The Chymical Wedding Read online

  Such, anyway, was the dream in which I lived those days.

  Then, one hot afternoon, I was no longer alone in the wood. From somewhere down the galleries of beech the sound of laughter echoed across the glade and stopped me short. The laughter was brief, as though a joke had been cracked – almost, it felt, at my expense, though I could see no one – then the air was stealthy and green and very still once more, until a blackbird chattered its indignant cry, and the laughter came again, female, a little hectic, over where the ground fell away to bracken.

  It puzzled and excited me; worried me too with its reminder that I trespassed there. Covertly I stepped between the trees.

  Pale and naked in an auburn glow of sunlight, a man and a woman were clasped in each other’s limbs, tussling and rolling in a hollow where the glade banked into mixed woodland. Beyond them a dense drift of bluebells threw their flesh into white relief.

  They were laughing as they fought, the woman over the man now, holding him spread-eagled by the wrists so that he was hidden beneath the arch of her back. Her legs were astride him as she tossed her head from side to side, teasing him with the dangle of breasts above his face.

  “All right. All right. I take it back,” the man laughed.

  “Every word?”

  “Every word.”

  “Say ‘uncle’!”

  “To a mere chit of a girl? Never.”

  “Say ‘I’m an old fool and I don’t know which side my bread is buttered, and I should count my stars that I’m lucky enough to have such a hotshot intellectual as a partner’.”

  “Consider it said.”

  “Say it.”

  “I can’t talk with my tongue in my cheek.”

  “Say it.”

  Then the man lurched up suddenly. The woman squealed, stretched back upright on her heels, and said, “Dammit, Edward, that hurt.”

  She pulled herself to her feet and turned away, one hand to a breast, rubbing the nipple. She was tall, sturdily built, the patch of hair at her groin thick and barbarous among the smooth planes of her body. Her tan was un-English and complete, except for the white flaw of an appendectomy scar. She tossed her hair back across her shoulders, and stood biting on a knuckle as though to distract herself from some other pain.

  Hands cupped beneath his head, the man wriggled a little in the sunlight, chuckling still. His body was scrawny, hollow-chested, the belly rounded like a wineskin over the grizzled cloud of his pubic hair. He must have been over sixty – some forty years older than the girl, who walked away from him to where her clothes were piled.

  “You can be really hurtful, you know that?” The soft, transatlantic accent to her tones was distinct now. As she slipped an arm into the sleeve of a faded purple shirt, I saw the reddened flesh where the old man must have closed his teeth. “Sometimes I wonder about you. I really do.”

  “If you will sin in the sunshine with a man quite old enough to be your grandfather you should expect something other than the simperings of pimpled youth.” The voice was measured and resonant, picking its way deliberately among the consonants, and he was smiling still, until he realized that the girl was distanced from him, unamused. “Are you all right, my dear?”

  “I’ll live.”

  “If you hadn’t jumped… It was only in sport, you see…” He essayed a smile. “Not the true serpent’s tooth at all.” The face was handsome still in a punished, ruinous way, the hair shiny, iron-grey curling to white, its wildness made wilder by the two bluebells threaded through his locks. He too was tanned, but there were manifold wrinkles round his eyes and mouth, and a salt-and-pepper moustache emphasized his moue as he muttered, “And we are feeling contrite. Do look.” He pointed down to the limp member slumped at his thigh. “Did you ever see such a sorry-looking fellow?”

  Despite herself the girl smiled. “You’re impossible.”

  “But amorous with it.” The old man stroked the ground beside him. “Why don’t you come back? Let me tender you some comfort.”

  “No way.” Head averted, the girl resumed the buttoning of her shirt.

  He shook his head regretfully. “You’re absolutely right: I’m a perverse old fool. I don’t know which side my bread is buttered and… what was the rest?”

  “Too late,” she declared, lightly aloof, “far too late.”

  “But such a day… such a day,” he sighed. “Time has no business here at all.”

