Wilson Harris

The Angel at the Gate

For Margaret,

Rowan and Laurence

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them suddenly

pressed me against his heart, should I fade in the strength of his

stronger existence? Is beauty nothing

but beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear?

From ‘The Duino Elegies’ by Rainer Maria Rilke

There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

From ‘East Coker’ by T. S. Eliot

The dialectic of the sacred permits all reversibilities; no “history” is final. History is in some measure a fall of the sacred, a limitation and diminution. But the sacred does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new manifestation it resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly.

From ‘Shamanism’ by Mircea Eliade

Note

I was approached by Father Joseph Marsden, a year or so before his death in June 1981, to analyse and interpret the automatic writing of his secretary and patient Mary Stella Holiday, an assumed name we adopted to avoid embarrassment for the person concerned. I worked on The Angel at the Gate under his supervision and had virtually finished the book when he collapsed and died suddenly.

The materials with which I worked were drawn not only from automatic narratives but also from notes Marsden had compiled in conversation with Mary Holiday. Some of these conversations were conducted under hypnosis.

There was a series of underlying rhythms in the automatic narratives through which unconscious motivation was mirrored in a variety of objects such as wheel, shawl, bale, chariot, and in flowers and the animal kingdom. I mention this briefly to make clear why these assume the proportions they possess in The Angel at the Gate.

Marsden approved of the procedures I adopted and felt they were consistent with the truths of the narrative. I owe him a great deal in the construction of this “fiction”. He helped me interpret the musical compositions by which Mary it seems was haunted from early childhood. There is no doubt that he assisted her profoundly to steer a path through a desolating period of her life and that her debt to him is enormous. On the other hand, he made no bones of the insights he gained from her and the debt he owed to her which possessed a darker rhythm in past generations when one of his white antecedents had purchased a black antecedent of hers in eighteenth-century Angel Inn behind St Clement’s Church in the Strand.

Mary suffered from a physical and nervous malaise as The Angel at the Gate makes clear. Through Marsden — the medical care he arranged for her and the sessions he provided in Angel Inn which gave scope to her “automatic talents”—that illness became a catalyst of compassion through which she penetrated layers of social and psychical deprivation to create a remarkable fictional life for “Stella” (apart from “Mary”) in order to unravel the thread that runs through a diversity of associations in past and present “fictional lives”.

I was astonished at the sudden, clairvoyant perception of Marsden’s death that comes at a particular moment in her automatic narratives. That clairvoyance is associated with the rhythms of a mirror that seem to enfold “presences” and “absences” around the globe. Marsden submitted himself to her, so to speak, as the target of a variety of masks with which she clothed him but the clairvoyant perception of his death was a strange climax between them in which his “fictional death” matched her “absences of self” through which she descended into a series of characters — their limitations and follies — drawn from associations of childhood in her father’s letters to her mother before she was orphaned or abandoned at the age of seven.

Her insights seem to me extraordinary and the characters she creates I have deemed “fictional” as I have no means of checking the letters and childhood associations from which they may actually derive.

She had, at one stage, contemplated leaving her husband and child but in the end succeeded in placing a variety of stressful legacies into perspective. This gave her a means of coping with despair. Marsden left his private fortune to her. This has now become a source of “good works” and a means of helping victims under threat of “possession” by daemonic powers.

W.H.

One

Sebastian Holiday read the note in his hand for the twentieth time with pride in his hollow senses when he came to the three phrases—“Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John”. Then he began from the beginning all over again—

Sebastian,

Have taken 80 no 90 valium tablets. Can’t carry on. Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John.

Stella

He folded the note with care as if he almost feared the dry ink would blot, and placed it in his breast pocket, then sank into a chair with half-collapsed springs that faced a couch across the room; over the couch a huge Jean Harlow poster had been pinned to the wall.

His eyes were bright, yet curiously blind, body grew hollow in the pit of the chair this late February afternoon; the year was 1981.

The light seeped through the curtained window to give a sheen to the walls of the room that matched Sebastian’s eyes. The Jean Harlow print was suffused with the ghost of the winter sun. Sebastian felt himself descending into that pooled ghost as if everything conspired to mask his innermost emotion. He gripped the arm of the chair as if it were materialized script in a book of riddles; the broken springs on which he sat were less the fabric of a chair and more a half-sunken, half-floating boat. The glimmering pool stroked baby John’s toys (the child was close on three years old) along the wall running at right angles to Sebastian’s boat.

Wooden lorries rather than boats were beached on their sides against a train with which John loved to play. Trains were his greatest amusement. He sometimes converted the lorries into carriages that he pulled and tugged behind an imaginary engine on imaginary tracks around the room. Then there was the skeleton house that John also was fond of, a sophisticated toy, with rooms that could be scanned, or re-assembled, through ribbed apertures, collapsible doors and windows. In one skeleton room a dentist leaned over a sailor, in another a barber trimmed a bearded man, in another guests had assembled for a feast presided over by a cat John had seated at the head of the table. The front door bell suddenly pealed. Mary had forgotten her key. Sebastian arose from the boat of his chair above skeleton house and imaginary train.

“Such a beautiful evening,” Mary said to him at the front door. “It will soon be dark.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the sky which was pale rose and smoke.

“Oh yes,” said Sebastian, but he saw nothing himself except the smudge of an aeroplane drawn across the fluid light above the houses on the other side of Dolphin Street.

Mary was now inside. She closed the door behind her and switched on the light in the corridor leading to the sitting room from which Sebastian had come.

“You needn’t worry about John,” she said gently. “Mother’s keeping him until Stella’s back. I must remember to collect his toys. How is Stella?”

It was now almost three days since Stella had been rushed to a hospital within an hour of taking the valium; the tablets had been drawn from her stomach in the nick of time before they had penetrated the bloodstream.

“She’s still flat on her back staring at the ceiling,” said Sebastian in a curious voice. Was it muffled remorse, muffled self-pity, that struck an echo in Mary’s heart? “Asking to see me and you all the time …”

I can’t bear to visit … Mary thought but she remained silent. They were now in the kitchen and she was rummaging in a bag of potatoes, carrots and greens. “I’ve bought some ham,” she said. Sebastian watched her, unseeingly it seemed, as she extracted the vegetables and peeled them swiftly. “I may be late tomorrow, Sebastian. Can you cope?”

“Of course I can cope,” said Sebastian. “I’m not a bloody child.”

“Not a child,” said Mary. “And yet I arrived last night to find you sitting like wood in the darkness without a light on in the entire house. Oh Sebastian, sometimes I feel we’re children playing, all of us, at being mature.” She was astonished she had said so much. It was the shadow of recent events speaking in her.

“Speak for yourself,” said Sebastian. He extracted the letter from his breast pocket.

Oh not that again, thought Mary. You’ve read it to me at least a dozen times. But she listened patiently nevertheless.

“Wish I were like you. Love you. You and Mary please take care of John.”

Mary’s eyes looked back to Stella’s through Sebastian’s as he finished the letter and looked at her with a shadow on his face that seemed to mirror all three. His eyes were deceptively open but their threaded look, threaded faces, disconcerted her. Were they kind, universal eyes or cruel, universal eyes that she and Stella shared with him? Whose eyes was she seeing? What a question to ask silently of “eyes” she thought she knew that suddenly mirrored the veiled darkness of the community of the world as if one of John’s imaginary trains flashed through a darkened, urban landscape, lights on darkened stations in an unreal pool of place, an unreality all the more disturbing in that it had been created by oneself, though how or why one could scarcely tell, Mary felt.

Why did Stella’s note written in a moment of helplessness, a moment of suicidal depression, enter him (penetrate his bloodstream) like a transfusion of pride? Did pride spring from the helplessness of others masquerading as perverse love for one’s accomplishments, for one’s apparent strength? She must ask Father Marsden. He was the only one who knew of the perversity, yet mystery of love.

Two

Sebastian was incapable of killing a fly, Mary knew. Violence saturated magazines and films but it left him drained. It left him in need of perverse affection. To strike a blow was to confess to his debilitation and need. Mary had witnessed some of the pathetic, yet shocking, scenes between Sebastian and Stella, and sometimes she dreamt she could see the epic devil of divine need of attention in his eyes when he and Stella quarrelled until Mary was enveloped in their claustrophobia. Claustrophobia was descent into the womb, into the devil’s foetal gun or foetal knife that needs to kill another it loves in the mother of space. Needs me! thought Mary. Needs the same woman broken into wife and sister. If Stella dies, something in me dreams that it needs to die to find another route back to life.

