by what we then were hearing of Anton Bruckner and performing at the foot of the cross in the grief of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater such as led to the inescapable error of our marriage.
You saw me recognise that glance, and in the very reading of it, love you. Yet you would not, could not join the men in their musical work upon the endara, twelve-handed on the compound floor.
You look away. The sound ripples like dancing liquid across the compound and clustered dwellings, across equatorial Africa.
You were pregnant with Jasper and the thought entered that the approaching demand of giving birth would unrivet you and give you African wings. For there was Khavaïru, dominant figure of that ensemble and the native community, performing the collective instrument for your enchantment and enticement, ready to make a space for you on the self-same logs from which he was fountaining forth his music.
Then from behind me where I was standing on the edge of the compound stepped the diminutive figure of Agnes, your favourite, our sacristan’s daughter whom you had nursed through her last, near-fatal bout of malaria. She was carrying your violin case in her bent arms like an offering. She must have slipped into our bungalow and found it by the piano in our living room. Your gaze was turned away as Agnes approached the liquid endara, three men or boys on each side, and the vast forest below stretching infinitely westwards, the true heart of equatorial Africa in its primal secrecy. From that impenetrability were the tuned endara logs provided, hewn by the sole fleeting inhabitants, the pygmies, my spiritual charges. By those iroku marimba logs was their existence evidenced among my Bantu hosts here amid the foothills of our mountains, and by the early morning fingers of smoke that rose randomly out of the oceanic canopy of trees.
Agnes’ arrival with your violin surprised you. She laid beside you the instrument by which you had already brought enchantment to her and other children of our host community of Bundibughyo. I could not tell whether the child caught your remote smile as your glance rose from the black leather box you found on the hard earth at your feet. On her return I motioned to the child to bring the bow too.
And at that moment as Agnes came by me with the bow in her hands, I was gripped by a prayerful poignancy of vision of your weaving from the improvisation of your soul and fingers out of the unstoppable cascade of percussive endara a flow of melody that would combine in one declaration of love this entire universe of African creation from the heave of Valhalla mountains and their dazzling glaciered peaks behind us to the east, where there was thunder, to the forest darkness impenetrable to the west of us. Now at your feet, Marigold, it seemed to me, lay that device of manipulated wood and gut and tautened horsehair precisely to meet the opportunity of our bizarre incumbency at this place at this moment. I watched you bend and open the case, bring out the instrument, put it to your chin, instinctively tune the fifths of its four strings, and gazing down now not upon the endara-marimba but towards where the mountains lay back, hiding their summits, draw back your bow. Agnes has come beside me, watching.
Khavaïru had observed you and redoubled his own musical endeavour to be your orchestra. Yet nothing came forth from you – no sound at all. There were only tears. I could glimpse them gathering, clouding your sight of the mountains. The poised bow-hand dropped. My prayerful vision hung in the air: I was all but incredulous and tearful myself. For it had been surely a moment God-given and to have come and gone … as a meteor of divine intervention may burn out in the atmosphere before it reaches earth. I turned away at once, fearful that you might have caught me noticing your tears, fearful of an unwanted intrusion, my darling, amid this alien place of my vocation, fearful of love exposed not as beauty but viscera.
That evening you withdrew to the prayer-room which also served as your practice room. And there you performed a partita of J S Bach entirely alone, and to perfection, so as to be alone without any audience whatsoever but in the presence of music as it were of God.
The drum, the male imperative, leaves you in awe.
‘They pray with the drum, Simon’.
Yes, yes. The outer and the inner. You are so close to the point.
From Christ you would resolutely hear no call. He was for me and my flock, not you. Music did for holy incarnation in your creative order. Pray with the drum. Ruminate with the enzenze. In our faith-clamouring community, you alone could not surrender to our parable or speak our metaphor. You would not mouth an invocation as elemental as Jesus’ Our Father. In our narrow home I prayed alone. The community of Christians at our Bantu hq, Uganda-side, and my black fellow clerics, took your nursing ministrations and the literacy classes as done in the name of Jesus: Wazungu were Christians: that was a given. You were enough around the mudbrick church and mistress of a choir that sang its fantasy to blur evidence of your ducking the Bible classes and never taking a wafer. They made no remark yet noticed more than they let on. I gave up putting it to you that between reason and God was no disjunction, that out of the lumen rationale springs the vision where belief takes flight and makes the music that is half your repertory. You heard me and fell glum, like one tone-deaf among songsters or a castrato among the gallant. Loving me was all your daring, permitting your abduction to equatorial Africa.
When the thorns of our life snarled us, how we did turn to one another! I saw your exasperation at my faith as a subtle envy that one day would vanish. Meanwhile, what you took as Reason was your shadow. To abandon the autonomy which defined the human being at his acme on the evolutionary graph affronted you … Letting-go spelled primitive unreason, even in the act of love. When you fell pregnant I did wonder if bearing a child would release the hidden spring of blind instinctive anarchy. Just that was my thought at the baptising of Jasper when you released him into my arms over the font against the baked walls of St Mary’s, Bundibughyo. When Jasper died, the mere notion of a loving Father-Creator became an outrage. That self-same deity had sacrificed her son to his Dad’s vocation. It made no sense.
