Sacrament

  “Who did it?”

  “Just some toothpaste and some—”

  “Dad, who did it?”

  The man paused, his mouth working as though he were chewing a piece of gristle. “Why do you assume I know?” he said.

  “Why do you have to be so argumentative? This isn’t a seminar. I’m not your student. I’m your son.”

  “Why did you take so long to come back?” Hugo said, his eyes returning to Will. “You knew where to find me.”

  “Would I have been welcome?”

  Hugo’s stare didn’t waver. “Not by me, particularly,” he said with great precision. “But your mother was very hurt by your silence.”

  “Does Eleanor know that you’re in here?”

  “I certainly haven’t told her. And I doubt Adele has. They hated one another.”

  “Shouldn’t she be told?”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’ll be concerned.”

  “Then why tell her?” Hugo said neatly. “I don’t want her here. There’s no love lost between us. She’s got her life. I’ve got mine. The only thing we have in common is you.”

  “You make that sound like an accusation.”

  “No. You simply hear it that way. Some children are palliatives in a troubled marriage. You weren’t. I don’t blame you for that.”

  “So can we get back to the subject?”

  “Which was?”

  “Who did this?”

  Hugo returned his gaze to the ceiling. “I read a piece you wrote in the Times, about eighteen months ago—”

  “What the hell has—”

  “Something about elephants. You did write it?”

  “It had my name on it.”

  “I thought perhaps you’d had some amanuensis write it for you. I daresay you thought you were waxing poetic, but Christ, how could you put your name to that kind of indulgence?”

  “I was describing what I felt.”

  “There you are then,” Hugo said, his tone one of weary resignation. “If you feel it then it must he true”

  “How I disappoint you,” Will said.

  “No. No. I never hoped, so how could I be disappointed?” There was such a profundity of bitterness in this; it took Will’s breath away. “None of it means a damn thing, anyway. It’s all shit in the end.”

  “Is it?”

  “Christ, yes.” He looked at Will with feigned surprise. “Isn’t that what you’ve been shrieking about all these years?”

  “I don’t shriek.”

  “Put it this way. It’s a little shrill for most people’s ears.

  Maybe that’s why it’s not having any effect. Maybe that’s why your beloved Mother Earth—”

  “Fuck Mother Earth—”

  “No, you first, I insist.”

  Will raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, you win,” he said. “I don’t have the appetite for this. So—”

  “Oh, come now.”

  “I’ll fetch Adele,” he said, turning from the bed.

  “Wait—”

  “What for? I didn’t come here to be sniped at. If you don’t want a peaceful conversation, then we won’t have any conversation.” He was almost at the door.

  “I said wait,” Hugo demanded.

  Will halted, but didn’t turn.

  “It was him,” Hugo said, very softly. Now Will glanced over his shoulder. His father had taken off his spectacles and was staring into middle distance.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t be so dense,” Hugo said, his voice a monotone. “You know who.”

  Will heard his heart quicken. “Steep?” he said. Hugo didn’t reply. Will turned back to face the bed. “Steep did this to you?” Silence. And then, very quietly, almost reverentially. “This is your revenge. So enjoy it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you won’t get another like it.”

  “No, why did he do this to you?”

  “Oh. To get to you. For some reason that’s important to him.

  He did state his devotion. Make what you will of that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police?” Again, Hugo kept his counsel, until Will came back to the bedside. “You should have told them.”

  “What would I tell them? I don’t want any part of this connection between you and these creatures.”

  “There’s nothing sexual, if that’s what you think.”

  “Oh, I don’t give a damn about your bedroom habits.

  Humani nil a me alienum puto. Terence—”

  “I know the quote, Dad,” Will said wearily. “Nothing human is alien to me. But that doesn’t apply here, does it?” Hugo narrowed his puffy eyes. “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?” he said, his lip curling. “You feel quite the master of ceremonies. You came in here, pretending you wanted to make peace but what you really want is revenge.” Will opened his mouth to deny the charge, then thought better of it, and instead told the truth, “Maybe a little.”

