The Children's Book

saints and angels who might answer his need for the larger life, and make his spirit less lonely and meagre. His church, like most Marsh churches, had been despoiled at the Reformation. The Virgin had been smashed, and the stone angels bashed and beheaded, though the ghosts of a fresco in which they played on trumpet and psaltery at the Creation, still stained the east wall, under the oval text-boards which had replaced them with Puritan admonitions. “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” And Solomon’s saying “Sand and gravel are very heavy things, yet the anger of a fool is much heavier.” And Job: “As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: So man lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.” Marsh Puritans were obsessed with the shifting dangers of masses of water and sand.

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