A Dance in Time: Chapter One of Iseult’s Story
“Think of it,” says Maud Gonne. “A human entity is about to be brought into existence upon the earthly plane.”
Lucien rolls his eyes. Tonight, they are in a carriage, twisting and turning through the outer roads of Paris, speeding towards Samois-sur-Seine. Dear Samois, Maud’s favourite village in all of France, where she has been so happy (and so unhappy). Samois: the fitting place for this ritual to be enacted.
She places her hand on Lucien’s wrist. “Don’t you wonder where Georges is now, before the deed is done?”
”I do not.”
“I imagine his soul as a ghostly vapour, hovering somewhere in space out of time, waiting for us.”
Again, that cynical upward flick of his eyes. Oh it is a naïve image, she knows that, but she holds to it only as a symbol of a deeper truth.
Is it not wondrous that this child towards which they hurtle exists as yet only as thought and feeling, swirls of sensation in their bodies. In her: a clamminess of the hands, a churning of the stomach, a tightness of the neck and shoulders. And in Lucien if nothing else, an anticipatory stirring in the groin. She knows she can count on that and tonight, for once, his priapic constancy is welcome — though his failure to show equal interest in other aspects of their ritual is…
No.
Banish such thoughts.
It is not propitious to fret. In a short while, all succeeding, she and he shall come together within the crypt at Samois cemetery where Georges, her beloved little Georginet, lies embalmed. At stroke of midnight, egg and seed will unite, sparking his dear little baby soul, once again, into being. Two Irish friends who are great seers have sworn it so.
But if success is to be theirs, if her timing is not to be set awry, then the coachman needs to hurry. Midnight is – she checks again the Victorian pocket-watch that once belonged to her father, Tommy - a mere forty-five minutes away.
Snapping the timepiece shut, she sits back in her seat, twists her thoughts again to Higher things. How far does the act of reincarnation change the alchemy of flesh and blood and spirit? Will the essence of new Georges be a replica of the old, having the same soul as before? Or, being of new flesh, possessed also of a different inner nature? So many of her questions have no answers and on such matters Yeats and Russell, her Irish mages, were unclear.
The coach takes a sudden swerve, almost throwing her on top of Lucien. As she lifts her eyes to his, she sees that he is smiling at her. A small stretch of the lips under his moustaches, but most certainly a smile. A coil of triumph turns within her. Without Georges, she has had nothing to hold him, nothing of hers to set against his first, legal family but once they have again a son, the issue of his stock and hers – fighting stock, not the milk-and-water blood of Madame Millevoye – then he would be truly hers again.
Truly.
She lifts the curtain, tries to peer through the blackness to check where they are. Trees flash past, dark denizens of the great forest of Fontainbleau, telling her nothing.
*
Samois – about six kilometers from the town of Fontainbleau – is one of those somnolent villages that line the Seine outside Paris, of the type immortalized by the painter Sisley. Ochre-coloured stone houses with green-shuttered windows squatting smug between river and forest.
Thirty minutes before, the village day ended with the return to home of the last customers to leave Lepotier’s taverne. By now, Monsieur Lepotier has emptied his money till, sorted and hidden his francs and centimes, tidied the stools, the kegs, the bottles of absinthe and cognac and climbed the back stairs to the chamber he shares with his wife. He finds her turned towards the wall, eyes resolutely closed. Ca fait mal, ma cherie? he asks her in his head, as he unlaces his boots. Pas de tout, he answers, lying into the creaking bed and thrusting a purposeful hand under her nightgown.
Other acts of sexual intercourse are already underway in Samois. The dry, weekly conjugation of Monsieur and Madame Dupont; the latest instalment in the affair between Monsieur Castor and his pretty, plump sister-in-law, Jeannette; the first coupling of the sixteen-year-old Michel Patton, the son of a local merchant family, and Jean Raspile, a young butcher, who have sneaked out their bedroom windows to meet in a dark clump of the forest….
We will avert our eyes from the furtive deposit a certain Monsieur Doneille is making into the taut, tight body of his eight-year-old niece (Why do men do such things? Because they must? Because they can?) and peep instead at the impressive sexual acrobatics of the recently married Bernards. Young M. Pierre is, at this very moment, running his tongue along Mme. Bernard’s inner anklebone to the accompaniment of her rising breath and they will still be enjoying each other long after Iseult’s mother and father are finished their conjugation.
