Sacrament

  And as for the man himself, he could not remember the events of the night clearly, and thanked God for the fact.

  iii

  Drew had fled home after the encounter on the stairs and, ferreting out the pack of cigarettes he kept for emergencies (though God knows he’d never anticipated an emergency quite like this), he’d sat down and smoked himself giddy while he thought about what he’d just experienced. Tears came, now and then, and a fit of trembling so violent he had to sit with his knees drawn up underneath his chin until it passed. It was no use, he knew, trying to make a sane appraisal of what had happened until tomorrow, for a very good reason: Before setting out for Will’s house, he’d dropped what he’d thought was a tab of Ecstasy, just to ease him into a more sensual mood. At the beginning of the evening, before the drug had kicked in, he’d felt slightly guilty about not telling Will what he’d done, but he’d been so careful to present himself as a man whose drug days were behind him that he feared the date would sour if he told the truth. Then the Ecstasy had started to mellow him out, and the guilt had vanished, along with any need to expunge it.

  So what had gone wrong? Something venomous in the tablet had turned round and bitten him, no doubt of that. He’d had a bad trip of some kind. But that wasn’t the whole answer, at least that’s what his instincts told him. He’d had bad trips before, a goodly number. He’d seen walls soften, bugs burst, clothes take flight. This delusion had been qualitatively different in a fashion he presently had no words to describe. Tomorrow maybe, he’d be able to articulate how it had seemed to him Will had been a conspirator with the venom in his system, feeding the madness in Drew’s veins with an insanity all of his own. And tomorrow maybe he’d also understand why, when the man he’d just made love to had come out of the bedroom, his head low, his body running with sweat, there had been a moment (no, more than a moment) when Will’s face had seemed to smear, his eyes losing all trace of white, his teeth becoming sharp as nails. Why, in short, the man had lost all semblance of humanity and become—for a few heartbeats, something bestial. Too wild to be a dog, too shy to be a wolf; he’d looked, just for a moment, like a fox, yelping with laughter as he came to do mischief.

  XV

  i

  Hugo had never been a sentimentalist. It was one of the bound-en duties of a philosopher, he’d always contended, to eschew the mask of cheaply gained emotion and find a purer place, where reality might be studied and assessed without the prejudice of feeling. That was not to say he was not weak, at times. When Eleanor had left him, twelve years ago now, he had found himself susceptible to all manner of claptrap that would have left him untouched at any other time. He’d become acutely aware of how much popular culture promoted yearning: songs of love and loss on the radio, tales of tragic mismatches on the soaps he’d catch Adele watching in the afternoon. Even some of his own peers had turned their attentions to such trivialities; men and women of his own age and reputation studying the semiotics of romance. It appalled him to see these phenomena and sickened him that he himself was prone to their blandishments. It had made him doubly harden his heart against his estranged wife.

  When she’d asked for a reconciliation the following January (she’d left him in July) he had refused it with a loathing that was fueled in no small part by repugnance at his own frailty. The love songs had left their scars, and he hated himself for it. He would never be that vulnerable again.

  But memory still conspired against reason. When every year toward the end of August the first intimations of autumn appeared—a chill at twilight and the smoky smell in the air—he would remember how it had been with Eleanor at the best of times. How proud he’d been to have her at his side; how happy to see their partnership fruitful: to be a father of sons who would, he’d thought, grow up to idolize him. They had sat together, he and Eleanor, for evening after evening in those early years, planning their lives. How he would get a seat at one of the more prestigious universities and lecture a couple days a week while he wrote the books by which he would change the course of Western thought. Meanwhile, she would raise their sons, then—once the children were independent spirits (which would be quickly, given that they had such self-willed parents)—she would return to her own field of interest, which was genealogy.

  She too would write a book, very probably, and garner her share of the limelight.

