Sacrament

CHAPTER X

0until the years, Will had needed to polish his powers of deception until they were virtually flawless - talking his way into places he was not supposed to go to document sights he was not supposed to see. They stood him in good stead in the hours following the confrontation in the rose-garden. First in the hospital, minutes after the stabbing, signing the paperwork that allowed his father's body to be tagged and taken away, then in the car with Adele, heading back to the house: through it all he pretended a calm, subdued demeanour and carried it off unchallenged.

He didn't repeat Rosa's confession to Adele, of course. What was the use? Better that she believed her beloved Hugo had died contentedly in his sleep than be troubled with the truth, in all its grotesquerie, especially when that truth brought with it so many questions that Will could not answer. Not yet at least. Enough had been said in the garden for him to dare believe he might yet decode the mystery. Row's talk of Rukenau as a living presence (as impervious to the claims of age, it seemed, as she and Steep), and the notion that he was somehow a healer of her pain (had she been foreseeing the wound she was about to sustain?) were both new elements in the story. He had not yet put the pieces together, but he would. What he'd felt in the garden he felt still: that Lord Fox remained in him, its spirit effervescent. It would sniff out the truth, however many carcasses it was hidden beneath.

No doubt that would be a dangerous process: whatever murderous intentions Steep had harboured before dawn were surely multiplied a hundredfold now. Will was no longer simply an error of judgment; a boy with a hole in his head who'd grown into a too-adhesive man. Not only did he possess information (very little, in fact, but Steep didn't know that), he'd also witnessed the wounding of Rosa. As if all of that wasn't enough, Will now had the knife. He felt it tapping against his chest as he drove, secure in the inner pocket of his jacket. If for nothing more, Jacob would come to reclaim it.

Given that fact, Will wanted to separate himself from Adele as soon as possible. Plainly Steep had little compunction about harming people who got between him and his quarry; Adele's life would surely be forfeit if she was in his path. Luckily, she was already in her pragmatic her tears all dried, at least for now, as she listed all the things she needed to do. There was the funeral director to contact, and a coffin to choose, and the vicar at St Luke's had to be told, so that a service could be arranged. She and Hugo had found a nice plot, she told Will, near the west wall of the churchyard. Strange, Will thought, for a man who had scowled at any profession of religious belief, to eschew the clean ease of cremation in favour of burial amongst the God-fearing elders of the village. Perhaps Hugo had done it for Adele's sake, but even that in its way was remarkable: that he'd put his own feelings aside so as to accommodate her wishes. Especially this decision, this last. Perhaps he had felt more for her than Will had thought.

'He made a will, I do know that,' Adele was saying. 'It's with a solicitor in Skipton. A Mr .. . Mr ... Napier. That's it. Napier. I suppose you should be the one to contact him, because you're next of kin.' Will said he'd do that straight away. 'First, some breakfast,' Adele said.

'Why don't you go down to your sister"s place for a few hours,' Will said. 'You don't want to be cooking food

'That's exactly what I do want to be doing,' she said firmly. 'I've been happier in this house-'they were driving up to the gate as she spoke -than any other place I've ever been. And this is where I want to be right now.'

She was plainly not going to be moved on the subject, and Will remembered her stubbornness well enough to know that further pressure would only entrench her. Better to eat some breakfast and assess the situation when he'd filled his belly. He had a few hours of grace, he suspected, until Steep made another move. There was Rosa's body for Jacob to deal with, for one thing; that was assuming she was dead. If she wasn't, he'd presumably be tending to her. She'd sustained at very least a grievous wound, delivered by a weapon that carried more than its share of fatal capacity. But she had outlived a human span by many decades (she'd been there on the banks of the Neva, two hundred and fifty years before) so she was clearly not as susceptible to death as an ordinary human being. Perhaps she was even now recovering.

In short, he knew very little, and could predict even less. In such circumstances, eat. That was Adele's recipe, and by God, it worked. Both their moods brightened as she cooked and served a breakfast fit for suicidal kings: bacon, sausage, eggs, kidneys, mushrooms, tomatoes and fried bread.

'What time did you get to sleep last night?' she asked him as they ate. He told her sometime after onethirty. 'You should lie down for a little while this afternoon,' she said. 'Two hours is not enough for anyone.'

'Maybe I'll find a little time later,' he said to her, though he would have to balance out the requirements of fatigue and vigilance to do so.

