Sacrament

  “Oh . . . well, I had the journal to obsess over.”

  “And did you?”

  She nodded, looking through him, as though in her mind’s eye she was picturing the thing she’d lost. “I never solved it, and that bothered me for years. Did you ever see what it contained?”

  “No.”

  “It was beautiful.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, breathing with admiration. “He’d made all these drawings of animals. Perfect they were. And on the opposite page to the drawing,” she was miming the act of opening the book now, staring down at its contents, “there was line after line of writing.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It wasn’t in English. It wasn’t in any language I’ve ever been able to find. It wasn’t Greek, it wasn’t Sanskrit, it wasn’t hieroglyphics. I copied a few of the characters down, but I never deciphered any of it.”

  “Maybe it was nonsense. Something he’d just made up.”

  “No,” she said, “It was a language.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I found it in one other place.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, it was strange. About six years ago, just after dad died, I started to take night classes in Halifax, just to get out of the rut I was in. I took courses in French and Italian, of all things. I think because of the journal really; I was still looking for a way to decipher it, deep down. Anyway I met this chap there, and we got on quite well. He was in his fifties, and very attentive I suppose you’d say, and we’d talk for hours after the classes. His name was Nicholas. His great passion was the eighteenth century, which I’ve never really had any interest in, but he invited me to his house, which was extraordinary. Like stepping back in time two hundred and fifty years. Lamps, wallpaper, pictures, everything, was, you know, of the period. I suppose he was a little crazy, but in a very gentle kind of way. He used to say he’d been born in the wrong century.” She laughed at the folly of all of this. “Anyway, I went to his house three or four times and I was browsing in his library—he had a collection of books and pamphlets and magazines, all about the seventeen hundreds—and I found this little book with a picture in it, and there in the picture were some of the hieroglyphics from Steep’s journal.”

  “With an explanation?”

  “Not really,” she said, the brightness in her voice dulling.

  “It was frustrating really. He gave me the book as a gift. He’d got it in a job lot from an auction and he didn’t care for the pictures very much, so he said to take it.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Yes. It’s upstairs.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “I’m warning you, it’s very disappointing,” she said, getting up from the table. “I pored over it for hours.” She headed on into the hall. “But I ended up wishing I’d never seen the bloody thing.

  I won’t be a minute.”

  She headed up the stairs, leaving Will to wander through to the living room. Unlike the kitchen, which was newly painted, the room might have been left as a shrine to the departed parents. The furniture was plain, eschewing any hint of hedonism; the plant-life (geraniums on the windowsill, potted hyacinths on the table) well tended; the designs of hearth-rug, wallpaper, and curtain a calamity of fuss and mismatched color. On the mantelpiece, to either side of the solid clock, were framed photographs of the whole family, smiling out from a distant summer. Tucked into the frame of one, a yellowed prayer card. On it, two verses:

  One with the earth below, Lord,

  One with the sky above,

  One with the seed I sow, Lord,

  One with the hearts I love.

  Make earth of my dust, Lord,

  Make air of my breath,

  Make love of my lust, Lord,

  And lift out of my death.

  There was something comforting about the prayer’s simplicity; the hope it expressed for unity and transformation. It moved him, in its way.

  He was setting the picture back down on the mantelpiece when he heard the front door open, and then quietly close. A moment later an ill-shaven man with pinched and woebegone features, his thinning hair grown to near shoulder length but unkempt, appeared at the living room door, and stared at him through round spectacles.

  “Will,” he said, with such certainty it was almost as if he’d expected to find Will there.

  “My God, you recognized me!”

  “Of course,” Sherwood replied, proffering his hand as he crossed the room. “I’ve been following your rise to notoriety.” He shook Will’s hand, his palm clammy, his fingers bone thin.

  “Where’s Frannie?”

  “She’s upstairs.”

