The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  Ralph arrived unseen in the waiting room of the casualty ward at the moment when a young doctor was reporting to Bob and me on Laura’s condition. Dazed, half out of my mind still, I heard him say that she had been in a severe state of shock on admission but was under sedation now. They’d decided it wisest for her to stay overnight. He assured me that a good night’s sleep was quite the best thing, and saw no reason why she should not be discharged the next day – though she would be delicate still and need careful handling.

  The doctor rasped his hand across the stubble of his chin and blew out his breath. “As for the old man… I’m afraid it looks like an extensive heart attack. In fact, if you hadn’t known what to do…” The sentence expired in a shrug. “Anyway, he’s with the coronary unit now. His blood pressure’s on the low side, and the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours will be quite critical. But the longer he goes without another attack, the better his chances. If you ring tomorrow, we might be able to give you a clearer picture. Did you leave your number – just in case.”

  Bob said, “I left mine. I’m there most of the time.”

  The doctor glanced back at me in an effort of encouragement. “You did a good job. All being well, he could be out of here in a week to ten days. I hope this doesn’t completely mess up your wedding plans.”

  Anxiety, ringing in my ears, made it hard to hear even the words intended to dispel it, so I was slow to realize that this last hope was also addressed to me. And that it made no sense. The doctor must have seen bewilderment deepen on my already dazed face. “It’s not you who’s getting married?” and – when I shook my head – “My mistake. I’m sorry. It’s just that he kept muttering something about being late for the wedding, and I thought…” He glanced in embarrassment at his watch. “Well, there’s not a lot more I can say. I should go home and try and get some sleep if I were you.” He raised a dismissive hand at our thanks, and turned away.

  Bob released his tension in a sigh. “He’s right, you know. There’s nothing we can do here. Come on, I’ll take you back.”

  I turned uncertainly and, for the first time, saw Ralph. Wondering with vague dismay how he could possibly be there, I saw him ease himself onto a bench and, with an expression too fatigued among the stresses of his face to believe in any other possibility, say, “I thought he was dead.”

  And so, for a time, had Bob, who admitted as much to Ralph now. And so had I, and though I’d listened to the doctor’s report with the critical attention of a jealous lover, I was still uncertain, for I’d heard no final reassurance there. It was as little absolute as the first faint shrug of Edward’s heart beneath my hands had been, as that first vomited gasp of breath before Bob turned him on his side. Speaking or not, Edward was in limbo still, and I in that tense and rarefied condition where the nerves believe that sleep is something only other people do.

  To leave Edward and Laura there felt like dereliction. It seemed to forfeit what little superstitious pull I had to stop him changing his mind again in the night; to make sure that Laura did not wake alone to the news that his heart had risen in rebellion once more. But there were no beds in these wards for the guilt-crippled and the lonely worriers, and Bob was not about to let me pass the night in this waiting room where there was no comfort in the knowledge that mine was not the only grief that Saturday night.

  Ralph too was in poor shape, his eyes watery in their pouches, the patrician calm quite lost in the ticking of his cheek. He pushed his fingers through the thin silver sweep of his hair, and diffidently suggested that we might like to come back to the Hall. He would, he said, appreciate our company.

  “I blame myself for this.”

  Tactfully, embarrassed by our gratitude, and with many of the questions that must have crowded at his lips like pressmen still unanswered, Bob had slipped away. At Ralph’s request I’d stayed on at the Hall in full expectation of his retribution. I would have welcomed it, but he sat over his brandy for a long time in silence, not even looking my way, before making this abrupt admission. His chin was tucked in his jowl, the fingers of one hand stroking his temple. He might have been sitting for the portrait of an elder statesman pondering a lifetime’s failure to mend the ills of the world.

  “But you didn’t even know what was happening,” I said, “not till it was too late.” I looked up and met the pained smile of an old man sensitive to youth’s tendency to forget that life is not its exclusive property.