The devil’s need of affection and attention came to a sudden, ironic climax in Stella’s attempted or staged suicide after an unhappy quarrel. Then it was that the devil popped out of Sebastian’s eyes and became absolutely real. He came upon Stella’s letter half an hour after she had taken the pills, she was lying curled into a ball in bed, John was asleep, Mary was at her mother’s. All Sebastian had to do to achieve his wife’s death was nothing, the simplest thing in the world. Leave her alone. Go for a long walk. Do nothing.

“Instead he rushed from the house,” Mary told Father Marsden, “as if the devil were at his backside, phoned for an ambulance and sat with Stella on the way to the hospital after asking a neighbour to keep an eye on John.”

“Ah,” said Father Marsden, “nothing surprising in that, my dear Mary. Your brother was possessed by the angel of need he himself invoked. Death is like birth; it is landslide one invokes to make oneself into a loved giant as one runs to meet it and to stay it.

“Sebastian’s hell is to be possessed by the angel of perverse need of love he invoked in wishing his wife dead. One man’s greedy or murderous wish for love touches us all — the ramifications are infinite. Self-created universe. Self-created limbo. When his wish was answered, his legs multiplied. They turned into the wheels of an ambulance, they became proud of themselves, obsessed with the riddle of love that motivates many a hospital founded by repentant millionaires. It’s an old story, old as daemons and gods we have forgotten.”

“Oh! I hadn’t realized …” said Mary.

“Realized what?”

“Why, that Sebastian may yet turn into a good man, even a god; he may become the founder of paradise.”

Father Marsden laughed with (rather than at) his student. The annunciation of humour was as unconscious of parody of the sacred as the birth of charity was sometimes unconscious of the devil of guilt. They sprang from uncanny remorse, uncanny hope, and comedy of everlasting spirit. In Mary’s naïveté, Marsden knew, lay the grain of uncanny hope in a bewildered world, the grain of ambivalent paradise in every loved giant.

It was eleven on that third evening since Stella’s attempted suicide that Mary and Sebastian turned in after “looking at the news”: President Reagan speaking of his budget, food kitchens in famine-stricken Ethiopia and the fossil-television bodies of starving children, reports of a mysterious light in the sky that American military personnel had first interpreted as an atomic trial in South Africa until they came to identify it, though still uncertain, with a passing meteorite, scenes of coffins of victims of a fire borne to their grave in Dublin, Ireland …

A time of fires, a time of famine, thought Mary, as she undressed. Within the past week or so one had been inundated by fires. There had been a fire in New Cross Road, London, where a birthday party was being held, resulting in the death of thirteen young West Indians. There had been the Dublin inferno, a dance hall on fire. Another blaze had consumed a hotel in the gamblers’ paradise of America, Las Vegas….

Mary gently lifted the covers and slipped in beside Sebastian. It was habit with them from early childhood into adolescence to sleep side by side on occasion, sometimes once or twice a month when they were adult. Stella was startled at first when she married Sebastian but accepted it as one accepts the gravity of innocence and as a natural, however bizarre, regression into the womb of space. She was two years older than they, thirty-five to their twin thirty-three. Their naked bodies did not touch. Mary’s was as smooth as silk, Sebastian’s roughened in places from the labouring jobs he occasionally did, digging trenches, brick-laying, hospital portering, shirt-less in many weathers of body and hollow mind. He had had a tough time since he had lost his job as an electrician in 1978. He had worked for broken stretches since then within which he would collapse like a marionette and subsist on the dole for staccato — apparently gestating — periods during which he fought with the need for attention to restore his self-respect. He fought within a darkness ignited by ambivalent love, ambivalent hatred of Stella and Mary. (Sebastian scarcely uttered a word about this — he had little vocabulary with which to do so — but Mary was convinced that this interpretation of his behaviour gave “meaning” to his “meaningless” lusts, “meaningless” hatreds. Who could know better than she the transparent polarization of kith and kin, yet twin, married bodies, they inhabited?)

Their bodies did not touch in essence, Mary knew, uncertain in what degree she was dreaming of herself or of frustrated Stella. Perhaps baby John had been conceived within the unconscious embrace of brother and sister (rather than husband and wife) and Stella’s discovery of her pregnancy just over three-and-a-half years ago was as startling as if a phantom cuckoo had deposited an egg in Mary’s (rather than Stella’s) body.

Mary dreamt that she lay in Sebastian’s mind dreaming of the foundations of paradise. A butterfly arose out of Dolphin Street kitchen and garden and its wings succeeded in drawing Mary and Stella together into the rhythm of a pulsating creature Sebastian sought to kiss and to kill at wishfulfilment stroke. He was astonished that wished-for fire under the dress of earth had drawn wives and sister-populations into a live butterfly which flew close to his eyes and mouth with the food of its wings. At first it seemed the soul of bread, the soul of possession, in a violent universe. He began to play a majestic lament to quintessential bride, quintessential property.

Mary woke abruptly. The vividness of her dream left her weak. She shivered almost imperceptibly; the butterfly in her blood warned of the curse that was soon to come. Another two days or three, perhaps four. The light of the ashy, winter morning seeped through the vaguely mud-coloured curtains. She was relieved to find Sebastian had not actually moved. He was a foot or two away from her, sound asleep, snoring at her side. Nothing to match the majestic lament of the flute he had played. Such were the anti-climactic foundations of paradise in Dolphin Street. Mary was relieved, then amused, but despite everything, despite nameless fears, despite sordid chorus, despite a deprived feeling at the pit of her stomach, there remained a sensation of the majesty of the flute that had entered her body — the body of time — since creation began. Sister and wife as catalyst for child and mother. In the grey light and ash of winter — inchoate, pre-menstrual genesis of the sun — life sought intercourse with death’s sleeping brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, in every stricken place around the globe that cohered nevertheless into endangered paradise.

She was relieved, and still amused; relieved to be here, to be alive, relieved she was still in bed with another man’s dreams however transient those dreams were in her own imagination like the dreams of god. What a bridge (or gulf) lay between god’s dreams and brother man’s. What an incorrigible snore! It sounded for all the world as if he were saying Sebastian is the founder of paradise: there was a hiss and a consonantal, equally hissing, ultimatum. Mary listened to the tail-end comedy of her cohabitation with him, with the majestic flute he had played. She was smiling openly as she brushed her hair from her eyes. How unkind it would be to wake him now, tell him she could not say whether he was her victim or she his — and ask him if he recalled the majestic lament he had played to her, the genius he had displayed for anti-climactic tragedy into the comedy of a butterfly as frail and sensitive in the texture of its wings as the hair over her eyes illumined by an iridescent rainbow of tears.

Father Marsden had said that if one could ascend a rainbow of tears one would converse with the souls of the living and the dead. It was on that rainbow-bridge that a butterfly of existence flew. On each wing were intricate and multiple records of the deeds of many lives shimmering and shifting to reflect anew each individual history or individual body. As such it was the spiritual chameleon of blood. It tended to fly upwards as well and to bring one into conversation with a “family tree” between heaven and earth. Curiously enough that “family tree” was not wholly unlike a body of television news transmitted by satellite branches in space around the globe, each satellite branch resembling a cocoon, a cylinder of bone drifting in air or reflected in glass.

The difference was — Mary felt as she lay in bed this morning — that “family tree news” came out of parallel universes to television cocoons, universes of unfurled wings on which had been inscribed events otherwise sunken into a sea of unconsciousness.

Mary’s mother had come from farming folk in the North. They had lived so close to the soil, embedded their fears and frustrations so deeply in the soil, that some of their descendants tended to run to the city as to a contrary plantation. Her father had been a postman. Or so she had thought at one period of her life before she discovered her real sailor-father’s letters. It was all recorded on a butterfly wing of bone along with the fact that her father’s mid-eighteenth-century antecedent had been black. A fact long submerged in a sea of space in which no one would have had the slightest inkling he was other than white.

That item of news, relating to black antecedents, was transmitted to her within two veiled lines of hair that fell over her eyes into pencilled butterfly wing. Marsden had been more prosaic. He had reminded her that she had browsed through his papers and books in the Angel Inn library, Hammersmith, where he lived, and had come upon another Angel Inn associated with one Crosby Hall that had been a private residence in London before being damaged by fire in 1673, when it was repaired and underwent a number of changes of personality, within the decade, to become a Presbyterian Meeting Hall, then a warehouse, then an auction room in which a sale was announced of “tapestry, a good chariot and a black girl about fifteen”.

There had, however, been some confusion in Mary’s mind, Father Marsden explained. Mary had confused the Crosby auction room sale with another advertised sale that had occurred a hundred years later, the details of which were explicitly declared in the Public Advertiser of 1769.

Those details rans as follows:

To be sold, a Black Girl, eleven years of age; extremely handy; works at her needle tolerably, and speaks English well. Enquire of Mr Marsden, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, in the Strand.

