The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  And she must struggle to hold him with her. She felt him slipping from her grasp as though, perversely – for there was nothing less on earth he wanted – he was resolute to prove his own insubstantiality. And if she strove with him, he would only resist more fiercely, so she must still herself, let go, in the hope that the primary imperative of his own being must bring him back. For a time the room was very cold.

  “Let it be ice then, if it must,” she thought, “for even there we know we can stand together.”

  “I am so cold,” he said – and not in answer – “I am so very cold.”

  Though she too shivered at the touch, she said, “There is warmth with me.”

  Then there was long silence.

  “In another world,” he said quietly at last, “ – perhaps in another age even, we might – you and I – have been able to sit so, side by side, before a blazing hearth, with the wind trying the window latch and yet unable to enter where we shared our peace. I have dreamt of this. One night – even before I came to you at the Lodge in such disreputable condition – one night, alone inside the Rectory, I dreamt of this. How we might sit there quietly with our books – you deliberating over the profundities of some old Hermetic sage; I pondering my chosen text, or – better – counting out the numbers of a verse… our two imaginations hard at work in silent sympathy until the clock should chime, a log shift among the embers in the grate, or some night bird call above the billows of the gale… Then we would look up, and catch each other’s eyes, and smile… And this, my dear, remains the entire and utterly impossible longing of my heart.”

  She might have wept to hear the sadness and the tenderness of that voice, but the vision it invoked corresponded with such total intimacy to yearnings of her own, and filled her so completely with the warmth of her returning presence, that it was less grief at those closing words which possessed her now than a hope, however tentative, for the recovery of lost joy. Somehow it must be possible to transfigure this experience. Whatever bars the world might seek to place between them, they had proved it now: it was possible to meet, if only so, in this ethereal domain where heart might speak with heart without concealment. No one could reach or touch them there, and none divide. Was not the realm of the spirit the one region where they had always truly belonged? Was not this perhaps the very meaning of his swift and agonized withdrawal from their meeting in the flesh? They had proved its joys, and proved them in a manner that belied all grossness. Now they must pass beyond. Their element was elsewhere, rarer, more refined.

  “Do you know,” he said, “what date it is today?”

  “It is the 25th of March.”

  “The Day of Blood.”

  Her perplexity was compounded by the response. Where had he gone while she was lost in thought seeking the one way through?

  “It is the Dies Sanguinis,” he said, “the day when the dead Attis rises from the dead.”

  Now she thought she understood. They had not, after all, strayed so very far apart, for his thoughts, like her own, were seeking images of resurrection. With a confidence that surely must share itself, she said, “The day also when once, according to a very old tradition, the date of Easter Day was fixed.”

  “No longer so. The feast is movable.”

  “Yes, and it is a great loss. That it moves in relation to the phases of the moon was the only wisdom in the change, for otherwise pagan and Christian might still have shared that celebration of renewal which was, for the worshippers of Attis, Hilaria, the Festival of Joy.”

  “When the world was turned upside down in carnival,” he said, “the feasting of the flesh.” And then, after a moment’s silence, in a voice that chilled her soul: “As you and I have turned the world upside down.”

  “But only that it might be righted.”

  “Out of chaos?”

  “Which is,” she answered swiftly, “the First Matter of things, whence all shall be reborn. That is the promise both of the cross and the Attis tree. These days about the equinox have ever been a hallowed time. And – do you not see it, Edwin? – Mary and Cybele, the two grieving mothers, are one and the same. This is the day when both their sons shall rise.”

  “Easter is not yet, and nor do I think that I can bear its coming.” His voice was hoarse and fearful now, more distant. “Today is the Day of Blood and what I see is a milling crowd. I hear the sound of laughter and savage music. I hear the cries of women selling violets. I can smell slopped wine. I see a drunkard pissing in the open drain, and there a masked clown strokes a giant phallus strapped about his loins. Among the cymbals and the flutes, the detonation of the drums, I see the long procession dance, and everywhere there is a lascivious sense of dread.”

  As possessed now by the terror of the vision as he was himself, she strove, gallantly, to answer. “I say to you: our love can only make this holier.”

  He laughed quietly, and she could not bear the note of mockery. “I would have you speak that thought,” she said.

  “It is only that you have overlooked something.”

  “I am trying as best I may,” she cried, “to hold the whole of this together, and you must help me, Edwin. It cannot be done alone.”

  “I think,” he said, “that it can only be done alone.”

  Alone in the Rectory, Frere had abandoned his attempt to write. In the contest between chaos and the word, the word had lost; yet chaos must not win. The irretrievable was done, and he could not deny the truth of the experience. He was committed now – committed both to the saving grace of it and to the guilt. He could conceive of only one point where these contraries might converge.

  Unable to find a shaping word of his own, he must turn elsewhere for guidance. Two books lay open on his desk: one of them, the larger, was the Holy Bible, opened at the nineteenth chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel; the other was his small, secretly long-cherished volume of the verses of Catullus.