  “So. You have your moment,” Hugo said, staring up at the ceiling. “You’re right. Terence does not apply. These . . . creatures are not human. There. I’ve said it. I’ve thought a lot about what that means, while I’ve been lying here.”

  “And?”

  “It doesn’t mean very much in the end.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “Well you would, wouldn’t you?”

  “There’s something extraordinary in all of this. Waiting at the end.”

  “Speaking as a man who is waiting at the end I see nothing here but the same tiresome cruelties and the same stale old pain.

  Whatever they are, they’re not angels. They’re not going to show you anything miraculous. They’re going to break your bones the way they broke mine.”

  “Maybe they don’t know what they really are,” Will replied, realizing as he spoke that this was indeed at the heart of what he believed. “Oh, Jesus,” he murmured almost to himself. “Yes . . . They don’t know what they are any more than we do.”

  “Is this some kind of revelation?” Hugo said in his driest tone. Will didn’t dignify his cynicism with a reply. “Well?” he insisted. “Is it? Because if you know something about them I don’t, I want to hear it.”

  “Why should you care, if none of it means anything anyway?”

  “Because I have a better chance of surviving another meeting with them if I know what I’m dealing with.”

  “You won’t see them again,” Will said.

  “You sound very certain of that.”

  “You said Steep wants me,” Will replied. “I’ll make it simple for him. I’ll go to him.”

  A look of unfeigned alarm crossed Hugo’s face. “He’ll kill you.”

  “It’s not that simple for him.”

  “You don’t know what he’s like—”

  “Yes I do. Believe me. I do. We’ve spent the last thirty years together.” He touched his temple. “He’s been in my head and I’ve been in his. Like a couple of Russian dolls.” Hugo looked at him with fresh dismay. “How did I get you?” he said, looking at Will as though he were something venomous.

  “I assumed it was fucking, Dad.”

  “God knows, God knows I tried to put you on the right track But I never stood a chance, I see that now. You were queer and crazy and sick to your sorry little heart from the beginning.”

  “I was queer in the womb,” Will said calmly.

  “Don’t sound so damn proud of it!”

  “Oh, that’s the worst, isn’t it?” Will countered. “I’m queer and I like it. I’m crazy and it suits me. And I’m sick to my sorry little heart because I’m dying into something new. You don’t get that yet, and you probably never will. But that’s what’s happening.”

  Hugo stared at him, his mouth so tightly closed it seemed he would never utter another word, certainly not to Will. Nor did he need to, at least for now, because at that moment there was a light tapping at the door. “Can I interrupt?” Adele said, putting her head around
the door.

  “Come on in,” Will said. Then, glaring back at Hugo. “The reunion’s pretty much over.”

  Adele came directly to the bed and kissed Hugo on the cheek. He received the kiss without comment or reciprocation, which didn’t seem to bother Adele. How many kisses had she bestowed this way, Will wondered, Hugo taking them as his right? “I brought you your toothpaste,” she said, digging in her handbag and depositing the tube on the bedside table. Will saw the glint of fury in his father’s eye, to have been seen addle-headed, asking for something he’d already requested. Adele was happily unaware of this. She fairly bubbled in Hugo’s presence, Will saw, sweetly content to be coddling him—.straightening his sheets, plumping up his pillow—though he gave her no thanks for her efforts.

  “I’m going to leave you two to talk,” Will said. “I need a cigarette. I’ll see you out by the car, Adele.”

  “Fine,” she said, all her focus upon the object of her affections. “I won’t be long.”

  “Goodbye, Dad,” Will said. He didn’t expect a reply, and he didn’t get one. Hugo was staring up at the ceiling again, with the glassy-eyed gaze of a man who has more important things on his mind than a child he would rather had never been born.