Fortified by food, tea and a couple of cigarettes, he made the call to Napier the solicitor, for Adele's peace of mind. Napier expressed his condolences, and confirmed that yes, all the necessary paperwork had been completed two years before, and unless Will intended to contest his father's wishes, all of Hugo's money, and of course the house, would go to Adele Bottrall. Will replied that he had no intention of contesting, and thanking Napier for his efficiency, went to pass the news along to Adele. He found her at the door of Hugo's study.

'I think maybe you should go through his papers rather than me,' she said. 'Just in case there's ... oh, I don't know . .. things from your mother. Private things.'

'We don't have to do it today, Adele,' Will said gently.

'No, no, I know. But when the time comes, I'd be more comfortable if you did it.'

He told her he would, and reported on his conversation with Napier.

'I don't know what I'm going to do with the house,' she fretted.

'Don't even think about it right now,' Will told her.

'I've never been very good with legal things,' she said, her voice softer than he'd ever heard it. 'I get confused when solicitors talk.'

He took her hand. Her thin fingers were cold, but her skin was creamysoft, despite the years of washing and cleaning. 'Adele,' he said, 'listen to me. Dad was very organized.'

'Yes,' she said. 'I liked that about him.'

'So you needn't worry-,

Suddenly she said: 'I loved him, you know.' The saying of it seemed to surprise her as much as it did Will; tears came, filling her eyes. 'He made me ... so happy,' Will put his arms around her, and she willingly took his comfort, sobbing against him. He didn't insult her grief with platitudes; she had loved this man with all her heart, and now he'd gone, and she was alone. There were no words for that. What little comfort he could offer he offered with his arms, gently rocking her while she cried.

He had seen mourning in a hundred species in his time. Made photographs of elephants at the bodies of their fallen kind, grief in every tiny motion of their mass; and monkeys, maddened by sorrow, shrieking like keening clansmen around their dead; a zebra, nosing at a foal brought down by wild dogs, head bowed by the weight of her loss. It was unkind, this life, for things that felt connection, because connections were always broken, sooner or later. Love might be pliant, but life was brittle. It cracked, it crumbled, while the earth went on about its business, and the sky on its way as though nothing had happened.

At last, Adele drew herself away from him, and mopping up the tears with a much-used handkerchief, sniffed and said: 'Well, this isn't going to get anything done, is it now?' She drew a sighing breath. 'I'm sorry things were the way they were between you and Hugo. I know how he could be, believe me I do. But he could be so wonderful, when he didn't feel as if he had to show off. He didn't have to do that with me, you see. I doted on him and he knew it. And of course he liked to be doted on. I think most men do.' She sniffed hard, and for a moment it seemed tears were going to come again, but she got the better of them. 'I'm going to call the vicar,' she said, tugging her mouth into a wan semblance of a smile. 'We'll have to think of some hymns.'

When she'd gone, Will opened the study door and peered in. The curtains were partially drawn, a shaft of sunlight falling across the littered desk and onto the threadbare carpet. Will stepped into the room, breathing the scent of books and old cigarette smoke. This had been Hugo's fortress: a room of great men and great thoughts, he'd been fond of saying. The shelves, which covered two full walls from floor to ceiling, were crammed with books. All the usual suspects: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hume, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kant. Will had peered into a couple of these volumes in his youth - a last forlorn attempt to find favour with Hugo -but the contents had been as incomprehensible to him as a page of mathematical equations. On the antique table to the left of the window, the second great collection this room boasted: a dozen or more bottles of malt whisky; all of them rare, and all savoured when the study door was closed and Hugo was alone. He pictured his father now, sitting in the battered leather chair behind his desk, sipping and thinking. Had the whisky eased his understanding of the words, he wondered; had his mind slid through the forests of Kant more speedily when slickened by a single malt?

He crossed to the desk, where a third collection was gathered: Hugo's brass paperweights, seven or eight of them, set upon various piles of notes. If any private correspondence with Eleanor survived it would be here in one of the drawers. But he doubted its existence. Even assuming his parents had once been so in love as to exchange passionate billets-doux, he could not imagine Hugo preserving them after the separation.

There was a sheaf of papers lying on the blotting pad in the middle of the desk. Will picked them up, and flipped through them. They seemed to be notes for a lecture; every other word contested, scribbled and rewritten, portions of the text so densely annotated it was virtually indecipherable. Opening the curtain a little wider to shed a better light on the desk, he sat down in his father's chair and studied the chaotic sheets, piecing the sense of the text together as best he could.

