Enlightenment, p.1
Enlightenment, page 1
Dedication
In memory of
David George Perry
A good Baptist
And a very good friend
Epigraph
There are two hungers, hunger for bread
And hunger of the uncouth soul
For the light’s grace. I have seen both . . .
—R. S. Thomas, “The Dark Well”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: 1997: The Law of Ellipses
Part Two: 2008: The Law of Equal Areas in Equal Time
Part Three: 2017: The Law of Harmonies
Perihelion
Acknowledgments
About Mariner Books
About the Author
Also by Sarah Perry
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
1997
The Law of Ellipses
Monday: late winter, bad weather. The River Alder, fattened by continuous rain, went in a spate through Aldleigh and beyond it, taking carp and pike and pages torn from pornographic magazines past war memorials and pubs and new industrial parks, down to the mouth of the Blackwater and on in due course to the sea. Toppled shopping trolleys glistened on the riverbank; so also did unwanted wedding rings, and beer cans, and coins struck by empires in the years of their decline. Herons paced like white-coated orderlies in the muddy reeds; and at half past four a fisherman caught a cup untouched since the ink was wet on The Battle of Maldon, spat twice, and threw it back.
Late winter, bad weather, the town oppressed by clouds as low as a coffin lid. A place spoken of in passing, if at all: neither Boudicca nor Wat Tyler had given it a second glance when they took their vengeances to London; and war had reached it only as an afterthought, when a solitary Junkers discharged the last of its ordnance and extinguished four souls without notice.
Thomas Hart was at his desk in the offices of the Essex Chronicle, surveying the town through a dissolving window. At that hour and from that vantage, lights appeared as fires set by travelers that crossed a soaking fen: strip lights in the shoe shops and newsagent’s not yet shuttered for the night, and in the cinema and bowling alley opening for business two miles out of town; lamplight in the bar of the Jackdaw and Crow, and streetlights coming on down London Road.
A man of fifty, Thomas Hart, and a man of Essex, for his sins: tall, and retaining as much hair as he had at forty, which is to say more above the collar than the brow. Dressed, as has always been his habit, in clothes chosen to be admired by the observant—a jacket, single-breasted, in Harris Tweed; a white shirt cuffed with silver links; a tie of oatmeal knitted silk. A face he does not deceive himself is handsome, but understands to be memorable: the nose not symmetrical, but of a pleasing emphatic size; the eyes large, direct, and approaching green. An air altogether of occupying a time not his own—might he be more at ease in an Edwardian dining room, say, or on a pitching clipper’s deck? Very likely.
Thomas was surveying an object on his desk. Two leather disks about the diameter of his own hand were fastened with a tarnished pin; the lower disk was painted blue and mottled with markings he couldn’t have made out even if he’d been inclined to try. The blue showed through a large hole cut in the upper part, and gilded letters at the rim showed the months of the year, and the days of the month, and the hours of the day. Thomas touched it as if it carried a contagious disease. “What,” he said, “do you imagine I should do with this?”
A younger man was sitting at the edge of the desk, swinging his foot. With the downcast gaze of the guilty he turned the upper disk with his finger. The hole moved. The blue persisted. “It belonged to my father,” he said. “I thought you might make something of it.” Nick Carleton, editor of the Chronicle and grieving son, looked with unconcealed amusement around the small office, which—despite the plastic venetian blinds and the computer’s hard drive humming as it labored at its work; despite the twentieth century wearing itself out on the pavements three floors down—gave the impression that at any moment a gramophone might strike up a Schubert lieder.
“I was sorry,” said Thomas gravely, “to hear of your loss. The death of a father,” he said, frowning at the window, “is at the same time both quite proper in the order of things, and incomprehensibly stupid.”
“I never saw him use it,” said Carleton, containing tears, “and I don’t know how it works. It is a planisphere. A map of the stars.”
“I see. And what do you imagine I should do with it?”
The evening was coming doggedly in. Wind seeped over the concrete windowsill, and a bewildered pigeon struck the glass and slipped from view.
