A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  There she was close to the drive with an armful of hollyhocks. Unplumed. Just as she always was, sharp-shouldered, pliant, of vital femininity.

  ‘Put the car over there and help me with these. We’ve got fourteen for dinner.’ No salutation, no name. She’s made it a chance encounter, the responding spontaneous, sans time, of our time-less hallmark. A thick-gloved hand brushes aside a strand of hair. I take the flowers. Here is she, that same lilt of frame, the stance, the pent and tiny movements, the inexhaustible cascade of hair that grey now invades, the unconscious flagrancy of mouth.

  Her eyes are on me.

  ‘I thought you might have changed but I don’t think you have. You’re just well worn and presumably speak fluent African. Rugged. I like you rugged. I’m sad to have missed meeting your girls and your Marigold.’

  In the house was Gyles, all but a man at 17, of whom Victor, already sixty, was so manifestly proud. Repeatedly he reverted to ‘my boy Gyles’. Victor’s self-assurance was not to be assailed. In his village church he sang just out of tune so loud that he must have been risking every vote in the congregation. ‘God likes a voice he can hear,’ he let me know. You remember, Marigold, my relaying that to you? Yet I was not to tell you of Evie murmuring to me after the service, In church with you, I’m jealous of God.

  I preached on the Transfiguration of Christ and my namesake Simon Peter – one of but three with Jesus on that mountain top – remarking, It is good to be here.

  There was more I could never tell you, Marigold, of that Sunday. God forbid! All of that brief weekend, with its lively dinner party on the Saturday and service on the Sunday, we had contrived, Evie and I, never to be more than momentarily alone together; whether by design or instinct or chance, thus it had been. I was aware of our performing in the presence of others a gavotte of stately partnership of which each of us was privately aware, of practised and predestined harmony which permitted no opportunity of actual bodily encounter. But then after that Sunday lunch, Evie and Gyles and I were sipping coffee on the long steps leading down into the deep garden. Victor was at the far end of it, where the trees began, beyond the blaze of Evie’s shrub roses and the herbarium.

  He called up to Gyles at quite a shout to join him with a bowsaw. Gyles got up to fetch the saw and go down the long lawn between the roses. How touched I had been by Victor’s pride in the lad … my boy Gyles, my boy Gyles. He was head boy at their local public school. Gyles himself handled his papa with affectionate detachment, as if he knew the old boy couldn’t refrain from playing to the full in life the script he’d written for himself, a life where everything was in place and he himself the purpose of it all.

  For that moment, Marigold, the loss of our son stabbed me anew. This Gyles here was so loose-limbed, engaging a fellow, moving with the grace of latent energy. The sorrow pierced me that after the twins you would never dare to give them a sibling who might have been a brother.

  Evie and I were silent, following the boy with our gaze.

  I broke the silence. ‘I can see something of you in him.’

  ‘And I can see you in him.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘He is your son, Simon.’

  As I turn my gaze on you, there’s that tiniest of smiles playing on your lips, Evie, lips of a myriad messages. Yet your eyes are still on Gyles as he reaches Victor.

  ‘Who knows?’ I murmur.

  ‘Only me. Now you.’

  ‘You intended it?’

  Now you turn to look at me with the mischief glinting alarm and with it the ancient covert invitation of intimacy.

  ‘I had come off the pill too early. It was my bish.’

  My sky has split. Beyond the sky is poised an ocean. Perhaps of tears.

  Gyles is on his way back to us. He is transfigured. I am a man at once stunned and joyous. It is good to be here.

  ‘And that was Tuesday,’ you say, cutting the cackle with the code we picked up from the gossipy old principal of Pusey at Oxford.

