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There was no deer. I was just driving too fast.
Later, three or four days later, dazed and drunk enough that lying on the chaise feels like falling off it - a suspended moment of falling, gravity trying to have its way with him - Francis will look over at Charles in his shirtsleeves, skin glowing in the light, and say, “Tell me - do you remember anything?” Knowing before he opens his mouth what Charles will say, and he does : “I don’t, I can’t. Almost nothing.”
They will all have been saying the same thing, even Henry, and when bitterness finally leeches into Francis’s blood (throat, mouth, voice) enough for him to say, “It seems almost like a waste of time, then, doesn’t it?” Henry will look at him with absolute disgust. As he knew he would. But at least then Henry will be looking at him.
***
What could we do, there were deer in the room, and now hundreds of deer reflected in our eyes.
-The Deer, B. H. Fairchild
“It’s going to work this time.” Since Charles has said this every time, and Francis more than once, and even Bunny on one unusually determined occasion, he doesn’t expect anybody to pay much attention to him - he’s telling himself, really. It’s become part of the ritual for him, a sort of pointless pep talk to stop himself actually thinking about what they’re trying to do. (And it generally irritates Henry intensely, which sometimes seems like a good enough reason for doing things in itself.) This time, though, Camilla surprises everyone by saying, “Yes. I think it is.” They’re the first words she’s spoken in over an hour, and they all turn to look at her; Charles feels his heart jump and bruise itself against his ribcage. She is sitting in the windowsill, her face half in light and half in shadow, a book open and ignored in her lap and she is so beautiful he wants to howl, wants to scream at Henry to call the whole thing off. She doesn’t know, he thinks frantically, wishing it true even as he knows what a wretched lie it is, she doesn’t know what’ll happen to her. Milly, darling.
But he says nothing, of course. Hunger claws at his stomach, along with anger, jealousy, fear, but always, also, anticipation. Each time they’ve tried this, he has looked at what it promised - the ability to be free of oneself, to give the self up to madness and instinct and be overtaken by a vast and all-encompassing truth - and known he would do anything to experience it. Once, he and Francis had had a conversation about it - hysterical, to begin with, they were both slumped drunk and laughing by the lake, passing a bottle of Zinfandel back and forth, and Francis had been loudly observing that they were running low on options for how to induce a trance state, and that perhaps they should have gone with the obvious and let Henry lecture them on the Roman invasion of Wales until they all passed out. “God,” Charles had said, wiping his eyes and holding the bottle out in a mock toast to the idea, “I think I’d rather slaughter an animal.”
“Oh, no,” Francis had replied in comic shock, a theatrical hand to his cheek, “Charles, your clothes.”
“We’d be in chitons again, surely.” He’d had a sudden image of it, Francis’s sheets wrapped around them, bloodstains on the white cloth. Frowning, he’d tilted the wine bottle until some of the red liquid trickled out onto the grass.
“What are you doing? We need that.” Francis had taken the bottle off him, but hadn’t drunk from it. Had stared at the now damp patch of grass, instead. “Oh, hell.”
“The awful thing is, I think I’d do it. If I thought it would work.”
“If Henry thought it would work, we’d already have done it,” Francis had pointed out with gloomy accuracy, and they had sat watching the light dancing on the surface of the water until it had turned too cold to stay outside.
*
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.
-Standing Deer, Jane Hirshfield
“It’s going to work this time,” Charles says, and Francis thinks here we go again, because he’s begun to believe that Charles is jinxing the whole thing by saying that every time - maybe even doing so deliberately. He’s all for ignoring it - in fact he’s all for ignoring Charles entirely, three days without wine or cigarettes making him waspish and impatient - but then Camilla’s low, certain voice from the windowsill : “Yes. I think it is,” she says, and Francis, by force of habit, looks at Henry. Henry, who is staring at Camilla like she’s delivering the Annunciation. “It does feel different,” he says with an embarrassing sort of hopefulness that sets Francis’s teeth on edge; not for the first time, he wonders why he ever agreed to this. Oh, he knows, of course, really - the aesthetics of it, the thrill of abandon, indistinct but seductive dreams of losing himself to the touch of the divine (played by Charles, for the most part, though as a model for divinity even Francis has to admit he’s somewhat lacking; the alternative, however, is something he absolutely refuses to think about), and so forth - but it has become so very tiring and, worse, so very humiliating. When he thinks about the things they’ve done - the things they’ve had to tell poor oblivious Richard, who, frankly, he would rather had been with them through all of this than Bunny, although Henry wouldn’t hear of it - well. Life has become like one long morning after the night before.
Yet even he has to admit there is a difference this time. Three days, while inconvenient, is not really that long a time to go without food, and yet he had woken that morning feeling hollow and light, translucent. He’d spent five minutes staring at his skin in the early winter sun, hypnotised by the cerulean veins beneath it, before someone had shouted something outside and startled him back to himself. But that air of rêverie has been with him all day. Things feel possible in a way they never have on previous occasions, as though any one of them might suddenly transform into something and take the rest of them with him. Or her; Camilla has felt it too, he could tell that even before she spoke up to agree with Charles. She is often quiet, but almost never listless, as she has been today. Conserving her strength, maybe. In private, a week or so previously, she’d appeared unannounced at his door with a bottle of Damassine (an absolute favourite of his; he didn’t remember ever having told her so) and had sat on his sofa in heavy silence until he’d asked her what was wrong.
