The Unseen(92)

I have not been able to sleep of late. I lie awake until the birds begin to sing, captivated by thoughts of the wonders of the earth, and how close I am coming to communing with them. For knowledge is the first step to enlightenment, and from enlightenment the path to a clearer inner vision and higher consciousness unfurls. I think that I cannot sleep because my inner sight is awakening. When I do sleep, in the first hour or so after dawn, I am beset by dreams, most troubling dreams. My own human doubts and fears return to mock me, and to test my resolve. Robin Durrant’s face comes to me often in such dreams, as though he has reached out, and wishes to guide me. Even when I wake, his face remains. He is in all my thoughts, and I feel his benign influence in my every action. The days will be long indeed, and empty while he is away. I wish he had asked me to go with him, so that I could remain at his side and help him in this time of great change.

I cannot sufficiently explain the aura of blissful harmony and knowledge that emanates from the theosophist. He is an exemplary man. This is how a person should be! His patience and learning, and how in all things he is both passionate and rational. He is the actual embodiment of an unsullied human spirit. How else to explain the feelings of completeness, peace and joy when I am in his company? Hester does not understand. When she speaks of him she is petulant, and is at times foolish. I should not reprimand her for it, since she does not know the truth, and can have little understanding of such esoteric ideas. Women were ever less pious than men, ever less studious, ever less able to commit to serious thought. Wisdom is not in their make-up, and they are not to be blamed for it. Though theosophy teaches that, within The Society, no such discriminations are made between the sexes, I do not claim to agree with every one of its tenets.

While Robin is away I will go myself into the meadows, and I will recapture the quietness of spirit that first allowed me to see the elementals. I will do this. I must not fail. For if I cannot do this I am no better than the gamblers in the pub, the fornicators in the dark corners of the streets. I will fight their assaults on decency, and I will fight my own impurities, the materialistic urges that have made it impossible for me to see again what I first saw. For as Charles Leadbeater himself says, for the elementals to be near an average man is like to be assaulted by a hurricane – a hurricane that has first blown over a cesspool. I will not be an average man any longer. If I can achieve this, Robin will truly have something to come back to. A proper companion, a proper acolyte to his teachings. For he must surely come back.





1911


For a while after she wakes, Hester can’t quite place what is different. Downstairs, she hears Cat opening the shutters quietly, the gentle clonk of wood against wood as they concertina away into the panelling. The air is still, and close, and too warm. Her skin itches slightly, hot and clammy wherever the sheets touch her, and her thoughts feel drowsy and slow. Then she realises – she is not alone. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she has woken up before Albert, and he remains in bed beside her, asleep on his back with his jaw fallen slack and the tiniest of frowns puckering his brow. The soft sound of his breathing fills what would normally have been silence. It has been six days since Robin Durrant went up to London, and there has been no word from him; and while Albert seems agitated and impatient at this, Hester is pleased, and feels happier than she has in weeks. She rolls over gently so that she can lie facing him. With the curtains still closed the light coming through the thick fabric is a rich, shady ochre. Albert has kicked the covers off in the night, and lies with his legs and arms jumbled wide, carelessly. Hester smiles fondly at him as he murmurs something unintelligible, and shifts his head a little.

To sleep in, Albert wears a long, loose shirt of unbleached linen over a matching pair of trousers. These are rumpled now, from a restless night, and lie bunched and creased in a way that would be most uncomfortable had he been awake. Hester puts out her arm and rests it gently on his stomach, and then recoils in surprise. There is a hardness at his crotch, beneath the pale linen, that she has never felt before. Albert murmurs again, more softly now. Hester stares at her husband’s body, but try as she might she can’t think what form of thing it might be that would feel that way – odd and almost unnatural, as if wholly disconnected from the rest of his relaxed, supine form. With her pulse quickening, Hester, ever so gently, fumbles at the buttons that fasten Albert’s trousers. The fabric is rough and she has to use both hands, though she does so with her lip gripped in her teeth in consternation, in case he should feel it and wake. He does not. And there it is. A curve of hardened flesh, arching up to rest against the soft down of his stomach, the skin satin smooth over an array of ridges and vessels; a deep, flushed, pinkish-brown colour, and a musky smell unlike any she has ever noticed him having before.