  What could I ever have reported to you, Marigold, old dutchie, to whom life bound me with countless delicate threads, that late Sunday evening? What glowering glowing truth had been lobbed into our hearth? From that minute I knew two things: a shaft of joy as of steel and the very sharpness of that blade’s isolation. My being was from that moment to be transfixed by a secret unshareable with you who shared my bed and table, a secret shareable only with her for whom prior love had turned as fatal as Paolo’s for Francesca da Rimini … the Francesca who – look, my Lord! – had not changed in the essence of her since our union in the heat of our innocence: she was that same maiden bride. All these seventeen years of her motherhood she had carried her body’s birth-secret without notion of sharing it with a soul, least of all him who made it. By her letting go of it to him with such insouciance, so unintendedly, her secret claim on him was spontaneously re-stated … as if to confront the Lord God himself with shoulders squared with What has He ever got over us? The imprint of Love is in our son. That is the creative gift. There is no trumping it.

  Put my secret tears in your bottle, Lord. They are tears of joy.

  Beloved wife, you now see face-to-face. No secrets hidden, all desires known. What could you have borne to hear?

  Not that secret.

  For an hour, Marigold, on my drive back to London, how I wept! At the wheel of my car on the M1 tears swept me in a gale. Through all that sunlit August sunset I wept, driving as if through the cloudburst drenching my face with the irreconcilability of my sorrow and my joy, sorrow and joy. This was my love-child, hermetic secret within me in our home. O the temptation to tell you what was there within me – to cast myself down before you in dramatic confession not of sin but joy in an orgy of truthfulness. The reality would have ripped you asunder and all we had made together!

  ‘You look washed out, Simon … How was your Oxford friend? Girlfriend.’

  I could swear I had never told you anything to warrant that correction …

  How canny you always were, how mysteriously intuitive, on matters touching your mate’s early manhood.

  ‘Ah. Things move on. She’s wedded to her Tory grandee. I told you.’

  Would that I might consult my Lord … since He will know how something glinting there – gold chalice – had on the instant been recognised by her. God knows, joy is unexpungible.

  A glass sheet had come down between us. Was it then at that instant the dementia began to creep upon you? – the vitreous seeping into the synapses of the mind, not perceptible yet ineluctable to distance you from what we, the rest of us, take as reality? Was it then? Was it then?

  Returning to you that evening ‘washed out’, I went to bed early and dreamed. I had returned from a strange faraway voyage of several years’ duration, carried in the bowels of an ocean-going ship that had sailed a vast distance to pagan and fearful shores. You, Marigold, were on the quayside to welcome me. The twins were with you – in my dream they were young, at three or four – and there you stood between them on the quay as I emerged out of the belly of the ship into the warmth of the English sunshine. How fresh you were and anxiously bright in a printed frock. As I was by way of stepping over the gunwales of the boat I held out my hands for you to catch my fingers and lean back to take the weight of me. Indeed you so attempted, but you failed. You were too weak, and were dismayed at yourself for being so weak. And at that moment I saw, beneath that printed frock, how thin you had gotten in my long absence, pathetically maigre, wasted, which you would not have had me observe: yet it was so. I was pierced with sorrow, that same sorrow which had me weeping in my car.

  You were as bone-thin my poor darling, in my dream, as you were to become in the last months of your dementia, unwilling to rouse your appetite and go on with what was left of you.

  IX

  Suddenly in this steep gully there is a thing live at my feet: a violent scurrying and bursting forth from a thicket here. And a savage pungency.

  I am unalarmed: I am the alarmer. I
am whipped back to Africa, to the equatorial forest by night, to Ituri. I have blundered upon the couchement of a boar in its refuge from the storm, immediately here: the very heat of the beast is evident to me – blundering into a densely wooded couloir, thicketed and jumbled with unexpected obstacles, saggero, ardra.

  I know to draw upon the wisdom of forest beasts. If this was the sanglier’s refuge, may it now be mine? This is as much my forest as the beast’s. Now it is for me to find a hide to curl up in, to be banked around, to gather leaves to cover me, attempt sleep. And more: if the beast was here it will have water somewhere within scuttling range.

  So indeed by my reading of its scent I have now found its nesting warmth, here in the hollow where the beast has been lying up! My body tells me that one side of this couchement is not natural rock but a rock wall made by man. It rises out of this steep earth by three or four feet in primitive slabs.

  Here am I amid the ruined evidence of ancient man, primal dwellers of this foreign massif.