The drum remained, the rumination of the drum: the drum, the rippling marimba on the compound floor, the whistle-flute, the strings plucked and stroked and bowed, the shunting feet. The pygmies’ cave was yet to come.
You set your heart and body against a second pregnancy.
At home on leave my old circles, they getting wind of my return – Oxford or school or county – the isolation took on another hue. How you dreaded the foregatherings. You’d tell me I became ‘scarcely recognisable’. And they, the old set, meant kindly, Marigold, seeking to prise you open with their curiosity (which you took as condescension) about life in remote Congo or crossing in a dug-out a grand, urgent, secret river to delve equatorial Africa’s vastest forest. They poked around for a sense of humour they began to wonder if you lacked … Clare, how particularly you sought us out, to draw in this Marigold that wed the Simon Chance you’d known so well – known as much for yourself as for your closest Oxford friend. You’d follow me into corners. Once in a corner you came out with You don’t ask about Evie, Simon. I did not instantly respond.
‘I can’t really bear to know … ’
What might I wish to know? Nothing. Nothing.
You half-smiled, waiting.
‘If you told me she was unhappy it would distress me. If you told me she was entirely happy it would devastate me.’
‘I shall not tell you, Simon. Evie does not brood. You know that. She makes the best of what life deals her. A good best. She has a young son she dotes on.’
‘What made her choose her Victor?’
‘She wanted to be married.’
‘To Victor Goodenough?’
‘He’s a decent honourable man.’ How intensely you were regarding me. And then you volunteered: ‘She could not bear to marry anybody she might be called upon to love as she loved you.’
Marigold, Marigold, in those episodes of home leave, even the Church group – the wives and families of the CMS – found nugatory common ground. The privations of remote stations were not for sharing, swapping stories, for they were known first by Him who sent me, who ‘tellest our wanderings, put our tears into his bottle’. To you, the ladies’ petty pieties were ridiculous, the masks of grief at our loss of Jasper made grief phoney. You’d scurry off to your old music coteries. You’d tell them of the instruments and sound-worlds you’d found in primal equatoria they’d not a notion of.
What you might have told Evie of me, Clare, during that decade and-a-half when Marigold and I were alone together darkest forested Africa, in the heart of that darkness, I did not wish to know either: my blind was down. The blind was down. All those years nothing had passed between us … no word exchanged, none written; scarcely, even, was there silent, mutual speculation. That I knew too.
VIII
My God, this Your stormed forest is so dark.
A voice returns to me concerning You.
‘There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
Oh for this night! where I in him
Might lie invisible and dim.
The voice does not include the possibility of this storm overwhelming me unshriven – leaving me in cold isolation: lost in the blackness of an oceanic forest under a shrieking wind. The voice even foretells it, heralds the untraceability of one sacrificed to the spirit. How many hours to dawn? How many nights and days does the Mistral blow? I shall not ask. Let me lie invisible and dim in Him and Evie.
Up in the villa on its hilltop they will have already swerved from anxiety and concern to irritation and on to exasperation and outrage. Who is this egotistical bishop-figure to slope off and plunge the household into disorder, double the havoc of their holiday refuge already havocked by an outer world of plummeting wealth, crashing banks, reputations evaporating!
My treasured Wally, are you spinning threads from our shared childhood to weave present aberration? Simon always pushed his luck. Swimming far beyond his depth where nobody could rescue him if he got the cramp – swimming Loch Rannoch as ten-year-olds forever.
‘That’s all very well, Wally. It’s too hard on Clare … ’
‘At least he might have told someone where he was setting off to … ’
‘Search-and-rescue teams don’t come free … ’
‘Wasn’t Simon done at Oxford for swimming bare-arsed across Worcester’s lake?’
And with what intent have our lot worked away to prop and guile ourselves! Our distinguished ranks, our vaunted functions, our guaranteed incomes, the ordered tenor of our lives. In such proximity to Chaos! I do not exclude myself. My episcopal vesture disguises the truth of me. I am cast as one with you.
Capriciously this Simon Chance chanced to be: now let him crawl away capriciously to lie invisible like the residue of beasts hidden in this interminable density, selvaggia e aspra e forte. Make no searches for me, not even you Evie. I am already with you in Him. Do not disturb yourself over things past and buried by years. You are wed contentedly to your portly peer. Stay content. I am the keeper of the passion in this place.
Let the dead bury the dead and let me find my cavity to do it. I am the single human at large in this forest, its last man alive. There are dead here surely, those Maures who left this territory their African name. It can only be your entombments I have glimpsed in deepest foliage, burrowed and buried in these gully walls, you Africans, clutching your alien gods from the other side of the sea, the southern terra. You died here, your Baal and all his djinns unrecognised by the surrounding natives. You were a stranded race as I am a stranded man here in this unpeopled place, the very last unreasonably alive. Let me join you, Maures.
