The Children's Book (20 page)

Most of the Norman windows had been smashed and Frank had had the idea of raising money in the diocese and commissioning a window from the great artist living in the parish. He had called on Fludd, and put the proposal—as a very vague beginning—to him, and Fludd had said he had many ideas, the spirit of God brooding on the waters, maybe, or a Tree of Life with gold and crimson fruits. For a few weeks these images had been discussed enthusiastically, over mugs of beer, and drawings had been produced, in chalk, and ink, and watercolour. Frank Mallett still had one or two. The rest had been destroyed by Fludd in an excess of despair. Frank had called one day, as usual, and found the potter sitting in his great chair and staring at nothing. He seemed almost unable to speak, almost catatonic. He had muttered “I can do nothing,” and “Leave me,” and Seraphita had come into the kitchen and said—tonelessly—placidly?—that her husband was unwell, and would not be ready to do anything for some time, she knew this well, and could assure Mr. Mallett that there was nothing to be gained from visiting, until Fludd was well again. Mallett had ventured the opinion that artistic powers perhaps ebbed and flowed like the tides. (He would not now dare to utter any such platitude.) Seraphita had agreed, flatly, that this might be so, and had stood, statuesque, waiting for him to take his leave. He knew, as her spiritual advisor, that he should offer her help, or comfort, or a chance to share her burden. But she looked at him, dully, patiently, waiting for him to go, and he went. Another time might be better, he told himself. This was all before Arthur Dobbin and the vanishing Martin Calvert had turned up at Purchase House.

•  •  •

And then, one winter afternoon, when Frank Mallett was in St. Edburga’s Church, kneeling in fact, in prayer in the chancel, trying to combat the seeping away or silting up of his faith, Fludd had come in search of him. He had flung open the door, letting in a roiling gust of wind, which rattled papers and briefly disturbed the altar-cloth. He stood in the nave, his bull-shoulders jutting forward, his large head hunched between them, paying no attention to the fact that the priest was kneeling. He said

“I am in mortal need. Will you hear my confession?”

Frank had got up, not gracefully. He was afraid. He was a young man, and innocent, despite his pretty pointed gold beard on his chin. He had lived a sheltered life, and had so far encountered no real horrors in his brief ministry, only the present fact of death, and the destructive bad temper of competitive churchwardens and hassock-embroidering ladies. He said mildly that this was an Anglican church, and that confession was not a sacrament. Fludd laid a hand on him, tugged at his sleeve, made him sit down in a box-pew and sat next to him, his breath laboured. He was wearing a black smock, which had a parodic look of a cassock.

“God,” said Benedict Fludd, “your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible—laughable, laughable—and the next, he is imperious.” He stopped. He said “It is like the phases of the moon, maybe. Or the seasons of the sphere we live on, rolling in and out of the light, skeleton trees one day, and then snow, and afterwards the bright green veil and after that the full heat and shining. Only it is neither regular nor predictable. And there are—others—who stride in, when he takes himself off. Who seem persuasive. Like Hindoo demons who are gods in their own terms.”

Frank listened. He thought in his young head that the rhetoric was practised. He murmured something about the tenacity of faith in the dark times of the soul, in the lean years of the spirit.

“I have no will,” said Fludd, with a note of satisfaction. “I am a battleground simply, and yet I live and walk about in the world. But there is—are—chinks of light, moments of stasis, between one state and another, between the victories of the Pale Galilean and the multiform Life-force. If you take my meaning. Times when I look before and after.”

“Yes,” said Frank.

“I am at such a cusp. Your God has removed his presence as though it had never been. He sheds no light, he illuminates nothing, all is thick grey cloud, or empty night full of pointless points of brightness whose order is nothing to do with me, but not yet menacing. It will be. Today I am lucid.”

“Yes,” said Frank.

“I tell you, young man, of things you cannot really imagine. I must unburden myself. I wish to tell you the tale of my werewolf-changes, so that perhaps the telling may release me. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes,” said Frank, who was physically alarmed by the big body trembling beside him. “So far, yes.”