The other five hundred or so villagers have chosen sleep over sex tonight. It has been dark since five o’clock, with the sun not due to surface again for another eight hours, and cold. Cold with winter damp, the sort of cold that seeps through to the bones. What else to do on such a night, but sleep, sleep…
But here comes the carriage, hooves and harness jangling open the night-quiet. Closer, closer, all the way along the winding road until it reaches the cemetery, where it halts with a jerk. The horse whinnies then quiets so that, for half a moment, all folds back into silence. Within the carriage, this half-moment communicates itself to Maud, feeling to her as if the world is waiting, holding its breath at what is to come.
She resists the notion. Where is the wonder in what is about to happen? What is more everyday on this earth than the coming, or going, of life? Yet it’s undeniable, this sense of significance: she feels it in the night sky with its hammering of stars above, in the broken road beneath the wheels of the carriage, in the breathing of the trees and in the sly bulk of the gravestones waiting in the cemetery, frosted sentries of the dark.
Enough! No more of this imaginative indulgence. She pushes the carriage door and steps out into the night, one hand to the mantle that covers her distinctive auburn coiffure. They are traveling incognito and one never knows who is about, even here, even at this hour.
Lucien steps down behind her, his arms full of candles wrapped in a blanket. “A bientot, Roger,” he calls up to the driver, who has his instructions to return for them in an hour, at 12.30. Roger lifts his tall hat in assent, his face impassive. “Cimetiere de Samois,” Maud can imagine him saying to his friends later, at his taverne. “Les petits fous de la petite noblesse.” With a flick of his reins, he leaves them and they stand, watching the carriage disappear around the bend, listening to its rumble and clatter fade across the fields.
One hour to change all. She shivers and takes Lucien’s arm, steers him towards the cemetery gates left unlocked by a bribe to the sexton. Oh but it is cold out here in open countryside. Together they walk a slow, curiously formal walk, side by side, step for step, as if she were a bride and he her father escorting her up the aisle. Wearing their evening clothes and each of a height, they make a handsome couple yet, even if there is nobody but the tombstones to see them.
At the furthest side of the cemetery, Lucien lays down his bundle before the finest mausoleum. He tries the key but the lock on the vault is troublesome; after wrestling with it for a time, he begins throw petulant looks back over his shoulder. Tut, clicks his tongue. And again: tut. Maud closes her eyes to shut him out. He wishes – she can hear his thoughts clear as if he spoke them aloud – to blame her. Why, he would like to ask, has she allocated to him the task of opening up when the difficult lock is so much more familiar to her.
Oh Lucien, Lucien…
She will not permit him to disturb her equilibrium. It is hardly her fault that he has visited his son’s tomb so rarely that he doesn’t know the knack of unclicking that bolt, really quite simple when you are used to it. And has she not agreed with him the timetable of this evening, the exact distribution of tasks and duties? Agreed it over and again during the past days, so often that he told her to desist, that he needed no more directives or instructions? So what is this huffing and tutting for now, this giving of himself over to pique?
She inhales deep, wrapping herself inside what is to come, so his vexation cannot infect her and the work they have to do. The key clicks, as she knew it would and the door opens with what seems like a sigh, puffing stale, malodorous air into their faces. Maud gasps: that dead stench, so much more concentrated by night, holds all their early grief in it. It slides in under the rivets in her mind, freeing incarcerated memories, allowing them to pierce her again: her old laments about a death-bird pecking at the window, her fear of the grey woman who showed herself to be a child-killer…
She wills them from her mind as she has so often before. With her will, she can do anything. Anything. Her father, Tommy, taught her that and she has always held to it. Isn’t she here tonight to prove it once again?
She extends her hand to Lucien, a mute request for him to hand over what he carries so she can take it down into the crypt.
“I do not think you can manage alone,” he says, aloud. “It is so dark down there.”
He has spoken. Spoken!
She wants to slap him to silence but restricts herself to placing her index finger on his lips. Be quiet, this finger insists. You know what is agreed.
He pulls back. For one moment she thinks he might turn and march off, past the watching gravestones, out the cemetery gate, into the night. She sees him consider it, knowing the reluctance she has had to overcome to get him here tonight, for his pariliamentary enemies would like nothing more than to have such a scandale to spread… His eyes lock with hers in one of their mute struggles. Always so vexatious with each other, now: it exhausts her. Such a waste of energy — and tonight, it cannot be permitted: it will corrupt the mood.