  That had been the dream. Then, of course, Nathaniel had been killed, and the whole prospectus had become nonsense overnight. Eleanor’s nerves, which had never been good, started to require higher and higher doses of medication; the books Hugo had planned to write refused to find their way out of his head and onto the page. And the move from Manchester—which had seemed an eminently rational decision at the time—had brought its own crop of troubles. That first fall had been the nadir, no doubt. Though there had been plenty of bad times later, it had been the insanities of that October and November that had scoured him of his former optimism. Nathaniel, in whom the virtues of the parents (Eleanor’s compassion and physical grace, Hugo’s robust pragmatism and cleaving to truth) had been wed, was gone. Will meanwhile, had become a mischiefmaker, his pranks and his secretiveness only reinforcing Eleanor’s belief that the best had gone from the world, so there was no harm sedating herself into a stupor.

  Grim memories, all of them. And yet when he thought of Eleanor (and he often did), the sentimental songs had their way with him still, and he would feel that old yearning in his throat and belly. It wasn’t that he wanted her back (he’d made new arrangements since then, and they worked well enough in their unromantic way), but that the years he’d had with her—good, bad, and indifferent—had passed into history, and when he conjured her face in his mind’s eye he conjured a golden age when it had still seemed possible to achieve something important. He yearned then, despite himself. Not for the woman or for the life he’d lived with her, and certainly not for the son who’d survived, but for the Hugo who had still been self-possessed enough to believe in his own significance.

  Too late now. He would not change the world of thought with a brilliantly argued thesis. He could not even change the expressions on the faces of the students who sat before him at his lectures: slack-faced young dullards whom he could not remotely inspire, and so he no longer tried. He had ceased to read the work of his peers—most of it was masturbatory trash anyway—and the books that had once been his personal bibles, particularly Heidegger and Wittgenstein, languished unstudied.

  He had exhausted them. Or, more probably, exhausted his inter-action with them. It was not that they had nothing left to teach him, but that he had no interest left in learning. Philosophy had not made him one jot happier. Like so much of his life, it was a thing that had seemed to offer value—a repository of meaning and enlightenment—that had proved to be utterly empty.

  That was one of the reasons he hadn’t moved back to Manchester after Eleanor’s departure: He had no interest in rifling the graves of academe for some pitiful nonsense to publish. The other reason was Adele. Her husband, Donald, had died of a creeping cancer two years before Eleanor had left, and in widowhood the woman had become more attentive than ever to the needs of the Rabjohns household. Hugo liked her plain manners, her plain cooking, her plain emotions, and though she was very far from the vintage beauty Eleanor had been, he had no hesitation in seducing her. Perhaps seduction was not quite the word. She had no patience with conniving of any kind, and he’d finally bedded her by telling her outright that he needed the comfort of a woman’s company, and suggesting that surely she in her turn missed the company of a man. Now and again, she’d said, she missed having somebody to snuggle up with, especially on cold nights. It had been, the week of this exchange, exceptionally chilly, which fact Hugo had pointed out to her. She’d given him the closest approximation to a sexy smile her dimpled face could manage and they’d retired to bed together. The arrangement had steadily become ritualized. She would sleep at home four nights a week, but on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays she’d stay
with Hugo. When his divorce from Eleanor was finalized, he’d even suggested they marry, but to his surprise she’d told him she was very happy with things just the way they were. She’d had enough of husbands for one lifetime, she told him. This way they weren’t bound to one another, and that was for the best.

  ii

  So life had gone on, in its unremarkable way and, despite his disappointments, Hugo had come to feel more at home in Burnt Yarley than he’d ever thought he would. He was not a great lover of nature (the theory of it was fine, the practice mucky and mal-odorous), but there was a rhythm to the agricultural year that was comforting, even to an urban soul like his. Fields plowed and seeded and tended and harvested; livestock born and nurtured and slaughtered and eaten. He let the house, which was now far too big for him and run down. He didn’t care that the gutters needed mending and the window frames were rotting away. When somebody at the Plow mentioned that the front garden wall had partially collapsed he told them he was glad of the fact: The sheep could get in to clip the lawn.