“I may be what you may call mad, tomorrow,” said Fludd. “It will not seem so to me then, but from here I see it with nausea. Each visitation is worse. There was no hint of it when I was a child. I was a choirboy with his head separated from his little body by a great pure white starched collar. If I flicked my own tiny pudenda no one knew and it was all innocent. And the sun shone all the time, round and bright like my collar. And then I began to become a man, and my voice broke, and my collar was taken from me, and my body—you understand—grew a life of his own, not under my control. I had terrible imaginings. I liked to hunt things. Creatures. Frogs and rabbits. I made clay images of them with love, and I destroyed them ingeniously, also with love. Do you understand? I see you do not. I have chosen my confessor intelligently. For you are a person of integrity, and will not speak of this. I went to Art School, and made drawings of the naked—men and women both—and imagined, aha,
drawing
them in quite another sense, like chickens. I made private drawings of drawing. I walked up and down the Haymarket like Rossetti you understand—looking at the flesh for sale, and slid into my double life in the end with ease. I found a young woman whose trade it was to understand men like me, and gratify their imaginings. I visited her—more and more frequently—and imagined hurting her, more and more ingeniously—and loved her, with my sunny self, more and more deeply and innocently. There was nothing, nothing we could not talk of, and in her presence—in her cheap bed, young man, Father, I became whole, and cleansed. She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist’s eye saw she was puny, though my lover’s eye saw her breasts as globes of milky
marble, and the tuft between her legs as the bushes surrounding the gate to Paradise Lost—and Regained.” He stopped. Frank thought, this is practised rhetoric, he has told this tale before, and polished it. It may be a fiction, or simply a
version
. He wondered how he knew these things.

“Do I embarrass or excite you, young man? Father?”

“No,” said Frank, though he was both embarrassed and minimally aroused in his own flesh. “No, I am here to listen.”

“I know, naturally, that I was not her only lover,” said Fludd. “She had her trade, it was part of her Self. Or so I thought. Maybe she was only a lost, impecunious young creature, driven by pure hunger and cold to offer heat and hearing which I took for understanding. I think differently of it from day to day, from phase to phase of my own moon-cycle. I did form the intention of making her my wife. I needed her so abjectly. It was when I found her that I found my vocation—fingers in clay running with water, fingers puddling in divine female flesh—I made vessels that were metaphors for her and our dealings with each other, coiled mermaidens and fern fronds uncurling—oh, it was all innocent enough, despite her trade and my madness.”

He stopped. Frank had a crazy moment when he wondered if this Magdalen had become Seraphita Fludd, and if that explained her inhibited stiffness.

Fludd was doing something which Frank saw was wringing his hands; he thought he had never seen it done before. Fludd said

“The next bit is nasty. You are the first person to whom I have told this—this thing. I went to see her at my fixed time—I had a key, but we had agreed when I should and shouldn’t visit—and I went up the stairs, two at a time.”

He stopped again. Frank waited, his own hands folded.

“There was a stench. I noticed it, I think, before I opened the door. She was on her bed. She was quite dead. She was a mass of raw, open wounds and blood, and blood. The edges of the pools of it were congealing, like glaze, on the surface of her thighs, and on the linoleum.”

“Yes,” said Frank, to interrupt the flow.

“She had run about, all over the room, pouring blood, grasping at things with bloody fingers, the marks were everywhere. I couldn’t look at her face—it was simply a mass of bloody
knobs—
”

“Yes,” said Frank, more firmly. He said “What did you do?”

“I stepped back, and closed the door, and went home to my lodgings. What else could I do?”

“Called the police?”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. It was too late for help. And I became—ill, sick, debilitated.” He came to a stop. “This is all?” said Frank. “All? It is a horror.”

“But not a horror of which you are—by your own account—guilty.”

How to find the voice of a confessor, or a judge. It slipped across Frank’s mind to wonder whether Fludd had really killed the woman, in a brainstorm, and was either lying or had forgotten. And it slipped into his mind to wonder whether the story was
made up
, either to hurt him, Frank, with, or to feed Fludd’s appetite for horror. Fludd said

“I am not lying, you know.” Then he said

“I am faithful to her, involuntarily. I do not love my wife, as I promised to do. There are thick walls between us. She is a beautiful woman, who expects to be desired, and I do not—often—desire her. I should not have married her.”

“It is very late to say that,” said the priest.

“She is a stupid woman. A plucked chicken in a serge carapace. Sometimes I think she has no soul.”

“You promised to love and cherish her.”

“I have tried. I may sneer to you, now, but I have tried. There is no love in our house. I am not the only one guilty of that.”