She pulls herself up to her full height so she can transfer to him her thoughts. We seek a reunion of the spirits. Our task is sacred. Let us banish petty human aggravations. Let us lay ourselves open to the spark of fire of the soul. Let us cast ourselves down in humble surrender so that we may become instruments of rebirth.
He drops her gaze, in what feels almost like a bow and her heart shudders: he has made her a pledge, a most grave and solemn promise. With the act that is to come, all will be reprieved.
She takes the candles and blankets from him, enters the crypt. Some might fear to go into a vaulted tomb by night but not she. It is only Georges down there, nothing to fear. Only her darling little Georginet. She closes her eyes: in this darkness, sight will not serve her, she must rely on other senses. Hugging her armload, she takes a step forward, the flat of one foot nudging engaging the whole of the ground, then the other. She is glad she wore her flattest boots.
It is colder in the crypt and damp. She lays down her bundle, feels among the candles for the tallest, fattest pair, the two she would place on either side of the coffin. The touch of cold candle-wax recalls her son’s embalmed limbs: the same unbending texture. Tonight the warmth of flame will soften the wax.
The rasp of a match never sounded so loud, the glare of its flame so bright. One wick, then another and the little crypt is suddenly filled with light. She stretches out her arms to place one hand either side of the tombstone and bends until her forehead touches stone.
O, great spirits, purify and strengthen us and seal our lips for the work. Titans of light, higher souls: make of us your instrument.
She recalls the swollen face that was Georges and not Georges, his tiny starfish hands laid one upon another and now always to be thus. That she can bear but she must push away the recollection of those fingers live, reaching up to touch her face, his wonder in his eyes at the brush of her skin. Go! Be gone! Spear of Lugh, pierce the night. Let the essence of God, the spark of fire of the soul, flow down into the cauldron of regeneration and rebirth.
She takes up the smaller candles and places in as wide a circle as the walls permit, wide enough for two tall people to lie within. In the centre of the tombstone she lays the two blankets – folded lengthways into two strips – at right angles to each other in the form of a cross. Then she briskly lights the rest of the candles, all 48 of them, before kneeling for a final, quick invocation.
She has to hurry now; it is almost time.
Tonight, they make amends.
Tonight atonement and retribution would be theirs.
She stands and, trying not to shiver, begins to peel off her clothes.
*
Above, sheltering in the small space between the door and the top of the stairs, Lucien smokes and waits, the base of his cigarette flattened between two frozen fingers. He can hear her moving about below, see the faint glow coming on at the end of the stairs. He knows she is lighting the candles: forty-eight small ones, two thick, large ones: fifty in all. Already the chill of night is seeping through to his bones. Sacre bleu, why the devil did he agree to this madness?
He blames her crazed Irish friends for this. It is they who are responsible for all her follies. Poets are always mad but the Celtic types are the worst. He had said as much to her last week.
“But Lucien, it was you, not Mr Yeats or Mr Russell, who gave me the idea,” she replied, and reminded him of the time he tried to persuade her, she who wanted to conceive an Irish patriot hero, to make love before the altar of Jeanne D’Arc in Paris Cathedral. He remembered then: how he bribed the sacristan but it all came to naught. And now, years later, this eerie travesty of his intention. On her terms. She really is the very devil of a woman.
The way she looked him in the eye before she went below, her finger pressed to his lips, attempting to subdue him. Hah! Once such behaviour would have delighted him, the challenge of breaking her, of turning hauteur to need. Once, he treasured that arrogant head of hers but now he knows it for a sham. All her fire is surface, as is the beauty that once consumed him. Beneath, she is the same as the rest.
Women are at their best when barely known: time always turns the outer charms transparent. One comes to see the snarl of complications beneath, the chaos that lies at the heart of all females. It is true what he said to Deroulede last evening: a mistress held too long becomes another wife.
Slap – slap – slap: from the foot of the steps come three loud handclaps, his cue to go down. He drops his cigarette, sparks falling through the dark, and crushes it underfoot. She pretends to mastery and he to submission but they both know the truth: it is pity that has hauled him here tonight.
Yet what power these women wield in their weakness.
In the crypt, all is light, giving an illusion of warmth. Two candles, tall pillars of light, stand sentry over the tomb. The smell in here brings it all back, fells him all over again. Perhaps Maud is right, perhaps this is the great sorrow that changed everything?
Perhaps.