“Francis -” she’d begun, and then nothing. She had toyed with her glass, putting it down and picking it up again, and eventually he’d knelt on the floor in front of her, resting his hands on her knees. “What’s the matter, darling, what is it?”
He can still hear the foreign tremor in her voice; she’d said, “I’m frightened,” and he’d blinked at her because he’d thought she was joking. “Camilla, frightened?” he’d teased, making it into an epithet : Artemis Daduchos, Dionysus Cthonius. Camilla, frightened. But she’d nodded, not looking at him, her face entirely blank. “I think - I keep having these dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“It sounds awful,” she’d said then in a more normal voice, smiling a little bit, “But it’s Henry. I keep having these dreams about Henry and Charles having a horrible fight in the woods. You know, next time we -” She’d gestured with her glass, the liquid tilting back and forth and catching the light. “I don’t want either of them to get hurt.” There’d been a touch of something else to those words, a fragile, brittle bitterness he’d heard colour her speech before and recognised as uncomfortably similar to his own on occasion.
“Nobody’s going to get hurt. Can you imagine Charles in a fight? He’d fall flat on his face.” He’d been trying for levity, for reassurance, but she’d shaken her head. “No, he wouldn’t.”
“Where am I when all this is going on?” he’d asked then, because he couldn’t bear it, this constant guessing and assuming and wondering, about Charles, about both of them. “Up a tree?”
To his surprise, and relief, she’d burst into giggles like a little girl. “High as a kite,” she’d said, and that had been that.
*
The deer in that beautiful place lay down their bones: I must wear mine.
-The Deer Lay Down Their Bones, Robinson Jeffers
“It’s going to work this time,” somebody says, cutting across Henry’s vivid memory of the dream he’d had last night like someone wiping ink off glass. He looks up, blinking away the afterimage; Charles, of course. He’s always saying it, as if to mark himself out as both doubter and prophet. He makes a small dismissive sound at the same time as Camilla, to his astonishment, says, “Yes. I think it is.” For a moment he can do nothing but stare at her, the white rush of his pulse loud inside his head. He remembers taking her hands and saying you are our lodestone, and she’d nodded, she’d understood. For all Henry has been the instigator, may be true North, he and the others are only points on the compass; Camilla is the needle. If she believes it will happen tonight, then he need have no further doubt. “It does feel different,” he agrees, and there is an eagerness in his voice that might under other circumstances have taken him aback. But they have tried so hard.
“Bunny’s the problem,” he’d said to Julian, soon after their attempts began. Julian had invited him in on the pretext of showing him a new work on Hesiod, but it had been clear from his bright-eyed impatience that he’d wanted only to hear how they were getting on. “Oh?” Julian had said, his eyebrows raised in disbelief, as he did when a question unexpectedly foxed them all in class; truly, none of you know? He’d felt a chill, then, unaccountably, and had set his cup down carefully on its saucer. “He is quite without understanding of what we’re trying to achieve. Really, it’s like explaining the Book of the Dead to a child who can only comprehend that it’s written in pictures.”
“Oh, surely not,” Julian had said with the smile he reserved for conversations about Bunny; indulgent, fond, parental. He had referred to Bunny as Henry’s brother, once, a comment neither forgotten nor entirely forgiven. “Perhaps you have not explained it well enough.”
“The others -”
“The others have an advantage,” Julian had cut him off, his voice suddenly clipped and cold. “As do you, and if you have failed thus far to achieve anything - really, I cannot believe you have forgotten your Xenophon. Does the fault lie with the soldier, or with the leader?” He’d taken too long to reply, the words leaving him as speechless as if he had been slapped, and Julian had turned away in disgust. “Go,” he’d said without looking back, moving to one of the extravagant vases littering the great room. “I don’t want to hear another word about it until you’ve succeeded.” Henry had left him clearing the dead and dying flowers from the arrangement, his deft hands plucking the disintegrating heads from among those still left standing; it had not escaped him, as a message.
*
These you may not hinder, unconfined
Beautiful flocks of the mind.
- Deer, John Drinkwater
“It’s going to work this time.” Charles’s voice breaks into her daydream and for a moment, as always, he is speaking only to her, the room empty of people. Then, as her gaze refocuses - she has had the same page open for a half hour at least, her eyes making kaleidoscope patterns of the letters as she let herself wander - she recognises their surroundings and takes in Francis, bored and tense; Henry, impatient, interrupted. No Bunny, but she might have expected that, and Charles with the same expression accompanying his words as usual - a childlike determination, the face of a boy declaring he is not afraid of the dark. He is, though, for once, right. It is going to work this time. She has felt it all morning, the same languid, hazy detachment that has overcome her on previous occasions when they’ve almost had it right, as though she could abandon her body entirely and float up towards the ceiling like gauze or dust. “Yes,” she says, “I think it is.”