  It was true. The girl paused in her dressing. Eyes closed, she seemed to draw in some of the sunlight with her breath. The man lay still. The two figures might have been drowsily patient under the eye of a French painter – soft impasto light, green wood shadow and the dreaming mist of bluebells beyond. There was nothing Anglo-Saxon here, not even a breeze to ripple gooseflesh on their skin. Nor, while they were silent, was the long moment of this century even. It felt closer, much closer, to Theocritus – and I, squinting like the Cyclops from the shade.

  Again the blackbird chattered its dismay. The girl opened her eyes. “Are you asleep?”

  “Adream.”

  She bent to pick up the discarded denim shorts, then stopped, straightened herself, and stood listening, as though sensing they were watched. Her eyes – they were narrow, dark-lashed – surveyed the trees.

  I shrank into the shade of a beech, one hand against its smooth bark for support. I could have sworn for a moment that our eyes met, but the girl showed no sign of alarm. She pursed her lips slightly, stretched her neck to tilt the chin, and then brushed back a stray tress from her face. The toes of her right foot drew a segment of a circle through beech mast and leaf mould.

  “Do you feel anything?” she said quietly.

  “Lust?” the old man suggested lazily. “A certain consuming nostalgia for your body. Remorse for a squandered opportunity …” He might have gone on but she frowned impatiently, shushed him, listening to the air. After a moment she said, “I think she used to come here.”

  The old man sat upright, suddenly intent. “You can feel her?”

  Again the girl’s eyes scouted the glade. “I’m not sure. There’s something.”

  “Close your eyes. Keep absolutely still. Let your other senses work.”

  The girl raised a hand to still his urgency. The air of the glade was glassy and brittle. She stood at the centre of a silence, radiating pure attention. The old man watched, mouth ajar, as if an untimely word or gesture might break a spell.

  “Yes, it’s there,” she said softly, “– an intense yearning… hunger… it’s everywhere here.”

  “The emotional hunger…” the man said, “the ache you described before?”

  “No, it’s different.”

  “How?” The demand was a quick, clipped breath.

  Suddenly, startlingly, the girl’s voice and posture changed. “It’s me,” she said, “I’m starving. Let’s go home.” She looked back at the old man and burst into bright laughter at his outraged scowl. “Got you.”

  “God damn,” he growled, beating the ground with the flat of his hand. “I told you never to fool about with that. Never, do you hear?”

  “Serves you right.”

  “I’ll serve you right.” As he pushed himself to his feet, she giggled again, snatched up her shorts, slipped her feet into sandals, then ran, fleetly, through the bluebell drift and up the bank. From the cover of the beech I watched the old man lumber after her, shouting, and saw the girl turn between two sycamores to call, “Better not leave your clothes. I might double back and pinch them and leave you to make your way back without.”

  “Then I’d garland my nakedness like Lear,” the old man bellowed, “and walk home via Saxburgh bidding copulation thrive. But I’ll have you first.”

  Long after they’d gone from sight, I could hear their squeals and shouts, the crashing of their tracks through bracken. Part of me wanted to laugh out loud, break cover, join the mad chase. Instead, astonished by the brief spectacle, feeling cheated, envious of the old goat, I turned away.

  And
there was movement behind me.

  A quivering in green foliage. A disturbance of sunlight off the leaves.

  Swiftly, I turned my head, certain for one hot moment that I too was observed. The scent of bluebells was in my nostrils, heady and raw. My own skin might have been glowing green as nettles now. I shook my head, blinked – there was nothing but the stir of light and leaf, and the flimsy swaying of a branch; but I was trembling a little.

  After a long moment, though in a different direction from that in which I could still hear the laughter of the girl, I too began to run.

  You get by, an hour at a time, mulling things over, nosing for a future, not content, but managing; then the wires cross with someone else’s world and suddenly you’re a shambles again. Actuality is elsewhere. You’re dispossessed.

