Her wrist was very narrow beneath the blade, very white; too frail a thing to put between a man and his despair. I watched her fingers fold around his knuckles where they gripped the black handle.
“Let it go now,” she said. “This isn’t yours. It’s out of your hands now.”
Edward stared down as she released the soft clasp and straightened her palm. There might have been nothing in the whole world but his own hand holding the razor and this other, vulnerable hand waiting to receive. Long seconds passed before the last of his will was expended in a scarcely audible groan.
As she took the blade from him, Laura closed her eyes. I heard a sharp intake of breath as though her flesh was seared with cold. She seemed to reel, and for a moment I thought she might faint, but with a little moan she turned away from us towards the open window. Reflected against the dark panes, the torch beam blazed there like a planet, sending webs of light back across the ceiling. They circled round us as the torch shook in her hand.
Then, in a voice of infinite pity, a voice that was her own and not her own, she murmured, “Oh my dear, what have you done… what have you done to yourself?”
All that he needed here was assembled. Everything was ready now. Only the self must be prepared.
Trembling, Frere returned to his desk.
At the end of all thought there was but one word that answered to his need, and the word was sacrifice. He whispered it aloud, and then, intrigued by the sound, repeated it: “Sacrifice.” Like the noises of his fire, its sibilants and fricative crackled and hissed across the tongue. Its purity annealed the mind.
It was a word radiant with great beauty, yet filled also, when approached in nakedness, with dread. It was a word he had tried to live with all his days, yet only now, after the brief burnt offering of all the other words by which he’d failed to still his heart, did he begin to understand how such a word might summon angels; for angels, like the word itself, were both beautiful and terrible, and carried immolation on their breath.
To sacrifice: to make sacred, to do the holy thing. It must remain a possibility. For however deep his transgression, if this love was sacred then one might make it more so in the act of sacrifice.
That there were occasions when a prized value must be sacrificed to the claims of the higher – this was part of his stock-in-trade as clergyman, a weekly adjuration to the Bostocks and the Whartons of this world, as nightly to himself. Yet how little he had lived its meaning, contaminating sacrifice with resentment, or foregoing it in preference for solace that did not long console. Those days were past. They had receded like the days of infancy when angels were the guardians of sleep, gentle as the tester’s drapery, merciful as his mother’s smile. How, as a child, he had puzzled over Jacob’s violent encounter with an angel, for who could believe that an angel might find it in his heart to maim a man? What an innocent he’d been to carry for so long the sentimental illusion that such powers were appointed merely for his protection!
Well, he knew better now. He was coming to understand the nature of true sacrifice.
He was coming to understand also how dubious was the distinction between the old law’s sacrifice of blood and the bloodless offerings of the new. The new law had been born in blood as everything was born in blood. There was blood on the stable straw, blood on the cross, blood – if one truly dared to taste it – in the chalice of the mass. It was the very currency of life, and therefore the only food acceptable before the gods. This was the knowledge every woman carried in her loins. It had always been so under the old law and the new, and he – poor quaking fool – was caught between them both. He had shed his cloth and entered the Garden; he had thought it paradise, but he knew now that its true name was Gethsemane, and that the roses of Isis flowered there among the violets of Attis.
To sacrifice: to be at once the priest, the altar and the offering. Much was already immolated in his passion’s flames, and a lifetime of prudent abnegation would recover nothing from the ash. Nor must he regret it; for if he had lived at all, it was in those moments when, like a dancer on the ice, he had surrendered narrow consciousness to the rhythms of the flesh, and thereby shook a fist at fate. Yet was it possible to live without regret? If Catullus were to be believed, not even the first initiate could answer yes to that.
He turned again to the pages of the Attis. Its closing cry was already deeply scored, but what seized his attention now was the crucial line of the poem where the gender of its subject shifts. How well Catullus understood the nature of the sacrifice required; how terrified the poet had been of it! And Frere himself was suddenly aware, in contrast, how remote he remained from the terror of the thing.