  Even dumb objects have their destiny. Rarely given a second thought, they perform their unconsidered duty day by day until their moment arrives and everything seems to hang on their location. Such now was the case with the keys to Edward’s car. Unthinking, I’d put them down on the table when Laura and I entered the Lodge; Edward wanted them, Laura was in possession, and the ensuing muddle in the yard would have been comical had it not been vile. Laura was resolute that she’d throw the keys in the lake sooner than let us drive off without her. Edward was equally determined that she should not come. With the two of them shouting at one another, we jangled together like the keys on the ring until she threw them across the cobbles and – when Edward went to search for them by torchlight – opened the rear door of the car, got in, and refused to leave. Already regretting the impulse which had led me to take up Edward’s challenge alone, I was glad enough to see her there. “Come then and be damned,” Edward snarled, and switched on the ignition.

  He drove in rage, would answer neither of us, stared ahead, crashing through the gears, but was alert enough to stand on the brake when a hare jumped from the hedge and froze in the headlight beams. We were all thrown forward. When I looked up, the hare crouched there in the moonlight, pricking its ears, staring back at us, before bounding off to be lost among the trees. The shock shifted Edward’s mood, but not pleasantly. I heard him chuckle beside me, and felt a frisson of dread as he muttered, “Enter these enchanted woods who dare.”

  He didn’t stop again until we reached the centre of Munding where he parked the car outside the churchyard. It was Saturday night, around eleven thirty. People were still drinking in the Feathers. He picked up the flashlight from the floor, patted my thigh with it, and said, “Get out. I’m going to show you something.” As he slammed the door behind him, I turned to look at Laura. She was white-faced, her nerves in ribbons, biting her lip. I said, “As long as we stay with him, he can’t hurt himself.”

  Her reply was a tense whisper, so thin on her breath I had to strain to hear it. “Something terrible’s going to happen,” she said.

 
“Not if I can help it.”

  “Nobody can stop it now.”

  “I don’t believe that. Are you going to help me?”

  The breath shuddered out of her as she opened the door.

  Edward was waiting for us at the lychgate. Ignoring Laura, he pointed the torch beam at me. “I’m going to show you Gypsy May.”

  “I’ve seen her already, Edward.”

  “I know that. You’ve seen her. But have you really looked at her? Have you let her take a long hard look at you? I think not.” He turned away along the gravelled path, chuckled, and began to sing. I recognized the song from my rugby-playing days at school – a bawdy variation on an air from Gilbert and Sullivan:

  There’s a portion of the female that appeals to man’s depravity,

  It’s fashioned with considerable care – able care;

  And what at first appears to be a simple little cavity

  Is really quite an intricate affair.

  Now doctors of distinction have examined this phenomenon

  On very many experimental dames – lucky dames,

  And have given to this portion of the lower female abdomen

  A series of delightful Latin names.

  The tune was flat on his throat, the words elegantly obscene. He stepped away from the path into the grass among the gravestones, then directed the torch beam upwards. It scanned the flints until its circle of light came to rest on the crudely carved features of the idol. The bulging eyes and the mouth’s grimace were thrown into shadowy relief. More hideous than it had been by day, the figure was no longer comical. The torch might have been a magic lantern projecting this single slide for a mind obsessed with its own disgust. In the otherwise dark night it turned the church into a lavatory wall.

  “Ugly old bitch, isn’t she?” Edward murmured. “And what is she saying? What is the son to my little lumière? How about: “Would you rather have me foul and faithful or fair and faithless?” And what’s the answer to that little puzzler, Cambridge?” He moved the beam slowly down until it was centred where the hands clutched at the open groin. He gave a perverse grunt of satisfaction. “You don’t know? Well, here’s another one for you. Do you know what that is?” he demanded. “Have you given it any thought?” Uninterested in any answer I might have found, he left a second or two for the question to sink in, then said, “It’s where we start and where we end, and we spend the time between trying to scramble back inside. Why do we do that, do you imagine? What is the fascination of the thing? I suppose Laura knows. She is it. But she can’t tell us. Those particular lips can’t talk. They can only open and shut like the mouth of a fish, without intelligence, and the only sound they make is a sort of munching.”

  Quietly Laura said, “Why are you hurting yourself like this?”

  Edward gave a little chuckle and ignored her. “Shall I tell you what I think it is? I think it’s the Black Hole. It’s the Singularity. It’s where all the laws break down. It’s where, if we dare to look, the universe turns inside out. Gravity is infinite here. Space and time come to an end. It’s the crunch, Cambridge. It’s the big crunch.” He stared up for a long time and then, in a changed voice, hollower, more abstract, added, “Theoretically speaking, it might constitute the entrance to another world, another universe – a kind of cosmic Happy Valley. Regrettably, however, the equations governing this hypothesis are so unstable that if they are disturbed by other factors – a body, for instance, approaching the Singularity – they collapse. The door closes. It shuts in our face. So we can never know. We don’t know how to think about it, you see. It can only happen to us. Like this.” He switched off the torch and plunged us into darkness. “What does that make you think of, Cambridge?” And, when I didn’t answer, “Precisely,” he said. “Your silence hits the nail on the head.”

