Sacrament

CHAPTER VII

Will spent the rest of the evening with Thomas Simeon, burying himself in this other life as a refuge from his own. It was no use brooding on what had happened at the hospital; with a little distance (and a couple of heart to hearts with Adrianna) he'd be able to put the experiences in a sane perspective. For now, it was best ignored. He rolled a joint, pulled his chair over to the open window, and sat there reading, lulled by the spatter of the rain on the roof and sill.

He'd left off reading with Dwyer moving from occult waters, where she'd plainly been out of her depth, back into the relative comfort of simple biography. Simeon's ever-reliable friend Galloway reappeared at this juncture, having been moved by 'the commands of friendship' (what had gone on between these two? Will wondered) to separate Simeon from his patron, Rukenau, 'whose baleful influence could be seen in every part of Thomas's appearance and demeanour'. Galloway, it seems, had conspired to save Simeon's soul from Rukenau's clutches; an attempt which, by Dwyer's description, amounted to a physical abduction: 'Aided by two accomplices, Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, the latter a disenchanted and much embittered acolyte of Rukenau, Galloway plotted Simeon's "liberation" as he was later to describe it, with the kind of precision that befitted his military upbringing. It went without incident, apparently. Simeon was discovered in one of the upper rooms of Rukenau's mansion in Ludlow, where, according to Galloway: "We found him in a piteous state, his once radiant form much wasted. He would not be persuaded to leave, however, saying that the work he and Rukenau were doing together was too important to be left unfinished. I asked him what work this was, and he told us that the age of the Domus Mundi was coming to pass, and that he would be its witness and its chronicler, setting down its glories in paint that Popes and Kings might know how petty their business was, and putting aside their wars and machinations, make an everlasting peace. How will this be? I asked him. And he told me to look to his painting, for it was there all made plain. "

'Only one of these paintings was to be found, however, and it appears that Galloway took it with him when he and his fellow conspirators left. How they persuaded Simeon to leave with them is not reported, but it is evident that Rukenau made some attempt to get Simeon back and that Galloway made accusations against him that drove him into hiding. Whatever happened, Rukenau now disappears from this story, and Simeon's life - which has only a few years to run - takes one last extraordinary turn.'

Will took the chapter break to go downstairs and raid the fridge, but his mind remained in the strange world from which he'd just stepped. Nothing in the here and now - not the brewing of tea nor the making of a sandwich, not the din of raucous laughter from the television next door, nor the shrill delivery of the comedian who was earning it - could distract him from the images circling in his head. It helped that he'd seen Simeon with his own eyes, living and dead. He'd seen the desperate beauty of the man, which had so fixated Galloway that he'd ventured where his rational mind had little grasp, to pluck his friend from perdition. There was something sweetly romantic about the man's devotion to Simeon, who was plainly of another order of mind entirely. Galloway did not understand him, nor ever could, but that didn't matter. The bond between them was nothing to do with intellectual compatibility. Nor, all smutty suspicions aside, was this some unspoken homosexual romance. Galloway was Simeon's friend, and he would not see harm done to one he loved: it was as simple, and as moving, as that.

Will returned to the book with his sustenance, unnoticed by Adele, and settling back beside the window (having first closed it, the night-air was chilly) he picked up the tale where he'd left off. He knew, or at least thought he knew, how this story ended, with a body in a wood, pecked and chewed. But how did it arrive there? That was the substance of the thirty pages remaining.

Dwyer had kept the text relatively free of personal judgments so far, preferring to use other voices to comment on Rukenau, for instance, and even then scrupulously quoting both supporters and detractors. But now she showed her hand, and it was no stranger to the Communion rail.

'It is in these last years,' she wrote, 'recovering from the unholy influence of Gerard Rukenau, that we see the redemptive power of Simeon's vision at work. Chastened by his encounter with madness, he returned to his labours with his ambition curbed, only to discover that with all craving for a grand thaumaturgical scheme sated, his imagination flowered. In his later works, all of which were landscapes, the hand of the artist is in service of a greater Creation. The painting entitled "The Fertile Acre", though at first glance a melancholy night-pastoral, reveals a pageant of living farms when studied closely-'

Will flipped the page to the reproduction of the painting in question. It was far less strange than the Rukenau piece, at least at first glance: a sloping field, with rows of moon-sculpted sheaves receding from sight. But even in the much-degraded reproduction, Simeon's sly skills were in evidence. He'd secreted animals everywhere: in the sheaves, and the shadow of the sheaves, in the foliage on the oak tree, in the cloak of the harvester sleeping beneath the tree. Even in the speckled sky there were forms hidden, curled up like the sleeping children of the stars.

