A Whistling Woman (30 page)

We had a ceremony of the Solstice, which was also a ceremony of the inauguration of the Hearers. So that you'll know the
import
of the ceremony, I need to tell you the tale of the formation of the cosmos according to Mani. Selah. We have a nightly gathering for tale-telling and talk—by fire-light and candle-light, in the old hall of this place. Gideon wanted to make the tale-telling into a personal confessional, but Josh Ramsden has hijacked it and tells tales of the Manichees and tales of the cosmos. He tells them well, with a note of scholarly scepticism and a poetic passion and a kind of entrancing hypnotism. It's all fiendishly complicated (
literally,
my friend,
fiendishly
) but I'll have a stab at the telling.
In the beginning were two Realms, the Dark and the Light, and they were quite, quite separate. The Kingdom of Light was in the East, West, and North, and the Father of Greatness reigned in it. The Tree of Life grew there (grows there) crowned with flowers, unvarying in its beauty. The Kingdom of Light is made of Five Things—Air, Wind, Light, Water and Fire. The Father of Greatness is surrounded by Aeons—twelve by twelve, made of light. They dwell in the “unbegotten air” in “the unbegotten land.”

The Kingdom of Darkness is the Kingdom of Light in a glass darkly, id est, reversed. It lies in the South, and the Tree of Death grows there, which is Matter as opposed to Light, Death as opposed to life, “as unlike the Tree of Life as a king and a pig.” Ramsden read out a passage in which Mani describes the king in his palace in his airy chambers, and the pig wallowing in filth, eating foul things, creeping round “like a snake.” The Kingdom of Darkness is boggy, full of pits, fens, gulfs and dark pools. It is smothered by Smoke, the “poison of death.” There are five worlds also in the Kingdom of Darkness—Smoke, Fire, Wind, Water and Darkness, inhabited by foul beasts or demons—bipeds, quadrupeds, flying things, swimming things and reptiles respectively. The Prince of Darkness is called Pentamorphos for he combines all these foul devilish shapes in one arch-Dragon. The Tree of Death is full of maggots which prey on the fruits of the tree, which oppress the branches of the tree, for all is disharmony.

The principle of the Kingdom of Darkness, nota bene O Kieran, is the random motion of aimless and excessive Libido or Desire. Ramsden smiled directly at me when he used this word, his sweet, sad smile of distant complicity, which is lovable in him. Selah.

Slopping randomly about in the dark and the smoke and the stench of the pit, some of the bipedal demons came to glimpse the Light, and lusted after it.

So they churned and stirred and boiled up, and invaded the Kingdom of Light.

And Light didn't begin to know what to do, because it was used to unvarying calm and peace.

So it divided itself into emanations. It made a female Mother of the Living, and they made (but did not engender) a Primal Man, who armed himself with the Five Elements—Air, Wind, Light, Water and Fire, which together make up the Life of the Father, which is also known as the Maiden of Light. The Primal Man wore the Elemental Maiden as armour, and went out to do battle with the Dark.

Which defeated him, and laid him out. And the infernal powers sucked in, ingested, the Light Elements of the armour.

Which acted like a baited hook, or a honey-trap, to make the Dark dependent on the Light.

Then a lot of subdivided deities were sent out to rescue the Primal Man, which they did. They all have very abstracted names, and are all part of the One.

Then the imprisoned Light had to be rescued. This gets complicated and I shall skip many of the operations. The Demiurge made the earth out of the defeated demons, and the sky from their flayed skins. The mountains are their bones. Matter is Darkness, is the message.

Pure light sits in the sky, in the form of the unchanging sun, and the changing moon, and the (slightly defiled) stars and planets.

Then it gets sexy. (Ramsden didn't. He remained serious-looking and gently expository.)

The Demiurge evoked the Maiden of Light who was also Twelve Maidens (the twelve signs of the Zodiac). Then the Demiurge and the Maiden revealed themselves naked in the sun and the moon to the female and male Demons. This overexcited the demons who ejaculated the Light they had swallowed which became seed and fell on the earth. It was mixed with the sludge of Sin in the dark beings, which worked in them like yeast in dough. From the sin came five trees, and from them all vegetable life.

The female demons were already pregnant but miscarried when they saw the Demiurge's beauty. Their foetuses fell to earth and survived, eating the buds of light from the trees, and becoming the animal kingdom.

So the Light is still bound in plants, and even (though less) in animals.