  Here I can crawl away into my own non-being and have the storm thrash and shriek above me. Here I can be nothing. This is a sunken place. Slumped here into the sink-hole between the foot of the wall and jostle of weeds and saplings in the creature’s stench, I feel guilty at its expulsion. Would that I shared it with you, O you sow who know not that God is Love, who need no God to teach you to die for your farrow. You are better than I, I who would fain fill my belly with the husks that you would eat and drink from that forest sump you slake at. I would have you share this couchement as I already share the warmth and odour you have left here, in this hollow primal man here has left for us. At that rim of my pygmies’ forest where the great river snakes north to Lake Albert, my hunters and I once chanced on the site of recent battle between a giant forest hog and a lion. O giant tusked hog, how you fought to your death for your sow’s farrow: there was your carcase, half-consumed, thrust deep into a thicket. That lion fought the duel of its life, such was the surrounding devastation. Such was love. Even the Bambuti stood in awe.

  In my forest here, the predator here is Man. I am man, yet no predator.

  I admire you, musty hog.

  Here in utter blackness, I make my little pit by gloving my body in the dumb earth against the rock slabs. It is as proper for me as a neat grave. Who’s to say it was not a mausoleum for those remnant Maures, black-a-maures, pre-Christian, pre-civilisation Africans, stranded on the wrong side when water of the melting northern ice divided continents. I take you to my heart like my Bambuti. Like them you are fortressed by your forest where you delved, hunted and nursed your fire, living out your lives in the dark and half-dark and leaving your bones. I am one with you, ancient men. Those Var peasants won’t get us here, those who penetrate our forest massif only to shoot out all that breathes and scuttles, drag it forth, gut, skin and roast it; feast on it and get drunk. They know nothing of the beast’s intimacies, its rootlings, fur and faeces. They’ll soon be manning the search parties that you, Clare, will have initiated.

  How I am comforted! – back among my beloved brethren whose forest is their all, sacred and benign, by which and in which and for which they have their being and go to their eternal rest.

  They’ll never find me here! Even if they bring dogs, the dogs’ noses will be deceived by the scent of the sanglier whose hide is my hide and body-musk my musk. They will never find us here, me and my Maures and my swine. Let me live and die here with my forest moors. We’ll share our forest with all the other creatures like my elfin pygmies in their bark from the omutoma tree, at work with arrows, pittraps, nets and bamboo gins. When these cork-oaks grow old and die and drop or shed their limbs there’s grub aplenty between bark and trunk, a thousand creatures with ten thousand legs to keep us fed. There are fungi, roots, sweet stems and berries. The forest is our father and our protector.

  They’ll never find us here, you remarked to me, Marigold, shy and alarmed, in that clearing where the Bambuti had admitted us in the Ituri forest. We had trekked out from Bubandi on the Lamia river with Samueli and fellow Mwamba porter, who warily despised pygmies as surely our Provençal bronze-agers warily once despised what remained of the Neolithic Maures. This was my fourth entry in and among my Bambuti, into their transient grove, and your first and only, Marigold. I carried Christian artefacts for the unlettered: Virgin and Child in porcelain, the Son of God twisted on the geometric cross carved out of teak. The missionary Simon Peter was in his evangelistic arc to arm them for another innocence.

  Here they were in a half circle, folk I knew, each by name, elves draped or skirted in bark and velvet-monkey skins (but one in jeans), some with bows, some crouched, some standing, their lips half-open and their eyes wide in speechless awe. None moved. None had ever laid eyes on a white woman. I knew what they were thinking – that this was an intrusion too much; these four of us. Samueli was of their acquaintance from his childhood when his father traded with them, and had their lingo well enough; yet they did not rate him a proper person nor a person who read the forest by living it and winning its trust. Samueli was a nyama, creature, as they spoke him when I was alone with them: a less-than-human species like the rest of the Bantu villagers they encountered. Their obeisance to Samueli and his fellows was pretence.

  I greet old Moke and he, the wit, responds, ‘Here is the Long One with his lady and if he takes her hunting she will get trapped by the forest. The leopard will eat her.’ This has them instantly falling about.

