And this was heresy.
He got to his feet, a hand at his temple, the fingers punishing the roots of his hair.
Was it possible then that this woman to whom he had foolishly opened his heart was pagan? That she had come to his church, singing and praying along with the rest, listening patiently to his sermons, yet all the time secretly revering not God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, but the obscene, aboriginal goddess that bared her parts to the world above their heads? The realization appalled him.
Yet, when he looked back at her, he saw such innocence, such apparent purity of soul. He remembered how his thoughts had dwelt on her in solitude, how he had imagined the life the two of them might have shared, and again his mind recoiled. His eyes ranged the room – the languid setter, the fire, the clock, the porcelain figurine. Thinking furiously, he took some steps towards the desk where her sheaf of papers lay. Her book. Was this then what it had to say? This her secret store of wisdom? With as little respect for privacy as some inquisitor, he reached to seize its pages, but before his hand arrived there his cuff brushed against the figurine. The head began to rock. He recalled himself, stared down into the Chinese face which he had thought, for a moment, broken by his touch. It rocked on its axle, smirking up at him. He turned to stare at the still-seated woman. Strive as he might, he saw only modest beauty there – the vividly blue, angled eyes that held his gaze, patient and perhaps, now, a little afraid. Was this then all she knew of sin? Had she no knowledge of the perils among which she walked?
“Miss Agnew, I cannot permit… Do you not see? Would you deny the Christian faith?”
“I deny nothing. Least of all what the New Testament teaches us of love and merciful forgiveness.”
She was smiling a little, if sadly, and this evidently sincere avowal brought some respite to his agitated heart. All was not lost.
But she had more: “It is the dark cloud of denial I resist. What I seek is admission, completion. And without her there is no completion.”
His alarm returned with greater force. No, there was power there. Behind the demure features there was power. She had accrued it from years of study among those old Hermetic books. Those were her true scriptures, those occult texts, that dabbled with magic. This woman was in danger. She was danger. And how innocently he had bared his soul to her. Had it not ever been the serpent’s way to disguise iniquity behind the fairest face? Already he had fallen prey to that seductive power. What sort of spell must she have cast across Emilia’s mind to persuade her that he might find comfort here? He must not hear this. He must not hear…
For she was saying, “If she has troubled you, I think it is because inside your deepest heart you know it to be so.”
“I cannot allow this. I cannot allow it.”
“But who is speaking, Edwin?” she demanded quietly. “Who is the I who cannot allow? Is it truly your voice… or the voice of the jealous father in you?”
He looked down on her aghast. His head was reeling. How had he come into this place? Who was this woman who had enchanted his tongue only now to lead him into chaos? There was an impulse to hammer at his temples where a dreadful voice was roaring out its commination: It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; he shall pour down rain upon sinners; snares, fires and brimstone, storm and tempest, this shall be their portion to drink…
He saw Louisa Agnew looking up at him as Gypsy May looked down. Before his bewildered eyes the two faces blurred – the fair one and the foul, the monstrous stone and the delicately chiselled bone behind the flesh. Two smiles melting into one, and within that already confusing blur a third appeared – the thin, conniving smile of his wife, thin as a sexton’s spade. He stared and saw only descending darkness there. The smiling dark, which must, at all costs, be resisted. Yet it swam before his vision, a vortex of engulfing energy, smiling, inviting, taunting him.
Before he knew it was about to happen, it was done. In two strides he was across the space between them, his hand raised and, with a crack that horrified him, brought down across that face.
Her head was wrenched round on her neck, tears jerked by the impact to her eyes. The breath broke from her. Pedro was up at her cry, bounding towards Frere, his mouth reaching for the frozen hand. Louisa leapt to her feet, calling the dog’s name, pulling him off. It was all a hideous muddle as she found the collar, and the dog was dragged, yelping, to the door, straining his head back at the man. She thrust the animal out into the night, then turned, leaning against the slammed door, panting, staring at Frere.
Who stood in horror, hands arrested in the air before him, a cuff torn.
“You must listen to me now,” she gasped.
His head was shaking, hair and eyes wild, hands reaching to cup his ears. “I… I am so…” His face was all ruin now, the hands helpless as though trying, vainly, to lift an immense load of stone. “I must go from this place… You must let me out…”
Her head ringing still, she pressed herself closer against the door. The breath shuddered through her.
“Please… you must let me pass….”
She did not move, but the shock was passing and, even in the midst of the remaining rage, she saw the man must choose. He must be free to choose. For a moment longer she panted there, then stood aside.
Stupidly he cast about for his hat, found it, took a stride towards the door.
“If you leave now, you will never forgive yourself.”
He heard the truth of it, stopped. He stared at her, saw how pale the face except where his hand had crazed the veins, and something collapsed inside him. He could scarcely breathe, but said, “I am already unforgivable.”
“That is not so.”
“You do not know. You know nothing of me. Nothing.”
Still she was panting, but inside herself was sudden stillness.