The first man, Adam, was the child of two demons, as was Eve. Their birth was engineered by the Prince of Darkness. Adam was a replication of the cosmos, containing Light in Matter—like an elephant engraved on a ring in miniature, according to the Chinese, the human world replicates the cosmic one, without addition or subtraction.

Adam knew nothing of his dark origins, or his infernal flesh.

Jesus of Light came to him as a messenger and revealed his true existence to him, eat and be eaten, shit and be shat, fuck and be fucked, stink and inhale the stench. Jesus of Light gave Adam to eat of the Tree of Life, and Adam uttered a cry, which Ramsden says is at the centre of the understanding of the Manichaean Universe. He howled like a maddened lion, “Woe, woe, to the maker of my flesh! Woe to him who has imprisoned my soul in it, and woe to the lawless whose actions led to my enslavement.”

According to Mani—who felt sex and food were the roots of evil—Eve's first two children, Cain and Abel, were sons of demons, not of Adam. His only child, conceived in a moment of human weakness, was Seth, who is the ancestor of all of us in whom the Light particles are still imprisoned. Our world, according to Mani, according to Ramsden, is a Smudge, and evil in it is not caused by our Sin but by demons of darkness, whom we aid and abet. We must release the Light, but the only ways to do this are both painful and self-destructive. Still, we must do what we can. So Ramsden says. He has instituted two ceremonies—the grip of the right hand, on meeting, which he says the Manichees took from the grip of the hand of the Demiurge or Living Spirit when he released the Primal Man from sleep, and the touching of the Three Seals—mouth, hands and breast. The sealed Mouth eats no meat, drinks no wine (!), the sealed Hands will hurt no creature containing Light Particles, the sealed Breast is a reference to elective chastity and abstention from procreation. These rather graceful rituals remove some of Gideon's more touchy-feely explorations from our daily encounters, and give relief to some, and suppressed irritation to others. I have to say that Gideon appears to be carried away on a general wing of enthusiasm and renovation and
vision
—shared
vision
—and when I say shared, I do include myself, and of course, Zag. Aided or not by acid.
We celebrated the Solstice yesterday. It was decided to have a fire at midnight—the midnight of the longest night. Canon Holly—a predictable enthusiast for the Golden Bough view of interchangeable rites—came up with the idea of incorporating a dead Tree into our fire as a symbol of renewal. He also came up with the Savonarola-like idea of a bonfire of vanities—everyone should cast
something
into the flames. So we built our fire round a suitably gnarled and withered old apple-tree, which hasn't produced fruit for years. It's on the edge of the orchard, and there were moments when I thought the whole thing would go up, and flames would sweep the plums and pears and crab-apples. Did I tell you that the Manichees believe Jesus wasn't crucified at all—that the account of the Crucifixion is a symbolic account of the crucifixion of Suffering Jesus on the Light-Cross (
crux luminis
), which is all trees and all vines and all plants where the light is imprisoned in the flesh of fruit and flowers—and further imprisoned of course, for longer, every time we eat an apple. Anyway, we built our fire well, using old furniture and bits of hen-houses. Did I tell you we have released all the birds—the broiler-house was like some demonic hideout from Tolkien, with great red lights like eyes, and all the white feathered beasties huddled together, crying, in the bloody light. They're all over now, but their feet suffer.

On the Night, there was a procession to light the Fire—Lucy was given the honour of pushing the burning brand into the mound. Then we all threw in a treasured possession. Lucy began with her wedding-ring. Clemency Farrar immediately added hers. So then Gideon added his. They did not look at each other. Clemency provided roast chestnuts and baked potatoes and toasted cheese throughout the evening, and mugs of apple-juice, cider, cocoa, spring water. Zag put in a teddy-bear. He said anyone could see he loved it, looking at how worn it was. It was most unpleasant watching it shrivel. Various women brought garments—a pretty dress, a sweater—or rings and bracelets. And I, you will ask? I decided I had to play fair (and I
was
under an influence, which is now wearing off ). So I cast into the flames my much-loved copy of
The Interpretation of
Dreams,
with all my layers of notes, and interleaved commentary. It was a true sacrifice, for there was no one there to know what it meant to me—and indeed, I should be interested to know, professionally, what it means to
you
.

So there we were. The flames went up into the black, and you could see, I thought, the Particles of Light returning to air at the edge of the burning sheet which surrounded the pyre. Zag brought out some warm coats—Afghan I think—sewed with gold stitching, suns and moons and flowers—on blond leather, and lined with shaggy fleece. He put them on Ramsden and Gideon and himself, and finished them off with Tibetan goatskin kind of hats, with dangling ears and a tassel. We are at a stage where everybody accepts everything gracefully. No one said fleece wasn't vegetarian. They did
look
like priests.