  The encounter in the wood had been like a hot dream. For a few minutes it took me outside myself, then it left me chafed and restless, critical of my vacant days. And it turned chilly that evening. Or was it merely in contrast to the heat of a day in which a bare-arsed wood-nymph could frolic unflinching over a paunchy Silenus with bluebells in his hair? Either way I was cold, so I carted a basketful of logs from the shed and looked for old newspaper to start a fire.

  It seemed odd that Clive hadn’t mentioned such neighbours. He’d suggested I look up Ralph Agnew at the Hall (“He has a soft spot for verse”), and warmly recommended Bob Crossley. “And while you’re there,” he’d added, “give my love to Gypsy May,” – about whom no more, except that I was bound to come across her.

  From his smile I’d pictured a batty old Romany woman thrusting clothes pegs at me and muttering darkly about the future. It seemed an improbable name for the American Amaryllis of the glade, though there had been a gypsy air about her – sallow-skinned, nomadic at a guess and – if her joke on the old man had travestied some serious business – psychic withal!

  With an arsonist’s interest I put a match to the paper and watched the kindling catch. Smoke wavered towards the cowl.

  So what were they up to here?

  And why, once more, was I relegated to the status of voyeur?

  Like most of my generation I’d grown up with a dangerous illusion: that once you were adult you were also, by a kind of evolutionary osmosis, a reasonably coherent individual. A person, no less. Only recently had events disclosed the shabby menagerie beneath the skin – and some of its creatures were bedded down in very dirty straw. In particular I distrusted the scrawny beast which eked out the narrow consolations of the voyeur’s role. It was contemptible. I could do without that shade of green.

  I jumped up from the trance with smarting eyes.

  The parlour was a cloud. The smoke had bent back on its tracks to explore the room. There’d be soot dust everywhere. I prised open a window – too small to make much difference – made for the door, pulled it open, and saw Bob Crossley standing at the step with a fist poised to knock. We stared at one another in amazement as smoke swooped round us.

  “Good God, are you on fire?”

  “It’s the chimney, I think. I just lit a fire and this happened.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Bob pushed past me into grey billows.

  “Chimney’s blocked. You’ve probably got a starling’s nest up there. Or it could be damp. There hasn’t been a fire in here for ages… Christmas!” He came back to the doorway, fanning the air. “Come on. Outside. It’s caught too far to pull it off yet.”

  We stood in the garden and he grinned at me. “Damp,” he decided. “I remember Clive had the pots netted. You shouldn’t have any trouble once the flue dries out.”

  “The thatch?”

  “Hmmm.” He stepped back, craned up at the pot where a thin feather of smoke wistfully aspired. “No, that’s all right. It’ll clear soon.” He looked back my way. “The thing is, Clive just rang. He’s ringing back in ten minutes… wants to talk to you.”

  My confusion was compounded. One of the attractions of The Pightle had been its phonelessness. It was Clive’s bolt-hole, and I’d thought myself uncontactable there, but here was the world at my shoulder again. It was like a bill dropping through the door.

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  Bob shook his head, and looked at his watch. “Better nip on down to my place. I’ll keep an eye on this.”

  “If you don’t mind…”

  “What neighbours are for. Handy timing really. On your way.”

  Bob’s house was larger, more permanently homely than The Pightle, the garden trim and well-worked, and everywhere, in the chintzed pelmets and loose covers, the traces of a woman’s hand. I found the phone in his study and, beside it, a photograph of his wife. There was a sturdy, Quakerly plainness about her, composed and unsurprisable. Her smile was patient of the camera, and vicariously, it seemed, of me. She was still the tutelary deity of the place. Other framed snapshots on the window sill showed the couple on holiday together in Venice, and on a CND rally somewhere, in matching parkas. I sensed that, for Bob, every glance upwards from the desk must be an act of memory. There were Open University textbooks there, a scribble pad and a paperback titled Karl Marx: Social and Political Thought splayed on its spine. The room smelled of Bob’s pipe.

  I picked up the phone at first ring and said, “Clive?”