  Amid the laughter, Marigold, you are glancing at me half-challenging, half in pity – maybe in anguish that I might awake to the delusion of my faith. It is because you love me and would not have me fooled. Your eyes saying What is it you can bring to these people? What can they have need of from you? Were they not all Christ’s children before Jesus arrived to speak of children? – Are they not his children yet?

  The texts thunder my head. ‘“Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven”. And taking a child’ – it is Matthew reporting – ‘he set him in the midst of them. Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me. And whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of Heaven as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.’

  Your unspoken protest, your darting plea, is What can you truly bring to them? They can’t have any use for your message of suffering, of sacrifice, of redemption. They were designed to live in their own kind of darkness. Perhaps of God, if you insist.

  Marigold, you were ready to parrot to me what I had brought back from my last long sojourn with my Bambuti and you had watched my own dilemma closing upon my head. You had watched me dragged into my own Christian crisis, using my terminology, not yours: on the challenge to intrude the G-word into his forest where G already was the forest, the provider, the protector, the master. They lived life whole, hence holy, in harmony one with another, knowing error but no evil, no sin, harbouring no resentment, no hate, no vengeance, being whole in the manner my Faith admired and Jesus preached yet which must elude all us non-forest dwellers. What need do they have of it? you once asked, meaning that terrifying sacrifice of God as Man by the cruellest method of execution men could devise … for the expiation of His fellows’ vanity. Had I not the simulacrum of that climactic horror each three inches long as mementoes of the infinitely superior wisdom I had come to bring them?

  ‘Your metaphor,’ she flings at me like a steel dart.

  And you my Bambuti knew nothing of vanity! No knowledge of it! You lived with and for one another with scarcely a quarrel, so quick to forgive, to heal any hurt by the balm of the group with no pointing of blame, since you were possessive of nothing – not territory, not goods, not chattels, not meat, not leaf shelters, not even mating partners. Every mother acknowledged the infant she had given birth to and the one who had caused her to conceive, yet every adult in the camp was mother and father to every child, and every oldie granny or grandpa.

  The Bantu in the villages were stalked and nailed by the evil
eye. They were beset by malign spirits and sorcery. Here sickness was no punishment; it was the way life was. Death was but the forest reclaiming its own. Thus they are children – I ventured to put it to you, Marigold – fit for the Kingdom.

  You countered, Was I to be first to introduce them to hatred, fear and greed, that they might learn of Christian redemption? What did I need to save them from? Was mine a better innocence than that which I had been at such pains to take from them?

  What you had perceived, Marigold, was my mission becoming reversed – that they were half-way to converting me. They were the very children Jesus spoke of, suffered to come unto him.

  I in my churched role had no means of handling this dilemma, that to know Christ they must be weaned of their childhood into adulthood, the grime and greed of it, before they must wilfully relearn it by the whip and ligature of the Faith. You saw my recognition of my soul’s futility, how here I had arrived at my own beginning, how for my own sake I must confess it, how they were lilies of the field or birds of the air which neither spin nor toil.

  So be it! For here was that spirit of joy that had fired my vocation to come to the forests of equatoria. What these Bambuti were still living was a primality of fragile but critical preciousness for man the sophisticate. They lived life whole in a manner that could not but elude the rest of us, yet which Jesus preached for such as us. Theirs was the only world they knew and supposed there was. I knew of the perilous vulnerability of their world, at the brink of their extermination. This was the last hour of this very remnant in the wide earth of gatherers and hunters and of the innocence Man had elsewhere grown beyond long long ago.

  Neither of us yet had knowledge of the cave, Marigold. We arrived with no expectation of it. You were here because you pleaded not to be left alone with your bereavement among the ladies of the diocese, fervent for Jesus and their incessant good works. Yet also you would not have me crack in isolation beneath the dilemma you knew to be confounding me: that none can become like children except by the way of knowledge of good and evil. You loved me in my induced confusion, yet helplessly. If things were coming to a head between us, our path and purpose, hurtling to a crisis, it should be beyond the sight of the diocesan community, beyond any human eye capable of prying. Instinctively you had seized upon the forest. And that very night was to be the cave, and the cave’s molimo.