He closed his eyes, and realized that though his shoulders were cold his palms were clammy; for the body knew. It understood the action it must undertake and undergo; the nerves vibrated with premonitory alarm. Poor Brother Ass – it had ever been his faithful servant, save only in the matter of its carnal appetite, and even there the mind had been the true seat of contention. So what reward was this?
Here, in the hour of their collision, there was a curious otherness about the body’s operations, as though it sighed and trembled now without consent, fretting in its traces while the mind hummed and hawed like an indecisive master. With the fingers of one hand he stroked the palm of the other, trying to catch his senses sensing themselves, and all he apprehended was a faint tickling sensation utterly remote from the place where he watched and waited. A hand may not embrace itself, he thought, nor the eye see its own seeing, any more than a mouth could bless itself with kisses. How strange that we should be so identified with the flesh that housed us, and yet feel so separate from its palpable existence! Yet its pain was our pain, and it could shrivel us. Even the pain of the mind was a physical pain, like the action of a vice sometimes, and sometimes like the cleaving of an axe.
And all of this was again evasion. What was needful now was the one thing solitude could not afford: an impulse from outside the self. The encouragement, the momentum, the hysteria – however one conceived it – that came from drum and tambourine, the wailing of the priests, the incitement of a crowd hungry for vicarious expiation. One might be seized in such a tide, drawn on, spring forth, and with a savage shriek of Ololugmos do in an ecstatic instant what a century of solitary meditation might never accomplish. Yet except in a few brief and precious moments of his life, Frere was no ecstatic. He was a stolid pilgrim who had erred. He was a man of books, who closed the pages of Catullus now, in fear, in an orgy of self-contempt, and saw, beneath its binding, the pages of his Bible lying open there. Here was the book of all the world. Exactly and unfailingly, it spoke to every aspect of the condition of man – even to such a terrible condition as his own had now become.
Had this same fear, he wondered, thrilled through the nerves of Origen, those many centuries before, when he, in his dark time, meditated on those same enigmatic verses in St Matthew’s Gospel? He must imagine so, for there was nothing new under the sun, and even here, in the particularity of fear, he had been preceded. Even perhaps in the realization which had come to him at last: that there was a rite in which a man might make his sacrifice to God and Goddess in a single act.
For if a priest was unworthy to share with his congregation Christ’s sacrificial passion, there remained a way whereby – in service to all the powers prevailing in his church as in his mind – he might take another sacrifice upon himself. A moment exquisite with pain – the self swiftly severed from the self – and thence a peace that passed all understanding might at last be found. The gods might there be met on their own terms. Within himself the opposites could at last be reconciled.
And this, surely, she must understand?
At his desk under the curtained window Frere began to read aloud, to calm himself, to know that even here in this extremity, he was also in the presence of his Lord. He was reading Christ’s words from St Matthew’s Gospel: “For there are some eunuchs which were born so from their mother’s womb; and
there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men; and there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”
He closed the cover of the Bible, repeated those last words to himself, and then, trembling in that cold March night in 1849, Edwin Frere took his razor from its leather case and held it for a time in the crocus of the candle flame. Sitting quietly naked, he sought to compose his lonely mind until there was nothing of Cybele and Attis there, of Origen and Matthew’s Gospel; nothing of Gypsy May. All images were displaced by the face of the woman he had loved with the entirety of his flesh and soul, and with a love that was finally forbidden. In her name, he thought, do I make this offering, and that calm which is the fortitude of a mind in resignation descended over him. When he saw that the steel had cooled, he made a slow inspiration of his breath, then cupped himself in his left hand, and with the other drew the blade across his flesh.
Later, when he saw that his fumbling efforts to stitch the wound had failed, he staunched the blood with napkins, drew on his clothes, went out to the stable and harnessed his horse to the gig. Then he drove slowly along the dark lanes to Dr Horrock’s surgery in Saxburgh.
