The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  And then, there in the middle of the lake, a line of verse came. I caught my breath as it shaped itself. Then another. I fumbled for a pen, found none, so I sat in the middle of the lake, saying the lines over and over to fix them. They were to become, much later, the closing verses of The Green Man’s Dream.

  Edward’s papers were easily found, where he’d said, on the desk. Beside the folder stood a porcelain figure of a plump mandarin with a hugely domed bald head. When I touched it, the head began to rock with silent mirth. He too, it seemed, was in on the secret.

  I was smiling back at him when I heard Laura come into the Lodge through the door to the lawn. She stared at me with surprise and, I thought, irritation. Her dungarees were smeared with clay, her hair tied back with the scarlet bandanna. “I thought it was Edward,” she said.

  I explained what I was doing there, looked away, awkwardly aware of intrusion, then asked if the kiln was open yet.

  “Not yet.”

  “Still too hot?”

  She nodded, distracted. The shadows of exhaustion I’d noticed round her eyes the previous night were still there. They were greyer, almost blue. They made her look ill. She leant against the door jamb, frowning into the room.

  After a moment I said, “It was quite a night.”

  She might have heard nothing more than noise, and glanced up at me, warily, as at a stranger who had solicited conversation. I was about to say more – some wry comment on Edward’s contrition – when she said, “Why did you come?”

  “I just told you – Edward’s papers, remember?”

  The frown deepened its creases. Again I felt my presence resented. I was interruption. I had come between her and her kiln. Well, Edward had warned me not to bother her and I’d tried. I turned to pick up the folder. Before my fingers reached it, I heard her say, “Oh God.” It came too quietly for an exclamation, was little more than an audible release of breath. She wasn’t looking at me but to my right where the mandarin’s head still rocked. Her lips were drawn tightly back.

  “Laura, are you all right?”

  She didn’t answer, closed her eyes briefly, then looked out again. Again not at me.

  “You look terrible. Are you feeling ill?”

  She shook her head impatiently, dazed, as though she’d been under water and was coming up for air. “I don’t think I can handle this…” The hostility in her glance was unconcealed.

  “Look, if I’ve disturbed you, I’m sorry. I’ll get back.” Again I reached for the folder.

  “Why did you have to come?”

  I left the folder where it was, turned, and suddenly felt like an object under her psychometric scrutiny. Adrenalin swirled. In that moment I realized that I knew nothing about her. Nothing at all. The active, pragmatic kiln-tender of yesterday was gone. Here in her place was a tenuous, dazed and, yes, fragile creature, receptive to frequencies of experience beyond my range. I felt transparent and insubstantial under that gaze until it broke, became a wince, and normality – or a condition closer to it – clicked back in. She said, “I’m sorry. Something really weird is happening…”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Look, why don’t you sit down?”

  “I don’t want to sit down.”

  The ferocity startled me. I remembered what Edward had said about the delicacy with which she must be handled, and stood uncertainly. She lifted the back of her hand to her mouth – a child in a corner, staring, unapproachable. She was seeing something that I couldn’t see. I knew it, and the knowledge rattled me.

  Then she said, “I am in great fear for my mind.”

  It came almost as much a question as a statement – either way appalling. And not only what she’d said but the way she said it, the cadences entirely un-American, studiously formal.

  “Laura, what’s happening?”

  The breath shuddered out of her. She looked up in desperate appeal. “Not me,” she said. For an instant her eyes shifted back across planes, but the contact was blurry. Again I had the feeling of a head surfacing, looking for help, sinking even as a hand was reached. “What did I say?” she demanded.

  “You said you were… frightened for your mind.”

  She nodded, panting, and, when she saw the anxiety in my eyes, smiled weakly. “Just stay with me, will you? Stay with me, please.” Her wrists crossed at her collarbones. I wanted to unfold those tensely clenched knuckles but her eyes glanced up and stopped me. It was like touching an electric fence.

  If I couldn’t hold her, it felt important at least to persuade her into a chair while I did something ordinary and restorative like making tea or talking her quietly down. Again I spoke her name, but she wasn’t listening, not to me. Her eyes wandered the room, not – as I first thought – watching movement, but searching, looking for a way. They came to rest on the nodding mandarin. She stared at it, smiling in a trance of sympathy. My eyes flashed between them. I reached out, put my fingers to the head, stopped it.

  She blinked, looked up. Dreamer returned? Or not? I gazed across at her, completely at a loss.

  “Say it,” she whispered.

  “What?… What do you want me to say?”

  With an impatient shake of the head, she closed her eyes again, trying to collect herself. Unsuccessfully. Then she seemed to shrug herself clear, looked round the room again, then at me. Again her eyes were all appeal. “Oh God… would you do something for me?”

  “If I can. What is it?”

  “Be honest with me.”

  I hadn’t expected this. I swallowed, nodded, though with none of the mandarin’s composure.

  “It matters.”

  “Yes.”

  “It really matters.”