  “Edward and I…” he said, “we had the most appalling row earlier this evening. It should never have happened. My fault, you see. Entirely my fault. It’s not the first time.” His eyes wandered the elegant room, stopping to hold in doleful regard the portrait of Sir Humphrey Agnew above the fireplace. “Secrets!” He grunted, shook his head. “They’re killers, you know. Learnt that in the Intelligence Service during the war, but we don’t care to admit it in our own lives. Families like mine… they have all kinds of secrets. They have their secrets and they have their pride, and the one often protects the other. Eventually, of course, it all comes out… usually in the wrong way, at the worst possible time… Then your pride goes to the bloody dogs, and you wonder why you didn’t…” He sighed, opened the palm of his hand, and smiled warily across at me. “Not being clear, I know, but it’s a little like Louisa’s story… been lying around for a long time like an unexploded bomb. Sooner or later it had to go off… Leaves you dazed when it does.”

  I said, “You knew the truth about Louisa all along?”

  “And you’re wondering why I didn’t tell Edward from the first?” There was a long silence which ended in a deep but not yet decisive sigh. “Edward and I… we go back a long way. A friend brought him up to Cambridge in the old days… I’d never met anyone quite like him. Some people found him brash and uncouth, and he was difficult, yes. But I liked his contempt for the place, his refusal to be awed. And that farouche wit.” Ralph looked up and added, as though in extenuation. “His origins are quite humble, you know.”

  “He’s never talked about it.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. Likes to give the impression he sprang fully grown from a mating of Hermes and Aphrodite.” If there was a touch of bitterness in his voice, it was displaced by sad affection as he said, “Most of all, I was taken by the way a whole aviary of birds seemed to sing under his hat – a rather disreputable hat, as I recall. Then there were meetings in town. Paris briefly… This isn’t the first time we’ve… what? Disappointed one another, I suppose. And deceived, of course. Yes – always the deception.” He got up, offered me the decanter and, when I declined it, poured more brandy into his own snifter. He returned to his chair, seemed to drift into reverie, though not happily so, and I saw for the first time what Bob must have noticed earlier: that he was already drunk.

  “Let me put it this way: suppose you had a friend – a very old and once very dear friend whom you’d lost touch with years ago in circumstances which were… which you’d long bitterly regretted. And suppose, as you’d often wished he would, that friend suddenly wrote to you again wanting to renew the friendship. Suppose also – though this might come harder – that you were old and rather lonely when the letter came. Are you with me so far?” He glanced up quickly, shyly, took in my nod and the thoughts behind it. “Then you begin to understand. Of course, I knew that Edward must be after something – when was he not? But one didn’t really mind, you see. You’re a poet yourself; you must have observed that Edward is quite the visionary… a man of enormous gifts who might, in the right emotional environment, have… Well, that’s neither here nor there. Not now. The point is, I was more than happy to hear from him again. And when it became clear that he was more interested in the dead Agnews than in their sole survivor, it didn’t greatly matter. He would be here at Easterness. We would be together.” He sniffed, swirled the brandy in his glass, then looked up again. “I should explain that in our correspondence he made no mention of Laura.”

  Under eyes intent for my response, I said, “That sounds like Ed
ward.”

  “Does it not? Though – in the light of what I’ve said – you’ll imagine my dismay when they turned up together. A research assistant, yes – advised of it, who could object to that? But a love nest in the Decoy Lodge was not at all what I had in mind. Nor, to be perfectly frank, did I have any great faith that their researches would uncover anything of importance. I was left with the hope that Laura would soon find the work tedious, as – I felt rather sure of this – she must quickly tire of Edward.” A thin, ironical smile reflected over vain wishes. “I felt reason to be optimistic. He was excited by the library… obsessed by it. He was talking in terms of a long stay. I had seen what happened before when his enthusiasms rode roughshod over the claims of relationship. And this particular relationship… Well, the girl was almost too young to be his daughter even. A somewhat vague creature, I thought. Beautiful, yes, but ill-educated, with an almost barbarous disregard for culture, history… I saw no future there. It could only be a passing involvement. So I had hopes, you see. And means to preserve those hopes. Means which, at the time, I thought not entirely self-serving.”