Marsden explained to Mary with a rueful smile that that “Black Girl” was her father’s true great-great-(or great-great-great-, he could not say) grandmother, news of whom had been transmitted to her by her dream-satellite in the womb of space.

Before arising from bed, Mary tried to decipher some other items inscribed in the “chameleon of blood” that flew on its rainbow-bridge of tears.

1661 For getting severall poore people out of ye Parish 8d 1679 Pd for clearing the Parish of a woman bigg with child 1/- 1682 Pd for clearing the Parish of two women bigg with child 4/- 1683 Given to James Edwards for clearing of the Parish of children and a greate Bellyed Black woman 2/- 1719 To gett rid of a poor Black woman with a bigg Belly 2/6 1727 Pd to severall Algiers slaves permitted to begg with a pass 3/6 1769 Cash paid at East India house for the discharge of Jackson a parishioner for having entered himself as a common soldier intending to leave his wife and child (Bigg with another) for the P’sh to maintain in his absence £4/4/11

Father Marsden could have confirmed the accuracy of “butterfly satellite” by referring to the parish accounts for St Swithin’s, London Stone, that were still kept by an ancient accountant he employed in his Angel Inn library. That ancient accountant was a character-mask Marsden employed in one of the occasional plays of earlier, forgotten times he staged in Angel Inn theatre.

Mary arose now from bed. Sebastian was sound asleep. Not snoring now. A dead log. She left the bedroom, had a quick shower, dressed, ate daintily and set out along Dolphin Street to Goldhawk Road.

It was a milder February morning than she had anticipated. The blanket she had relinquished on leaving bed seemed to pursue her still and to lie over the tree-less junction of Dolphin Street and Goldhawk Road, and upon the neo-Georgian early-to middle-twentieth-century houses in Dolphin Street that bore an unpretentious, if not down-at-heel, appearance in 1981.

Mary gave subtle rein to the impulse of black and harlequin humour that ran always with her upon, yet still below, the threshold of words. This was her chariot of resistance to depression, a chariot to air-tarnished bodies, rotten ghosts, a fluid tapestry of wheels, vaguely polluted, yet half-radiant, winter sun.

Cleanliness runs next to devil-may-care cosmopolis, she thought; pollution’s the wheeling palette of spirit of place. She wished she possessed the brush (the ironies) of spirit of place. Wishes (the chariot of place said to her) were painted horses on butterfly wings and their consequences — as she knew in her dreams of auction block rooms — were disturbing and strange. They brought one face to face with characters that had been dipped into every conceivable dye. Two “punk” characters were approaching her now and their scarlet-tinted hair seemed to levitate above the pavement.

She stopped at the first chemist she came to in Goldhawk Road and bought another packet of sanitary towels. The metaphysical wishes of the body — the chemistry of bandaged souls — invoked many a fashion, bizarre costumes, wholly unconscious of the sources (the curses and the blessings) from which they had sprung.

A mirror in the chemist’s shop gave her a glancing appreciation of herself. She was elegantly, perhaps slightly tartily dressed, red-gold hair, a shade too much eye-shadow, a stylish winter coat the colour of flamingo, beautiful legs (spirit of place said), good features (Marsden said), gloves that hid her groomed nails and sensuously veined flesh that came to light as she shed a glove and extracted a pound note or two from her purse. She put the article she had purchased into a neat, leather bag and restored the glove to her hand.

How unreal, yet real, one was when one saw oneself with one’s own eyes from angles in a mirror so curiously unfamiliar that one’s eyes became a stranger’s eyes. As at the hairdresser when she invites one to inspect the back of one’s head.

Next door to the chemist, the spirit of place had lavished sky-blue, artificial paint on a studio for processing film and auditioning “starlets” to play nude scenes upon magazine covers.

The studio ran up vertically for two storeys above the pavement and then it ran the entire block to the corner, occupying however — in horizontal extension of itself — only the upper storey above other business premises at pavement level. The distinction between the two remained the rather garish blue that divided the “stars” above from the mundane pigmentation of IRONMONGERS ICES CONFECTIONERS and LUSTRACURL. LUSTRACURL was the unexpected card in the pack belonging to the comedy of spirit of place; it depicted not scarlet but ink-black hair as if to add a note of carnival West Indian paint, carnival lustracurl blood, to Marsden’s book of consumer riddles and origins of human attire or dress.

On her way to Shepherd’s Bush market Mary passed Greek, Chinese and Indian restaurants vaguely coated with the misty conglomerate of space, their menus like price tags upon antique windows and upon chamber pots filled with exotic plants.

Marsden’s eighteenth-century accountant was often seen prowling in the neighbourhood licking his chops at the fortune he could have made had it been possible to transport backwards in time the curiosities of twentieth-century London into his Crosby auction rooms. Footballs rubbed balloon noses with space invaders, pop records looked blandly across counters at AD 4000 conflict games, prams kissed lampshades and jeans.

Mary assembled a list of prints of masterpieces and posters of actors and revolutionaries the eighteenth-century Marsden accountant acquired in late twentieth-century Shepherd’s Bush market and in Goldhawk Road. The list was as follows:

For getting poore Van Gogh’s yellow chaire out of ye Market 25p For getting one unsigned Cubist Bigge Bellyed Woman out of ye Market 50p For getting Lowry’s thin-Bellyed Populace out of ye Market 100p For getting Picasso’s Blue Period (coffee-stained) out of ye Market 25p For getting Starsky and Hutch (bullet-stained) out of ye Market 25p For getting oil-rich Nigerian Benim Queen out of ye Market 100p For getting ye pointillist Seurat Bathers out of ye Market 25p For getting Dracula and Frankenstein out of ye Market 50p For getting Che Guevara and Catholic Nunne out of ye Market 25P

And that was but a sample of the refugee oddities Mary ticked on the accountant’s pad. He was a rather quaint old gentleman, she thought, until one looked deeply into his veiled eyes scarred by the wishfulfilment tragedies and comedies of the marketplace. He breathed an air of refinement and stoical mask of the world’s cruel fair and its enslaved commodities called “arts”, “revolutions”, “entertainments”. Was art, was revolution, was entertainment, but a veil over the humours of the human/animal body? Had nothing changed since archaic woman menstruated, became pregnant and gave birth to a masterpiece, a daemon baby, a daemon Heracles possessed by serpents which he strangled in his cradle?

What was the human distinction between p (for a twentieth-century entertainment poster) and imperial shilling (with which to expel “greate Bellyed” mother and yet to purchase endangered child and trickster of cradles)?

All of which reminded her that it was time to ascend the bridge of space by catching a bus and flying to Marsden’s Angel Inn in Hammersmith.

She had become acquainted with Father Marsden in the winter of 1976 when she answered an advertisement in an evening paper calling for a secretary/research student to work with him on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A knowledge of English literature — it was stated — would prove an asset. She continued working for several months after she became pregnant in June 1977 and then returned when John was six months old. Marsden kept in touch with her all the time. He was much more than an employer, he was her witch-doctor, her priest, her newfound master. His house became a bridge into other worlds and an elaborate cave of the womb over which she was invited to preside and to bleed her hopes and despairs through hypnoses of creativity within which he seemed to bind her and liberate her. She spied multiple humours of body and bandaged soul. In that cave of Angel Inn The Tempest raged close to Wuthering Heights, The Ancient Mariner stood with Ulysses, Pygmalion seduced Darwin on the Voyage of HMSBeagle Round the World. Mary changed HMS Beagle to Beatle Submarine.

Thus Mary’s arrival was as much a historic event as if she were herself another book of fictions in conversation with those he kept on his shelves, in his drawers and numerous cabinets, numerous living masks in the volume of riddles of spiritual blood he was compiling. Transfusion was part of his original (rather than revolutionary) art. It created a subtle, therapeutic no-man’s land or accent upon cross-cultural humanspace between “possession” and “possessed”. She knew of (but had not met) the “no-man’s land writer” he had employed to assemble his notes and the characters she herself was creating — in conjunction with his masks — into a book of “fictional lives”. “What is he like?” she had once asked but had received a dusty answer worthy of his accountant except that his eyes seemed to vanish yet sparkle with benign humour, benign principle that sometimes one needed to “divide and rule”.

Today was Friday — it was Father Marsden’s morning for shopping — so she knew she would arrive at the Inn before he got back. (On occasion — upon Fridays — as she had implicitly confessed, she had stumbled upon Marsden or his extraordinary accountant in Goldhawk Road or Shepherd’s Bush market.)