  He was increasingly regarded as an eccentric in the village, he knew; a reputation he did nothing to contradict. He’d once been quite the peacock when it came to suits and accoutrements.

  Now he simply wore what came to hand, often in faintly outlandish combinations. In crowded places, such as the pub, his deafness (which was slight in his left ear, much worse in his right) made him shout, which only increased the impression of a slightly addled soul. He would sit at the bar drinking brandies for hours on end, opining on any subject that came up; to hear him in shouted debate, nobody would have guessed him a man out of faith with the world. He argued heatedly on politics (he still called himself a Marxist, if pressed), religion (of course, the opiate of the people), race, disarmament, or the French, his debating skills still formidable enough to win two out of every three rounds, even when he was espousing a position he had no belief in, which was to say, most of the time.

  The one subject he would not talk about was Will, though of course as Will’s reputation had grown, so had people’s curiosity. Very occasionally, if Hugo was three or four brandies deep, he’d offer a noncommittal reply to an observation somebody made, but people who knew him well soon came to understand that he was not a proud father. Those with long enough memories knew why. The Rabjohns boy had been a participant in what was surely the grimmest episode in the history of Burnt Yarley. Twenty-nine years on, Delbert Donnelly’s daughter still put flowers on her father’s grave on the first Sunday of every month, and the reward for information leading to the arrest of his killers (posted by the meat baron in Halifax from whom Delbert had always got his pies and sausage) was still good. At the time of his death, so history told, he’d been playing the Good Samaritan, out in the snow looking for a runaway child, a child who, it was believed by those who still mused on the mystery had been somehow complicit with the killers. Nothing had ever been proven, of course, but anyone who had followed Will Rabjohns’s rise to fame could not help but notice the perversity of his work. Nobody in the village could have used that word, except perhaps Hugo. They would have called it a mite strange or not quite right, or—if they were in a superstitious mood— the Devil’s business. It certainly wasn’t wholesome or healthy to be going around the world the way he had, finding dying animals to photograph. It was further proof, for those who cared, that Will Rabjohns, man and boy, was a bad lot. So bad, in fact, that his own father would barely admit paternity.

  Hugo’s silence, however, did not mean Will was not in his thoughts. Though he spoke with his son rarely, and when he did their exchanges were remote, the mysteries of that winter almost three decades before (and of his son’s place in those mysteries), vexed him more as the years passed, and for a reason he would never have admitted to anyone. Philosophy had failed him, love had failed him, ambition and ego had failed him: Only the unknown remained to him, as a source of hope. Of course, it was everywhere, the unknown. In the new physics, in disease, in a neighbor’s eyes. But his closest brush with it remained the business of that bitter night so many years ago. Had he realized at the time something extraordinary was afoot, he would have paid closer attention: memorized the signs, so that he might Liter find his way back into its presence. But he had been too busy with the labors of being Hugo to notice. Only now, when those distractions had rotted away, did he see the mystery glinting there, as cold, remote, and constant as a star.

  He’d read in Newsweek an interview in which his son, when asked what quality he valued most in himself, had replied patience. That came from me, Hugo had thought. I know how to wait. That was how he passed the days now, when he wasn’t in Manchester. Sitting in his study smoking a French cigarette, waiting. When Adele came in with a cup of tea or a sandwich he would turn his attention to his papers as though he were in profound thought, but as soon as she’d gone he’d be gazing out through the window again, watching cloud shadows pass across the fell that rose behind the house. He didn’t know exactly what he was waiting for, but he trusted his wits enough to be certain he’d recognize it when it came.

  XVI

  The summer had been wet, the rainfall so heavy at the beginning of August that it had stripped and flattened much of the crop, threshing it before its time. Now, a week from September, the fields were still waterlogged, and the hay that had survived the deluge was rotting where it stood.