Priest to both God and Goddess now, never again to be the lover of Louisa Agnew, he had become, and would for ever remain, her mystic brother.
14
The Gesture of the Secret
Ten minutes after midnight, Ralph Agnew’s man Talbot was driving back to the Hall after an unsatisfactory evening in Norwich when he found Munding Street blocked by a small and, at that time of night, unexpected traffic jam. Beyond the three cars halted ahead of his own he saw the blue light of an ambulance whirling its lurid flicker across the faces of those who watched from doorways and the few people standing in the street. Among them he recognized Bill Rush, George Bales and Mrs Jex wearing a topcoat thrown over a dressing gown and carpet slippers. His first thought was a street accident – probably someone rolling home from the Feathers knocked down by a drunken driver. Then he saw me: one arm around a figure huddled in a blanket, I was approaching the rear door of the ambulance through the gateway of what, to the best of Talbot’s knowledge, was the empty Rectory.
His curiosity further aroused, he switched off his engine and was no sooner out of the car than he was ordered to get back in and reverse, like the cars ahead of him, into the car park of the Feathers. From there he watched the ambulance wail around the bend by the Post Office, making for Saxburgh and the main road. By the time he joined the small group outside the Rectory gate, disturbing rumours were already taking shape.
A quarter of an hour later, Talbot was back at the Hall reporting to Ralph what he now knew – that his friend Edward Nesbit had suffered a heart attack and was dead.
This devastating news would later be confirmed by the one person who, in what had been ill-lit and frantic circumstances, was best placed to observe precisely what was happening, but in those shocked moments Ralph needed no confirmation. Incapacitated by grief and guilt, he tried to take in Talbot’s confusing account of the night’s events, and then, having sought to clear the brandy from his head with coffee, he changed his slippers for shoes, covered his informal evening wear with a trench coat, and drove against the blur of approaching headlights down the long miles to the hospital.
Most of what Talbot told Ralph he had learnt from the pigman, Bill Rush, who had been walking away from the Feathers with Bob Crossley less than half an hour before, when he spotted a light in an upstairs window of the old Rectory. He was puzzled by it at first, and then a little unnerved. It was Bob who insisted that they investigate.
The two men came through the Rectory gate at the moment when, with time swirling round me like the torch-lit air of the room, I heard Edward gasp, saw him clutch at his chest and then – as fast as if an axe had truly fallen – topple to the floor. I heard Laura’s clipped cry, then the sound of the razor clattering to the boards, and I was down beside Edward, pulling back the collar of his coat, loosening the throat-buttons of his shirt. I felt, before I saw, the tears rolling down his face. I felt them on my hand. Then, outside, like the return of sanity itself, someone shouted, “Who’s in there?” and I recognized Bob Crossley’s voice.
By the time Bob and Bill Rush had found their way up to where I crouched over Edward’s prostrate body and Laura shivered across the room, Edward’s mouth was already turning blue. Dazzled by their torches, I squinted up at the two men aghast, and said, “He’s not breathing. I think…”
Bill stood in the doorway, wide-eyed, and the questions froze at Bob’s lips as he recovered from the first shock and bent down over Edward. He put a finger to his throat and found no pulse, then lifted an eyelid, looked at the pupil, whispered, “Damn,” and turned to me. He must have seen I was in no state to act because he looked back over his shoulder at Bill and snapped, “Ring for an ambulance. Don’t stand about. Now.”
“The box is dead,” I said.
“Sod it.” Bob reached into his pocket, held out a key to Bill. “It’s for my front door. Use my phone and for God’s sake be quick about it.” Commanded out of astonishment, Bill grabbed the key and turned for the landing. “Tell them it’s a heart attack,” Bob shouted after him. “Wait for them outside. Show them where to come.” Then he looked back at Edward, took a deep breath, raised his fist and brought it down with a sickening thump on the breastbone. He shifted his weight, pinched Edward’s nostrils with one hand, lifted his head back with the other, then bent and began to blow into his mouth. After several breaths he felt again for a pulse, cursed under his breath, then looked back at me. “How long’s he been like this?”