Even her fury was a stationary flame, fierce but still. Out of that stillness she heard her own proud voice. “My knowledge is the knowledge of the heart, and you will hear it. You have laid hands on me, Edwin Frere, and I have suffered it. You will listen to me now. And you will listen with the whole of yourself, for if you do not, you will go empty from this place.”
Something vital on which his balance relied had sheared. Everything was shifting, on the move. Under no conscious direction – as though seeking its own safety from the general fall – a hand scrambled for his brow. His throat was an opened fault from which, as no more than a seized creaking sound, the years of grief convulsed. He turned away, and there was nothing certain beneath his feet. His hand felt for, and found, the chair.
A woman was kneeling at his feet. She was holding his hand in hers, and he could have swooned almost to be conscious of the touch. Again the terror of transgression seized him, but it was a gesture from the past, a shade that carried no great weight within the turmoil of his soul. And still the world was insubstantial round him, a glassy place, a hall of mirrors, where nothing was constant save the sound of a soft voice speaking above the din of his wreck.
“I know how terrible she appears. I know how to the uninitiated eye she seems to offer only immolation, dismemberment, the dark. But that is only the face of her own hurt. She has other faces, Edwin. She is our Mother. She is our Mother and her other face is love. And she will not be denied because she too is truth. I promise that there is great peace to be found in her. Hers is the peace which passeth understanding. It was hers long before the Christian church claimed it for its own. It is her service that is perfect freedom.”
The world was turning upside down. He might have been hanged by the heels and swinging, so little was space firm around him. Everything was inverting now, like a mirage that shivered over desert air.
“I promise it is so. All true men, at all times, have known it to be so… have known that without her power they are less than men, mere shadows of their finer selves. And such powers never die. They are always immanent within us and ask only that we enter into new relations with them. She is aroun
d us always, dear friend, around and within, because she is Nature, the very matter of our being, the mistress of the elements. And whether she is revered as Pessinuntica or Artemis, Dictynna or Aphrodite, Cybele, Isis or humble Gypsy May, she is always one and the same. She is alive here now in you, and asks only to be loved and rightly feared.”
Yes, fear was possible, for beyond that face everything was swinging still. Yet he was soothed by the gentle voice. The old names out of Apuleius lapped the air about him with their poetry. Archaic and strange their sounds, yet also immediate and familiar – and so blessedly soft in contrast to the harsh comminations of the jealous, isolated God.
And this woman across from him…
More priest than he was himself, he had thought, but how very wrong he had been. No priest but priestess, her face vivid with the living presence of the goddess for whom she pleaded now. He saw his own reflection in those eyes and, around it, unfathomable darkness. A dark where one might finally lose oneself for ever. And this was puzzling in the contrary emotions it aroused – for at moments he sensed the possibility of a long-sought consummation there, and at others he panicked at a kind of death – a drowning to be resisted, held at bay, refused. Always before he had thought of drowning in another’s eyes as merely figurative, some fancy of the poets, but no, it was possible. And how then should one be saved? In that place there could be no will, no breath.
Yet the small reflection of his face was shining there undrowned; inverted somewhere deep inside the recesses of her brain, yet set aright within the bright field of her vision. Was this then where he deeply belonged? Was it possible that through such utter deliverance of the self into the dark, the self itself might shine?
How strange that from the tumult of his mind such glassy calm should grow; such void of all inhibiting commandment that now, slowly, he might reach out his hand to soothe the flushed cheek he had struck, and seek forgiveness there.
Eyes closed, wondering, she received its touch. She leant her face into the soft crook of his hand. And then, after a long moment, she eased her head away to look at him.
This was, and was not, everything that had been intended. So deeply had she prepared her heart for loss, she could not quite believe that this had come to pass so quickly. She was perplexed and speechless now. No longer – no more than he – was she in command. With the breath arrested at her throat, she waited.
13
The Keepers of the Keys
We wander through experience like dreamers, and what should be obvious at once too often becomes so only when the harm is done. We know it, and we forget it; then we wake in shock.
In that way the meeting at Saxburgh shook me back to consciousness, for nothing I’d learnt there was, in essence, new. That the world was a dangerous and unstable place which continued to exist only because those with the power to decide otherwise permitted it to do so – this was birthright information. It had always been there, like the certainty that I must, at some point, die. It was a condition of existence, and to think on it too closely induced numb panic, an almost pathological despair. But I tried that night; I tried, and thought warped back upon itself.
Nobody wanted things this way; this was how things were; and though there was a reasonable case to make against such a state of affairs, it was not about to change. Reason, it seemed, was not enough. On both sides of the argument the premises were older far than reason. They would not be reconciled. And so – when thought failed – you were left with feeling.
The bleak news from the meeting jammed my feelings as it jammed my mind. That night I began to wonder whether the very capacity to feel was so impaired by exposure to atrocity that men like me could only bungle the music now, pounding out a few crude chords on a diminished register. Guilt we could manage; rage was still a possibility; and always, underlying everything, the deep bass note of dread. Beyond that – what? Something flute-like and tremulous, trying to phrase its breath. Small sound against the engines’ roar.
