In Another Country (26 page)

He curled up on the bed of love, tight as an embryo, and sobbed; he choked on his own snot; he was a grub, a grown man with his knees up to his brow, smelling his own terror and despair; in overalls, with dirty working boots, a competent man, weeping over his exile from all fellowship with love; shoved into space, into the cold and the dark of the interstellar spaces, turning forever like a finished capsule. For an eternity, for an hour or so. After that, uncurled and lying quietly in his wife's embrace, behind the curtain of her hair, he said in a level voice he was not fit to live, he had a coward soul, he cringed in shame that he had ever associated himself—in a far-off laughable mimicry—with any of his saints and heroes, the artists and the poets. He begged in the flat, the leaden voice that she would burn every scribble of his or daub she ever found. He begged her to promise there would be nothing left, not a scrap or jot to show the world his folly and ridiculousness. And he said again that he wasn't fit to live, that on her house and home and child and love he was unfit to have the smallest claim. Then shame over these his speeches. Dumbness then, the mute inability. And a vague terror, hard to pinpoint, hard to lay a finger on its whereabouts. Inside or out? The air he breathed, the wreath of atmosphere around his neck and shoulders. Or in the blood, coursing around him for as long as he was he. The nights had terrible gaps in, rents and pits, and every morning waking he felt sheeted under lead.

Ten days of this, a bad passage. He came out lachrymose and vastly sentimental. He sat with Gwen in the bedroom window like a grandfather, her hand clasped tight on his little finger as though she anchored him and nurtured him. With a large benevolence he watched Benjamin, like his own younger self, labouring at the finish of their steep track to the bridge and the beginnings of the outside world. The thistly grass was gay and innocent with rabbits, like a tapestry. Carrie, her hair coming loose from under a red headscarf, pushed manfully at the wheelbarrow. She waved, said something to Benjamin, he looked up and waved. They swam in tears as far as Seth could see.

Then his return began, unhoped for, miraculous, never biddable but somewhere in the depths of him insistent as a germination or water forcing up. He wandered about in the house and out of doors with Gwen on his hip, she was easiest to be with, he could babble at her or murmur like a breeze and what delighted her in the early summer delighted him, thistledown, dandelion clocks, forget-me-nots around their neatly stone-flagged spring whose water was a clear continuous beginning again. He viewed himself with more indulgence now, with a wry friendliness. Held up the child against the soft blue sky and intoned while she kicked and chortled: My own heart let me more have pity on; let/ Me live to my sad self hereafter kind … Brought her close, kissed her nose, went down on his heels and toddled her towards him. Her cool hands warmed in his; he marvelled with her over the unpractised action of her legs. Scooped her up to admire the woodpile, Benjamin's special pride, and the new plots set as well as possible for the growing season's sun. The stone barn, the very sight of it, tilted his spirits towards a steep collapse, so he walked away, down the slope past Benjamin and Carrie smoothing the last few yards, to the water where the wagtail liked to visit and sat there till they called him, willing his fears into submission in the happy consciousness of the child. Returning, admiring, he suddenly saw where a new plot might be dug, on the slope itself, with some terracing, almost Mediterranean; he would begin it next day.

That evening he read in the Shelley Benjamin had given him. He read Mary Shelley's notes on the poems year by year, until the last. They were brave, these people, he said. It's brave just being in a place like that, so far from anywhere, facing the open sea. And Mary collecting everything afterwards and writing her notes, that's brave. What happened to Harriet? Benjamin asked. Seth made no answer so Carrie said: She went in the Serpentine. He had left her for Mary. They married and went to Italy. Seth was thinking of her heavy clothes, sodden, the mud, the weed. And her heavy belly, she was very pregnant. They didn't look after one another, Carrie said. One to another they were a catastrophe. I suppose everybody is responsible, Seth said. I mean for what he does. They left one another their own responsibility. He was feeling bolder. He was thinking about his terracing—whether to tell them or not, or make a start first thing, for a surprise.

