Sacrament

CHAPTER XV

i

Hugo had never been a sentimentalist. It was one of the bounden duties of a philosopher, he'd always contended, to eschew the mask of cheaply-gained emotion, and find a purer place, where reality might be studied and assessed without the prejudice of feeling. That was not to say he was not weak, at times. When Eleanor had left him, twelve years ago now, he had found himself susceptible to all manner of clap-trap that would have left him untouched at any other time. He'd become acutely aware of how much popular culture promoted yearning: songs of love and loss on the radio, tales of tragic mismatches on the soaps he'd catch Adele watching in the afternoon. Even some of his own peers had turned their attentions to such trivialities; men and women of his own age and reputation studying the semiotics of romance. It appalled him to see these phenomena, and sickened him that he himself was prone to their blandishments. It had made him doubly harden his heart against his estranged wife. When she'd asked for a reconciliation the following January (she'd left him in July) he had refused it with a loathing that was fuelled in no small part by a repugnance at his own frailty. The love songs had left their scars, and he hated himself for it. He would never be that vulnerable again.

But memory still conspired against reason. When every year towards the end of August the first intimations of autumn appeared - a chill at twilight, and the smoky smell in the air - he would remember how it had been with Eleanor at the best of times. How proud he'd been to have her at his side; how happy to see their partnership fruitful: to be a father of sons who would, he'd thought, grow up to idolize him. They had sat together, he and Eleanor, for evening after evening in those early years, planning their lives. How he would get a chair at one of the more prestigious universities and lecture a couple of days a week while he wrote the books by which he would change the course of Western thought. Meanwhile, she would raise their sons, then - once the children were independent spirits (which would be quickly, given that they had such self-willed parents) - she would return to her own field of interest, which was genealogy. She too would write a book, very probably, and garner her share of the limelight.

That had been the dream. Then, of course, Nathaniel had been killed, and the whole prospectus had become nonsense overnight. Eleanor's nerves, which had never been good, started to require higher and higher doses of medication; the books Hugo had planned to write refused to find their way out of his head and onto the page. And the move from Manchester - which had seemed an eminently rational decision at the time - had brought its own crop of troubles. That first autumn had been the nadir, no doubt. Though there had been plenty of bad times later, it had been the insanities of that October and November that had scoured him of his former optimism. Nathaniel, in whom the virtues of the parents (Eleanor's compassion and physical grace, Hugo's robust pragmatism and cleaving to truth) had been wed, was gone. Will meanwhile, had become a mischief-maker, his pranks and his secretiveness only reinforcing Eleanor's belief that the best had gone from the world, so there was no harm sedating herself into a stupor.

Grim memories, all of them. And yet when he thought of Eleanor (and he often did), the sentimental songs had their way with him still, and he would feel that old yearning in his throat and belly. It wasn't that he wanted her back (he'd made new arrangements since then, and they worked well enough in their unromantic way) but that the years he'd had with her - good, bad and indifferent - had passed into history, and when he conjured her face in his mind's eye he conjured a golden age, when it had still seemed possible to achieve something important. He yearned then, despite himself. Not for the woman or for the life he'd lived with her, and certainly not for the son who'd survived, but for the Hugo who had still been self-possessed enough to believe in his own significance.

Too late now. He would not change the world of thought with a brilliantly argued thesis. He could not even change the expressions on the faces of the students who sat before him at his lectures: slack-faced young dullards whom he could not remotely inspire, and so now no longer tried. He had ceased to read the work of his peers - most of it was masturbatory rubbish anyway - and the books that had once been his personal bibles, particularly Heidegger and Wittgenstein, languished unstudied. He had exhausted them. Or, more probably, exhausted his interaction with them. It was not that they had nothing left to teach him, but that he had no interest left in learning. Philosophy had not made him one jot happier. Like so much of his life, it was a thing that had seemed to offer value - a repository of meaning and enlightenment that had proved to be utterly empty.

That was one of the reasons he hadn't moved back to Manchester after Eleanor's departure: he had no interest in rifling the graves of Academe for some pitiful nonsense to publish. The other reason was Adele. Her husband Donald had died of a creeping cancer two years before Eleanor had left, and in widowhood the woman had become more attentive than ever to the needs of the Rabjohns household. Hugo liked her plain manners, her plain cooking, her plain emotions, and though she was very far from the vintage beauty Eleanor had been, he had no hesitation in seducing her. Perhaps seduction was not quite the word. She had no patience with conniving of any kind, and he'd finally bedded her by telling her outright that he needed the comfort of a woman's company, and surely she in her turn missed the company of a man. Now and again, she'd said, she missed having somebody to snuggle up with, especially on cold nights. It had been, the week of this exchange, exceptionally chilly, which fact Hugo had pointed out to her. She'd given him the closest approximation to a sexy smile her dimpled face could manage and they'd retired to bed together. The arrangement had steadily become ritualized. She would sleep at home four nights a week, but on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays she'd stay with Hugo. When his divorce from Eleanor was finalized, he'd even suggested they marry, but to his surprise she'd told him she was very happy with things just the way they were. She'd had enough of husbands for one lifetime, she told him. This way they weren't bound to one another, and that was for the best.