There she is, surrounded by the wide ring of candles, naked to the skin. Lying on the tombstone like Christ on his crucifix, arms outstretched across two blankets she has folded for the purpose. Around her neck she wears her father’s timepiece while candlelight gleams on the pale mound of her belly, along the skin of her thighs, across the rise of her breasts and her erect nipples, standing to attention. Is it just the cold - or has this bizarre ritual injected the sex act with the excitement it no longer holds for her?
Impossible to know as she keeps her eyes closed, her face impassive. Her father’s fob watch is open, reading nine minutes to midnight. What if he were to leave her here, naked and unfulfilled? Is that not what she has done to him so often, with her fastidious aversion? And not just since Georges’s death, though that is what she likes to pretend. What if he were to leave her, to know for herself that humiliation? Bah! Why does he torment himself with this nonsense? He knows he will do as he has pledged.
All he has to do is squint his eyes a little so he can forget what festers between them. Limit his attention to her fine physique. She is, after all, the most beautiful woman in the world, and not just according to that idiot journalist, Stead. So centre on those two peaked breasts, those long thighs, the shadow of promise between them. Why think of saying no, what man would? See, already it is working.
Already, he feels the stirring he needs. He shrugs off his overcoat, lets it lie where it fell at the end of the steps. Removes his jacket and waistcoat, his trousers and shirt, his undergarments and his stockings until he is as naked as she. The chill air on his bare skin feels almost solid. The cement floor underfoot is not dry. Just damp, he hopes, and not the secretions of some animal. Stepping into the circle of candles, he kneels on the edge of the blanket in front of Maud. No response. He bends to kiss her lips, lying along the length of her. Her skin is ice, she is like a corpse, her lips rigid under his.
Her body holds its crucified position. Is she to be unmoving throughout, a passive receptacle? In her little lectures about who was to do what, she never covered that detail.
He reaches for her hands, splaying his arms out along hers, but she holds them in two tight fists. The devil! He will make her open at least her hands to him. With his fingers he prises hers apart. Something is clutched in her grasp, something woollen. He holds it to the candle: a knitted bootee, one in each hand. Georges’s bootees.
Her lips are moving but making no sound. He moves to close her murmurs with his mouth. Forget the bootees, forget the coffin… the lace robe… the small, solid, half-pouting, baby mouth… Forget, forget… He feels for her breasts, squeezes the mounds of flesh, thinks to take one in his own mouth. Yes, yes, a surge of strength swells in his veins. He is in command, a man again.
*
Maud is glad she has kept her eyes fastened. He is quite, quite lost to her now, sunk into his own coarseness, almost hurting her. No matter – she had anticipated as much. Tonight is about more than male pleasure. Tonight, he is for her what she has so often been to him, a means to an end.
This is what he has done to her, to them.
She turns her head and, without making it obvious, checks Tommy”s watch. Almost time. She opens her legs, guides Lucien into place. As he breaks her, she cries out, a small surprised shriek. Not her cry of old, but he, with his thickening breath, shows no sign of knowing that. Another glance at the time – one minute to go – and she touches him on the buttocks, their signal, and he increases his rhythm, plunging in and in again. She feels his moment approach, the moment he wants to last forever, the moment that heralds its own demise. She arches her hips to meet it, once… twice… thrice…
May the spirits rise to meet us. May perpetual light shine upon us. May the great Mother move to bring forth life. Life out of death, life out of death eternally…
As he climaxes (at – yes! – exactly midnight), as his seed shudders through her, she is flooded with gratitude. Tears, which since the death of Georges are always too ready to overrun, rise but she squeezes them back. No tears, no tears: they have succeeded.
After a time, Lucien lifts his head from her breast and tries to shift but she grips his shoulders, pins him with her eyes. “This,” she says, “is our greatest act together.”
His eyes swivel from hers, unwilling to follow her thought. Exasperating man. Then, almost to their own surprise, they are drawn back. He stares at her and, wonder of this wondrous night, through this staring intensity, she feels him submit. It is as if he seeks to gaze into her soul, his expression is so intense, so solid. He has need of her still.
“We have succeeded,” she tells him, with great, definite tenderness.
“How can you know this?”
“We have succeeded.”
Life out of death. Light from the darkness. Unto us a child is born.
In truth, Lucien barely hears or sees her. He is gazing not at her but at the reflection of the flames dancing in her eyes. Past the steaming fervour of Maud’s certainty, into the mystery of light .