Next morning Seth appeared at the foot of the bed. He whispered a strange sentence: the boat has come. It was early, he had parted the curtains slightly and the sun shone on the black paint and the golden brass. Carrie woke. Benjamin was asleep on her left arm. He looked, to Seth at least, much as he had lately in his drawings and paintings, only more beautiful, the black curls, the lashes. Carrie smiled, gently disengaged herself, sat up. Seth said again: the boat has come; but with his eyes on Benjamin shook his head in wonder and added the words: sweet thief. Carrie joined him outside in the sunlight. You've been working already? Yes, he said. Come and see. He took her to the edge and pointed down to where he had begun hacking out a terrace. We shall grow what we like, he said. Carrie put her arms around him. Was I dreaming, she asked, or did you say something about a boat? I did, said Seth. That's the strange thing. But not strange at all really. Not for this place. I was working and I looked up at the dam and thought how lovely the water must be with the sun on it already. I thought I might go and swim and when I got up there I saw the boat, a little rowing boat with the oars in. It was bumping against the land where I might have gone in swimming. It's nobody's, we can use it.

Everything from the far end drifts before the wind and arrives sooner or later up against the dam or lodges in a near angle. They claimed the boat and the shipped oars until they should hear of someone who had a better claim. They made a mooring in a tiny inlet, out of sight of the rampart should anybody walk there, which was almost never, and whenever they liked, which was often, the four of them were out on the water. There was nearly always a breeze but rarely too strong to make headway against. And besides, by keeping close and following on water the path they had followed or made to the far end of the lake, they could creep along, like a yacht skilfully tacking. They packed a picnic, landed where they pleased: by two or three hawthorns, by the broken line of a drystone wall where it descended and entered the water. Poignant, these traces, these indications of a connection and a use gone out of sight. Keeping an eye on the weather—they were never foolhardy—they crossed with steady strokes the width near the far end, to experience, said Seth, the imaginable tremor of the hermit's holy well still bubbling out of the ground invisibly below. And best were their returns, scarcely rowing at all, idling down the centre, confident of safety within reach on either bank, wafted by the breeze and what felt like the bent or inclination of the water always to be coming from the west and heading, however quietly, towards the ruled line and the little tower that made the limit and the brink. It was sweet to drift like that, as though to a sheer falls but knowing they could halt when they chose, safe in a secret harbour, and disembark and descend their secret stairway into their house and home. Often they had a soft music on these returns. Carrie sat in the stern, holding Gwen and singing; Seth rowed, his eyes on them, and behind him in the bows Benjamin, become accomplished, played and murmured an accompaniment. Seth was between them, between their music. Their last such return was at full moon. They had not thought of it. They were idling down the length of the water, the music dying behind them like a wake, there was the merest breeze, and the blue of the sky was becoming pale so very gradually they were beginning to drift into nightfall before they would notice. Then Seth saw in Gwenny's face what she had seen. Her eyes were all amazement, she thrust out her pointing finger, as though she were the inventor of that gesture of an astonishment demanding to be shared, then Carrie saw too and suffered likewise a childish shock and pause or gap in her adult comprehension. Moon! The moon! White as a bone, frail as a seed, big as a whole new earth, the moon was rising over the rim of the dam, dead centre, clearing it, first with the ugly stump of tower intruding, then free, sovereign, beyond measure beautiful and indifferent. Seth turned sideways on, so all could see, and like that they drifted nearer and nearer, in silence but for the water lapping.

Carrie woke. The curtains were slightly parted, which made her think he must have stood there and looked at her. She went to find him on his terraces. There was fresh earth dug but the mattock had been flung down. She turned and called for him, the echo came back, a single note, distended. Benjamin came down. He'll be swimming, he said. Or in the boat. Look for him, will you, Carrie said. Benjamin began the climb, Carrie went indoors, dressed, saw that Gwen was still asleep. Then downstairs again, uneasy, and met with a shock, an absence: the table was cleared of his sketches, drawings, paintings; the portfolio, that had stood by it, also absent. She ran out, Benjamin was coming down from the dam, too fast. She waited by the spring, he hurried by her, not a word, averting his face. His breath was coming in sobs. He ran to the stone barn, she followed, the door was open, he took a step in, bent forward, turned to face her, ashen, smitten white. The weights, he said. He's filed them off. They're gone. He began to whimper, a queer unstoppable distress, bolted like an animal for the cliff again. Carrie fetched the child and laboured with her oblivious up the stairway to the ugly level rampart of the dam. She saw Benjamin already distant, small, making haste along the bank, visiting every inlet, in all his bearing, his sudden leaps and halts, hurting her even as he diminished with his manifest dread. How large the water, vast the hills and without bounds the sky.