“Two minutes? Three maybe. I don’t know.”
“No longer than that?”
“It can’t be.”
“Then there’s still a chance.” Again he blew into Edward’s mouth, then shifted to press urgently on his chest. It was like watching a man trying to kindle fire with nothing but bare hands and breath. Three or four times he lurched from mouth to heart, muttering, “Try, dammit, try,” and then – as once more he felt for, and failed to find, a pulse – I watched my mind reel through calamitous thick dark, and heard my own words yearning for denial as I hissed in a breath I hoped Laura would not hear, “Is he dead?”
“There’s no pulse,” Bob said, “no ventilation. I think he’s gone but we’ve got to keep trying. It’ll be easier with both of us. Look, I want you to work on his heart. Press on the chest – here, at the sternum. No, a bit higher or you’ll break it. That’s it. I’m going to give him more mouth-to-mouth, and as soon as you see me stop, push down hard – use both your hands – four, five times, then I’ll try to get more oxygen in him. We’ll keep it going like that – alternating. Are you ready?”
I nodded, knelt beside Edward and, as Bob raised his mouth, began to push at Edward’s unmoving chest. Crossed hands mimicking the simplest, forgotten action of the heart, battering at Edward’s door, I was shouting in silence, cursing him, begging – a fervent muscular beseeching that he not persist in this refusal of his duty, until – no longer knowing whether I was trying to pump life into him or pump death out – I could manage no more than an abject iteration at each push upon his heart of the one word please.
*
From a place somewhere close to the ceiling Edward is looking down in mild perplexity that we should be so alarmed by what is to him an entirely acceptable predicament. He feels no pain, no panic at this abrupt severance from a body which is no more than an object of remote and declining interest. He watches as Bob presses his lips to what had once been his own mouth, and I lift and drop my weight like a plunger at his chest. He wonders that this stranger and I should take such pains to drag him back into the pathos of the flesh when he has been liberated from its toils with such simplicity. It is, admittedly, a little odd to be floating here in such detachment while things are so frantic below, but the sensation is not unpleasant; indeed, were it not for our obvious dis
tress, it would be mildly amusing even. Then his attention shifts to where Laura watches, her arms crossed at her chest, hands at her shoulders, shivering. With a pang of dismay he recognizes her profound state of shock.
His first thought is that there should be some means to comfort her, but from this airy altitude nothing is quite tangible. He is powerless to touch or speak, and he does panic a little then, but only for a moment. Even more forcibly than when he’d gazed from inside the skin, he is struck by how very young she is, and how very beautiful. He observes her at last without demand or desire, as though a series of film-thin screens have been withdrawn – screens of thought and fancy, ideas mirroring his otherwise invisible soul – and she is simply there, beyond all yearning, and beyond – as the last of those screens is removed – the merely circumstantial fact of her material existence.
So this was what the ancients had meant when they spoke of star-fire! He has never entertained any of the pallid, Sunday-school illusions of the soul as a wispy length of cotton-voile floating about in inner space, but that her centre should be so crystalline and igneous, shining like struck flint, and, yes, burning with a cool sapphire brilliance – this ravishes his feelings. It fills him with a pure rejoicing, and so excellent is the revelation that – when he remembers her contingent self once more – it is with a tenderness that could dream of asking nothing save the small effort of consciousness which would show her to herself as she is visible here to him.
But then, as though he is ascending with astonishing velocity or – because there is no sense of motion – she is receding with equivalent speed, he sees her diminish even as he seeks to communicate these thoughts. She is becoming smaller and ever more remote until all the illuminated figures gathered about his body have quite disappeared, and the light itself has dwindled to a single distant star.
The Chymical Wedding Page 54