'Here,' Dwyer wrote, 'is a mellower Simeon, painting with almost child-like pleasure the secret life of the world: drawing us in to peer at his half-hidden bestiary.'

But there was more to the picture, Will sensed, than a visual game. There was an eerie air of expectation about the image; every living thing it contained (except for the exhausted harvester) in hiding; holding its breath as if in terror of some imminent deed.

Will returned to Dwyer's text for a moment, but she had taken her critique off on a hunt for painterly antecedents, and after a few sentences he gave up and returned to the reproduction for further study. What was it about the picture that so intrigued him? It would not have been remotely to his taste if he'd simply happened upon it, knowing nothing of the painter. It was far too coy, with its prettified animals peering out from their boltholes in the paint. Coy, and unnaturally neat: the corn in military array, the leaves in spiral bouquets. Nature wasn't like that. The most placid scene, examined by an unsentimental eye, revealed a ragged world of raw forms in bitter and unending conflict. And yet, he felt a kinship with the picture; as though he and its maker were, despite all evidence to the contrary, men of similar vision.

Frustrated not to better understand his response to the work, he returned to Dwyer's text, skipping the art critique - which was mercifully short - and moving on to pick up the biographical threads. Whatever she'd claimed about the mellower Simeon, the facts of his life did not suggest a man at peace with himself.

'Between August of 1724 and March of 1725, he moved his lodgings no less than eleven times, the longest period he spent in one place being November and December, which he passed in a monastery at Dungeness. It is not clear whether he went there intending to take vows. If so, it was a passing fancy. By the middle of January he is writing to Dolores Cruikshank - who had been one of Rukenau's cronies three years before but was now, in her own words, quite cured of his influence -and states:

' "I am thinking of leaving this wretched country for Europe, where I think I may find souls more sympathetic to my vision than ever I have found in this too rational isle. I have looked everywhere for a tutor who might guide me, but I find only stale minds and staler rhetoric. It seems to me, we must invent religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only constant is in inconstancy. Did you ever meet a doctor of divinity who knew this simple truth; or if he knew it, dared speak it out? No. It is a heresy amongst learned men because to admit it is to unseat themselves from their certainties, and they may no longer lord themselves over us, saying: this is so, and this is not. It seems to me the purpose of religion is to say: all things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing that is yet to be: All Are So. There was one that we both knew who taught this truth, and I was too arrogant to learn it. I regret my foolishness every waking hour. I sit here in this tiny town, and look West to the islands, and pine for him like a lost dog. But I dare not go to him. He would kill me I think, for my ingratitude. Nor could I fault him for that. I was misled by well-meaning friends, but that's no excuse, is it? I should have bitten off their fingers when they came to take me. I should have choked them with their prayer-books. And now it's too late.

' "I beg you, send me news of him if you have any, so when I look towards the isles I may imagine him, and be soothed."'

This was powerful stuff; but difficult for Will to sympathize with. He had made his way in the world largely by defying tutelage, so this yearning for a teacher, so passionately phrased Simeon might have been speaking of physical desire, seemed to him faintly preposterous. To Dwyer also. 'It was,' she wrote, 'an indication that Simeon was undergoing a profound psychological upheaval. And there was more; a good deal more. In a second letter to Cruikshank, written from Glasgow, less than a week later, Simeon's over-ripe imaginings are running riot:

' "I heard from a certain source that the Man of the Western Isles has finally turned his golden architect to his purpose, and has the foundation of Heaven laid. What source is this, you ask? I will tell you, though you may mock me. The wind; that is my messenger. I have inklings from other sources, it's true, but none I trust as much as the wind, which brought me nightly such reports of all our Certain One has done that I began to sicken for want of sleep, and have retreated to this foul Caledonian town where the wind does not come with such fresh news.

' "But what use is it to sleep, if I wake in the same state that I lay down my head? I must mend my courage, and go to him. At least that is what I think this hour. The next I may be of another opinion entirely. You see how it is with me? I have contrary thoughts on every matter now, as though I were divided as surely as his architect. That was the trick by which he turned the creature to his purpose, and I wonder if he sowed the same division in my soul, as punishment for my betrayal. I think he would do that. I think he would take pleasure in it, knowing I would come after him at last, and that the closer I came the more set against myself I would become."