  My answer and her emphasis were a collision of clipped breath. She blinked again, her head jerking as though under the impact of a sudden change of mind. It was left in distress.

  “What is it?” I urged.

  “I don’t know how to…” Again her eyes were averted. “Look, this is going to sound really strange…”

  I waited, was startled by a soft cooing that echoed down the chimney liner; a wood pigeon must have alighted on the chimney pot outside and was warbling to itself. I said, “Go on.”

  She held the silence until it collapsed in a sigh which passed right throughout the tense length of her body. But when they opened again, her eyes were calmer, resolute. “Do you want me?”

  “What?”

  “Now, I mean. Right now.”

  “Jesus, Laura!”

  As though I’d slapped her, she turned her cheek to the door jamb. “This is really difficult for me.”

  “You’re not the only one.” But the attempt at levity was misplaced. In the silence that followed I could hear us both breathe.

  She glanced back, distraught. “I got it wrong… I must have.” And she turned her face outdoors towards the lake. “I’m sorry… I don’t think I can stay with this. I’d better get out of here.”

  “Laura.”

  “What?”

  She stopped, the fingertips of one hand still at the jamb.

  “Look, bear with me.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  “Do you think I do?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  “I thought you wanted me… I thought…”

  And I too was in utter confusion.

  Of course I wanted her. Ever since I’d seen her in the glade, it had been impossible to be in her presence without the memory returning. Alone, those lonely nights since – the previous night in the lake – it left me hunted by the dogs of sense. And if, for a few moments in the skiff, I’d thought myself beyond desire, I knew differently now.

  Be honest with me. Christ! Yes. Now. Whenever. But…

  “Do you mean this?”

  “Yes. I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Laura, I think I’d better leave.” I turned back to the desk.
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  “You’ve been brave enough to come,” she said. “Be brave enough to remain.”

  Again that eerie feeling of an alien voice, formally phrased and non-contemporary; yet it was all invitation, and when I turned she was looking at me, lips slightly parted, whispering, “Don’t go.” It was her own voice now, and the shift was unnerving.

  “Are you doing this to hurt Edward?”

  “What?”

  “After last night… the rows you’ve been having?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “He’s my friend, for God’s sake.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.” Again she was biting her lip, eyes closed.

  “Laura…”

  “I don’t know what’s real, don’t you see?” A hand pushed through her hair. “There are all these feelings and I…” Her eyes were beseeching now. “Be honest with me. Please be honest with me.”

  I stared at her, tense and flushed, and knew that whatever delirious influence she was under it spoke to something entirely as irrational inside myself. Something prior to words, derisive of them. Yet it was a word she wanted. A true word to dispel the unreality around her, to make it real again. But once that word was uttered, everything would change.

  My thoughts were not thoughts at all; they were gongs, pulse-beats, measurements of moments passing; a needlepoint awareness that to act on her displaced, half-crazed condition would be irresponsible folly. And still I said, “You know I do.”

  Her eyes closed in a shudder of relief. A hand reached out.

  Then, as I approached, “Not here,” she said. “Out there. On the lawn. Where the book was burnt.”

  For a moment that last demand stopped me in my tracks, but she was already out on the lawn, loosening the bandanna at her hair, and from the first opening of her mouth at mine I was lost. Hesitations, anxieties went to the wind, and what began as a fast coupling of limbs, hands everywhere, mouth on mouth amid the thick tangles of her hair, rapidly became much more than lust.

  Though not immediately.

  For a while I might have been exacting vengeance there – vengeance on Jess, on Martin, on – more obscurely – Edward, my friend, but she caught my head in her hands – no, this was not what was intended. Her gaze was asking me to listen to some sound, some call she heard; yet even there, in that plaintive searching of eyes, the meeting remained impersonal. It was as though we’d slipped our names with our clothes, and entered an anonymous dream where there was elegance, simplicity, a kind of carnal refinement in the way her lithe body moved around mine.

  Not a word was exchanged. In a dazzle of sunlight and green trees, the lake lapping at the jetty where the skiff knocked and bobbed, we were, it seemed, almost dancing – softly and fiercely, the way swans might dance. Slowly, the dance became a third presiding presence from which we were indistinguishable. It was where and who we were – and to realize this I must have stepped outside it. Immediately she sensed my absence. As though to prevent some inconsolable loss that must otherwise be sustained, her hands clasped at my back like a fragile thing. I heard her gasp at the sudden loneliness; then, for an instant, the thought of her lying beneath me was more compelling than the fact. I was briefly exulting in the sense of control it brought, when I met the strength of her resistance.

  It came as a refusal of shallow excitement, and then, more powerfully, as undertow. There was a swift, unnerving realization that she was no more in control than I, though readier to submit to whatever impersonal forces were gathering around and between us; then the waters closed over my head. I heard the cries as her body shuddered and softened, and I lurched over her, hovering there, wide-eyed, before pulling away to lie panting on the grass.

  The entire surface of my skin was glowing. The sky seemed very far away.