  Dazed as I was, it occurred to me that Ralph’s interest in first inviting me to the Hall might have been more complex than I’d guessed. Though the invitation had been to meet Edward, he might well have been fishing for the complications that could arise from a meeting with Laura. Observing my frown, he glanced away, then said, “I want to show you something,” and pushed himself to his feet a little unsteadily. He crossed to a shelved alcove, removed the first of a number of identically bound volumes, and began flipping through leaves of charcoal-coloured card. Towards the end he found the leaf he sought. “Ah yes. Take a look at this. It says it all.”

  He handed me the open album and I was looking at a snapshot of two young men reclining on a lawned river bank, one with his head in the other’s lap. Both had open-necked shirts and wore baggy flannels. A blond quiff fell across the brow of the seated youth, who smiled down where his fingers tilted the petulant chin of his darker companion towards the camera: Edward. It was recognizably he, though unlined, clean-shaven and glamorous as a lean-visaged Gypsy. He held a cigarette between his lips, and frowned, impatient of the moment. A wine bottle and an open volume of verse lay on the grass beside him: high summer, more than half a century ago, twenty years before I was born.

  “That was in Cambridge,” Ralph said. “On the Backs at King’s. Shortly after we first met. As you will have observed, the years have not been kind.”

  It was true. Outside that context I would not have recognized Ralph’s features in that blond young man. He took back the album, gazed down at the picture for a moment, then snapped the covers shut, and returned the volume to its place on the shelf. Then he paused beside a small framed portrait on the panelled wall, snorted, and arranged his own face at the same angle as that of the old man portrayed there. “Do you see the likeness? It may not be so obvious now – since my stroke, I mean – but Edward was not the first to comment on the resemblance. This is Henry Agnew, of course – Louisa’s father. Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  The abruptness of the demand took my already confused mind by surprise. Before I could answer, he said, “I don’t. But I do believe in blood. And, in a way, I suppose I believe in ghosts. We carry them inside us. We are all haunted houses. Henry was haunted. His father certainly was – atrociously so. And I suppose I too am a haunted man. You can’t live alone in a place like this and not be haunted.” His glance surveyed the high ceiling, the costly drapes, the antique furnishings. Suddenly the atmosphere of the Hall was claustrophobic: centuries of privilege, and the price of privilege, hanging on the air like jaded regalia; the portraits, varnished against time, but gazing down on life like exiles. “I’ve made arrangements to leave it to the National Trust,” Ralph said, and then, with a dry melancholy smile: “Perhaps democracy will exorcize it.”

  I felt myself beginning to dislike him as much as I now mistrusted him, but as I watched him return to his chair and swig at his brandy, I remembered that I can’t have cut much of a figure myself at that moment; that we were complicit in our separate guilt over Edward; and that my judgement was so confused by the night’s events it was no longer reliable.

  “Where was I?” he asked.

  “Your feelings when Edward turned up here with Laura.”

  “Ah yes. So, the fact is, when Edward began questioning me about Louisa – what I remembered of her, what I’d learnt from my parents and elder brothers – I took a decision. I decided to keep a secret. A secret, you understand, not the secret. The Hermetic secret I couldn’t keep for the simple reason that I didn’t have it. Nor was I even persuaded of its existence… although I suppose I engaged in a little self-deception here. Edward clearly believed in it – which surprised me a little because the first time we’d talked about my ancestors many years ago, he’d shown not much more than a sceptical curiosity. But now he needed the belief – it was what brought him here, and I was not about to discourage him with my own scepticism. In fact, his enthusiasm delighted me. I became rather intrigued by it myself – knowledge that might give us greater purchase on the lamentable fiasco in which we are all condemned to play our impotent part these days – and here, at the Hall, among my family’s papers! Improbable, I grant you, but intriguing. So I told myself that if my ancestors had indeed possessed knowledge of such a secret then the purely circumstantial factors of their private lives could have no intrinsic bearing on it. I went further. I told myself that such information might only confuse the issue… though you will have guessed by now, of course, I was afraid that if Edward knew all there was to know about Louisa then his interest in remaining at Easterness might not long survive the knowledge. There has been scandal enough in his own life. He has scant curiosity about the emotional difficulties of others.” He sighed, glanced wanly up at me. “A secret within the secret then. At the time it seemed harmless enough. Indeed, I’m still not sure that I was so very wrong. As Edward himself will tell you, secrecy is a great enticer.” Then he favoured me with a rueful smile. “I had not anticipated that Laura would prove to be a person of such singular abilities. Nor that events would unfold quite the way they did.”