“I cannot judge, there.”

“I am not asking you to judge. Or to interfere. If I thought you had the
nous
or nerve to interfere I wouldn’t talk to you. Look at you shaking. You will pretend this—confession—has never happened.”

“I expect it was partly your intention to make me shake. What do you expect me to do?”

“Nothing, nothing, nobody can do anything. I shall go home and slide for a time into my private compartment of Hell. I am horribly afraid—always—of never finding the way out or of—”

“Or—?” Frank prompted. But Fludd had come to the end of his confession, just as abruptly as he had begun it. He stood up, and stumbled out of the church without a backward glance.

Frank Mallett had thought to himself that what had been “confessed” was not what Fludd had come to confess. He lived for a few weeks in fear of Fludd doing something to harm himself, or his family,
or some outsider—he had been afraid of something in the future, and had confessed something far in the past. Fludd did indeed enter a black period, alternately swearing and breaking pots, or taking long solitary marches along the shingle beach at Dungeness, waving his arms, and shouting at the sky. Frank Mallett made timid attempts to visit Sera-phita and “bring her out” and Seraphita, remorselessly, made minimal tea-party comments on the weather, or the jam, or the servants, and waited for him to go away. Geraint’s schoolwork suffered when Fludd was in a black mood. His arithmetic deteriorated. So did his Latin translation. And then one day—or so Frank imagined it, for he was not, naturally, present at the time—Benedict Fludd shook himself, and went back into his studio and began beating out wedges of clay.

The two friends cycled into Winchelsea on a very hot summer day, to discuss the preparation of a series of lectures, in Lydd, for the darker months in the autumn. They took paths across the Walland Marsh and along the Camber Sands, which covered the drowned town of Old Winchelsea, as though it had never been. They skirted Rye Harbour, and wheeled past Camber Castle along the flats, with the hill on which Winchelsea had been rebuilt in the thirteenth century, a mediaeval planned town, in front of them. They were visiting Miss Patty Dace, who lived in a small house facing the part-ruined church of St. Thomas the Martyr, across peaceful turf, marked by ancient leaning gravestones. Like many Winchelsea houses this one resembled the white clapboard houses of New England. It had a small, well-tended front garden.

Miss Dace was waiting, and opened the door before they could knock. She was in her forties, and made of bone and muscle, with a fierce face, hooked nose, high cheek-bones and deep-set dark eyes under brows like bristling caterpillars. Her hair looked as though it had undergone intense applications of the curling-tongs, but in fact coiled itself naturally, as though she had African ancestors. She liked to be busy. She was the acting secretary of many groups: the local Theosophists, the local Fabians, the Winchelsea and District Dramatic Society, the Circle of Watercolourists, and a group which worked for women’s suffrage. She had taught at a London girls’ school in her time, and had worked briefly as an assistant almoner in a hospital. She had been very active in the agitation to extend the franchise for local authorities and Poor Law boards to married women, and women who were not home-owners. Last year
the Liberal Government had abolished the property qualification for Poor Law boards and had made it possible for married women to stand for election. Miss Dace had rejoiced. She had stood for election herself, and had been defeated by a married woman, Mrs. Phoebe Methley, the wife of a writer, Herbert Methley, who had bought a smallholding near East Guldeford. Miss Dace had had a good Christian upbringing. She tried to feel neither disappointment nor resentment, and turned her attention to the cultural life of the community. She was the custodian of the Fabian book-boxes, which were despatched from London full of challenging and improving reading. She arranged lectures, both for the Fabians and for the Theosophists, and for combined groups of both. Until recently, she had also, through something called the Christo-theosophical Society, tried to arrange discussions of esoteric spiritual life, and especially the female aspect of Christian spirituality. Patty Dace wanted
more life
and thought it might reside in Theosophy. She had been put out to read, in the pages of
Lucifer
, a passionate denunciation of Christianity’s attitude to women, written by Blavatsky herself, studded with quotations from the Bible and the Church Fathers about woman as the organ of the devil, the hissing of the serpent, the most dangerous of wild beasts, a scorpion, an asp, a dragon, a daughter of falsehood, a sentinel of hell, the enemy of peace. Mme Blavatsky noted that in the New Testament “The words sister, mother, daughter and wife are only names for degradation and dishonour.”