'Here,' Dwyer wrote, 'is the first mention of suicidal thoughts. There is no record of any reply from the pen of Mrs Cruikshank, so we must assume she judged Simeon so far gone he was beyond her help. Once only, in the last of the four letters he wrote to her during his Scottish sojourn does he refer to his art:

' "Today I have conceived a plan as to how I may play the prodigal. I will make a portrait of my Certain One upon his island. I have heard it called the Granary, so I will make the painting surrounding him with grain. Then I will take it to him, and pray that my gift assuages his rage. If it does then I will be received into his house and will gladly do his bidding until I die. If it does not, then you may assume I am dead by his hand. Whichever is the case, you will not hear from me after this."

'This pitiful letter,' Dwyer here remarked, 'was the last he ever wrote. It is not the last we hear of him, however. He survives for another seven months, travelling to Bath, to Lincoln, and to Oxfordshire, relying on the charity of friends. He even paints pictures, three of which survive. None of them fits the description of the Granary painting he is planning in his letter to Dolores Cruilcrhank. Nor is there any record of his having travelled to the Hebrides in search of Rukenau.

'It seems most likely that he gave up on the endeavour entirely, and went south from Glasgow in search of more comfortable lodgings. At some point in the travels, John Galloway tracks him down, and commissions him to paint the house he and his new wife (he had married in September of 1725) now occupy. As Galloway reports in a letter, to his father:

' "My good friend Thom Simeon is now at work immortalizing the house, and I have high hopes that the picture will be splendid. I believe Thomas has it in him to be a popular artist, if he can just put aside some of his high-flown notions. I swear if he could he would paint an angel blessing every leaf and blade of grass, for he tells me he looks hard to see them, noon and night. I think him a genius, probably; and probably mad. But it is a sweet madness, which offends Louisa not at all. Indeed she said to me, when I told her he looks for angels, that she did not wonder that he failed to see them, for he shed a better brightness than they, and shamed them into hiding. " '

An angel blessing every leaf and blade of grass - there was an image to conjure with, Will thought. Weary of Dwyer's prose now, of guesswork and assumptions, he returned to The Fertile Acre and studied it afresh. As he did so he realized the connection between this image and his own pictures. They were before and after scenes; bookends to the holocaust text that lay between. And the author of that text? Jacob Steep, of course. Simeon had painted the moment before Steep appeared: all life in terror at Jacob's imminence. Will had caught the moment after: life in extremis, the fertile acre become a field of desolation. They were companion creators, in their way; that was why his eye came back and back to this picture. It was painted by a brother, in all but blood.

There was a light tapping at the door, and Adele appeared, telling him she was off to bed. He glanced at his watch. It was ten-forty, to his astonishment.

'Goodnight then,' he said to her, 'sleep well.'

'I will,' she said. 'You do the same.' Then she was gone, leaving him to the last three or four pages of Simeon's life. There was little of any consequence in the remaining paragraphs. Dwyer's researchers ran out of steam two months or so before Simeon's passing.

'He died on or about July eighteenth, 1730,' she wrote, 'having reportedly swallowed enough of his own paints to poison himself. This, at least, is what is widely assumed to be the truth. There are in fact contradictory voices in this matter. An anonymous obituary in The Review, for instance, published four months after Simeon's death, hints darkly that "the artist had fewer reasons to die than others did to silence him."And Dolores Cruikshank, writing to Galloway at about the same time remarks that: "I have been trying to locate the physician who examined Thomas's corpse, because I heard a rumour that he'd found curious and subtle dislocations in the body, as though it had been subjected to an assault before death. I thought of the 'invisibles' you told me he had been so fearful of when you'd taken him from Rukenau's place. Had they perhaps mounted an attack upon him? But the physician, a Doctor Shaw, has disappeared apparently. Nobody knows where, or why. "

'There was one final oddity. Though John Galloway had made arrangements for his agents to collect the body and have it removed to Cambridge, where he'd arranged for it to be buried with due honours, when they came to do so the remains had already been spirited away. Thomas Simeon's last resting place is therefore unknown, but this writer believes his body was probably taken by land and sea to the Hebrides, where Rukenau had chosen to retreat. It is unlikely, given Rukenau's iconoclastic beliefs, that Simeon was buried in hallowed ground. It's more likely he lies in some anonymous spot. It is only to be hoped that he rests well there, the travails of his life ended before he had truly made any mark upon the art of his time.