Angel Inn existed in a quiet, residential backwater off the busy Hammersmith area, not far from the old St Paul’s schoolground. There were lime and horsechestnut trees in Marsden’s street all bare and singularly beautiful now as living sculptures of winter. Spirit of place possessed not only the ribald artifice of Goldhawk Road but unselfconscious naked integrity of winter lime or catalyst of seed preceding spring. Cross-cultural winter and spring.

Mary arrived at the gate, made her way to the door along the flagged path through the garden covered with a sprinkle of blossom, minute snowdrops. She was surprised to find the door ajar and wondered if Marsden was in. She entered and made her way along the thickly carpeted corridor towards the great study on her left. It was an enormous house that seemed to echo with whispers, and the corridor itself ran far past the study into deep interior rooms that Marsden kept locked. The door of the study like the front door was ajar. She entered (it too was red-carpeted and whisperingly silent) and made her way across to a window overlooking the garden that came around from the front to the side of the house.

She deposited her bag on the table by the window and had begun to unbutton her coat when a sound caused her to spin around towards a great desk diagonally across from her in the huge, high-domed study. The book cases lining the wall became a swift blur as her eyes focused on a black youth (he could have been eighteen or nineteen years old) who had been seated at Marsden’s desk but had now sprung to his feet. For a moment she was paralysed with fright and convinced he would attack her. They were alone in the house. The city receded even more than it had already done the moment she came through the door. She felt with intolerable vividness the loud ticking of the great, gloomy clock high on the wall over Marsden’s desk, as if each sound came glimmering through its shadow-strewn face where the light streaked the glass over the Roman numerals, the long hand and the short.

The young man’s body and head stood just below and in line with the clock on the wall that seemed now a clown’s moon, however menacing, plucked from her own body to adorn external cave or womb or study. There had been stories in the local papers of women who had been attacked and robbed in the middle of the day. Thirteen minutes to eleven. Millions were being born, millions were dying. Mary read the time exactly through the shadowy multitude in the clock. She also “read”, at the heart of the clowning moon, it seemed, above the young man’s head, that he (like every thief of time) was lame. He had moved, limped a little, and she saw that his left ankle was bandaged. He belonged to the endless millions of the dying, of the newly born, all ages, all foetal humanity. The carpet between them had turned to charmed blood, her frozen blood mingling with his, his with hers like glass.

He was dressed in soft, leather shoes, the bandage on his naked foot, tennis shorts (such as a jogger might wear for a brisk trot around the block), and a thick sweater of greyish-blue. His face quivered slightly, the bones clear and sharp (so much so she wondered if he was much older than she first thought he was), giving extra tension to a tuft of beard on his chin. Her fears began to revive. The material and immaterial presence of millions enfolding them became scales of twin-memory, flesh of memory, and made her feel suddenly black and naked herself. And yet his eyes, she was convinced, were as frightened as hers in the moon of time, so frightened they saw through her blackness to her white breasts and her white belly and thighs.

Fright and fear bred violence (Marsden seemed to be saying to her as she confronted the black man in the room who seemed older and yet younger than she could gauge in her confused state of mind). For that very reason (Marsden implied) there was a compulsion or infectious Cupid’s arrow in her — and in him — that ran deep as love, true love, perverse love. It was obscure, that compulsion and arrow, but it related to the target of unfinished being, to a summons she had issued to him. She had summoned him or he her, though when or where that summons, that call, had gone forth was buried in layers of desire, the desire for pigmented luxuries, necessities, commodities of harsh and sweet emotion, daemonic possessions through which to extend one’s reach and grasp, one’s body, one’s brain and muscle. That was the key to every white or black, schizophrenic Cupid who had afflicted her in afflicting him, that was the perverse adolescence of civilization, perverse comedy, key or arrow of greed or dragon’s rape or love that encircled the globe.

Love! What was love save the key to lock or unlock fear? To love was to fear the keys of god and man alike, angel and trickster alike, thief and saint alike, child and monster alike. To love was to fear the keys of the kingdom. And once again she wanted to seize the window and SHOUT … scream for help from any and every passer-by. He may have divined her thoughts, he may have read her hysteric endorsement of the ambivalences of love and fear through which we judge others and are judged by others. “I’m not a thief,” he cried, “so please don’t make a scene. I haven’t a thing, not a weapon. Look! Nothing.” He spread his arms wide. “Father Marsden knows I’m here, though,” he confessed. “I was forbidden this room … but I saw….” He turned his eyes to the desk. “The door was open and I saw the funny title of that book.” He pointed to the desk.

“Sir Thomas More’s Utopia,” said Mary, smiling against her fear and finding her tongue at last. “I put it there myself this week.” His eyes were upon hers now. “I put it …” she began again, then stopped. “I brought you here,” she thought silently. “Utopia was the baitI used.”The thought came of its own volition. It seemed irrational, yet true. There was a ticking silence between them, a deeper pull than she could gauge, a deeper call than she knew, that had sounded long, long ago, even before the time when her father’s great-great-grandmother had been hooked by an Englishman to bear him children of mixed blood. Their names, in an eighteenth-century accountant’s ledger, were Chanty, Ambition and Desire. What names with which to saddle a child, names that called to mind Makepeace, Patience and Grace. Nowadays horses were heir to that tradition of names — Cupid’s Bow, Black Romance, Vanity Fair. How inimitable was the wishfulfilment cradle and stable of the human race, how inimitably vulnerable one was, how prone to nurse spectres in every webbed moment or vanity fair of blacks and whites within which one was entangled. Black Anancy (Marsden had told her) meant god’s chariot, god’s tapestry and trickster-spider, god’s bandaged, miniature ankle or wheel. How inimitably entangled one was in all fearful nets and creatures one had been purchasing and selling from time immemorial, immemorial object, immemorial flesh-and-blood.

Anancy suddenly hobbled to the door on his bandaged foot. There was something almost deliberate, almost masochistic, in the way he seemed to stand on the injured limb as if it gave him pleasure. Mary remained at the window, riveted there still by fear (or was it by obscurest affection?). Whose need was greater, she wondered, hers or his? All at once he appeared in the street. He waved at her. Her white face through the glass must have looked like a ghost’s! Then suddenly he shot away like greased lightning. Incredible! Her heart almost stopped. She could scarcely believe her eyes. Had it all been a trick, the bandaged ankle, the infirm gait? Was he a practised thief after all who deceived everyone with a twisted foot? She rushed forward without thinking into the corridor of the house, wondering if anything outside had been snatched, a vase, a mask or painting, anything, and in her bewilderment and rage — as she gained the beautifully furnished entrance hall — the sensation enveloped her that he was still here, still in the house, running for all he was worth not outside in the street but inside in the corridor upon the bridge of Angel Inn between worlds past, present and future. She saw him coming out of a future that resembled the past (the significant minority of blacks that had once lived in Europe) and she collapsed in a dead faint.

Mary came to herself with Father Marsden’s beard falling towards her like grey-black moss in a dry riverbed to which she had been transported. She was in a daze and he helped her up from the floor and with an arm around her led her back into the study. “Oh my god,” she said. Her memory was blank.

He led her to the great armchair by his desk into which she slipped with the luxurious sensation of reclining in an upright bed or couch. “A little wine,” he said. She sipped the red wine, the shadow of memory was returning, she felt a trifle better. “Father, I’m sorry I collapsed like that but….”

“Not at all, my dear.”

“I remember now — it was the black man.”

“What … what …?” said Marsden sharply.

“I came upon him in the study. I thought he was lame. But he ran.”

“Ah!” said Marsden with a trace of relief in his voice. “Young Anancy. He’s on his way to … He’s back from … He should not have come into the study. But then, I know, it’s Utopia. You left it there yourself.”

The wine imbued her with a gentle fire but she still felt curiously at a loss and as if she had voyaged into another country.

“He was black, Father, and when he fooled me and ran like that I felt he’d been up to no good, that he was a thief, and then … it was as if…” She stopped. She felt ashamed of her double vision now, the running figure (greased lightning) in the street and also in the house, within corridor and bridge, so swift it vanished into locked interior rooms and spaces, locked bedrooms, locked memories, secret files.

Marsden gave her a gentle pat on the head. “Try and relax, Mary,” he said. “How are you feeling now?”

“Better,” she said. But her voice sounded shaky and uncertain. Marsden was watching her intently. His black greying beard fell to his chest and she remembered the sensation of moss falling from rock, the sensation of the many journeys, expeditions he had made of which she had read in his papers, expeditions into many corners of the globe. In her half-dazed, half-waking state, with the wine coursing in her veins, she was struck afresh by his high forehead close to her now, the faintest aroma of incense, she thought, perfumed sculpture of bone, priestly mask of flesh. The domed head sanctified the hidden eyes, almost hooded eyes, that receded into folds of skin and yet occasionally sparkled under the thickest eyebrows she knew with the light of phenomenal sympathy, kindness and understanding.