  There was a moment’s silence at the other end, then an unfamiliar voice demanded, “That you, Bob?”

  “Er… no… He’s out at the moment.”

  “Well who’s that?”

  “My name’s Darken. I’m living in the cottage up the lane – The Pightle?”

  The stiff voice softened. “Oh, I see. Clive’s friend?”

  “That’s right. Look, I’m expecting a call. Bob should be back in a few minutes if you’d like to call again.”

  “No, no need. Quite glad to speak to you, in fact. Listen, this is Ralph Agnew. From the Hall. Just ringing to tell Bob I’m having a few people for drinks on Friday. About eight. Like him to come.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Oddly enough, was going to suggest he bring you along. Want to meet you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see…”

  “Do come. Poet, right? One of Clive’s stable? Yes, you really must. Someone you should meet. Nothing formal, you understand? Shall you be there?”

  Damn Clive!

  “I’m not sure what I’m…”

  “I really think you should. Eightish then. Friday. Okay?”

  Before I could answer, he put down the phone. I did the same, but it rang again almost immediately.

  “Bob?”

  I recognized Clive’s voice. “No, it’s me.”

  “Oh it’s you, is it? Nose still above water then? Bob tells me you haven’t been showing your face.”

  “I’m settling in.”

  “Everything okay? Managing all right?”

  “Fine – except that I’ve just set the place on fire.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t panic. The chimney was smoking, that’s all. Bob says it’s damp. He’s up there now. The cottage, I mean, not the chimney.”

  “Well thank God it’s in capable hands. Listen, mooncalf… why didn’t you tell me that Jess didn’t know where you were?”

  “Has she been ringing you?”

  “Course she has. Half off her head. You really are too much.”

  “Not really her concern these days.”

  Clive savoured the edge in my voice. “She does still care about you. We all do, though God knows why we should.”

  I said nothing.

  “And there are the kids. I mean, a vanishing act’s a bit hard on them, don’t you think?”

  “I was going to send a card.”

  “Well get on with it, lad. I’ve got better things to do than shuttlecock about between you and Jess.”

  “Did you give her this number?”

  “And drag old Bob into your catastrophes? No way. But she did wring the address out of me. Expect a letter. She chewed my head off for not letti
ng her know where you were before.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about that.”

  “So you should be. Anyway, I think I cooled her down. You writing yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Dug the garden?”

  “Look, Clive…”

  “Well do something useful, for God’s sake. You must be sick of the sight of your navel.”

  “I’ve just been invited out.”

  “Good. Who by?”

  “Ralph Agnew.”

  “Better still.”

  “Was it your idea?”

  “Mine?”

  “He knew I was here… who I was.”

  “Village life has no secrets. You’re going, I trust?”

  “Maybe. Haven’t made up my mind. Who’s Edward?”

  “Edward who?”

  “Here. In the village. Oldish man. Sixty or so. American girlfriend.”

  “No idea.”

  “I saw them romping in the wood today. In their birthday suits.”

  “Good Lord! Sixty, you say?”

  “At least.”

  “Not hallucinating, are you?”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “It’s just that I don’t remember the woods being quite that lively. Mind you don’t get shot at, by the way. There are some mean keepers round there. Oh yes… one other thing. I’ve got that cheque. Royalties on Shadowgraphs. Not exactly a princely sum. Shall I send it on?”

  “No, hang on to it. I’m not sure how long I’ll be here.”

  “I thought you were settling in?” Clive said and, after a silence: “Well, it’s up to you. Listen, post that card, will you? If it’s the best you can do. And go and see Ralph, okay?”

  “Okay.” I put down the phone, then said aloud, twice, “Damn!”

  Bob Crossley was standing at The Pightle door. “I’ve managed to rake some of it out,” he said, “but it’s still a bit thick in there.” He took in my preoccupied frown. “Don’t worry. It’s only smoke.”

  “It’s not that. Look, I’m really grateful…”