ii

So life had gone on, in its unremarkable way, and despite his disappointments, Hugo had come to feel more at home in Burnt Yarley than he'd ever thought he would. He was not a great lover of nature (the theory of it was fine, the practice mucky and malodorous) but there was a rhythm to the agricultural year which was comforting, even to an urban soul like his. Fields ploughed and seeded and tended and harvested; livestock born and nurtured and slaughtered and eaten. He let the house, which was now far too big for him, run down. He didn't care that the gutters needed mending and the window-frames were rotting away. When somebody at The Plough mentioned that the front garden wall had partially collapsed he told them he was glad of the fact: that way the sheep could get in to clip the lawn.

He was increasingly regarded as an eccentric in the village, he knew; a reputation he did nothing to contradict. He'd once been quite the peacock when it came to suits and accoutrements. Now he simply wore what came to hand, often in faintly outlandish combinations. In crowded places, such as the pub, his deafness (which was slight in his left ear, much worse in his right) made him shout, which only increased the impression of a slightly addled soul. He would sit at the bar drinking brandies for hours on end, opining on any subject that came up; to hear him in the midst of shouted debate, nobody would have guessed him a man out of faith with the world. He argued heatedly on politics (he still called himself a Marxist, if pressed), religion (of course, the opiate of the people), race, disarmament or the French, his debating skills still formidable enough to win two out of every three rounds,even when he was espousing a position he had no belief in, which was to say, most of the time.

The one subject he would not talk about was Will, though of course as Will's reputation had grown, so had people's curiosity. Very occasionally, if Hugo was three or four brandies deep, he'd offer a non-committal reply to an observation somebody made, but people who knew him well soon came to understand that he was not a proud father. Those with long enough memories knew why. The Rabjohns boy had been a participant in what was surely the grimmest episode in the history of Burnt Yarley. Twenty-nine years on, Delbert Donnelly's daughter still put flowers on her father's grave on the first Sunday of every month, and the reward for information leading to the arrest of his killers (posted by the meat baron in Halifax from whom Delbert had always got his pies and sausage) was still good. At the time of his death, so history told, he'd been playing the Good Samaritan, out in the snow looking for a runaway child, a child who, it was believed by those who still mused on the mystery, had been somehow complicit with the killers. Nothing had ever been proved, of course, but anyone who had followed Will Rabjohns' rise to fame could not help but notice the perversity of his work. Nobody in the village could have used that word, besides perhaps Hugo. They would have called it a mite strange or not quite right, or - if they were in a superstitious mood, the Devil's business. It certainly wasn't wholesome or healthy to be going around the world the way he had, finding dying animals to photograph. It was further proof, for those who cared, that Will Rabjohns, man and boy, was a bad lot. So bad, in fact, that his own father would barely admit paternity.

Hugo's silence, however, did not mean Will was not in his thoughts. Though he spoke with his son rarely, and when he did their exchanges were remote, the mysteries of that winter almost three decades before (and of his son's place in the midst of those mysteries), vexed him more as the years passed, and for a reason he would never have admitted to anyone. Philosophy had failed him, love had failed him, ambition and ego had failed him: only the unknown remained to him, as a source of hope. Of course, it was everywhere, the unknown. In the new physics, in disease, in a neighbour's eyes. But his closest brush with it remained the business of that bitter night so many years ago. Had he realized at the time something extraordinary was afoot, he would have paid closer attention: memorized the signs, so that he might later find his way back into its presence. But he had been too busy with the labours of being Hugo to notice. Only now, when those distractions had rotted away, did he see the mystery glinting there, as cold, remote and constant as a star.

He'd read in Newsweek an interview in which his son, when asked what quality he valued most in himself, had replied patience. That came from me, Hugo had thought. I know how to wait. That was how he passed the days now, when he wasn't in Manchester. Sitting in his study smoking a French cigarette, waiting. When Adele came in with a cup of tea or a sandwich he would turn his attention to his papers as though he were in the midst of some profound thought, but as soon as she'd gone he'd be gazing out through the window again, watching cloud shadows pass across the fell that rose behind the house. He didn't know exactly what he was waiting for, but he trusted his wits enough to be certain he'd recognize it when it came.