Now she must wait on the dam in a steady breeze. Everything drifts that can sooner or later down the length of the water and bumps against the terminus, the ugly wall. The little boat will come, with its oars shipped, empty. Everything that can float will drift this way, the work, the distorted likenesses, they will be for a while like spawn, like a flotilla of vaguely coloured rafts, till the colours run and all weighs heavier and they sink. The boat will come. But what cannot kick free, anchored at the feet, what cannot rise on the body's insistent buoyancy, pulling towards the daylight on the will to live, that must stay where it is and in her lifetime will never rise, only toll like a bell, like a sunken, silent and useless bell. On the dam, the baby on her hip, Carrie reflects that she has said she will never forgive him.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charis

 

 

 

C
haris, Zoë and Felix, said Zoë, daughters and only son of Prosper and Felicity, christened as they were so that their names should be a blandishment, like calling the Furies the Eumenides, the Kindly Minded, and just as futile. For in truth, she said, mumble all the apotropaic spells you like, bribe all the greater and the lesser gods you've ever heard of, still they fuck you up, your mum and dad, and in our house, no less than in the House of Tantalus, they do so with a vengeance. Dear sister Charis, third of the first-born daughters who have killed themselves, I was not at your cremation nor at the Service of Thanksgiving for your Beautiful Life nor at the scattering of your ashes in the Sacred River Alph, farewell, dead sister, I weep for you. Our brother in Jesus, Felix who is full of shit (though he tells all and sundry he had the shit kicked out of him at a tender age by Mama in one of her rages), our beloved brother Felix, who escaped soon as he could to sweet New England to do good works for a Community of Fathers, this sharp-suited executive announces to the world that he has seen you in the arms of Mary Mother of God and that she loves you better than her one and only boy and that you are in the light there and at peace and radiantly happy. No soul among the millions in his Facebook does not rejoice with him at this glad news, said Zoë. Dear Charis, forgive me if I don't forgive you for leaving me in the world with him.

You should see your website! I tell you, one glance at it, all the anti-emetics available on the NHS would not keep you from throwing up. He calls it his choir of angels extolling you, my sister. And he has posted there the rhapsody he delivered at the Service of Thanksgiving, for the world to see: Charis is in the Light. Charis was brave. Charis prays for us. Charis asks our help to create a Church of Light. Charis is the Butterfly. For after the scattering of your ashes on the effulgent surface of the Sacred River Alph, a butterfly landed on the basket which had contained them and stayed there for a while, quietly. In truth, my dearest, being dead, you have brought out the very best of the worst in him, said Zoë. But this will make you laugh. If you really are safe and sound in the arms of the Virgin Mary this will make the pair of you wet yourselves laughing. Remember that photo of you and me and his daughter Allegra (!) dancing? Was it in Powys, when you returned from the waterfalls? Or at Beaurepaire, before I gave up the unequal struggle, and we were dancing the crane dance, the labyrinth dance, that turn by turn was to bring us deeper into Gaia's mysteries? Oh that dance! There were three of us, Charis, Zoë and the radiant child Allegra, all dancing the crane dance in pretty dresses. And he emails me to say he has airbrushed me out on the grounds that I was looking miserable and spoiled the picture. So now there are two, Allegra and Aunt Charis (deceased), with a hole between them where poor Zoë was till our brother in Christ Jesus disappeared her because she had a face like a wet Whit Week. And that, sweet sis, is how the website opens, on a nice big lie, and goes on that excellent beginning from strength to strength through the ninety-nine delusions with links along the way to multitudes more, said Zoë.

