One with the earth below, Lord, One with the sky above, One with the seed I sow, Lord, One with the hearts I love.
Make earth of my dust, Lord, Make air of my breath, Make love of my lust, Lard, And life out of my death.
There was something comforting about the prayer's simplicity; the hope it expressed for unity and transformation. It moved him, in its way.
He was setting the picture back down on the mantelpiece when he heard the front door open, and then quietly close. A moment later a man with ill-shaven features, pinched and woebegone, his thinning hair grown to near shoulder length but unkempt, appeared at the living-room door, and stared at him through his round spectacles.
'Will,' he said, with such certainty it was almost as if he'd expected to find Will there.
'My God, you recognized me!'
'Of course,' Sherwood replied, proffering his hand as he crossed the room. 'I've been following your rise to notoriety.' He shook Will's hand, his palm clammy, his fingers bone-thin. 'Where's Frannie?'
'She's upstairs.'
'I've been out walking,' Sherwood said, though he had no need to explain himself. 'I like to walk.' He glanced out of the window. 'It's going to rain within the hour.' He went to the barometer beside the living-room door and tapped it. 'Maybe a downpour,' he said, peering at the glass over his spectacles. He had the manner of a man twenty or thirty years his senior, Will thought; he'd moved from an adolescent to an old man without a middle-age. 'Are you here for long?'
'That depends on my Dad's health.'
'How is he?'
'Getting stronger.'
'Good. I see him at the pub once in a while. He knows how to start an argument, your Dad. He gave me one of his books to read, but I couldn't get through it. I told him too: I said, it's beyond me, all this philosophy, and he said, well then there's hope for you yet. Imagine that: there's hope for you yet. I said I'd give him it back but he told me to throw it out. So I did.' He grinned. 'I told him next time I saw him. I said: I threw out your book. He bought me a drink. Now if I did that they'd call me daft, wouldn't they? Not that they don't anyway. Here comes Daft Cunningham.' He chuckled. 'Suits me.'
'Does it?'
'Oh aye. It's safer that way, isn't it? I mean people let you alone if they think you're three sheets to the wind. Anyhow . .. I'll be seeing you later on, eh? I've got to go soak me feet.'
As he turned to go, Frannie appeared behind him. 'Isn't this wonderful,' she said to Sherwood, 'seeing Will again after all this time?'
'Wonderful,' Sherwood said, without any great measure of enthusiasm. 'See you again then.'
A look of bemusement crossed Frannie's face. 'Aren't you staying to talk?'
'Well actually I should be on my way,' Will said, glancing at his watch. It was indeed time he was off; he'd promised Adele they'd make an early visit to the hospital today.
'Here's the book,' Frannie said, passing a slim, dun volume to Will.
Sherwood was meanwhile slipping away up the stairs. 'Would you mind letting yourself out, Will?' Frannie said, apparently concerned about her brother's behaviour. 'I'll give you a ring tomorrow, and maybe you can come back down when Sherwood's feeling a little bit more sociable.' With that, she was gone, up the stairs to find out what was amiss.
Will let himself out. The cloud-layer had thickened and darkened; rain, as Sherwood had predicted, could not be far off. Will picked up his pace, flipping through the book Frannie had given him as he walked. The pages were as stiff as card, the printing too small to be read on the move. The reproductions were in black and white, and poor. Only the title page was readily legible, and the words upon it brought him to a halt. A Mystic Tragedy was the main title. And underneath: The Life and Work of Thomas Simeon.
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: