Sacrament

  “John Galloway was killed in 1734, accidentally shot during a military exercise on Dartmoor. Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, who assisted Galloway in the abduction of Simeon from Rukenau’s house, both died young: Varty perished of consumption and Maupertius, arrested for smuggling opium in Paris, died of a heart attack in police custody. Only Dolores Cruikshank lived out her biblical span, and more, dying at the age of ninety-one.

  Much of the correspondence quoted here was in the possession of her heirs.

  “As for Gerard Rukenau, despite four years of attempts by this author to uncover the truth behind his legendary existence, little beyond the information contained within these pages could be found.

  There is no trace of the house in Ludlow from which Galloway supposedly abducted him, nor are there extant any letters, pamphlets, wills, or other legal documents bearing his name.

  “In a sense, none of this matters, Simeon’s legacy . . .” Will’s concentration drifted here, as Dwyer again tried to fit Simeon’s work into an aesthetic context. Simeon the prophetic surrealist, Simeon the metaphysical symbolist, Simeon the nature painter. Then the text just petered out, as though she could not find a personal sentiment that suited her, and had simply let the text come to a halt.

  He put the book down, and looked at his watch. It was a quarter after one. He didn’t feel particularly tired, despite all that the day had brought. He wandered downstairs, and went to search the kitchen for something to eat. Finding a bowl of rice pudding, which had been one of Adele’s coups as a cook, he retired to the living room with bowl and spoon to indulge himself. Her recipe hadn’t changed in the intervening years: The pudding was as rich and creamy as he remembered it. Patrick would go crazy for this, he thought, and so thinking picked up the phone and called him. It wasn’t Patrick who answered, but Jack.

  “Hey, Will,” he said, “how ya doin’?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You called at the right time. We’ve got a little meetin’ goin’ on here.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh you know . . . stuff. Adrianna’s here. Do you want to talk to her?” He got off the line with curious haste, and put Adrianna on. She sounded less than her best.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Sure. We’re just having some serious conversations here.

  How are you doing? Have you made peace with your dad?”

  “Nope. And it’s not going to happen. He told me point-blank he doesn’t want me visiting him any more.”

  “So are you going to come home?”

  “Not yet. I’ll give you plenty of notice, don’t worry, so you can lay on a big Welcome Home party.”

  “I think you’ve partied enough,” she said.

  “Uh-oh. Who have you been talking to?”

  “Guess.”

  “Drew.”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s he saying?”

  “He thinks you’re crazy.”

  “You defended me, of course.”

  “You can do that for yourself. Do you want to speak to Pat?”

  “Yeah. Is he around?”

  “He is, but he’s not . . . doing too well right now.”

  “Sick?”

  “No, just a little emotional. We’ve been having a heavy conversation, and he’s not in great shape. I mean, I’ll get him for you if it’s urgent.”

  “No, no. I’ll call back tomorrow. Just send him my love, will you?”

  “Do I get some too?”

  “Always.”

  “We miss you.”

  “Good.”

  “See you soon.”

  When he put the phone down, he felt a pang of separation, so sharp it caught his breath. He imagined them now—Patrick and Adrianna, Jack and Rafael, even Drew—going about their business while the fog crept over the hill and ships boomed in the bay. It would be so easy to pack up and creep away, leaving Hugo to heal and Adele to dote. In a day he’d be back amongst his clan, where he was loved.

  But there would be no safety there. He might forget the hurt of this place for a few days; he might party himself into a stupor, and put the memories out of his head. But how long could that forgetfulness last? A week? A month? And then he’d be taking a shower or looking at the moth on the window, and the story he had left unfinished would come back to haunt him. He was in thrall to it: That was the unpalatable truth. His intellect and emotions were too thoroughly engaged in this mystery for him to leave. Perhaps at the beginning he’d been merely a conduit, as Jacob had dubbed him, an unwitting sensitive through which Steep’s memories had flowed. But he had made himself more than that over the years. He’d become Simeon’s echo: a maker of pictures that showed the spoiler’s hand at work. There was no escaping that role, no pretending he was just a common man. He had laid claim to vision and with it came responsibility.

  If so, so. He would watch, as he had always watched, until the story’s end. If he survived, he would hear witness as no one had ever done before: He would tell a tale of near-extinction from the survivor’s side. If not—if he was dispatched into an unnatural grave by the very hand that had made him the witness he was—then he would at least go knowing the nature of his dispatcher, and lie, perhaps, more quietly for the knowledge.

  VIII

  The pain killers Hugo had been administered denied him easy slumber. He lay as though upon a catafalque in the dimly lit room, while memories came to pay their respects. Some were vague, no more than murmurs and flutterings. But most were crystalline; more real to his heavy-lidded eyes than the idiot nurses who now and then came to check on his state. Happy visitations, most of them: memories of the halcyon years after the war, when his star had been in the ascendant. There had been a period of three or four years following the publication of his first book, The Fallacy of Thought, in 1949, when he had been the idol of every iconoclast in English philosophical circles. At the tender age of twenty-four, he had published a book that not only challenged the tenets of logical positivism (all metaphysical investigation is invalid, because it can never be verified), but also existentialism (the chief imperatives of philosophical study are being and freedom). He was later to repudiate much that he’d written in that first book, but that didn’t matter now. He forgot his doubts, and remembered only the fine, high times. Debating at the Sorbonne with Sartre (he’d met Eleanor there that spring); making mincemeat of Ayers at a party in Oxford; being told by one of his sometime tutors that he was destined for greatness, that if he kept to his purpose he would change the course of European thought. All perfect nonsense, but he indulged it readily tonight, enjoying the gilded phantoms that glided to his bedside to pay him court. (Sartre was among them, as batrachian as ever, with Simone in tow.) Some of these tribute payers simply smiled and nodded at him, One or two were too drunk to say a word, but many chatted to him in a casual fashion—unimportant opinions, every one. But he listened indulgently, knowing they only sought to impress.

  And then, more quietly than even the quietest of the crowd, came one who did not belong among these blithe memories, and with him, his lady friend, watching Hugo from the bottom of the bed.

  “Go away,” Hugo said.

  The woman—her companion had called her Rosa, hadn’t he, out on the dark road?—studied him sympathetically. “You look tired,” she said.

  “I want the other dreams back,” he said. “Damn it, you’ve frightened them off.” It was true. The room had been vacated of all but these two: the smiling beauty and her gaunt and sickly groom. “I told you to go away,” Hugo said.

  “You’re not imagining us,” Rosa said. Oh Lord, he thought.

  “Unless of course, we’re all illusions. You imagining us imagining you—”

  “Don’t . . . bother,” Hugo said, “I wouldn’t let a first year student get away with that sort of sophistry.” Even as he spoke, he regretted his tone. He was supine and light headed, lying in a bed: This was no time to be condescending. “On the other hand . . .” he began.

&nb
sp; “I’m sure you’re right,” the woman said. She pinched herself. “I feel very real.” She smiled, touching her breast now. “You want to feel?”

  “No,” he said hastily.

  “I think you do,” she replied, moving along the side of the bed toward him. “Just a touch.”

  “Your boyfriend’s very quiet,” Hugo said, hoping to distract her. She glanced back at Steep, who had not moved a muscle since arriving. His gloved hands were clinging to the rail at the bottom of the bed, and he looked so frail in the sickly light Hugo felt less intimidated the more he studied the man. The mesmeric strength he’d displayed on the road seemed to have run out of his heels; though he stared at Hugo hard, it was the fixedness of a man who lacked the will to avert his eyes. Perhaps, Hugo thought, I don’t have to be afraid. Perhaps I can talk the truth out of them.

  “Does he want to sit down?” Hugo asked.

  “Maybe you should, Jacob,” Rosa said, to which Steep grunted and retreated to the comfortless chair beside the door.

  “Is he sick?” Hugo asked her.

  “No, just anxious.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Coming back here,” the woman replied. “It makes us both a little sensitive. We remember things, and once we start remembering, we can’t stop. Back we go, whether we like it or not.”

  “Back . . . where?” Hugo wondered, putting the question lightly, so as not to seem too interested in the reply.

  “We don’t exactly know,” Rosa said. “Which bothers Jacob a lot more than it bothers me. I think you men need to know these things more than we women do. Isn’t that right?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Hugo said.

  “Well he frets noon and night about what we were before we were what we are, if you follow me.”

  “Every inch of the way,” Hugo beamed.

  “What a man you are,” she said.

  “Are you mocking me?” Hugo bristled.

  “Not at all. I always mean what I say. You ask him.”

  “Is it true?” Hugo said to Steep.

  “It’s true,” he replied, his voice colorless. “She’s everything a man could ever want in a woman.”

  “And he’s everything I ever wanted in a man,” Rosa said.

  “She’s compassionate, she’s motherly—”

  “He’s cruel, he’s paternal—”

  “She likes to smother—”

  “So do you,” Rosa pointed out.

  Steep smiled. “She’s better with blood than I am. And babies. And medicine.”

  “He’s better with poems. And knives. And geography.”

  “She likes the moon. I prefer sunlight.”

  “He likes to drum. I like to sing.”

  She looked at him fondly. “He thinks too much,” she said.

  “She feels more than she should,” he replied, looking back at her.

  They fell silent now, their gazes locked. And watching them Hugo felt something very like envy. He’d never known anyone the way these two knew one another, nor opened his heart to be known in his turn. In fact he’d prided himself on how undiscovered he was, how secret, how remote. What a fool he’d been.

  “You see how it is?” Rosa said finally. “He’s impossible.”

  She feigned exasperation, but she smiled indulgently at her beloved while she did so. “All he ever wants is answers, answers.

  And I say to him—just go with the flow a little, enjoy the ride a little—but no, he has to get to the truth of things. What are we here for, Rosa? Why were we born?” She glanced at Hugo. “More sophistry, eh?”

  “No,” Steep said, clucking at her. “I won’t have you say that.” He pulled himself to his feet, turning his gaze on Hugo.

  “You may not admit it, but the question runs in your head too, don’t tell me it doesn’t. It vexes every living thing.”

  “Now that I doubt,” Hugo replied.

  “You haven’t seen the world through our eyes. You haven’t heard it with our ears. You don’t know how it moans and sobs.”

  “You should try a night in here,” Hugo said. “I’ve heard enough sobbing to last—”

  “Where’s Will?” Steep said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “He wants to know where Will is,” Rosa said.

  “Gone,” Hugo replied.

  “He came to see you?”

  “Yes, he came. But I couldn’t abide his being here, so I told him to go away.”

  “Why do you hate him so much?” Rosa said.

  “I don’t hate him,” Hugo replied, “I just don’t have any interest in him. That’s all. I had another son, you know—”

  “So you said,” Rosa reminded him.

  “He was the heart of me. You never saw such a boy. His name was Nathaniel. Did I tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Well it was.”

  “So how did Will take it?” Steep said.

  Hugo looked faintly annoyed to have been distracted from his reverie. “How did he take what?”

  “Your sending him away?”

  “Oh Christ knows. He’s always been secretive. I never knew a thing he was thinking.”

  “He got that from you,” Rosa observed.

  “Maybe,” Hugo conceded. “Anyway, he won’t be coming back.”

  “He’ll come and see you, one more time,” Steep said.

  “I beg to differ.”

  “Believe me, he will,” Steep replied. “It’s his duty.” He glanced at Rosa, who now sat gently on the bed beside Hugo. She lay her hand on the patient’s chest, lightly.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Be calm,” she told him.

  “I am calm. What are you doing?”

  “It can be bliss,” she said.

  Hugo appealed to Steep. “What’s she withering on about?”

  “He’ll come to pay his respects, Hugo—” Steep replied.