“A little more wine,” Marsden said gently. “Try and relax.”

She drank the wine and surrendered herself to the sensation that Marsden’s divine knob of a head accentuated his otherwise frail body and gave it a curious strength, the strength of a stick or a rod upon which to lean. As if something, some invisible presence, did lean upon him, did support itself through him, a spirit that towered invisibly above him and clasped him as if he were its knobbed walking stick with which to patrol the globe … It was an extraordinary half-drowsing, half-protected feeling that ran hand in hand with endangered self and she wondered in what degree the Anancy figure had helped to bring it into play and into being.

There was a distinction, yet resemblance, between Anancy and Marsden, between masked, black youth and masked, white age. At the heart of the cloud that still partially enveloped her, Anancy returned as sculptured chariot of god (with one wheel that ran round and round as if it were whole, yet served in envisioning a broken revolution to signify the moral fate of all human design). Father Marsden was quite different. His strength was the paradox of spiritual age. His body had been whittled or sliced by fate, it seemed, into a knobbed stick. The apparatus of daemonic possession that he may have endured or enjoyed as a young man had changed; he had been cut and penetrated over many decades into a living evolution or original species of spiritual art until his priest’s body had come to signify not so much “possessed apparatus” (possession by inventive angels and inventive devils) as consenting prop or support, consenting organ or stick, upon which a giant spirituality leaned and signified freedom from desire, freedom from the perversities of affection.

Mary longed to reach up to him, unprepossessing as he may have seemed to others who would have been dubious of his intentions, the hypnotic wine, the hypnotic net he cast far and wide. Ancient lover. Ancient annunciation. She would have yielded herself to him without a moment of misgiving; she would have laid bare her heart to knob or stick or bone upon which a towering spirit walked in space. Laid bare her breasts, her thighs, her body. Laid bare … What was she saying, thinking? Mary was dazzled by — and ashamed of — the many creatures she was, the distances that lay between herself and the consenting prop she had glimpsed. In her haste to reach out to it or to him, to seize his consenting organ of spirituality and hard-won art of freedom, she was suddenly unsure who or what he was, who or what she was. No wonder he seemed unprepossessing to others, priest, ex-priest, lover, seducer.

The distance between “possession” and “freedom” was infinitely great. It had no alternative but to make one faint, make one collapse, run, crawl, diminish itself, yet multiply itself into deceptive wheels, into Anancy chariot, unselfconscious tricks of guilt, black romance, difficult seed of encounter between ancient stick of a master and naïve mistress of god.

“Shall I get you a taxi, Mary?” Marsden broke in. She sensed a sudden weariness in his voice.

“I’m fine now,” Mary protested. “I haven’t yet typed the paper you asked me to do Wednesday.”

“No rush,” said Marsden. She had been faint before, he now was. Where lay the truth, where the fiction of towering strength?

“I want you to rest over the weekend, my dear. And if you’re down with the curse on Monday, I’ll see you on Wednesday or Friday. Now I’ll phone for a taxi.”

Mary arose from the chair. “I’d prefer to walk, Father,” she said. “It’s a mild day. I feel like walking. I’m sorry….”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Marsden. But she sensed his displeasure. It was so subtle, she could not be sure what she may have said to offend him. He led her to the door and waved after her. Ancient lover. Had she said that? Ancient annunciation of humanity. Had she actually said something like that? Had she held on to him? Had she sought to climb into paradise with him? Unprepossessing, prepossessing summit of freedom, ascent to which is littered by creatures of desire that pop up and speak …

Mary was sorry to go, glad to go. That alone, so to speak, was the measure of two selves.

Marsden was displeased, she felt, yet as he waved after her he was pleased — she sensed it in the way his body was poised, the mysterious alchemy of hidden summons within overt gesture of farewell, hidden pleasure within displeasure — pleased that though she went she would come again as another self or with another self. His apparent void (was it pleasure or displeasure?) endorsed, if anything, a curious blank cheque or invitation to draw upon a bank of fictional “memories” and “non-memories”, “absences” and “presences”, with which to cast her fluid line (in paradoxical kinship to his stick) towards a psychic vitality of encounter that was needed if she were to create various stages, various approximations, to consenting prop she had glimpsed through him. That those approximations — line and prop — could lead her into the strangest veils and territories, into endangered premises and waters of emotion, went without saying. But there was no alternative to that long line, harlequin bait, if she were to salvage what was deepest and truest in herself. Each transfusion of blood from line to stick, as it were, from endangered blood to endangered bloodlessness was the paradoxical resource of divine pleasure and it was fraught with the danger of unconscious, unwitting intercourse and yet therapeutic mystery in brides of god.

It was — as she had said to Marsden — a beautifully mild day. She felt enlivened, thoroughly revived. The net of the sky laced the trees and invited afresh convertible line and support through which the distances between Marsden and herself sometimes seemed wide, sometimes close. Something suggested to her — on coming to the site where St Paul’s School used to stand on the road between Hammersmith and Olympia — that she should enter the deserted grounds and sit for a while on a covered bench under the webbed trees. Someone would call to her in a little while … ten, fifteen minutes…. It had all been arranged — that something seemed to say. She would become susceptible in or after that call — through rod and line — to intimate voyage of “other self’ or “other selves”.

Three

Sebastian woke and extricated himself from bed. It was thirteen minutes to eleven by the clock on the table close at hand.

Sebastian felt little, perceived little, or so it seemed to line or rod of place that hovered in Mary’s book of lives and masks above him, seeking support in him, and studying his movements that were those of a log half-staggering a little, half-floating on arousal from sleep. There was no visible bandage around his ankle but he seemed nevertheless as lame as Anancy. Or, if not lame, an inversion of Marsden. Marsden’s consenting support for great spirituality had become in Sebastian a hollow tree, the hollow shadow of towering presence.

Thus an odd puppet-like stiffness distinguished Sebastian’s limbs — odd, one would have thought, in such a young man, Mary’s twin-brother but lacking her fluidity of grace and line. On closer inspection, one was less sure of Sebastian’s true posture (how much had been invented by Mary and Stella to transmit to Marsden), and whether it was less an outer stiffness of body and more an inner deprivation of mind that cast its scales over his eyes.

He did not see the crumpled sheets and blankets he had left on struggling out of bed; he did not see the miniature map and relief model those bedclothes had made as if they were ridden by a cosmic chariot, cosmic anancy plates under Africa, Asia and Europe to divide the bed into land masses and oceans, into compressed towering mountains, into descending boats and troughs, now fashioned into a geologic toy with which precocious baby John could play at continents in motion.

Sebastian parted the curtains on being pulled by the line of place to turn his unseeing eyes up to a mild grey web of sky that seemed more ashen over Dolphin Street than over Angel Inn or St Paul’s schoolground, Hammersmith.

The world of geologic daemon was intrinsically grey in Sebastian’s eyes, possession of ash that turned heaven around into depressive function of hell. Thus even when he drowned his senses they persisted in a crackling or sedimentary conflagration under the sea or high on the land of his hollow spirit. Yet it was here in alchemies of water and fire that Sebastian unwittingly drew close to a religious sensibility, a religious mould within which his deprivations became the soil of an epic callous or torment of being.

That distinction or divide between callous insensibility and genuine torment was a factor in the line Mary unfurled between “possession” and “freedom”; save that possession masked itself as epic callous, freedom as unwitting torment.

Sebastian now repaired to the lavatory in his smouldering boat of a house cast adrift on the winter of space. Then he stumbled into the cave of the kitchen, lit a couple of gas rings, made indifferent coffee, boiled an egg, buttered toast.

Inverted paradise or depressive function of hell — in the degree that he was obscurely conscious of it — made him both lame and desirous of “speed” (a drug he secured on private prescription and also from underground sources). He was also addicted to codeine linctus and this he was able to buy in the open market at any chemist.

When he was on speed he tended to vanish into the lavatory and dream he was Stella’s prisoner but would erupt into gigantic liberator, that toilet paper was the post office he had founded in paradise upon which to scribble messages and wishes. Out of such ash-grey, ash-blue rolls of paper he had constructed laconic music which he afterwards transferred to a diary.

This February morning he felt himself master of the empty house. Stella was in hospital. Mary was at Angel Inn. He stacked egg-cup, saucer, plate, etc. in the sink, and reached up to a shelf in the kitchen where he kept his 1980 and 1981 diaries. Each day was allotted an area of no more than one inch by one inch within which to transfer his lavatory ruminations. Sebastian squeezed a spidery line or two, spidery vein or two, into each restricted day.