  “I’ve been out walking,” Sherwood said, though he had no need to explain himself. “I like to walk.” He glanced out of the window. “It’s going to rain within the hour.” He went to the barometer beside the living room door and tapped it. “Maybe a downpour,” he said, peering at the glass over his spectacles. He had the manner of a man twenty or thirty years his senior, Will thought, he’d moved from an adolescent to an old man without a middle-age. “Are you here for long?”

  “That’s depends on my dad’s health.”

  “How is he?”

  “Getting stronger.”

  “Good. I see him at the pub once in a while. He knows how to start an argument, your dad. He gave me one of his books to read, but I couldn’t get through it. I told him, too: I said, It’s beyond me, all this philosophy, and he said, Well then there’s hope for you yet. Imagine that: There’s hope for you yet. I said I’d give him it back but he told me to throw it out. So I did.” He grinned. “I told him next time I saw him. I said: I threw out your book. He bought me a drink. Now if I did that they’d call me daft, wouldn’t they? Not that they don’t anyway. Here comes Daft Cunningham.” He chuckled. “Suits me.”

  “Does it?”

  “Oh aye. It’s safer that way, isn’t it? I mean people let you alone if they think you’re three sheets to the wind. Anyhow . . . I’ll be seeing you later on, eh? I’ve got to go soak me feet.” As he turned to go, Frannie appeared behind him. “Isn’t this wonderful,” she said to Sherwood, “seeing Will again after all this time?”

  “Wonderful,” Sherwood said, without any great measure of enthusiasm. “See you again then.” A look of bemusement crossed Frannie’s face. “Aren’t you staying to talk?”

  “Well actually I should be on my way,” Will said, glancing at his watch. It was indeed time he was off; he’d promised Adele they’d make an early visit to the hospital today.

  “Here’s the book,” Frannie said, passing a slim, dun volume to Will.

  Sherwood was meanwhile slipping away up the stairs.

  “Would you mind letting yourself out, Will?” Frannie said, apparently concerned about her brother’s behavior. “I’ll give you a ring tomorrow, and maybe you can come back down when Sherwood’s feeling a little bit more sociable.” With that, she was gone, up the stairs to find out what was amiss.

  Will let himself out. The cloud layer had thickened and darkened; rain, as Sherwood had predicted, could not be far off. Will picked up his pace, flipping through the book Frannie had given him as he walked. The pages were as stiff as card, the printing too small to be read on the move. The reproductions were in black and white, and poor. Only the title page was readily legible, and the words upon it brought him to a halt. A Mystic Tragedy was the main title. And underneath: The Life and Work of Thomas Simeon.

  VI

  i

  He began to study the book as soon as he got back to the house.

  It was scarcely more than a monograph; a hundred and thirty pages of text, along with ten line reproductions and six plates, which was intended, so the author, one Kathleen Dwyer, stated as: “a brief introduction to the life and work of an almost entirely neglected artist.”

  Born in the first decade of the eighteenth century, Thomas Simeon had been something of
a prodigy. Raised in Suffolk, in humble circumstances, his artistic skills had been first noticed by the local vicar, who out of what seemed to be a selfless desire to have a God-given gift provide joy to as many people as possible, had arranged for the young Simeon’s work to be seen in London. Two watercolors from the hand of the fifteen-year-old boy had been purchased by the Earl of Chesterfield, and Thomas Simeon was on his way. Commissions followed: a series of picturesque scenes depicting London theaters had been successful, there had been a few attempts at portraiture (these less well received), and then, when the artist was still a month shy of his eighteenth birthday, there had come the work by which his reputation as a visionary artist was made: a diptych for the altar of St Dominic’s in Bath. The paintings were now lost, but by all contemporary reports they had caused quite a stir.

  “Through the letters of John Galloway,” Dwyer had written,

  “we can follow the blossoming of the controversy which attended the unveiling of these paintings. Their subjects were unremarkable: the left hand panel depicting a scene in Eden, the right, the Hill at Golgotha.”

  “ ‘It seemed to everyone who saw them,’ Galloway reports in a letter to his father dated February 5th, 1721, ‘as if Thomas had walked on the perfect earth of Adam’s Garden, and set down in paint all he saw; then gone straightaway to the place where Our Lord died, and there made a painting as desolate as the first was filled with the light of God’s presence.’

  “Barely four months later, however, Galloway’s tone had changed. He was no longer so certain that Simeon’s visions were entirely healthy. ‘I have many times thought that God moved in my dear Thom,’ Galloway wrote, ‘but perhaps that same door which he opened in his breast to give God entrance, he left unattended, for it seems to me sometimes that the Devil came into his soul, too, and there fights night and day with all that is best in Thom, I do not know who will win the war, but I fear for Thomas’s presence of mind.’ ”

  There was more on the subject of Simeon’s deterioration around the time of the diptych, but Will skimmed it. He had an hour before Adele had planned their trip to the hospital, and he wanted to have the slim volume read. Moving on to the next chapter, however, he found Dwyer’s style thickening as she attempted to make an account of what was clearly a problematic area in her researches. Paring away the filigree and the qualifications, the essence of the matter seemed to be this: Simeon had undergone a crisis of faith in the late autumn of 1722 and may (though documentation was unreliable here) have attempted suicide. He had alienated Galloway, his companion from childhood, and sequestered himself in a squalid studio on the outskirts of Blackheath, where he indulged a growing addiction to opium. So far, predictable enough. But then, in Dwyer’s constipated phrasing, came:

  “The figure who would, with his subtle appeals to the painter’s now debauched instincts, render the glorious promise of his gilded youth a tarnished spectacle. His name was Gerard Rukenau, variously described by contemporary witnesses as ‘transcendalist of surpassing skill and wisdom,’ and by no lesser personage than Sir Robert Walpole, ‘the very model of what he must become, as this age dies.’ To hear him speak was, one witness remarked, ‘like listening to the Sermon on the Mount delivered by a satyr; one is moved and repelled in the same moment, air though he arouses one’s higher self and one’s basest instincts simultaneously.’

  “Here, then,” Dwyer theorizes, “was a man who could understand the contrary impulses that had fractured Simeon’s fragile state of mind. A father confessor who would quickly become his sole patron, removing him both from the pit of self-abnegation into which he’d fallen and from the leavening influence his saner friends might have exercised.”

  At this juncture, Will put the book down for a couple of minutes in order to digest what he’d just read. Though he now had a few descriptions of Rukenau to juggle, they essentially canceled one another out, which left him no further advanced.

  Rukenau was a man of power and influence, that much was clear, and had no doubt powerfully affected Steep. Could Living and dying we feed the fire not have been a line from a satyr’s sermon? But as to what the source of his power might be, or the nature of his influence, there was little clue.

  He returned to the text, sprinting through a few paragraphs that attempted to put Simeon’s work in some kind of aesthetic context, in order to pick up the thread of Rukenau’s involvement with the painter’s life. He didn’t have to go far. Rukenau, it seems, had a plan for Simeon’s wayward genius, and it soon showed itself. He wanted the painter to make a series of pictures

  “evoking,” according to Dwyer, “Rukenau’s transcendalist vision of humanity’s relationship to Creation, in the form of fourteen pictures chronicling the building—by an entity known only as the Nilotic—of the Mundi Domus. Literally, the House of the World. Only one of these pictures is known, and it indeed may be the only one surviving, given that a woman friend of Rukenau, Dolores Cruikshank, who had volunteered to pen an exegesis of his theories, complained in March of 1723 that: ‘between Gerard’s meticulous concerns for a true reflection of his philosophies, and Simeon’s aesthetic neuralgia, these pictures have been made in more versions than Mankind itself each one destroyed for some puffing flaw in conception or execution . . .’ ”

  The one extant painting had been reproduced in the book, albeit poorly. The picture was in black and white, and washed out, but there was enough detail to intrigue Will. It seemed to depict an early portion of the construction process: a naked, sex-less figure who appeared to be black-skinned in the reproduction (but could just as easily have been blue or green), was bending toward the ground, in which numerous fine rods had been stuck, as though marking the perimeters of the dwelling. The landscape behind the figure was a wasteland, the dirt infertile, the sky deserted. In three spots fires burned in a crack in the earth, sending up a plane of dark smoke, but that only seemed to emphasize the desolation. As for the hieroglyphics that Frannie had described, they were carved on stones scattered throughout the wilderness, as though they’d been tossed out of the sky as clues for the lone mason.

  “What are we to make of this peculiar image?” the text asked.

  “Its hermeticisim frustrates us; we long for explanation, and find none.” Not even from Dwyer, it appeared. She flailed around for a couple of paragraphs attempting to make parallels with illustrations to be found in alchemical treatises, but Will sensed that she was out of her depth. He flipped to the next chapter, leaving the rest of Dwyer’s amateur occultism unread, and was halfway through the first page when he heard Adele summoning him. He was reluctant to put the book down, and even more reluctant to go and visit Hugo a second time, but the sooner the duty was done, he reasoned, the sooner he’d be back in Thomas Simeon’s troubled world. So he set the book on the chair and headed downstairs to join Adele.

  ii

  Hugo was feeling sluggish. He’d had some pain after lunch, nothing unusual, the nurse reassured Adele, but enough to warrant a dessert of pain killers. They had subdued him considerably and, throughout the three-quarter hour visit, his speech was slow and slurred, his focus far from sharp. Most of the time, in fact, he was barely aware that Will was in the room, which suited Will just fine. Only toward the end of the visit did his gaze flutter in his son’s direction.

  “And what did you do today?” he asked, as though he were addressing a nine-year-old.

  “I saw Frannie and Sherwood.”

  “Come a little closer,” Hugo said, feebly beckoning Will to the bedside. “I’m not going to strike you.”

  “I didn’t imagine you were,” Will said.

  “I’ve never struck you, have I? There was a policeman here, said I had.”

  “There’s no policeman, Dad.”

  “There was. Right here. Rude bugger. Said I beat you. I never beat you.” He sounded genuinely distressed at the accusation.

  “It’s the pills they’re giving you, Dad,” Will gently explained, “they’re making you a little delirious. Nobody’s acc
using you of anything.”

  “There was no policeman?”

  “No.”

  “I could have sworn . . .” he said, scanning the room anxiously. “Where’s Adele?”

  “She’s gone to get some fresh water for your flowers.”

  “Are we alone?”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned up out of the pillow. “Am I . . . making a fool of myself?”

  “In what way?”

  “Saying things . . . that doesn’t make sense?”

  “No, Dad, you’re not.”

  “You’d tell me wouldn’t you?” he said. “Yes, you would. You’d tell me because it’d hurt and you’d like that.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You like watching people squirm. You get that from me.” Will shrugged. “You can believe what you like, Dad. I’m not going to argue.”

  “No. Because you know you’d lose.” He tapped his skull.

  “See, I’m not that delirious. I can see your game. You only came back when I’m weak and confused, because you think you’ll get the upper hand. Well you won’t. I’m your match with half my wits.” He settled back into his pillow again. “I don’t want you coming here again,” he said softly.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

  “I mean it,” Hugo said, turning his face from Will. “I’ll get better without your care and attention, thank you very much.” Will was glad his father’s eyes were averted. The last thing he wanted at that moment was for Hugo to see what an effect his words were having. Will felt them in his throat and chest and gut.

  “All right,” Will said. “If that’s what you want.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Will watched him a moment longer, with some remote hope that Hugo would say something to undo the hurt. But he’d said all he intended to say.

  “I’ll get Adele,” Will murmured retreating from the bed, “she’ll want to say goodbye. Take care of yourself, Dad.” There was no further response from Hugo, whether word or sign. Shaken, Will left him to his silence and headed out in search of Adele. He didn’t tell her the substance of his exchange with Hugo; he simply said that he’d wait for her at reception.