Now I quit my holm oak, I half-creep downward holding a bent forearm before my face to save my eyes from spearing twigs. High above, their fellow branches whip and writhe and sometimes crack and sunder.
I seek now only oblivion.
No more purging, no further shriving. I’ll admit you djinns of the lost Moors, listen to the last whispered muezzin, an empurpled Christian of the sea’s north shore. I’ll make my last orison to the tutelar of this forest, malign or otherwise.
Far above I can still discern against dark sky lariats of branches twitching and lashing. At my forest’s bed, darkness assembles in a hundred shades …
Did I betray you all life long, Marigold? Did I betray you by marrying you? Did I heap deceit on deceit by fathering your babies, spinning expectations, inviting mischance? When you and I fell into companionship, I was intending celibacy. I meant to put body behind me and forgo the clutter of matrimony. I knew the lure of celibacy, the via negativa, for priest no less than monk.
Wherever passionate response to passion is within any man’s reach, such response will play the trump: this is I, what I am for! Such I know well enough. All at once and not invited (glimpsed at a casement window, across a crowded room, in an empty church) love catches at the heart … there is this one other.
Beatrice was that other, Dante, your heart’s inspiration, object of ultimate union if not in earth then heaven, little Beatrice Portinari, ever since she was nine: when at twenty-three she was taken from this world you were left to weave her in as your consort, she as woman, you as man. On the wild route to paradise, Virgil himself gave way to her as your companion, woman in union with man in the further passion of union with a shared Lord who died and came again to life. See it anew! Beatrice did not block you from God’s love, Dante, but opened you to it.
Haven’t I asked myself, Marigold, whether your resistance to Christian doctrine was apprehension at one love blocking the other? You took on me, mission-minded, in return for having your man. Was that crude error?
‘A man shall be joined unto his wife and they shall be one flesh.’
So Paul to his Ephesians. Yet what if all along there had been that other pairing which soul had sealed and made away with: that prior indivisibility, Man and Maker? Paul, Paul, you cannot outlaw soul for soul’s caprice. The trump had been played, the trick already taken.
By then my mentors were persuading me that for God’s will-work I was pledged for, to have a wife alongside was beyond gold. And there you were, Marigold, loving me, declaring it was me you needed.
Century upon century in a man-contrived world you women have been cast frailer than us men. So it is: frailer, yet truer. O Woman loving in the way a woman loves, you cannot but accord to the love of the man you give your body to (the sheer fact and act of it) the total of your being … no less than the bearing of his child shall come to partake of the same totality. Thus is your being made alive and thus your love is holy. How can it be otherwise when in the ground of the creative ordinance you are the passive and your man the active; you await and he is awaited; man does but you are. And so beyond, you are the grander figure in this strange gendered gift of life: that within your own person you bear the totality of your being. Unum est necessarium, that single thing. The one commitment, Martha, mulier.
See how it is that, for any woman, betrayal of the love she’s dared to offer forth is of infinite consequence.
You are the creatures of such infinitude. This I know.
Do you hear me, Marigold? … and remember how, home from Africa for good – I being attached to Southwark with a demanding brief at the CMS headquarters covering so much of Christian sub-Saharan Africa, and simultaneously at work on the Triple Essay on my Dante, Poet, Man and Christian – the postman brought us a certain envelope? The handwriting privily alarms me. The Rev. and Mrs Simon Chance: an invitation to visit Evie and her Vict
or for a weekend in the shires. During all those bustling leaves from our Congo diocese, neither you nor I had ever encountered Evelyn Goodenough or scarcely mentioned her. Now, however, we are ‘home’.
We were to bring our twins, Evie’s letter read, if we could … ‘since Gyles should be here’: her own son Gyles, whom Evie knew that I would know to be but a few years older than our twin girls. I might like to preach, the letter read, at their village church.
You, Marigold, at once found good reason not to be able to accept. My Oxford friends rattled you and Evie’s name was writ Oxford. The twins on a camping holiday would not be at hand to cushion you.
You could know nothing of the roles Evie and I had played in each other’s lives as undergraduates: I had never dared breathe it. I would not have trusted my voice – you, with the acutest of ears and who once had blurted to me, If I did not have you, I would not want to live … That particular weekend, as you briskly recalled, you had a choral composition of your own at the cathedral; you could take no chances with it.
So it was I went alone. I was expected in time for tea on the Saturday. With you on my arm, Marigold, I would have been not less but more sure of my part. Alone, I was ambushed by alarm. I took the car because of the two earlier calls I had to make that day in that Midlands diocese. After my pub-lunch I stopped by at the off-licence at the edge of Leamington and bought a half-bottle of vodka. Before reaching Stourton Bassett I pulled off the road to take a swig. I had not so much as glimpsed Evie for nearly two decades.