The tree went up in great cackling shoots, most satisfactorily. We danced a bit, in a circle. Canon Holly quoted St. Lucies' Day, by Donne. “ 'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's.”

He ruined me, and I am rebegot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

He made an impromptu little sermon. There were many of those, during the long night, listened to with more or less rapt attention. I shall spare you the rest, including my own, which I don't remember too well, owing to the acid. I do remember Holly's. He twisted Donne's brilliant black extravaganza of erotic despair into a prayer to the Deus Absconditus, the Dead God, to be reborn in the Particles of Light in all of us. Religious men always twist. Or maybe they see the truth, or a truth, we mostly miss.

It would be so very easy to mock our doings. The English
style
is fatally mocking—we can only have the Sublime, it seems, if we include the grotesque as a safeguard. So yes, we were absurd, a lot of predominantly middle-aged English people, some dressed-up, some not, shuffling and very occasionally prancing, round a bonfire, chanting hymns we didn't know the words to, tumtitty, tumtitty, waving our arms in spontaneous gestures. Canon Holly pointed out that Lucy was Lucy's name, and she was Lux, Lucis, the Maiden of Light, and was blessed amongst women for providing the Hall for the Hearers. It was half after-dinner speech, half pagan paean. I saw his horrible teeth glitter in the fire-light and I didn't smile. Clemency (her first error?) said Lucy wasn't a Maiden, and Ramsden (who hadn't said anything, just stood in his robe with the red light on the white wool of his head) said that from now, she was, for all was new at the moment of the turning of the Solstice—which, by a
half
accident happened exactly as he spoke. So there she stood in her fiery fleece, an appley little woman, with a lamb pressing against her legs (she has a tame one called Tobias) and greying hair coming out of its hairpins, and tears running all over her little round face.

The world is turning into the Light, said Ramsden. Hens were chooking all round us, stirred up by the light and heat and disturbance. A fox coughed, not far away. I heard an owl. The sky was full of sparks, and stars beyond the sparks. I felt. I felt—
why not
? Why can't we have back the tyger burning bright, and the burning lamb, and the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death (fire streamed from the dead fingers of the convulsed apple-tree). Why can't there be singing and ritual and meaning and a grand purpose, as men once thought there was? I didn't feel mocking, I felt like a Son of God.

At the end, at dawn, it was decided to take a brand from the burning and light a fire in the hearth of the hall in the Hall. Zag said he would take the brand. He said he liked lighting fires. No one quarrelled with his self-election—indeed, it was as though he had spoken with the common voice. So we followed him in, and (with the help of a cigarette-lighter, I have to confess) he started the home-fire.

And we all went to bed in the morning.

Chapter 16

The family dressed the tree for Christmas. It was a bushy spruce, with a few cones, smelling still of wet resin and the life of sap. They hung it, as they now always did, with the golden wire hexagons and polyhedrons Marcus had made for Stephanie. The gathering was grown—Bill and Winifred were there, with Stephanie's children, Will and Mary, Frederica and Leo, and Daniel, who had just arrived. Agatha and Saskia were also there, staying this year in Freyasgarth. Marcus had made new decorations to add to the traditional ones, after his conversation with Vincent Hodgkiss. He had made gold and silver spirals and abstract lapped cones, Fibonacci angels. He wound a great snaking spiral around the form of the tree, measuring the intervals. Will hung the pin-points of light—red, blue, green, white—at random amongst Marcus's order. He was singing, loudly “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Frederica said to Agatha that she would never have believed, never, that her father would live in a house with pop music singing from the attic, round and round, over and over, on and on. Agatha said she had heard Bill himself humming “Eleanor Rigby.” “It's a good poem,” said Agatha. “Yes, but you wouldn't expect him to notice,” said Frederica.

Will was fourteen, and was singing in order not to have to speak. He was heavy like his father, and dark like his father. Mary, who was twelve, was singing solo in the Carol Service in the church. It was the first day of her first period, which she had learned from girls at school to call the Curse. She retired often to stare with a kind of awe at the red spots of blood on the soft white space of the towel. She had bought the towels herself, and had said nothing to Winifred, who as only a grandmother, however loving, was outside this female thing, was withered. She had said nothing to her schoolfriends, either, although the event was much discussed in the abstract. It was private, and strange, and satisfying. She needed a confidante, and thought of Frederica, and rejected her. She wasn't a sympathetic person, she wouldn't listen. She thought she would tell Agatha Mond, who was quiet and kind, and also a private and secret person. In her mind, darkly, she thought of the wet red traces in terms of the tale of Snow White, whose mother had seen three drops of blood on the snow, had borne her daughter, red as blood, black as ebony, white as snow, and had died. Her own mother had carelessly let herself be killed by an ice-machine, and Mary punished her, by never thinking of her. She was singing Christina Rossetti's “In the Bleak Midwinter.” She was singing of white things, snow on snow, a breast full of milk, a lamb. She had the beginnings of breasts herself, and was not invulnerable. She would speak to Agatha. There was a grave conversation about what to do, what to look out for, that was proper to have.