“You’re our longest-serving contributor,” said Carleton, flinching at the bang. “Our most admired. Indeed I should say our most popular.” I’m beginning to speak like him, he thought: Thomas Hart is catching, that’s the trouble. “I’ve often heard it said that it’s a consolation—that’s the general feeling, as I said to the board—to wake on Thursday morning, and find your thoughts on Essex ghosts and literature and so on, before turning to the matters of the day.”
“Literature,” said Thomas mildly to the planisphere, “is the matter of the day.”
“Your work has an old-fashioned feel,” Carleton pressed on. “You’ll allow me that. I argue that’s your charm. Other papers might seek out some young person to be the voice of their generation, but here at the Essex Chronicle we pride ourselves on our loyalty.”
“I could hardly have asked to be the voice of a generation,” said Thomas, “since there is only one of me.”
Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy religious air of a defrocked priest, and was known to attend a peculiar little chapel on the outskirts of town. He had a courtly manner considered an affectation by those who didn’t like him, and irresistible by those who did; and if it couldn’t be fairly said that he was strange, there was certainly the impression of his being the lone representative of his species. Of Thomas Hart’s family, companions, politics, tastes in music, and weekend pursuits, Carleton knew nothing, wondered often, and would never ask. That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned with deep feeling suppressed until the final pages (when some confusing event ensued, generally in bad weather). Were Carleton his literary agent, he might have pleaded with the other man to allow himself, in fiction at any rate, to say what he really felt, and not veil it all in atmosphere and metaphor; but he confined himself to glancing sometimes at the cheap green notebooks that attended Thomas like spoor and were now stacked three deep on his desk (Monday, he read surreptitiously, late winter. Bad weather—). It hadn’t occurred to him that Thomas wouldn’t know a planisphere when he had his hands on it, or that a tentative suggestion he look to the stars would be so unwelcome. Blinking, he recalibrated his idea of Thomas Hart, and became persuasive: “Loyalty,” he said, “is a key concern of ours. But it is increasingly felt that you might benefit from new material, and it struck me you might like to write about astronomy. You see”—he reached for the planisphere, and moved it—“this is today’s date, and so you’ll find Orion in the south.”
“Astronomy,” said Thomas, with the look of a man tasting a bitter substance. He turned the disk. He extinguished the stars.
“In fact,” said the editor, “it struck me that you could write about this new comet.” He made a withdrawal from the store of knowledge inherited from his father: “It’s a Great Comet, you know, with naked-eye visibility. People really go in for that sort of thing. Bird’s Custard once put a comet on their adverts. Perhaps it’s a bad omen, and there’ll be a disaster, then we’ll have something for our front page” (he brightened here at visions of catastrophic fires).
“What comet?”
“Thomas! Do you never look up? They call it Hale-Bopp. It’s been on the news.”
“Hale-Bopp,” said Thomas. “I see. I never watch the news.” He raised the planisphere toward the editor. “I have no interest in astronomy. This comet could crash through the window and land on the carpet and I’d have nothing to say about it.”
Carleton refused the planisphere with a gesture. “Keep it. Give it a try. We have to think of something, Thomas: circulation is down. Do you want to write about this sheep they’ve cloned in Scotland, or about the general election? Celebrity gossip, perhaps, or the sexual intrigues of the Tory cabinet?” He received a look of admonition, as if he’d stained one of those pristine white cuffs.
“I am too old,” said Thomas, “for new tricks.”
“These days,” said Carleton, hardening his heart, and further depleting the store of his inheritance, “a good pair of binoculars offers more or less the same magnitude as Galileo’s telescope. Five hundred words, please. Why don’t you start with the moon?”
“Is there a moon tonight?”
“How should I know?” Carleton was at the door; Carleton was almost free. “I’ve always found it unreliable. Five hundred word s, please, and six if the night is clear.”
“These days,” said Thomas, “the nights are never clear.” With bad grace he lifted the planisphere to the weak light seeping in and turned the upper part. The perforation slid over the painted leather, and half-familiar names appeared on the ground of blue: Aldebaran. Bellatrix. Hyades. Well, then. Five hundred words, and six if the night was clear; and meanwhile he was behind on his correspondence. A solitary letter in the steel tray, the flap lifting and the stamp not straight, the letter signed boldly in blue ink:
James Bower
Essex Museum Services
17 February 1997
Dear Mr. Hart,
I think I have some information that might interest you.
