Sacrament

CHAPTER VI

He began to study the book as soon as he got back to the house. It was scarcely more than a monograph; a hundred and thirty pages of text, along with ten line reproductions and six plates, which was intended, so the author, one Kathleen Dwyer, stated as: 'a brief introduction to the life and work of an almost entirely neglected artist.

Born in the first decade of the eighteenth century, Thomas Simeon had been something of a prodigy. Raised in Suffolk, in humble circumstances, his artistic skills had been first noticed by the local vicar, who out of what seemed to be a selfless desire to have a God-given gift provide joy to as many people as possible, had arranged for the young Simeon's work to be seen in London. Two watercolours from the hand of the fifteen-year-old boy had been purchased by the Earl of Chesterfield, and Thomas Simeon was on his way. Commissions followed: a series of picturesque scenes depicting London theatres had been successful; there had been a few attempts at portraiture (these less wellreceived) and then, when the artist was still a month short of his eighteenth birthday, there had come the work by which his reputation as a visionary artist was made: a Diptych for the altar of St Dominic's in Bath. The paintings were now lost, but by all contemporary reports they had caused quite a stir.

'Through the letters of John Galloway,' Dwyer had written, 'we can follow the blossoming of the controversy which attended the unveiling of these paintings. Their subjects were unremarkable: the left hand panel depicting a scene in Eden, the right, the Hill at Golgotha.

"'It seemed to everyone who saw them," Galloway reports in a letter to his father dated February 5th, 1721, "as if Thomas had walked on the perfect earth of Adam's Garden, and set down in paint all he saw; then gone straightaway to the place where Our Lord died, and there made a painting as desolate as the first was filled with the light of God's presence."

'Barely four months later, however, Galloway's tone had changed. .Ye was no longer so certain that Simeon's visions were entirely healthy. "I have many times thought that God moved in my dear Thom, " Galloway wrote, "but perhaps that same door which he opened in his breast to give God entrance, he left unattended, for it seems to me sometimes that the Devil came into his soul, too, and there fights night and day with all that is best in Thom. I do not know who will win the war, but I fear for Thomas's presence of mind."'

There was more on the subject of Simeon's deterioration around the time of the Diptych, but Will skimmed it. He had an hour before Adele had planned their trip to the hospital, and he wanted to have the slim volume read. Moving on to the next chapter, however, he found Dwyer's style thickening as she attempted to make an account of what was clearly a problematic area in her researches. Paring away the filigree and the qualifications, the essence of the matter seemed to be this: Simeon had undergone a crisis of faith in the late autumn of 1722 and may (though documentation was unreliable here) have attempted suicide. He had alienated Galloway, his companion from childhood, and sequestered himself in a squalid studio on the outskirts of Blackheath, where he indulged a growing addiction to opium. So far, predictable enough. But then, in Dwyer's constipated phrasing, came:

... the figure who would, with his subtle appeals to the painter's now debauched instincts, render the glorious promise of his gilded youth a tarnished spectacle. His name was Gerard Rukenau, variously described by contemporary witnesses as "transcendalist of surpassing skill and wisdom ", and, by no lesser personage than Sir Robert Walpole, "the very model of what he must become, as this age dies". To hear him speak was, one witness remarked, "like listening to the Sermon on the Mount delivered by a satyr; one is moved and repelled in the same moment, as though he arouses one's higher self and one's basest instincts simultaneously".

'Here, then,' Dwyer theorizes, 'was a man who could understand the contrary impulses that had fractured Simeon's fragile state-of-mind. A father confessor who would quickly become his sole patron, removing him both from the pit of self-abnegation into which he'd fallen and from the leavening influence his saner friends might have exercised.'

At this juncture, Will put the book down for a couple of minutes in order to digest what he'd just read. Though he now had a few descriptions of Rukenau to juggle, they essentially cancelled one another out, which left him no further advanced. Rukenau was a man of power and influence, that much was clear; and had no doubt powerfully affected Steep. Could Living and dying we feed the fire not have been a line from a satyr's sermon? But as to what the source of his power might be, or the nature of his influence, there was little clue.

He returned to the text, sprinting through a few paragraphs that attempted to put Simeon's work in some kind of aesthetic context, in order to pick up the thread of Rukenau's involvement with the painter's life. He didn't have to go far. Rukenau, it seems, had plans for Simeon's wayward genius, and it soon showed itself. He wanted the painter to make a series of pictures 'evoking', according to Dwyer, 'Rukenau's transcendalist vision of humanity's relationship to Creation, in the form of fourteen pictures chronicling the building - by an entity known only as the Nilotic - of the Domus Mundi. Literally, The House of the World. Only one of these pictures is known, and it indeed may be the only one surviving, given that a woman friend of Rukenau, Dolores Cruikshank, who had volunteered to pen an exegesis of his theories, complained in March of 1723 that:

" ... between Gerard's meticulous concerns for a true reflection of his philosophies, and Simeon's aesthetic neuralgia, these pictures have been made in more versions than Mankind itself, each one destroyed for some piffling flaw in conception or execution ..."'

The one extant painting had been reproduced in the book, albeit poorly. The picture was in black and white, and washed out, but there was enough detail to intrigue Will. It seemed to depict an early portion of the construction process: a naked, sexless figure who appeared to be black-skinned in the reproduction (but could just as easily have been blue or green), was bending towards the earth, in which numerous fine rods had been stuck, as though marking the perimeters of the dwelling. The landscape behind the figure was a wasteland, the ground infertile, the sky deserted. In three spots a fire burned in a crack in the earth, sending up a plane of dark smoke, but that only seemed to emphasize the desolation. As for the hieroglyphics which Frannie had described, they were carved on stones scattered throughout the wilderness, as though they'd been tossed out of the sky as clues for the lone mason.