Is there Internet in Heaven? Do you spend much time online? I tell you, Charis, Zoë said, it would take eternity and then some to mark and inwardly digest the half of what's already there under your beloved name. The Other Photograph pops up everywhere. I mean the one of you striding purposefully up the long slope towards Seaford Head, all alone, my dearest, and nothing before you but the empty slope, the summit and the sky. Taken a couple of years ago, I believe, in May or June, by that fat holistic potter—Angie? Fran? Isolde?—who told you she could heal you. And there you are climbing out of the busy little town where hundreds of lucky people are having a nice time in ordinary ways. No sooner were you named in the local newspapers, the fat lady emails it, the photo, to our Felix and from him in seconds it goes forth and multiplies and humans in all five continents have it on their screens. Did he weep much for you when you were living, Charis? I don't remember that he did. But now he shows you to strangers on his BlackBerry and takes off his glasses and dabs at his eyes with a snowy white handkerchief and says what a comfort that photograph of you climbing Seaford Head in the days of your almost hopefulness has been to him and Father. Tell me, Charis, did you ever understand our brother Felix? Does Mary? Does the Trinity, all three of them combined and thinking hard? In truth though it is an excellent photograph, said Zoë. You are turning away, you are heading off up the long slope alone. I have never been there and I never shall but I imagine the air to be a pure delight and surely there are skylarks and the flowers that love the chalk and all around you space and the feeling of the nearness of the sea. But the white face, the sheerly final face, the flatly vertical height and fall, how could a human being employ a thing so utterly inhuman? Don't worry, big sister, I shan't go anywhere near the place.

That book I lent you about Eleanor because I thought it might fortify you in the locked ward but which you couldn't bear to read, they posted it back to me. I was rather worried that they knew who I was and where I lived, said Zoë. But I'm glad to have her book.

Father skipped the ceremony at the Sacred River, Zoë said. But he attended your cremation and the Service of Thanksgiving, leaving early, of course, to drive back to Ealing and put Mother to bed. To annoy Felix, I asked that she, Mother, be remembered with everyone else among the prayers because if anyone is in hell, in this world or the next, she is. Felix wouldn't allow it, needless to say. He said it would not be appropriate. He said he had consulted the Carmel Fathers and had been told by them that it made no sense theologically to pray for a soul in hell. So I thanked our Felix, Zoë said, for saving the congregation from doing something nonsensical.

Email, mobile phones and the Internet are a marvellous facility, Zoë said. Here I am in Swindon miles away all on my own and nonetheless
au courant
. Alas and God help me, it was the last thing I wanted and surely not your intention but doing what you did has brought us closer, me and the blessed Felix. Now the Word comes from him to me in superabundance. As do the images. He sent me one of those slide shows so I can view you through the years approaching nearer and nearer to that sweet summer morning in the Year of our Lord we are still suffering in. I see you on a trike in Ealing, setting off, and the look on your face is more fearful than hopeful. Your schoolgirl years distress me. By then it was obvious. And you on courses and retreats, you dancing, singing, painting, drumming, weaving, making masks and pots and doing tai-chi and meditating among bare ruined choirs or in a glade. So many stations, photograph by photograph, sent to me by Felix, of your road to Seaford Head.

And would you believe this? (Of course you would.) When he flew in from Boston to visit you on the trauma ward he called at Martha's first and phoned me from the place itself, as he called it, her attic room, with the neighbour who found you, the Good Samaritan, standing by him at the open window. The sill is quite high, he said. You had to put a chair there to climb on to it. He said that beyond the damaged roof he had a view of the garden, the blossom, the little white clouds on a blue sky and to him they were proof perfect of the love of God. He did not mention the psychiatric hospital, whose beech trees, lawns and wards are also visible from that window, just over the wall at the bottom of the garden, as you and I, my dearest, know. But there was, he said, a blackbird—he thought it was a blackbird—singing from the rooftop above his head. He held the phone so I could hear it, sister.

Flying back next day, said Zoë, Brother Felix emailed me from the airport to say you had told him you were damned but that he had promised you Mary loved you and would lift you down from the Cross into her lap. And he added that the Fathers could not do without him for more than a day or two, however urgent his own family responsibilities might be. He begs the world to google Carmel Fathers. Every hit, he says, feels like a shot of the love of God. And when people see the photographs of the work-in-progress on that donated land in a glade among the ancient redwoods of New England, when they see the ruined chapel and the cloisters of Beaurepaire, where you were happy, Charis, being resurrected in effigy by the holy work of the Fathers' hands, they put their money where their amazed eyes have been. Charis, by moving from Martha's house to the bosom of Mary you have greatly increased the blessed Felix's fundraising powers, he says. On the ten million dollars he had drummed up already, two million more have come in since you left. He tells me the Fathers tell him he is what they had been praying for: the man abundant in both money and the Spirit. In their Norman and Early-English ruins, by a virgin spring, there will be a place for thinking prayerfully of you, sweet Charis, so he told me, Zoë said. He also tells me he is considering litigation against Beaurepaire for not allowing you to stay there indefinitely and against the psychiatric hospital for allowing you out of their sight. And he has asked the Carmel Fathers' legal advisers to advise him on the soundness of his case.