As I’m sure you know, we’re doing renovation work at Lowlands House, and it has turned up some interesting documents. We think they may relate to a woman who lived at Lowlands in the nineteenth century, who disappeared and was never discovered. I’ve always enjoyed your column and remember especially your account of going in search of the Lowlands ghost—and it occurred to me the legend might even be connected with this disappearance! Could you be persuaded to come and visit me at the museum? We are open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I’m always at my desk.
Yours sincerely,
James Bower
Thomas put down the letter. Was it possible the strip light briefly dimmed, and summoned out of shadow the figure of a vanished woman, now returned? It was not. Thomas smiled and turned again toward the window. The stunned pigeon had left its greasy imprint on the glass, and it rose like the Holy Ghost behind the venetian blinds.
Late winter, thought Thomas, bad weather—he buttoned himself into his coat; he left the offices of the Chronicle—that was as good a beginning as any. The planisphere was in his pocket, and pricked him with its bent brass pin. The adamant cloud cover was burnished by streetlight, and somewhere behind it, he thought, Carleton’s comet was concealed like a letter in an envelope, and no doubt bringing bad news.
Gone five in the evening, and traffic pursuing itself out of town; Aldleigh coming into view, and Thomas passing women laboring with plastic shopping bags, and schoolboys who bickered and swore. The rain eased into particles of mist that swarmed about the streetlights like flies, and Thomas conversed with himself. What could account for his indifference to the stars? The troubling thought occurred that perhaps he was afraid the annihilating vastness of a comet’s orbit would end his tentative faith. Then again (Thomas was consoling himself), Virginia Woolf had written about a solar eclipse, and there was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s slip of comet to consider: there were precedents. “Bellatrix,” he said, feeling the discomfort of the planisphere, but grudgingly delighted by the syllables. “Hyades.” He stood now at a crossroads, where traffic went in haste to London or down to Aldleigh’s shops and office blocks. Slipping between cars, Thomas crossed to the opposite pavement and stood there for a time. At his left, there was the broad road to town; at his right, the road that narrowed to a shallow bridge over the River Alder. Thomas looked neither left nor right, but rather surveyed a chapel behind iron railings on London Road. It was flanked by a mossy wall, and by a derelict patch of ground known to him as Potter’s Field; its iron gate was fastened with a chain. Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the Thirty-seventh Psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its bricks were pale, its proportions austere: it was a sealed container for God. No passerby would ever take it for a place of worship, and Aldleigh’s children believed it to be a crematorium where old men were converted into ashes and smoke. No sacred carvings flanked the door, and no bells rang; its pitched slate roof shone blue when wet. Its seven tapered windows had the look of eyes half-closed against the sun, and on brighter days, light picked out a single disk of colored glass set in each window’s apex. This was Bethesda Chapel, as fixed in time’s flow as a boulder in a river: Aldleigh ran past it, and around it, and could never change it. Above the door a narrow plaque read 1888, and beyond the bristled threshold mat, 1888 persisted. All the dreadful business of the modern world—its exchange rates, tournaments, profanities, publications, elections, music, and changes of administration—washed up against the green door and fell back, dammed.
“Bethesda,” said Thomas, leaning on the gate, speaking to himself and inclined to smile; then the iron chain, which ought to have been locked, unlatched and fell on his foot. Thomas, stifling surprise, peered in confusion through the haze. “What was that?” he said. “Did you see that?” Nobody heard, or could answer. He leaned farther in and doubted himself; it was shadows shifted by the passing traffic, nothing more. Still—“I wonder,” he said. The chain moved over his shoe. Thomas felt the animal of his body respond: stiffened hairs at the nape of his neck and on his forearms, the chambers of his heart compressed—It’s the Lowlands ghost, he said to himself, amused by his own fear, she’s come vaulting over the wall!