The habit of recording seeds of greatness in each locked hour or day stained the wall with invisible hieroglyphics that taxed both Stella and Mary. The diary entries were visible and in conjunction with invisible institution, epic lavatory, they achieved the random alchemy of seed of majestic lament that Mary had dreamt as resident in Sebastian’s ambivalent foundations of paradise in the wake of the letter he had received from Stella and the action of remorse to save her life; it was as if Sebastian had stumbled upon an equation between his unseeing mind in ironies of the liberator and invisible genius or unseen presence, as if he had rifled resources between “epic callous” and “torment of being”, torment of need.

Perhaps Sebastian was a thief of love, a thief of genius, to shore up his rotten life. If so he was oblivious of it. Sick genius of Dolphin Street.

The first entry in his diary (the first transferred lavatory code) was on 5 November 1980. He had lost his job that day as a porter in the Victoria Maternity Hospital. The entry ran in spidery, sad letters BANG BANG to imply not only that it was Guy Fawkes Day but that he had drunk two bottles of codeine linctus on top of speed. He was unemployed again. One could barely decipher what he had written and the effect of BANG was like a muffled drum or silent shape of ghostly liberator, ghostly, confused freedom-fighter. The explosions, the fireworks, constituting Guy Fawkes Night, were therefore fodder of blindness as far as Sebastian was concerned except for the thief of grandeur he saw flitting in them, in their ash-grey, ash-blue flares.

He had attempted on that Guy Fawkes Night to steal Stella from John and take her to bed but she had resisted saying she hated him when he was on drugs. He had retaliated with words that had been put into his mouth by blind jealousy. “I know what it is — you’re just like my bloody sister Mary. You want to be fucked by a holy man.”

Stella went white. She knew it was less Sebastian speaking than the hollow giant he was, the hollow founder of epic institution, epic family. Yet she was angry. She saw (if Sebastian did not) the effect on precocious baby John who was listening. He responded to their quarrel by bleating like a lamb, then he became mute as rock, his face nevertheless like glass or a mirror in which the sad, stifled refrain of the baton of place passed, the shadow and the rhythm of blood. The spectacle of the music he had stolen confused, yet held Sebastian. Stella clung to John and wondered whether she had been right to resist her husband. She imprinted a kiss on John’s face of glass. Hysteric imprint. She became a toy herself, even as she held, or submitted to, a toy. Flesh-and-blood glass in her hands and upon her breasts. The quarrel of drugs and sex had fused into a third party — their child in whom (in whose tabula rasa mirror) were contained all hostages to love and fortune. Thus in their child — whom she wished to protect in the sullen gift of herself to his father — lay also a catalyst through which to break that sullen gift by aligning it to him and to all pledges of liberation, pledges against sexual blackmail or pawns of flesh-and-blood every freedom-fighter unconsciously makes.

Which alternative she chose depended on the measure of toy she became. She could — at one stroke — select a square inch of mirror possessing all hostages to the devil and imprint it with a kiss until third-party child-hostage of the family of man mirrored all unfulfilled pledges and hypnotic abuse.

Sebastian apologized to Stella for his behaviour the following morning and sought to please and placate poor John by making faces of saviours and kings he had liberated from prison, the faces of millionaires, astronauts, coalminers, even barbers and emperors, all in his name, his (John’s) body. John bided his time. His troubled innocence, the price he had been for so many liberations, needed now to invest in a bank of flowers. He wiped away the faces Sebastian invited him to mimic and drew him into the street. Sebastian was taken by surprise. He suggested that they go to Paddington Station where the great trains run. John refused to be bribed by sweets and promises. With a sweep of his hand he insisted on another rich train, rich fate.

The emphasis on rich was consistent with Sebastian’s adoration and unconscious parody of liberated millionaires but because of the troubled innocence of a child, it was all the more compelling, all the more layered with naïve traces of angelic moral and subtle grandeur. Wealth or riches had achieved great things, aeroplanes, nuclear rockets, fantastic buildings, fast trains, ships, cathedrals, etc. etc. etc., but in essence it seemed now even to blind Sebastian — as John thumped him with his small fist — that all these magnificent conceptions were native to a child’s genius. They were — whatever their splendour — still divided from the lighthouse of maturity no one had yet founded in paradise. And therein lay — in the irony of hostage to the devil who commanded the globe — the memories of hypnotic family, hypnotic abuse, upon which great architects and scientists, great composers draw as they too, like John, wave a hand, strike the ground, strike up the orchestra of a train of flowers to match every gamble of soul.

With a sinking heart Sebastian was being tugged and pulled by John along Dolphin Street. They did not have far to go. The pale November sun painted the houses on their side of the street with glimmering pearl and threw the other side into chill and luminous shadow. There was no wind and the sun in which they walked was warm as a light rabbit or a piece of cheese on toast. They came to the garage John had in mind. A procession was emerging, it crossed the pavement at a snail’s pace and moved on to the street. A faint chime of bells rang far across the city.

“Millionaire,” said John, pointing to the great black hearse banked high with flowers that seemed to Sebastian’s hollow senses remote or faded like squares of toilet paper stuck together with ash. Sebastian felt the faintest, yet stifling, burden, he seemed to see unseeingly his own addiction laid bare before him; to see unseeingly as if the eyes of ashen bell in his head were open in the other’s head, whoever the other was in the coffin in the hearse. It was faintest awakening, faintest baton, faintest cracked coffin (rather than resurrection) that the angel of liberated wealth invoked. And it was still shrouded in parallel wheels of oblivious innocence and guilt (his guilt and John’s troubled innocence). John was delighted, convinced it was all a celebration; it was as if he knew (though how could he know?) that the hearse possessed millionaire hostage to faintest awakening, faintest orchestra of the unemployed, faintest descent into the funeral of an age.

If John were not rabbit-child, cheese-child, paradise-child, to be consumed in the games they played, Sebastian would have sworn that he knew, that he had planned the cultivation of a rich procession to mimic or strike back at his (Sebastian’s) hollow games of wealth and theft of genius. That theft required the foundations of the coffin, that the scales should not fall from one’s eyes until the faint time was ripe to re-visit paradise. When would that be? Sebastian looked at John but John kept his own counsel. The procession now began to roll. Each car was a sleek composition of chariot-and-cat. The hearse possessed wheels to accentuate the deaf road on which it ran even as it incorporated the blind springs of animal grace one associates with sombre countenance, purring fate, angelic chauffeur.

“Holy, oblivious chauffeur,” Sebastian thought he heard John say. But that was impossible. The faint bell had ceased to chime but an invisible presence peered over the rim of the coffin and waved to Sebastian.

*

Sebastian waved back from his cell, the last day in November, meditating upon lavatory codes he had compiled over the month that bore upon the debts he was accumulating, the credit he had received, unpaid bills, for drugs.

There were three spidery entries for the 13th, the 21st and the 29th that ran as follows:

90 minute script, White City

180 minute script, White City

90 minute script, White City, cancell’d

Minute actually signified day, and 90 days’ supply Sebastian knew would last for scarcely a fortnight. Script was code for prescription but in the underground market it implied high-priced scene or promised money.

White City implied the pavement opposite the greyhound stadium close to the Broadcasting Studios in White City. That was the rendezvous where Sebastian met his producer or middleman. Cancell’d implied that he was up to his eyes and ears in debt (he owed his producer close to fifty pounds and had had to cancel his last script). Thus it was clear that Sebastian had paid dear to the underground market for speed.

The slide into debt had started when he had forfeited prescriptions from his GP after a quarrel and had thus lost his normal supply at the normal rate or price. The facts were that as a porter on night duty at the Victoria Maternity, he had successfully appealed to his doctor or GP for a prescription by explaining how starved he was for sleep during the day by the fiendish racket that a road repair gang was making just beyond his bedroom window. He needed a rich speed to face the night, the abyss of the night, after a snail’s crawl of sleep during the day; eyes pounded and barely shut when it was time for him to open them to the last shades of the sun.

In any event — even if he had not lost his job at the hospital — the gang had long since dispersed, and the funeral, long-suffering faces he turned upon his doctor, long-suffering, coffined day husband, long-suffering, coffined night porter, were of no avail. His deception had worn thin when the doctor happened to drive through Dolphin Street at noon and to come upon no sign whatever of the mysterious road gang, the mysterious grave diggers of Sebastian’s exasperated daytime soul.

Sebastian was awakened rudely by Stella’s voice just beyond the lavatory door. “Sebastian, Sebastian, how long are you going to remain in there? I need to have a word with you before I leave for the market.”