Later, Agatha told Frederica that Mary had confided in her. “She's one of the lucky ones,” said Agatha. “She looks lovely, she doesn't have spots, she hasn't got cramps, and feels she ought to have, she's just slipped into it.”

“Are you sure? She doesn't look old enough.”

“Of course I'm sure. She's a most practical young woman.”

“I'm a dreadful failure, Agatha. If I was a real human being—she should have told
me
. Not you. If not my mother, me.”

The dead are very present at Christmas. Sweet and terrible, Stephanie flickered in Frederica's body.

Agatha said, not quite truthfully, that the Curse was a rite of passage, that
non
-family was the right choice. She also knew Frederica wasn't who you would tell.

Frederica started to say to Agatha that the whole gathering was a gathering of non, or not-quite family, incomplete units like two sides of a square, or one of Richard Gregory's illusory hanging wire cubes, which turned out to have quite different properties. But she did not say it to Agatha, because remarking on that to Agatha brought up the never-mentioned subject of Saskia's absent, unnamed, unknown father. Saskia did appear, more than any other human child Frederica knew, to be the product of parthenogenesis.

Bill Potter had spent the whole of Frederica's childhood inveighing against the Virgin Birth. What are we to think, he would shout, of a squeamish set of monks who can't bear the thought of normal human bodies and have to invent all this farrago of an untouched, intact girl—with a lovely pure odourless inside, and a benign cuckold of a husband-to-be—producing the Incarnation, so to speak, at half-cock. The Word became Flesh, he would roar, but only
nice
girlish flesh, not real rough-and-tumble
affectionate
flesh. They had disgusting imaginations, those monks. Frederica had wished he would shut up, and had accepted his arguments. Hearing his voice raised again as she went in to high tea on Christmas Eve, before the carols, she assumed he was making his annual protest. But he was not. He had been testing the assembled children—Leo and Saskia, William and Mary—on their knowledge of the biblical narrative and had found them wanting. They knew about the ox and the ass, but were ignorant of the Slaughter of the Innocents. They knew about angels singing to shepherds, but had not been told about Lucifer and his fall. He sang the prophecies of Isaiah from the
Messiah
and they looked blank. He recited

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie
down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling
together; and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down
together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the
weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth
shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

The children looked blank. Bill said “No one knows the Bible any more.”

“I shouldn't have thought that should bother you,” said Daniel.

“How can they read Milton, and Lawrence, and Dickens, and Eliot without knowing their Bibles?”

“It wasn't written for that purpose. If it's not needed, it will all have to be rethought. Scripture isn't a
literary
matter. If Canon Holly is right, and God is dead, and we must dismantle the mythology, all your stuff goes with it, I'd have thought.”

He looked both pugnacious and amused, Bill thought. He said

“You can't just
take everything away
—at once—”

“Why not? It's what the Revolution is supposed to do.”

“What Revolution?”

“The one the students want. The New World. We can't imagine it, they say, because we're stuck in the dead past. You and me both,” said Daniel, grinning blackly at his father-in-law. Bill's once-red hair was ash-silver, and his temper was damped. He grinned back, ruefully.

When they set out for Church, in the dark, for the midnight carols, Bill put on his fleece-lined jacket.

It was Frederica who said, astounded “You
don't
—you never come. You never come.”

“Are you ordering me not to?”

“I'm commenting. You can't expect us not to comment.”

“I thought I would go to hear my granddaughter sing a poem by Christina Rossetti. Since the old order is about to pass away, according to Daniel.”

“I wasn't prophesying. Only commenting.”

“Are you going to tell us what you
do
think is happening?”

“No,” said Daniel. He had put on his dog-collar for the evening as a symbolic gesture, he was not sure of what. “I'm not. I'm only one man. One priest.”

“But you have to say you're glad I'm joining your flock,” said Bill.

“I don't. I'm not sure I am. You're subversion incarnate. But I am glad we shall hear Mary sing together.”