'What are we to make of this peculiar image?' the text asked. 'Its hermeticism frustrates us; we long for explanation, and find none.' Not even from Dwyer, it appeared. She flailed around for a couple of paragraphs attempting to make parallels with illustrations to be found in alchemical treatises, but Will sensed that she was out of her depth. He flipped to the next chapter, leaving the rest of Dwyer's amateur occultism unread, and was halfway through the first page when he heard Adele summoning him. He was reluctant to put the book down, and even more reluctant to go and visit Hugo a second time, but the sooner the duty was done, he reasoned, the sooner he'd be back in Thomas Simeon's troubled world. So he set the book on the chair and headed downstairs to join Adele.

ii

Hugo was feeling sluggish. He'd had some pain after lunch; nothing unusual, the nurse reassured Adele, but enough to warrant a dessert of pain-killers. They had subdued him considerably, and throughout the three-quarter-hour visit, his speech was slow and slurred, his focus far from sharp. Most of the time, in fact, he was barely aware that Will was in the room, which suited Will just fine. Only towards the end of the visit did his gaze flutter in his son's direction.

'And what did you do today?' he asked, as though he were addressing a nineyear-old.

'I saw Frannie and Sherwood.'

'Come a little closer,' Hugo said, feebly beckoning Will to the bedside. 'I'm not going to strike you.' 'I didn't imagine you were,' Will said.

'I've never struck you, have I? There was a policeman here, said I had.'

'There's no policeman, Dad.'

'There was. Right here. Rude bugger. Said I beat you. I never beat you.' He sounded genuinely distressed at the accusation.

'It's the pills they're giving you, Dad,' Will gently explained, 'they're making you a little delirious. Nobody's accusing you of anything.'

'There was no policeman?'

'No.'

'I could have sworn ...' he said, scanning the room anxiously. 'Where's Adele?'

'She's gone to get some fresh water for your flowers.'

'Are we alone?'

'Yes.'

He leaned up out of the pillow. 'Am I ... making a fool of myself ?'

'In what way?'

'Saying things ... that don't make sense?'

'No, Dad, you're not.'

'You'd tell me wouldn't you?' he said. 'Yes, you would. You'd tell me because it'd hurt and you'd like that.'

'That's not true.'

'You like watching people squirm. You get that from me.'

Will shrugged. 'You can believe what you like, Dad. I'm not going to argue.'

'No. Because you know you'd lose.' He tapped his skull. 'See, I'm not that delirious. I can see your game. You only came back when I'm weak, and confused, because you think you'll get the upper hand. Well you won't. I'm your match with half my wits.' He settled back into his pillow again. 'I don't want you coming here again,' he said softly.

'Oh for Christ's sake.'

'I mean it,' Hugo said, turning his face from Will. 'I'll get better without your care and attention, thank you very much.' Will was glad his father's eyes were averted. The last thing he wanted at that moment was for Hugo to see what an effect his words were having. Will felt them in his throat and chest and gut.

'All right,' Will said. 'If that's what you want.'

'Yes, it is.'

Will watched him a moment longer, with some remote hope that Hugo would say something to undo the hurt. But he'd said all he intended to say

'I'll get Adele,' Will murmured retreating from the bed, 'she'll want to say goodbye. Take care of yourself, Dad.'

There was no further response from Hugo, whether word or sign. Shaken, Will left him to his silence, and headed out in search of Adele. He didn't tell her the substance of his exchange with Hugo; simply said that he'd wait for her at reception. She told him she'd just been speaking to the doctor and he was very optimistic about Hugo's progress. Another week, she said, and he could probably come home; wasn't that wonderful?

It was raining now. Nothing monsoonal, just a steady drizzle. Will didn't shelter from it. He stood outside with his face turned up to the sky, letting the drops cool his hot eyes and flushed cheeks.

When Adele emerged she was in her usual post-visit flutter. Will volunteered to drive, certain he could shave fifteen minutes off the travel time, and be back with the Simeon book before dark. She babbled on happily as they went, mainly about Hugo. 'He makes you very happy, doesn't he?' Will said.

'He's a fine man,' she said, 'and he's been very good to me over the years. I thought when my Donald passed away I'd never have another happy day. I thought the world was at an end. But you know, you get on with it, don't you? It was hard at first because I felt guilty, still living when he was gone. I thought: that's not right. But you get over that after a while. Hugo helped me. We'd sit and talk and he'd tell me to just enjoy the little things. Not try and understand what it was all about, because that was all a waste of time. It was funny that, coming from him. I always thought philosophers were sitting talking about the meaning of life, and there's Hugo saying don't waste your breath.'

'And that was good to hear, was it?'

'It helped,' she said. 'I started to enjoy the little things, the way he said. I was always working so hard when Donald was alive-

'You still work hard.'

'It's different now,' she said. 'If something doesn't get dusted, I don't fret about it. It's just dust. I'll be dust one of these days.'

'Have you got him to go to church?'

'I don't go any more.'

'You used to go twice on a Sunday.'

'I don't feel the need.'

'Did Hugo talk you into that?'

'I don't get talked into things,' Adele said, a little defensively.

'I didn't mean-'

'No, no, I know what you meant. Hugo's a godless man, and he always will be. But I saw the suffering my Donald went through. Terrible it was,terrible, to see him in such a state. And I know people say that's when your faith gets tested. Well, maybe mine did and it wasn't strong enough, because church never meant the same to me after that.'

'God let you down?'

'Donald was a good man. Not clever, like Hugo, but good in his heart. He deserved better.' She fell silent for a minute or so, then added a coda: 'We've got to make the most of what comes along, haven't we? There's nothing certain.'