Sebastian hastily pulled up his trousers, pulled the chain, and shot through the door BANG. His alacrity made it clear to Stella that he was high. Not high like Mary’s Father Marsden upon whom a great spirit leaned to patrol the globe, but high in an inverted sense as if he (Sebastian) ran on the edge of numinous, Alfred Hitchcock coffin or pit, yet stood upon a pole held aloft by a devil in the depths of that coffin, a pole on which he danced with numb toes, and skilfully, however blindly, preserved himself from the swirling grave beneath.

The hierarchies between Marsden’s freedom and swirling depths of possession were multifold, both Mary and Stella knew. Sebastian’s high — in point of fact — stood above other stilts or highs or needles’ points in the coffin of space. Each high presumed that it stood on the lip of the coffin however deep it may already have fallen … that it waved at passers-by rather than sink into oblivion.

“Sebastian, what have you been up to?” Stella said. “It’s been an age. Look! It’s time we sorted out this dole business. I’m not even sure how much you are getting. You’ve been pinching from it, Sebastian. I know it’s hell to be out of work. Do you realize it’s Mary’s salary that’s been seeing us through? Thank god for Father Marsden.”

“I can spend my money as I like,” Sebastian grumbled.

“Your money? What about John? What about food, rent, electricity, gas?”

“We’ll make out,” said Sebastian. He suddenly had an inspiration, a way of making his debts look like high, devilish cunning assets. “I’m writing a play for White City.” It was a euphemistic confession to himself that though he had cancelled his third script he would have to find money and pay something next time to secure a body of speed. Stella was deceived, as she often was, by the faces he made. She opened her eyes wide. “White City television studios? Have you really written a play, Sebastian?” Then she laughed, it was quite absurd. Of course, on the other hand, all he needed was to string a few words together. The camera would do the rest. Still, even so, she was sceptical. “What nonsense, Sebastian.” She was staring at him hard. “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Someone’s been approaching you to appear on a programme about drugs. I know they’ve been talking to addicts and that they appear to pay good money to the heroin people. I’m not sure it’s your scene, Sebastian. Speed’s nothing at all, nothing at all, compared to heroin.”

Sebastian was surprised by the turn of events. He felt he must build on the immediate lie, erect a higher and higher pole on which to dance even if it lasted but for a moment. “My scene does interest them. It does. It does.” But, even as he dwelt on the notion, his mind went blank. The truth was he had been driven by her (the bitch!) into an area that would require of him a confession of obliviousness to the torment he endured. Without that obliviousness how could he endure the invisible spectres that waved at him?

“Why should I tell them anything? Why should I say how I feel or don’t feel?” The silent question about oblivious mask seemed to pop into his mind from nowhere and to make him more unhappily conscious of Stella’s uncanny capacity to unsettle him, when he was high, to unsettle the foundations of the coffin that ran far deeper than his perception.

“I shan’t go through with it, that’s all. I won’t appear. They won’t pick my brains.”

“But why not? You needn’t worry,” said Stella. “I shall tell you what to say.”

“You? Tell me what to say?”

“All I mean is I could work out something for you. You won’t have too much — to say too much.”

Sebastian stared at her with rising anger at his risen lie beyond which it seemed now he could not escape. He felt, given a chance, he could rip … Dolphin Street ripper. That was the way to keep a lie solid. When did he and Stella ever say too much to each other? They tended, on the whole, to speak in monosyllabic bursts and utterances; except on those occasions when the need for blood music became so intense it created excited quarrels, terror and loathing, fascinations with horror. And even then those fascinations tended to fade like a forgotten dream the next morning, the phantom, warring cities they had erected tended to fall.

“You’re a bitch, Stella,” said Sebastian now. He’d show her he could talk. “One day you’ll cave in … you’ll write a letter….” It was a random shot. Perhaps he had had a glimmering sensation of the future.

“What letter?” Stella was hurt and puzzled.

Sebastian ignored this. “Everything has to be your idea. You invent even the lies I tell. You feed me cues, you, Mary and John. I’m your fucking nobody genius. Even this interview (or would it be an inquisition?) at White City, even now…” He didn’t know how to confess at last that there was to be no television programme, that he had been lying, not she. He had been building heroic (not heroin) playwright into himself.

Double-edged play indeed, play that accumulated into money masks he owed his drugs’ middleman; but play also that signified the abstract programme of a bitch (that was how he now saw Stella’s cue) — a cue all the more needling in that it constituted the pole he wished to climb from which to wave to a million viewers from the coffined, brilliant box that glowed like live ashes in their sitting rooms.

What was sobering and frightening, Stella felt, was how the trivialities of their lives, the quarrels about nothing, could breed an enormity of double-edged play, Sebastian’s actual money debts, and their mutual debt to the cliff or precipice of inner truth to which they clung for dear life. Stella knew she could slip if she were not careful, that Sebastian could wear her to a shred.

Stella felt suddenly, irrationally, worn to a shred. Perhaps it was true that she tended to stitch words into his mouth and to treat him like a failed coat. Her attitude aroused him to retaliate, to feign a desire to see her perish. How — Stella wondered — did all this reflect on the lie he had told? Was it not, however unwittingly, as much her lie as his?

Here was stage indeed, White City studio, in which she could become his interrogator, and also interrogate herself, implicitly interrogate Mary.

The question they needed to ask themselves was this: what was the difference between lies and truth?

Some lies were called white lies but others such as Sebastian’s were punted around like a ball or seized upon to ease the unbearable pressure of truth that the seed of genius and responsibility resided — however rotten its state — in every man, every woman, every child; seed of dawning consciousness of plagued humanity, seed of unique perception of birth and death — a perception that no paradisean animal possessed prior to Man. For the first time, perhaps, who knows, in the entire universe, the lie had become a little death that affected the body of the animal kingdom in the human imagination, human kingdom. And, as a consequence, truth (however faint) was ubiquitous; it resided in the heights and in the depths, in flower and in beast, in perceived cradle as much as in perceived coffin — in awareness of little births, little deaths in order to usher in the infinite metaphysic that all are born to die several deaths, to endure several lies, if one is to move by degrees into genius of mutual responsibility, shared responsibility for the truth, shared capacity to judge and to be judged for the lives one lives, the way one treats everything. That judgement was intrinsic to genius and to the terrifying reality of love.

Stella was almost lost in judgement of herself. Her interrogation was fading, the lights of the studio went down and Sebastian’s voice came to her from within the hollow tree of himself. It was as if he had retreated into perceived coffin or television box and summoned her to follow him. She hesitated. He was humming a tune. Stella was startled almost out of her wits at the consequences of the lie she had unwittingly put into his mouth. It had led to this! It had led to a tune that riveted her backwards in time, into childhood associations. The voice of the humming dead! Her mother’s voice had tended to be deep, contralto, and in the depths of Sebastian’s tree, the depths of the studio, it seemed to rumble anew out of the past.

Her mother’s voice (she could scarcely believe it was so close at hand in coffin or studio) was Mary’s mother’s voice. Why did she have to say that now? Ah yes, said Stella, I am a mask Mary wears, a way of coping with truth. We are each other’s little deaths, little births. We cling to sarcophagus-globe and to universal cradle.

It was the song that her mother was singing that brought it all back. “Mack the Knife”.

“Put on a record,” said Sebastian in the depths of the studio. “Tell the old woman to stop.”

“She isn’t old,” Stella protested.

Her mother stopped.

Stella wondered if she would fly, if she were offended, but no, she didn’t, the music returned once again coming this time from an old gramophone her mother possessed. It was “Mack the Knife” sung and played by Louis Armstrong. The absurdity and tall story lyric, oceanic city, were sustained by Armstrong’s height of trumpet and by his instrumental voice, hoarse and meditative in contrast to the trumpet he played, ecstatic cradle, ecstatic childhood, ecstatic coffin, ecstatic grieving surf or sea.

Where the shark bites with his teeth dear

Scarlet billows start to spray….

On the sidewalk Sunday morning

Lies a body oozing life….

Mack the Knife was a sailor. His follies, his callous epic of loves and crimes, left him bereft and exposed and storm-tossed, trumpet-tossed, on the hoarse sea or voice upon which he sailed from port of call to port of call through a procession of phantom women, Sukey Tawdrey, sweet Lucy Brown and Jenny Diver; all were apparently as doomed as he. Only a consummate naïveté, consummate riddle of childhood truth, could beach Mack the Knife in Armstrong’s and Stella’s mother’s voice and turn him into anti-climactic folly or hollow crime and into a pageant of tricks, the lame that walked, the blind that saw, the dying body that oozed life.