'John Galloway was killed in 1734, accidentally shot during a military exercise on Dartmoor; Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, who assisted Galloway in the abduction of Simeon from Rukenau's house, both died young: Varty perished of consumption and Maupertius, arrested for smuggling opium in Paris, died of a heart attack in police custody. Only Dolores Cruikshank lived out her biblical span, and more, dying at the age of ninety-one. Much of the correspondence quoted here was in the possession of her heirs.

'As for Gerard Rukenau, despite four years of attempts by this author to uncover the truth behind his legendary existence, little beyond the information contained within these pages could be found. There is no trace of the house in Ludlow from which Galloway supposedly abducted him, nor are there extant any letters, pamphlets, wills or other legal documents bearing his name.

'In a sense, none of this matters. Simeon's legacy...'

Will's concentration drifted here, as Dwyer again tried to fit Simeon's work into an aesthetic context. Simeon the prophetic surrealist, Simeon the metaphysical symbolist, Simeon the nature painter. Then the text just petered out, as though she could not find a personal sentiment that suited her, and had simply let the text come to a halt.

He put the book down, and looked at his watch. It was a quarter past one. He didn't feel particularly tired, despite all that the day had brought. He wandered downstairs, and went to search the fridge for something to eat. Finding a bowl of rice-pudding, which had been one of Adele's coups as a cook, he retired to the living-room with bowl and spoon to indulge himself. Her recipe hadn't changed in the intervening years: the pudding was as rich and creamy as he remembered it. Patrick would go crazy for this, he thought, and so thinking picked up the phone and called him. It wasn't Patrick who answered, but Jack.

'Hey, Will,' he said, 'how ya doin'?'

'I'm okay.'

'You called at the right time. We've got a little meetin' goin' on here.' 'About what?'

'Oh you know ... stuff. Adrianna's here. Do you want to talk to her?' He got off the line with curious haste, and put Adrianna on. She sounded less than her best.

'Are you okay?' he said.

'Sure. We're just having some serious conversations here. How are you doing? Have you made peace with your Dad?'

'Nope. And it's not going to happen. He told me point-blank he doesn'~ want me visiting him any more.'

'So are you going to come home?'

'Not yet. I'll give you plenty of notice, don't worry, so you can lay or a big Welcome Home party.'

'I think you've partied enough,' she said.

'Uh-oh. Who have you been talking to?'

'Guess.'

'Drew.'

'Yep.'

'What's he saying?'

'He thinks you're crazy.'

'You defended me, of course.'

'You can do that for yourself. Do you want to speak to Pat?'

'Yeah. Is he around?'

'He is, but he's not ... doing too well right now.'

'Sick?'

'No, just a little emotional. We've been having a heavy conversation, and he's not in great shape. I mean, I'll get him for you if it's urgent.'

'No, no. I'll call back tomorrow. Just send him my love, will you?'

'Do I get some too?'

'Always.'

'We miss you.'

'Good.'

'See you soon.'

When he put the phone down, he felt a pang of separation, so sharp it caught his breath. He imagined them now - Patrick and Adrianna, Jack and Rafael, even Drew - going about their business while the fog crept over the hill, and ships boomed in the Bay. It would be so easy to pack up and creep away; leaving Hugo to heal and Adele to dote. In a day he'd be back amongst his clan, where he was loved.

But there would be no safety there. He might forget the hurt of this place for a few days; he might party himself into a stupor, and put the memories out of his head. But how long could that forgetfulness last? A week? A month? And then he'd be taking a shower or looking at a moth on the window, and the story he had left unfinished would come back to haunt him. He was in thrall to it: that was the unpalatable truth. His intellect and emotions were too thoroughly engaged in this mystery for him to leave. Perhaps at the beginning he'd been merely a conduit, as Jacob had dubbed him, an unwitting sensitive through which Steep's memories had flowed. But he had made himself more than that over the years. He'd become Simeon's echo: a maker of pictures that showed the spoiler's hand at work. There was no escaping that role; no pretending he was just a common man. He had laid claim to vision, and with it came responsibility. If so, so. He would watch, as he had always watched, until the story's end. If he survived, he would bear witness as no one had ever done before: he would tell a tale of near-extinction from the survivor's side. If not - if he was dispatched into an unnatural grave by the very hand that had made him the witness he was - then he would at least go knowing the nature of his dispatcher, and lie, perhaps, more quietly for the knowledge.