  “It’s all right for the likes of you,” Ken Middleton, who owned the largest acreage of harvestable land in the valley, had remarked to Hugo in the pub. “You don’t have to think about these things like us workin’ men.”

  “Thinkers are working men, Kenneth,” Hugo had countered. “We just don’t sweat doing it.”

  “It’s not just the rain,” Matthew Sauls had chimed in. “It’s every bloody thing.” Sauls was Middleton’s drinking comrade, a dour pairing at the best of times. “Even me ol’ da says things is just coming apart.”

  Hugo had been harangued by Matthew’s ol’ da, Geoffrey, on this very subject earlier in the year when, much against his better judgment, he’d agreed to accompany Adele to the Summer Fayre, where she’d entered her onion pickle in the annual competition. Geoffrey’s wife had also entered, and while the two women chatted (with the natural reserve of competitors), Hugo had been left to endure Old Man Sauls. Without the least provocation, the man had launched into a monologue on the subject of murder, the recent killing of a child by another child in Newcastle the particular upon which he hung his grim talk. It’s a different world, these days he said over and over. What had once been unthinkable was now commonplace. It’s a different world.

  “You know what your ol’ da’s problem is, Matthew?” Hugo said.

  “He’s as crazy as a coot,” Middleton put in.

  “Well, that’s undoubtedly true,” Hugo replied. “But that’s not what I had in mind.” He emptied his brandy glass and set it down on the bar. “He’s old; and old men like to think everything’s coming to an end. It makes it a littler easier to let go.” Matthew didn’t reply. He simply stared into his beer. But Middleton said, “Talking from experience, are you?” Hugo smiled. “I think I’ve got a few more years in me yet,” he said. “Well, gentleman. That was my last for the night. See you, tomorrow, maybe.”

  It was a lie, of course; he didn’t need a few more years to understand ol’ da’s point of view. He felt it taking shape in himself.

  There was a certain grim; satisfaction to be had in bad news.

  What man in his right mind, knowing he was not long for the world, would wish it to burgeon and brighten in his absence?

  Perhaps he would have read the entrails differently if he’d had grandchildren, found reason for optimism in the midst of murder and deluge. But Nathaniel, who would surely have given him fine grandsons and granddaughters, was thirty years dead, and Will an invert. Why should he hope the best for a world that would have nobody he loved in it once he’d gone?

  There was pleasure to be taken in playing the prophet of doom, no doubt of that. As he
walked home tonight (he always walked even in the dead of winter; he liked his brandy too much to trust himself behind the wheel) there was a spring in his step that would not have been there had the night’s debate been more optimistic. Swinging his stick, which he carried more for effect than support, he strode out of the light of the village into the lampless mile of road that took him to his gate. He felt no anxiety, walking in the dark. There were no thugs here; no thieves out to prey on an inebriated gentleman walking alone. It was very seldom he met anyone at all.

  Tonight was an exception, however. About a third of a mile outside the bounds of the village he caught sight of two people, a man and a woman, strolling toward him. Though there was no moon, the starlight was bright, and from twenty yards’ distance he was able to tell that he didn’t know them. Were they tourists perhaps, out enjoying the night air? Fugitives from the city, for whom the spectacle of dark hills and starscape was enrapturing?

  The closer he got to them, however, the stronger the impulse became to turn around and head back the way he’d come. He told himself to stop being a silly old fool. All he had to do was wish them a pleasant good evening as they walked past and that would be an end to it. He picked up his pace a little and was about to speak when the man—a striking fellow in the silvery light—said, “Hugo? Is it you?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” Hugo said. “Do I—”

  “We went to the house,” the woman said, “looking for you, but you weren’t there—”

  “So we came looking for you,” the man went on.

  “Do we know one another?” Hugo asked.

  “It’s been a long time,” the man said. He looked perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three, but there was something about his poise that made Hugo think this was a trick of the light.