  III

  Leaving the man was like departing a battlefield. The engagement had ended inconclusively, but painful as the conversation had been, it had obliged him to put into words an idea that would have made little or no sense before the events of the last few days: Jacob and Rosa, despite their extraordinary particularities, were strangers to themselves. They did not know what or who they were; the selves to whom their deeds were attributed, fictions. This, he began to believe, was the conundrum at the heart of his agonized relationship with Steep. Jacob was not one man, but many. Not many, but none. He was a creature of Will’s invention, as surely as Will, and Lord Fox, were Steep’s own creatures, made by a different process, perhaps, but still made. Which thought inevitably begged another conundrum: If there was nobody in this circle who was not somehow dependent upon the volition of another for their existence, could they be said to be divisible entities or were they one troubled spirit: Steep the Father, Will the Son, and Lord Fox the Unholy Ghost? That left the role of Virgin Mother for Rosa, which faintly blasphemous notion brought a smile to his lips.

  As he wandered back down the dispiriting corridors to the front of the building he realized that from the very beginning Steep had confessed his ignorance of his own nature. Hadn’t he described himself as a man who couldn’t remember his own parents? And later, talking of his epiphany, evoked the perfect image of his dissolution: his body lost to the waters of the Neva; Jacob in the wolf, Jacob in the tree, Jacob in the bird?

  It was cool outside, the air moist and clean. Will lit a cigarette and plotted as best he could what to do next. Some of what Hugo had said carried weight. Steep was indeed dangerous right now, and Will had to be careful in his dealings. But he couldn’t believe that Steep simply wanted him dead. They were too tightly bound together; their destinies intertwined. This wasn’t wish fulfillment on Will’s part: He had it from the fox’s own mouth.

  If the animal was Steep’s agent in the curious circle, which he surely was, then he was espousing Jacob’s hopes, and what was being expressed when the animal spoke of Will as its liberation, if not the desire that he solve the enigma of Jacob and Rosa’s very existence?

  He lit a second cigarette, smoked his way through it and immediately lit a third, desperate for the nicotine rush that would help him clarify his thoughts. The only way to solve this puzzle, he knew, was to deal with Steep directly, to go to him, as he’d told Hugo he would, and pray that Steep’s desire for self-comprehension overrode the man’s appetite for death. He knew how it felt, that appetite; how it had quickened his senses, shedding blood. The very hand that put his cigarette to his lips had been inspired by the knife, hadn’t it, exulting in the harm it was capable of doing. He pictured the birds even now, huddling in the cleft of a frozen branch, winking their beady eyes—

  “They see me.”

  “See them back.”

  “I do.”

  “Fir them with your eyes.”

  “l am.”

  “Then finish it.”

  He felt a tremor of pleasure down his spine. Even after all these years, all the sights he’d seen that in scale and savagery beggared the little murders he’d performed, he could still taste the forbidden thrill of it. But there were other memories that in their way held as much power. He brought one of them to mind now and put it between himself and the knife: Thomas Simeon, standing among the blossoms, proffering a single petal.

  “I have the Holy of Holies here—the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself—right here on the tip of my little finger. Look!”

  That was also part of the puzzle, wasn’t it? Not just Simeon’s metaphysical ideas, but the substance of the simpler exchanges between the two men. Simeon’s rejection of Jacob’s attempts to coax him back into the company of Rukenau; the promise Steep had made to protect the artist from his patron; the talk of power play between Rukenau and Steep, which had been concluded, Will half-remembered, with some fine, careless words of independence from Steep. What had he said?

  Something about not knowing who’d made him? There it was again, that same confession. Will’s recollection of the conversation between Steep and Simeon was far more patchy than his memory of the knife, but he had the sense that Rukenau had possessed some knowledge of Jacob and Rosa’s origins that they themselves did not. Could he have remembered that correctly?

  He began to wish he could conjure Lord Fox and quiz him.