  Somewhere among the trees a bird piped two notes over and over, sharp as the bright tines of a fork.

  We lay for a long time not even looking at each other. Not speaking. Had they even occurred to me, the customary intimacies would have dried at my lips: the lawn was no homely marriage bed, and what had happened there neither a casual encounter nor the consummation of a long-premeditated affair. It felt closer to a state of possession from which, only slowly, like a diver sensitive to pressure, the familiar self emerged.

  When eventually I turned my head, I saw the hair still streaked across Laura’s face. Her eyes were closed, the long lashes unmoving. There was no tension anywhere about her. She might have lain in relaxation after a yoga class – the soft exhaustion that exertion brings. I smiled uncertainly, expecting her to sense my gaze and meet it. Only her breath rose and fell. There was no intelligible expression on her face. I was aware suddenly that she might have been lying quite alone.

  As had never previously been the case after making love, I felt entirely vulnerable. The longer I looked at her unturning head the more it seemed that whatever she was thinking about – if she thought at all – it wasn’t me. She lay unmoving even as I reached out to touch her hand. I turned away, eyelids closed with the sunlight blazing through them. I could smell the grass very close. It stirred memories of adolescence and, with them, a sense of interminable loneliness.

  Was this then what women felt when they complained of being used – that their own essential nature, their individuality, was of no intrinsic interest, a discard? Or did their disappointment run deeper still? I didn’t know. It didn’t much matter to me, for the glow was fading from my skin, and I felt brittle. I felt exposed, as though somewhere someone – Edward? the Green Man? – had been watching, was watching still, would shortly come out from the trees, grinning at my discomfiture.

  Nothing happened.

  And I remained uneasily aware that all these thoughts were counterfeit; that they sought to diminish the experience, to make it manageable as my will retrieved what it could from the forces that had confounded it. I badly wanted her to speak. I was looking, I suppose, for some word of acknowledgment that I had been real to her in my own right. She said nothing. The bird piped on, like an unanswered phone.

  An insect nuzzled among the hairs at my shin. My back itched a little against the turf. And then I thought of Edward as he really was, in the library at the Hall, fretting over my delay, ignorant of this swift betrayal. I remembered his face as Laura climbed from the lake. I remembered the way he’d held the axe.

  I said, “So what happens now?” and broke her solitary dream. She looked across at me as if at last remembering. She smiled. A hand reached out. Too late.

  Why was I angry? Why that, when so much else should have been possible?

  “Well?”

  She frowned, bewildered by my tone, then raised herself on one elbow to look down on me. A breast hung close to my chest. I flinched from its soft touch. Again the puzzled frown – candour amazed by the world’s equivocation, a dreamer waking to find the dream unshared. I shifted my eyes away, possessed by the cold thought that I’d got what I’d long wanted and had little to show for it now but the prospect of more trouble than I could handle. I said, “I have the feeling that had absolutely nothing to do with me.”

  She didn’t answer. For as long as I could, I endured that troubled appraisal, then looked away. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know how you can say that.”

  Because – I thought – I wanted it denied and she hadn’t denied it. I was watching her face as she spoke, and saw the flicker of uncertainty. I was spying on her. I was spying on the machinations of my own mind. For a few moments out on the lake my life had been simple: now, not half an hour later, the twists were endless. If I was angry, it was because I’d so quickly compromised the glimpse of freedom I’d been given. It was because I felt incompetent with the ensuing complexity, and remorse was mere indulgence. It was because I was still unnerved, and because anger itself wouldn’t serve. And when, naked above me, she observed these ticking thoughts and said, “It was beautiful, wasn’t it? Be glad. Please be glad,” I was left feeling like a man too sma
ll for an honour conferred on him.

  It shamed me, shifted the grim mood, but the edge of frustration was still in my voice as I said, “Laura, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re feeling… where you are.”

  She looked at me, her lips slightly ajar, waiting for words to present themselves. She looked down at her hands, pensive, then plucked a stalk of grass, put it to her lips, and smiled. She was smiling as a nurse might smile, as an older woman might smile at a young inexperienced lover. I turned away.

  “But you were there,” she exclaimed. “I know you were there. You must have been or it couldn’t have happened… not like that.” She took in my disconsolate frown. “You don’t know? You really don’t know.”

  What began as question had become realization. Then, amazingly, she laughed. Not loudly or long, but a bright involuntary peal of amusement that a moment before would have left me feeling mocked, but it was clear now that she wasn’t laughing at me. It was at the sky, the moment, the spellbound day itself in which she seemed to see for the first time how she too had been tricked into ecstasy and was delighted by the joke. Naked against the vivid green of the grass, against the green shadow of distant rhododendrons, she was entirely alive, entirely enigmatic. And her delight made me want the rapture back, to cancel what I’d said, forget the spleen – it already tasted sour on my lips – and simply rejoice in the naked excellence of our being there. I began to see the anger for what it was – an evasion of vulnerability, a clumsy way of reasserting control, and that to persist in it could only forfeit something infinitely more precious.