  He switched on the torch again but it was placed beneath his chin now and the shadows made a hideous grinning mask of his face. “Of course, Laura would have us think of it otherwise. They have to. It’s their ace in the hole. They’re under zoological compulsion to make it look as inviting as they can. And, I grant you, it can be beautiful. It’s of its antinomian nature to be at once beautiful and ugly; seductive and repugnant; rarely seen and evident everywhere; silent and summoning… I could go on and on because, as instruments of torment go, this one is singularly well designed.” He lowered the torch. “You might say it’s one of the cleverer tricks in Death’s Jest Book.”

  By now I was scared, and less of Edward himself than of his absence. He was gone from his own face, and from his own voice. Something cold and vile had usurped his place, had seized the opportunity to corrupt his dreams. And this was only the preliminary. I began to feel that Laura was right – that a terrible thing must happen unless it was stopped now.

  “I don’t believe any of this,” I said. “This isn’t you speaking.” I held his stare, casting about for the ounce of civet that might sweeten his thought, but he lifted the beam to my face, momentarily dazzling me. “Then you haven’t seen it yet. You just haven’t got it.” He swivelled the torch beam back up to Gypsy May, and spoke to her. “You’re going to have to try harder, lady. This one is denser than poor Frere.” Then he looked back at me. “He saw it – your friend Frere, our mystic brother – yours and mine, sweet pie. He knew. Listen to this.”

  He fished in one of the large pockets of his coat and brought out a book. It was small, ledger-like, with a scarlet spine and marbled cover, and the contents – I saw them briefly in the torch beam – were hand-written. Edward began to read aloud from a page he had marked with a spill of paper:

  In his loneliness the poor fellow’s mind seems to have been unhinged by thoughts of Gypsy May, though how a man of his culture and intelligence – to make no mention of his faith – could fall under the spell of such superstitious, corn-dolly nonsense is quite beyond me. Perhaps his unhappy stint in India accounts for it, for there was also much confused mention of that. Whatever the case, take her seriously he did, and to what lunatic extremes!

  Try as we might to unlock its secrets with our scalpels, the brainbox remains a mysterious job-lot affair in which, for aught I know, the rude aboriginal savage still stamps his dance next door to the respectable Anglican parson at his prayers; or, for that matter, on the hither side, your free-thinking man of medical science who sits scratching his pate, posing questions to both his neighbours – questions to which, it seems, there yet wants a reasonable answer.

  Edward looked up from his reading, snapped the book shut and replaced it in his pocket. “It’s about Frere, of course. It’s from the casebook of Dr Thomas Horrocks, physician and surgeon of Saxburgh. It’s dated in March 1849. You might have got on well with him, don’t you think?”

  “Where did you find it, Edward?”

  He gave a sardonic chuckle. “Never you mind. Here it is. What every bad boy needs to know about blind justice.”

  “Ralph,” Laura said. “You got it from Ralph.”

  Edward stared at her. “You really are quite remarkable. Yes, Ralph had it all along. He was the keeper of the key after all. But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is the end of the game. Are you with me, Cambridge?” Swinging the torch across the night sky, he began to walk back towards the lychgate, picking up the words of the song.

  “Where are you going?” I called after him.

  He swung the torch so that it illuminated the red brickwork and the white window casements of the old Rectory. “To the Green Chapel,” he said. “Where else?”

  Inside the Rectory, Frere’s fire was burning low. He rose from his desk, took a log from the basket and dropped it among the embers. A brief constellation of sparks rose and sparked against the hearth-back. He put his shoe to the log, thrusting it among the small flames and, when he was sure that it had caught, returned to his desk. A third book waited there, splayed open on its spine on the pages of the opened Bible. It was the Book of Common Prayer. He had been studying the Order of Service he must shortly observe for Easter.
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  On Good Friday morning – no more than a few days hence – he must address the God of the Christian faith before his congregation, asking for mercy on all Jews, Turks, Infidels and Heretics. He must read that Epistle to the Hebrews in which it was acknowledged that the blood of bulls and goats had never been an adequate sacrificial offering, and what was finally required was that the human body of Christ become the paschal lamb. He would be obliged to bid the congregation draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of faith, having their hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and their bodies washed in pure water. “Let us hold fast our faith without wavering,” he must exhort, “and let us consider one another to provoke unto love.”

  Even now, alone, how his heart stopped at the word.

  Before Easter was over, he must announce to the parish that Christ, the passover, was sacrificed for them: “therefore let us keep the feast. Not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

  But which truth? Whose sincerity?

  “If ye then be risen with Christ,” he must command, “set your affection on things above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God, not on things on the earth.” And this with his own eyes painfully averted from that beloved face in the nave before him – but not turned upwards, away from it, towards the goal he must set for his parishioners.

  “Mortify your members,” he must instruct them, “which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence and covetousness which is idolatry. For which thing’s sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience, in the which ye also walked some time when ye lived with them.”