We deal daily with the squalid facts of our animality, Hugo had written, putting (illegible) a process of self-censorship so engrained we can no longer see it at work. We do not examine the excrement in the bowl or the phlegm in the handkerchief for moral or ethical (he had first written spiritual in place of ethical, but struck it out) indicators. There followed a paragraph that he had excised completely, cross-hatching it in his fervour to erase it. When the text picked up again, it was clearer, but still problematic:

Tears, we may allow, carry a measure of emotional significance. In certain (illegible) sweat may be ... (illegible) But as scientific methodologies become increasingly sophisticated, their tools charting and (calibrating, was it? or calculating; one of the two) the nuances of the phenomenal world with an accuracy that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, we are obliged to reconfigure our assumptions. Chemical signifiers - the sap that oozes from our flesh and organs in response to emotional activity- may be found in all our waste products. Beside this he had scrawled three question marks, as though he was here doubtful of his facts. He ploughed on with his thesis nevertheless:

Emotion, in other words, resides in the most despised matter in our local parameters, and it will soon be within the realm of instrument sensitivity that the precise emotional source of these signifiers may be discovered. In short, we will be able to recognize a quality of mucus that carries traces of envy; a sample of sweat containing evidence of our rage; a portion of excrement which may be dubbed loving.

The perverse wit of his father's construction brought a smile to Will's lips; the way that last sentence had been cunningly constructed, phrase by phrase, to climax in the inevitable collision of the sublime and the abject. Had Hugo seriously intended to deliver this to his students? If so, it would have been quite a sight, Will thought, seeing the import of what they were being told dawn on them.

There followed two and a half paragraphs that had been scratched out, and then Hugo had taken up his argument in an even more unlikely direction, his language growing steadily more ironic. How are we to read and interpret these glad tidings? he'd written, This curious interface between emotions that we hold in high esteem and the muck which our bodies ooze and expel? In passing these chemical signifiers into the living and sensitive matrix of a world which it pleases us to characterize as neutral, are we perhaps influencing it in ways neither our sciences nor our philosophies have hitherto recognized? And further, in reconsuming the products of this now-tainted reality as food, are we at some presently indiscernible level continuing a cycle of emotional consumption: dining, as it were, on a salad dressed with other men's emotion?

At the very least, let us admit the possibility that our bodies are a kind of market-place, in which emotion is both the coin and the consumable. And if we dare a braver stance, consider that the terrain we have dubbed our inner lives is, in a fashion we cannot yet analyze or quantify, affecting the so-called outer or exterior world at such a subtle, but all-pervasive level that the distinction between the two, which depends upon a clear definition of a non-sentient, material state and us, its thinking, emoting overlords, becomes problematic. Perhaps the coming challenge is not, as Yeats had it, that 'the centre will not hold', but that the boundaries are blurring. All that constituted the jealously defined expression of our humanity - our private, passionate selves - is in truth a public spectacle, its sights so universally manifested, and so commonplace, that we can never gain the necessary distance to separate ourselves from the very soup in which we swim

Strange stuff, Will thought, as he laid the sheets back on the blotting pad. Though the word spiritual had been very severely ousted from the text, its presence lingered. Despite the dry humour, and chilly vocabulary of the text, it was the work of a man feeling his way towards a numinous vision; sensing, perhaps reluctantly, that his philosophies were out of breath, and it was time to let them die. Either that, or he'd written it dead drunk.

Will had lingered long enough. It was time he got on with the business of the day, the first portion of which was contacting Frannie and Sherwood. They needed to be told of events at the hospital, in case Steep came looking for them. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible. Returning to the living-room, Will found Adele busy on the phone, talking, he surmised, to the vicar. While he waited for the conversation to finish, he juggled the relative merits of delivering his message to the Cunninghams by phone or going down to the village to talk with them in person. By the time Adele had finished, he'd made his decision. This was not news to be delivered down the line; he'd speak to them face to face.

The funeral had been arranged for Friday, Adele told him, four days hence, at twothirty in the afternoon. Now that she had the date set she could start to organize the flowers, the cars and the catering. She'd already made a list of people to invite; was there anybody Will wanted to add? He told her he was sure her list was fine, and that if she was happy to get on with her arrangements he would take himself down to the village for an hour or so.

'I want you to bolt the front door when I'm not here,' he told her.

'Whatever for?'

'I don't want any ... strangers coming into the house.'

'I know everybody,' she said blithely. Then, seeing that he wasn't reassured, said: 'Why are you so concerned?'

He had anticipated her question and had a meagre lie prepared. He'd overheard a couple of nurses talking at the hospital, he told her: there was a man in the area who'd been trying to talk his way into people's homes. He then described Steep, albeit vaguely, so that she didn't become suspicious about the story. He was by no means certain he'd succeeded in this, but no matter: as long as he'd sowed sufficient anxiety to keep her from letting Steep in, he'd done all he could.