The wet air parted, and briefly there was the impression of a shadow thickening and persisting against the green door, and slipping out of sight. Then, under brief headlight illumination, Thomas saw a mark painted by the chapel’s iron knocker: something like a cross, if badly done, and blotted with a circle. The headlights went out. The mark returned to the shadows. Thomas, in whom disbelief equaled curiosity, went through the gate. Sound of bad-tempered traffic, of girls on the high street calling to each other from the pavements; sound also of some furtive motion by the green bay tree. Then abruptly a shadow there detached itself, became substantial, and crossed the car park toward Thomas. It came with such spiteful speed he called out, “Mind how you go!” with useless good manners, and stumbled as a creature with a white hood knocked him in passing. Briefly, three things: thin face; pale eyes; thin hand clutching a can of paint. Possibly also something said, but this consumed by the traffic and the muffling air—then Thomas, slowly turning, saw the intruder seep into the small crowd going up to town.
“Dear me,” said Thomas. He approached the door. Paint ran between the boards; the circle surmounting the cross dribbled like an open mouth. Youths, he understood, were given to tagging railway arches in cheerful acts of defiance; but there was nothing cheerful in this inscrutable symbol already blurred by rain, which instead conveyed a kind of incompetent malice that left Thomas obscurely depressed. He took his notebook from his pocket, and one by one tore out pages that softened quickly in the wet air; and using these he cleaned the door as best he could. Then he turned his back and headed for the town, leaving the rest to the weather.
Bethesda receded. It kept the peace. Up ahead the newsagent’s and grocer’s were drawing down their shutters for the night, and a train leaving for Liverpool Street rattled the glasses in the Jackdaw and Crow. A man in a red velvet coat spread cardboard boxes at the foot of the war memorial, and made himself a pillow with the News of the World. “Evening,” said Thomas, and received an imperious nod. He headed down a sloping alley and on to Upper Bridge Road, which passed in Essex for a hill, so that the redbrick terraces going over the hump had the look of a sleeping dragon’s long articulated spine. So uphill, then down, and on into Lower Bridge Road, which ran under the dripping railway arch, and led neither into Aldleigh nor out of it—led nowhere, in fact. Here thirty-four Victorian terraces built for the engineers who had labored on the London line faced each other, withdrawn behind their cars, and gardens, and signs urging passersby to vote Labour, or Conservative, or to beware the dog. One house alone resisted the modern age. Here there was never any modern music heard, or exclamations from soap operas or films, and certainly no evidence of allegiance to any political party or social tribe. There was instead an insistent quiet, and the impression of a house set back behind a faint but impenetrable mist. Thomas Hart was home.
Nick Carleton, wondering how the other man lived, pictured with affectionate pity a solitary life in a fastidious apartment, and a narrow bed made each morning without fail. He was mistaken. Thomas lived where he’d been born, and where (so he often thought without rancor) he’d very likely die; and if he lived alone he was not lonely, that being a condition not of solitude but of longing, and Thomas was not a discontented man. The habits and tastes of his parents, which had been those of austere children of Bethesda’s particular God, had been stripped with the wallpaper and carpets, and nothing remained of them now but Thomas himself. It was all exactly as he wanted it to be. The oak table by the window was burnished with decades of meals and work, and shone on fat turned legs. The sofa was deep, and blue, and partly concealed by a quilt his mother hadn’t had time to finish. Edwardian and Victorian and art deco lamps which ought not to have agreed with each other nonetheless got on for the sake of Thomas, and shone from the sideboard and the floor. A broad bay window facing east allowed a single hour of rising sun before the room dimmed in the shadow of the railway bridge; and when a fire was lit in the grate, yellow marigolds bloomed on the surrounding tiles. The walls were obscured by books in arrangements that might have pleased a librarian, save that those by Thomas Hart were interposed here and there, since it pleased his vanity to imagine the phantoms of his imagination conversing all night with Emma Bovary in her vulgar gown, or Mrs. Dalloway fretting over shopping lists. Pictures were hung in curated disorder: a lithograph signed by Picasso in the plate, a skilled oil of a turbulent sea. Occupying a large space it did not deserve, a small photograph showed Bethesda Chapel on the day of its opening: 1888, and a godless sun scorching the lawn, while bearded men stood somberly with women in their summer hats, and beyond the chapel wall on Lowlands Park’s unconsecrated land, a bareheaded woman stood in the shade of an elm, only ever looking up. Thomas, turning on the lamps, regarded her a while. He’d feared her in childhood, since her face in shadow had been featureless, but these days considered her a lodger, her dress and her bent neck increasingly distinct behind the glass.