Felix says you have stepped off a white cliff into universal love, said Zoë. He says you have quitted the Earth of Agony for the Sea of Peace. Stella Maris illuminates you, Mary Star of the Sea illuminates you for all to gaze upon. And Mary has spoken through our brother Felix and said, Go, sisters and brothers of the sister in my lap, go tell the story that must be told and let it touch the hearts of all in all the world. And there is more, said Zoë. Every day he updates the site and emails me and phones me more and more.

How I despise myself, said Zoë. I should shut the system down, drive the whole fat box to the tip and throw my phone in after it and lie still in the dark and see you clearly, Charis.

Charis, when you came back from the waterfalls you were radiant, Zoë said. It was in Powys, early evening in May or June, and although you asked me would I like to come with you I could tell you wanted to walk up the stream alone. Now, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can see you as you were when you came back and found me reading and watching for you in the grounds. And it is easy for me to remember and imagine what the walk was like out of the grounds, following the stream to the waterfalls that you did not know were there. Though you walked alone you carried with you up the stream the loving fellowship of the house whose trees and lawns and flowers you were leaving. You carried in you the quietness, the expressive dancing, the hours of song and of silent meditation under the stars around a fire, all that and more, as you climbed by the thread of a stream that came down out of the mountains and all the things that made the body and the spirit of the stream, its hurry and abundance, its endlessly varying polyphony, the brightness, the leapings, the passages almost of stillness and the hazels, alders, willows, harebells, ferns, rocks and mosses through which the water felt and expressed itself, all that and more, said Zoë, you carried with you in a joy rising to ecstasy as you stepped out from under the cover of greenery and found yourself at the opening of a large horseshoe, an almost sheer embrace of hillside around a pool into which three waterfalls fell with a steady force and noise and overflowed and ran as living water down and down into the grounds of the house in which you felt at home. And at that place under the waterfalls, so you told me, Charis, Zoë said, you prayed, as you had never prayed in your life before, that having looked and listened hard and breathed the smell in of the thunderous falls and taken a palmful to your lips, you would be enabled to follow the waters down and be forever in your slight person a vessel and a bringer of love and joy not just into the fellowship of that blessed house but into any house and any company you ever thereafter entered. That was your heartfelt prayer, said Zoë, as you turned your back on the waterfalls and the high horseshoe wall and began your careful descent through the watery greenery to me.

You don't know, said Zoë, unless with the love of Mary comes omniscience, that the only time I visited you during your second incarceration in the locked ward I knew at once, even before you mentioned Seaford and your barmy potter friend, what you were planning, sister. And I didn't try to dissuade you and I didn't alert your keepers. And really I cannot tell whether my conscience troubles me on that account or not. When Felix emailed me his report—from Father—of the hours you spent dithering on Didcot Station and then of your foolish leap from Martha's window my chief thought was, If this must be let it be clean. Naturally he attached his pictures of the hole in the tiles and of the soil pipe, aerial and a section of the gutter hanging off. What a mess you made! What on earth were you aiming at? Quits with Mater? Another dagger in the heart of Saintly Pater? Believe me, Charis, I should not have liked to see you alongside her in a wheelchair and him ministering to you both till he dropped dead. I know about vengeance, I have thought about it and I know there are better forms of it than that. So when in the locked ward I saw how spruce you looked, how mobile you were again, no walking frame, scarcely needing even a stick, and I learned they trusted you to go into town and get your hair done, I had a pretty good idea what you were up to. And when you spoke of Seaford in that lingering way, how happy you had been there with that dippy potter woman, I thought that would be clean at least. Does it weigh on me or not? Worse to bear, said Zoë, would have been your sisterly hatred had I warned your keepers and they took me seriously and stopped your little privileges and put you under obs twenty-­four hours a day. You wouldn't have liked that, would you, Charis? Zoë said
.