My own most recent display of feeling had not been impressive. Regardless of the missiles pointed at my life, I’d rowed from shore to shore of the lake as to a marvellous island, and emerged from the encounter on the lawn with little on my lips but petulant demands. Where had I been? What did I imagine I was doing? What – the question presented itself here as in the graver, unthinkable matter – what were my real feelings?
Primarily guilt. It was after midnight, I was alone, Edward’s agents were hammering at my door and they knew I’d sing. Dragged in for questioning, I pleaded guilty. Guilty to loitering with intent. Guilty to being an accessory before, during and after the fact. Guilty because Laura fascinated me, excited me and, yes, unnerved me. But it was also evident that she was not in love with me.
I remembered her smile as she’d suggested I was still dreaming, and knew now, as I’d guessed then, that she was not in love with me. And neither – it should have been obvious before as it was obvious now – was I in love with her. I had been dreaming – a dreamer dazed by gratified desire who had woken, empty-handed. We had made love but we were not lovers. We were both about other business, the nature of which remained unclear. So here, as in so much else, the real crime was unconsciousness.
Alone in The Pightle I faced the incredulous challenge in the eyes of my children: We don’t understand why the world should be like this. Why have you allowed it to happen? You’re our father, you made this world before we came. You brought us here and abandoned us. How do you explain all this? What do you intend to do about it? We deserve an answer.
I could frame only their unanswerable demands.
I was in no shape for facing truth and knew that truth was unavoidable. Knew too that it was not enough merely to admit the truth – one had to act on it. But how?
I reviewed my life and found I had no practice. I was a father on the run, a failed husband, a faithless friend. I was a poet who couldn’t write, a teacher with no store of wisdom, a loveless lover, uninitiated male. It wasn’t meant to be like this and this was how it was. Always – whether in the realm of feeling or of thought – it seemed the unintended consequences of our own intentions took the trick.
Eventually I slept. I hadn’t gone to bed – I fell asleep where I sat on the old Chesterfield, and even as sleep closed round me, I was talking to my children, trying, vainly, to explain myself.
In the dream that came, a woman had seen how to unlock the world’s terror of nuclear war. I didn’t recognize her. There was nothing distinctive about her. She was just a woman and her idea was simple; the leaders of the nuclear powers must surrender the keys that would trigger nuclear war. They must surrender them to her.
They were all old men and they were very tired. Mistrustfully, one by one, they handed over the keys. When they were all surrendered, the woman placed the keys on a cushion and took them to the Pope. (And, yes, even in its dreaming state a part of my mind sat up and said, The Pope?) But for a long time the Pope looked down where, in his hands, on the cushion, the possible destruction of the planet innocently lay. Finally, in a voice of absolute authority, he said, “The Quakers shall hold the keys.”
I woke, agitated, and could make no sense of it. But I remembered Edward’s advice, found pencil and paper, and there, at two in the morning, as faithfully as I could, I wrote its details down, then went to bed.
Well after nine, I woke in anxiety. Throughout much of the morning I waited for Laura, expecting her at every sound in the lane. There was no sign.
For the first time I regretted my lack of a phone. I needed to know what was happening and feared that it was something bad. Why else didn’t she come when she had said she would? I dithered, wondering whether to break the implied if unspoken promise not to seek her out. She had begged me not to do that, but wouldn’t it be best – bravest at least – to have things out and ride the consequences? Or was I only forcing things with my own rough demands again?
The dithering was intolerable, and typical. For a time I floundered in self-contemp
t until I saw that, out of the previous night’s diagnosis of my life, one thing might be done. Weeks had passed and I’d taken no final decision about the job. The deadline was soon due and I had to make up my mind. I did so, for though the thought was scary, I’d seen it already – I couldn’t go back. Even in sharing my students’ disdain for the institution that each month paid my bills, I’d exampled them only in hypocrisy. The agenda of the job was acquiescence, and I could no longer acquiesce. It took ten minutes to write, sign and seal a letter of resignation.
There on the table I found the pencil scrawl in which I’d written down the dream. It read like nonsense, and my thoughts shifted away. My eyes fell on the sealed envelope. As long as it remained unposted, nothing had changed. Also there was a phone box outside the Post Office.
I set off down the lane, and even as the letter dropped through the slot it felt like madness. There was a Victoria Regina monogram embossed on the red box in the wall: that black mouth had been waiting since Louisa’s time for just this crazy moment. It had swallowed my past.
I went into the phone box and when I picked up the receiver it was dead. I couldn’t believe it – having got the guts together to ring the Lodge first and then my kids, the bloody box was dead. I hammered at the cradle and it made no difference. Mrs Jex came out of the Post Office. I had to listen while she explained at length about the endless trouble she’d been having with it. She took in my scowl, offered me the use of her phone, but I wasn’t about to stand under her nuclear siren talking to Laura while she cocked her ears. I said it didn’t matter and managed, finally, to get away.
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