The Potter family filed into St. Cuthbert's Church. Frederica held Leo's hand, going up the path, although he was almost too old. They were another unfinished family, like Agatha and Saskia. Leo had received a very large parcel from his father, which he had brought, unopened, and put under the tree. Will was walking, not with his father, but with Winifred. Bill and Daniel were together. Mary was in the vestry with the choir. The church was hung with holly and ivy, with boughs of fir and pine, with golden baubles and silver starbursts. There was the old, good smell of leaves, and candlesmoke, and stone very faintly warmed.

The congregation was large. It was augmented this year by a contingent from Dun Vale Hall, the Anglican members of the Hearers. Gideon had come with Clemency, and Canon Holly in a long black shaggy overcoat, and Ruth shepherding a group of children—Lucy Nighby's three children, in knitted hats, the little one wearing a pink eye-patch, and three others. There were one or two more children. Gideon and Clemency's four, now in their twenties, were absent, though only Daniel knew them well enough to notice this. Gideon and Canon Holly also wore their dog-collars. Gideon wore the embroidered coat Zag had given him at the Solstice, gold sun and flowers on hide and wool. Clemency wore a swooping maxi-coat in black velvet, which made her look, Frederica thought, like the Wicked Queen, at least from the back. She had a black velvet cap with a long scarlet silk tassel. The congregation stole surreptitious glances. They were curious about the Hall.

Jacqueline Winwar came in late. Last year she had been part of the Potter grouping. This year, she was solitary, and looked ill. She bent her head—hatless—in prayer, looked up, and saw Ruth, who smiled freely and brilliantly at her old friend, transfiguring her own rather waxily serious little face.

The choir filed in. The organ struck up. Saskia observed audibly that they looked like angels, and so they did, in their white starched tents, fluted and floating. They all carried candles, which they then placed in glass holders before them. They were all ages, from mothers and aunts through retired churchmen and youths with acne to children, and almost not-children, like Mary. They had—she had—scarlet ribbons round their white frilled necks. Frederica thought of the guillotine, and Daniel thought of sacrificial lambs, and was overcome with grief for his daughter, her grave round face, her red-gold hair, her quiet, easy, precise movements, until he saw that the grief was for Stephanie, whose form moved like a ghost in and round her daughter's. There was the cast of her eyelid, there was the curve of her neck and the pulse in it, there was the golden cheek in the light of the flame. He shook himself. Mary was Mary and alive. He was Daniel, and was mostly alive. He saw her tongue moisten her lips as she prepared to sing.

They sang “The Holly and the Ivy.”

The holly bears a blossom
As white as lily-flower
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To be our sweet Saviour.

The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.

Mary sang descant. Her young voice rose to the stone and moved over it and descended again, air in a stone chamber. The candle flames flickered and leaped. Mary's shadow moved like a ghost on the stone; she was still, but the flame was not. They sang “We Three Kings.” Daniel hummed the verse about myrrh.

Sorrowing, sighing,
Bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb:
O—Oh—
Star of wonder, star of night ...

The Vicar, who looked like a farmer, asked Miss Godden, the headmistress of the Freyasgarth school, to read the Epistle, which was Hebrews I:I. She read well, respecting Cranmer's rhythms, trenchant and matter-of-fact about mystery, infinity, and the divine Man who was co-eternal with it. As angels are not, St. Paul insists.

God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time
past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken
unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom
also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the
express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his
power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right
hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better than the
angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than
they. For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my
Son, this day have I begotten thee ... And again, when he bringeth in
the first-begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God
worship him. And of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire ...

Frederica was always moved by angels. She looked up into the roof of the church, and small, stony, solid ones stared down at her, between stony feathers. Great impossible sailing beings, half-human, half-bird, creatures of a threshold. She looked at Agatha, who had invented the terrible Whistlers of
Flight North,
and thought that her mind naturally inhabited the world of living metaphor which was myth and fable, whereas she, Frederica, was confined to stitching and patching the solid, and you could still see the joins.

Miss Godden read serenely on.

And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the
earth; and the heavens are the work of thine hands: they shall perish, but
thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a
vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but thou art
the same, and thy years shall not fail.

Hark the Herald Angels sing ...
Veil'd in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the Incarnate Deity ...

Daniel sang for the pleasure of the sound, and behind him heard Gideon's golden voice, louder and clearer, and beside him a small creaking, unaccustomed throaty voice, Bill Potter, singing Charles Wesley's hymn, in Freyasgarth Church.