  “What is this?”

  “And he’ll be weak. I need him weak.”

  Hugo could hear his pulse in his head now, its lazy rhythm soothing. “He’s already weak,” Hugo said, his voice a little slurred.

  “How little you know him,” Steep replied. “The things he’s witnessed. The things he learned. He’s dangerous.”

  “To you?”

  “To my purpose,” Steep replied.

  Even in his present, dreamy state, Hugo knew they came to the heart of things: Steep’s purpose. “And . . . what . . . is that exactly?” he said.

  “To know God,” Steep replied. “When I know God, I will know why we were born, she and I. We’ll be gathered into eternity, and gone.”

  “And Will’s in your way?”

  “He distracts me,” Steep said. “He puts it about that I’m the Devil—”

  “Now, now,” Rosa said, as if to soothe him. “You’re getting paranoid again.”

  “He does!” Steep said, with a sudden fury. “What are those damnable books of his if they’re not accusations? Every picture, every word, like a knife! A knife! Here!” He slammed his fist against his chest. “And I would have loved him! Wouldn’t I?”

  “You would,” said Rosa.

  “I would have treasured him, made him my perfect child.” Steep rose from his chair now, and approaching the bed, he gazed down at Hugo. “You never saw him. That’s the pity of it. For him. For you. You were so blinded by the dead you never knew what lived there, right under your nose. So fine a man, so brave a man, that I have to kill him, before he undoes me, utterly.” Steep looked up to Rosa. “Oh be done with it,” he said. “He’s not worth the breath.”

  “Be done?” Hugo said.

  “Hush,” Rosa said. “Clear your mind. It’s easier.”

  “For you maybe,” he replied, trying to sit up. But the light pressure she had upon his chest was all she needed to keep him in his place. And the thump of his heart was getting louder, and the weight of his lids heavier.

  “Shush,” she said, as though to a troubled child, “b
e still . . .”

  She leaned a little closer to him, and her warmth and her breath made him want to curl up in her arms.

  “I told you,” Steep said softly, “he’ll see you one last time. But you won’t see him, Hugo.”

  “Oh . . . God . . . no . . .”

  “You won’t see him.”

  Again, he tried to rise up out of the bed, and this time she let him come a little way, far enough for her to slip her hand around his body and draw him closer. She had started to sing: a soft and lifting lullaby.

  Don’t listen to it, he told himself, don’t succumb. But it was such a gentle sound—so calm and reassuring—that he wanted to fold himself into the woman’s arms and forget the brittleness of his bones, the hardness of his heart, wanted to sigh and suckle—

  No! That was death! He had to resist her. There wasn’t strength enough in his limbs to free himself. All he could hope to do was put some important thought between his life and the song she was singing, anything to stop him dissolving in her arms.

  A book! Yes, he would think of a book he might write when he’d escaped her. Something that would touch and change people. A confessional, perhaps, told with all the vitriol he could muster. Something sharp and bracing, as far from this saccharine song as possible. He’d tell the truth: about Sartre, about Eleanor, about Nathaniel—

  No, not Nathaniel, I don’t want to think about Nathaniel.

  It was too late. The boy’s image appeared in his head, and with it the lullaby, full of sweet melancholy. He couldn’t fully understand the words, but he got the gist. They were words of reassurance, telling him to close his eyes and sink away, sink away to the place beyond sleep where all the good children of the world went to play.

  His eyelids were so heavy now he was looking through slits, but he could see Steep, watching him from the bottom of the bed, waiting, waiting . . .

  I will not give you the satisfaction of dying, Hugo thought, and so thinking turned his gaze toward Steep’s mistress. He couldn’t see her face, but he felt the fullness of her breasts beside his head and dared think there was hope for him yet. He would fuck her in his imagination; yes, that’s what he would do: put his erection between himself and death. He would strip her naked in his mind’s eye and pin her down, make her sob with his assault till her throat was too raw for lullabies. He started to move his hips against the coverlet.