  Again he withdrew into silence, negligent of my existence. Part of me wanted to be out of there, alone with my own feelings, but there was a kind of justice that Ralph and I should be consigned to each other here. We had both deceived Edward, and were both agonized by the harm we’d done. In those moments we deserved one another. We had no one else.

  “The point is,” he resumed eventually, “when Edward came into the Estate Office yesterday demanding to know whether I was aware of any connection between Louisa and Edwin Frere, I could scarcely believe my ears. The only evidence of such a connection was in my private possession – as it had been for many years. I had found it among the things left behind by my brother Hilary when he went to Flanders. No one had touched them – for a long time his room had been a sort of shrine, a dreadful sort of reliquary – until I took over here and sorted it out. Did you know that Hilary had the makings of a fine poet? I was always rather envious of him. Envy and admiration are rarely far apart.” Ralph sighed; I thought he might lose his thread once more, but he recalled himself and said, “You will imagine my consternation then – particularly as at that moment I had more pressing matters on my mind – something my gamekeeper had told me only moments before.”

  I coloured and said, “That’s why you shouldn’t take all this on yourself. You weren’t the only one who lied to him.”

  “No, but I told him the truth, and sometimes that is the greater crime. You must have been blaming yourself, of course, but take my word for it – your little misdemeanour may have been the occasion of Edward’s crisis but it was not the cause. I made use of it, you see. Not then. Not at that moment, though the seed was planted. But later – when he came back – when, finally, I threw the facts in his face. The facts about Louisa and Frere, yes… but that, I’m ashamed to say
, was less than the half of it…”

  He averted his eyes from my puzzled gaze, then pinched them with the thumb and finger of his right hand. He sagged back in his chair, wincing from the memory. After a time I asked him what had happened.

  “I was on my own here earlier this evening… listening to music. I didn’t hear him arrive… wouldn’t have known he was here but I went out to get something and heard the noises in the muniments room. Talbot was out and it frightened me a little… the security here isn’t very good. I was about to phone for the police when I heard him swearing and recognized his voice. I went up, saw the frightful mess he’d made there. Papers everywhere, Edward in the middle of them, looking like death. He was behaving… abominably… strangely, and I was very worried for him at first… but then, once the truth was out, he was violently angry with me… offensively so… hurtfully. And suddenly I was furious with him… angrier than I knew until the rage started to take its own disastrous course. There were almost fifty years of anger that had been waiting for this moment… anger, resentment, injury, humiliated and wounded pride… the vicious brand of rancour that only the rejected know how to wield. I made him face it all – his own endlessly disastrous folly over women, his talent for treachery and betrayal, for using other people as, once again, he had made use of me. I dragged him back over what I well knew had been quite devastating experiences. With a cruelty of which I would not have believed myself capable I forced him to recognize that most of his life had been a monstrous exercise in self-deception… that I was not the only one who had suffered from the lies he told himself. I told him that to the best of my knowledge there was only one secret behind existence and he was excluded from it, and would always remain so because his heartless self-absorption rendered him incapable of love. I could see that I was lacerating an already wounded man, but I couldn’t stop myself because I too, you see, am a very selfish old man. The ugliness of it all was appalling. It ended with my handing him Frere’s razor and inviting him to make use of it – to do to himself what he’d long since done to his verse, and what, for all the good I am, he’d done to me…”