  Not because he believed the creature would have the answers to his inquiries about Rukenau, he would not. But because for all the animal’s prickly manner and obscure remarks, he was the closest Will had to a reliable touchstone in this confusion. There was evidence of desperation, Will thought. When a man turns to an imaginary fox for advice, he’s in trouble.

  “Aren’t you cold out here?”

  He looked around to see Adele striding across the parking lot toward him. “I’m fine,” he told her. “How’s Hugo?”

  “All settled down for the night,” she said, plainly happy to have him comfortably tucked up.

  “Tune to go home?”

  “Time to go home.”

  He was too distracted to engage Adele in cogent conversation on the way home, but she didn’t seem to mind. She chattered on anyway, about how much better Hugo looked today than he had yesterday, and how resilient he’d always been (he seldom caught so much as a cold, she said). And how quickly he would bounce back, she was certain, especially once she got him home where he’d be more comfortable, and she could coddle him. Nobody was ever comfortable in hospital, were they? In fact, a friend of hers, who’d been a nurse, had said to her the very worst place to be ill was a hospital, with all those germs in the air. No, he’d be much better off at home, with his books and his whiskey and a comfortable bed.

  The homeward trek took them over Hallard’s Back, where for a distance of perhaps two miles the road ran straight across bare moorland. No lights here, no habitations, no trees. Just the pitch-black sweep of moor on either side of the road. While Adele chatted on about Hugo, Will gazed out at the darkness, wondering, with a little chill of guilty pleasure, how close Jacob and Rosa were. Out there in the night right now, perhaps: Rosa hunting hares; Jacob staring at the sealed sky. They didn’t need to sleep through the hours of darkness; they weren’t prone to the exhaustion of ordinary men and women. They would not wither; nor lose their strange perfection. They belonged to a race or condition that was in some unfathomable fashion beyond the frailties of disease or even death.

  That should have made him afraid of them, because it left him defenseless. But he was not afraid. Uneasy, yes, but not afraid. And despite his ruminations in the parking lot, despite all his unanswered questions, there was a corner of his heart that took curious comfort in the fact that this p
uzzle was so complex.

  There was little comfort, this voice inside him said, in discovering a mystery at the wellspring of his life so banal his unremarkable mind could readily fathom it. Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing there was some revelation still unfound, than to pursue and possess such a wretched certainty.

  IV

  i

  He slept deeply up in the beamed room that had been his as a boy. There were new curtains on the window and a new rug on the floor, but otherwise the room was virtually unchanged. The same wardrobe, with the mirror on the inside of the door where he had appraised the progress of his adolescence countless times, studied the advance of his body hair, admired the swelling of his dick. The same chest of drawers where he had kept his tiny collection of muscle-boy magazines (filched from newsagents in Halifax). The same bed where he had breathed life into those pictures and dreamed the living bodies there beside him. In short, the site of his sexual coming of age.

  There was another piece of that history, albeit small, at work downstairs the following morning. “You remember my boy, Craig,” Adele said, bidding the man working under the sink to emerge and say hello.

  Of course Will remembered him; he’d conjured up Craig in his coma dream: A sweaty adolescent who for a few hours had roused in the thirteen-year-old Will a feeling he could not have named—desire, of course. But what had seemed for a little time attractive in Craig the adolescent—his scowl, his sweat, his lumpen weight—was charmless in the adult. He grunted something unintelligible byway of a greeting.

  “Craig does a lot of odd jobs around the village,” Adele explained. “He does some plumbing. Some roofing. He’s got quite a little business going, haven’t you?” Another grunt from Craig. It was strange to see a grown man (he was fully a foot taller than Adele) standing crab-footed and bashful while his mother listed his accomplishments.

  Finally, he grunted, “Are you done?” to Adele, and returned to his labors.

  “You’ll want some breakfast,” Adele said. “I’ll cook up some eggs and sausage, maybe some kidneys or black pudding?”