Stella was shivering. The fascination of the song for her mother was something that she grew up with. Mack was also the name that her father bore. Mack was her mother’s god. And her mother’s name? Guess, Stella whispered to Sebastian in the darkened studio. Jenny! It was a random hit, bull’s eye. It struck home. Jenny heard. She was weeping. It came with the faintest whisper of the sea, the faintest whisper of a flute, in the studio. Mack’s women were the Sukey Tawdreys, the sweet Lucy Browns, of the world. Between the ages of four and seven Stella thought that the postman was her father. Until she realized that he was but the middleman between her real father and Jenny her mother. He brought the letters from foreign ports with foreign stamps over which Jenny wept. On her seventh birthday the last letter arrived. Her father was dead, his ship sunk. It was a lie. It drove her mother in to an asylum where she contemplated Mack clinging for dear life to sarcophagus-globe even as she vanished into the arms of god, bride of god.

Stella was taken into care by a Social Welfare Body and placed in an orphanage in East Anglia.

The loss of her parents imbued her at an impressionable age with an ambivalence that was to haunt her all her life; an ambivalence that subsisted upon the apparent eclipse of her antecedents (Mack the Knife and Jenny Diver) hand in hand with a sensation of being pulled by them nevertheless into the depths and heights of the studio of place, studies of earth and sea and sky. It was akin to a dream of intensest moment she had forgotten though that dream was alive to contain her in its folds of unconscious memory, to possess her and to give her a sense of being charged with flight, a sense also of charging others to come to her or to be possessed by her. The energy of that charge broke life into several masks, several paths, several patterns of obliviousness by which Stella could bear her earliest terrors of love and death.

Jenny had been careless with the letters she received from Mack, and Stella read them all. Jenny’s carelessness had random design, random madness, random legacy. The letters she deposited infiltrated the records she played from rag-time to jazz, Delius to Sibelius. Stella recalled (yet did not recall) the names of the women of whom Mack wrote as if they were encapsulated forever in Lucy Brown and Sukey Tawdrey. Those musical names were masks that internalized themselves into arrested states of being, into curious half-child, half-woman brides of god — a failed god at times that she mocked. A god nevertheless she sought to prompt, to feed with cues, cues of her longing to change the world … The sea of East Anglian landscape became a mosaic of seasons as well as of nameless places within and without itself, an endangered paradise, an endangered ocean, haunting summons, a haunting enchantment.

Out of the depths of the studio “Mack the Knife” ceased and was followed by the music of Delius sailing across the Anglian sea of Stella’s orphanage upon which Mack’s women were subtilized into spectres of perennial however sordid grief, perennial however enchanting beauty.

First came “A Song of Summer”, one of Jenny’s favourite records.

The generous rise and fall of the waves (the cellos and basses) and the seagull gliding by (a flute theme) transported Stella into a meditative, child’s eye exultation and vision. Jenny Diver’s tears streamed down the sky into the sea but they were rich beyond every calculation, they almost seemed to choke her into serenity. In the midst of the waves the gull altered its shape. It beckoned, it called, from some endangered, yet serene, climate in which the no longer blind, no longer paralysed, no longer deaf composer lived.

Jenny turned now to “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring”. Stella listened for the faint cuckoo, cuckoo. It came after — or in the midst of — a body of repeated phrases, short, glancing tears from Lucy Brown. There it was, faintest crack in the coffin of nature, cuckoo, phantom egg deposited in the nest of a stranger….

Jenny stopped the record and put on “Brigg Fair” in which folk-song and magical season blended and Sukey Tawdrey was subtilized beyond cheap or sordid encounter into delicate place, all her gaudy, funeral garments swinging in the lightest wind, the lightest alchemy of the fair of death and life; sometimes a slow, quiet swing or dance enveloped her limbs, only to be quickened again, enlivened again, into the commerce of heart and mind. Then came the poignant commodity of “Brigg Fair”’s grief, the “still sad music of humanity”, changing nevertheless into child’s eye wonder, pearls for tears, into a long bar of echoing stillness, sounding the heights and the depths, and summoning her, summoning her, to follow in the footsteps of the dancers on sarcophagus-globe, earth and sea and sky.

Lastly Jenny played “A Walk in the Paradise Garden”. Here it was that her departure seemed to grow imminent into an endangered paradise, half-Utopia, half-inferno. The mosaic sea gave way to snow mountains and ice maidens wreathed nevertheless in flowers plucked from a wild garden. The soft tread of spectres accompanying Jenny Diver and Sukey Tawdrey rose, sank back, rose again. Each spectre clung to the clarinets, to a pendulum that rose in one direction before it returned and melted into stillness, a stillness that was never wholly still, bride of both clock time and timelessness somewhere in the mountains above the sea or somewhere in space above the earth, in another planet where life and death whispered endless secrets to each other.

*

December brought the curtain of weather down over White City and broke upon Stella less with music and more with operatic mutes whose gestures were eloquent enough for the season of the year. They were sullen creditors, scarcely saying a word but threatening catastrophe unless they could collect money Sebastian owed them. They were not — Stella discovered — his greyhound pavement suppliers of speed but others of whom she knew nothing and from whom he had borrowed a fiver here, a fiver there, to bet on “the horses”. The horses had become a new lie. He sweated over bits of paper with the names of jockeys and favourites. Towards mid-December a terrifying jockey arrived, terrifying saviour, moment of truth. It was to make Stella see how dangerous their way of life had become, how prone they were to hurt each other, how third-party child could mirror judgement day.

It had been a depressing morning, damp, cold, heated atmospheres in turn. They had quarrelled over money. He had called her a cold-hearted bitch. Then he had stormed out of the house. The quarrel, on Stella’s part, had been aggravated by the fact that she was suffering from an intermittent cough and had been to the doctor who advised her to stop smoking. It was around noon when Sebastian left the house, frustrated and miserable. Stella undressed. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was unquestionably thin, she felt, but magnetically young all the same she knew from the automatic bite of Sebastian’s blind, metallic eyes. Perhaps the magnet that pulled his eyes into her body resided in her small, rounded breasts and slender legs balancing themselves like fashionable twigs of whittled and daring flesh in league with technical body. It was as if the marrow of sex dared not only to wear bone but magnet, white and rosy marble.

Magnetic exposure! Yes, one throve on hidden varieties of magnetic exposure. One’s mirror was crowded with phantom, shared bodies of fashion. Cinematic nudes. Fashionplate buttocks. Stella pirouetted in the mirror. Perhaps she should have been a model or a dancer. The room seemed now full of eyes as if an invisible camera were presiding over a private auction-block riddle, invisible camera impressed with the faces of eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, staid accountants who flocked Father Marsden’s Angel Inn in search of the blessing interfused with the curse.

Perhaps Mary could advise her. Forlorn hope. Mary and she had not been on good terms lately. A wall had risen between them. Mary felt Stella was neglecting John.

She turned from the crowded mirror, the invisible camera, and slipped into bed but not before swallowing a couple of valium pills or sleeping tablets. She forgot John who was playing in the sitting room with his trains and chariots. Sleep settled upon her. A thundering knock smote the door like the hooves of a horse. Stella shot up and was filled with horror to discover that she had not corked the bottle of pills on the table beside her bed, and John had come into the room and was about to empty the contents into his mouth. Stella snatched it from him in the nick of time.

“You wicked, wicked child,” she said.

But he saw nothing wicked in what he had been about to do.

The thundering hoof came again.

Stella arose, went to the window and peered through the curtains. She could just make out the shadow of someone standing at the front door and was flooded with gratitude. His knock had wakened her, thundering judgement day knock. He knocked rather less loudly now and began retreating down the steps into the narrow garden from which he looked up at the window where Stella stood. Perhaps he glimpsed her naked body through the slightly open curtain and it made him curse softly. “You, lady! Sebastian owes me a fiver. Let me jump you and he can keep it.” And then, as if to confirm what he was, he undid his fly and exposed himself with studied deliberation. It all happened in a flash, phantom jockey, phantom horse. He buttoned his fly again and vanished into the street but Stella remained at the curtains as if she had been judged, if not jumped. Her posture broke. Tears rose, evaporated, rose afresh. Her first impulse was to berate Sebastian’s “horses”, to curse him for his friends and the abuse they heaped upon her. It was he who had summoned the beastly man. Was he beastly? Was judgement day the moment of the beast, mutual beast, mutual animal in whom birth and death are mirrored in sex, truth and lies, salvation and damnation? She pulled John against her and turned from the window. She stared at the bottle of pills she had now placed out of his reach.

“Oh my god,” she said, “thank god! You are safe.”

*

When Sebastian learnt later that day of the events of the afternoon he seized upon them to justify his frustration.

Stella was unbalanced, he said.

It was clear, he said, that John had been in the greatest danger because of her prime carelessness.

He brushed aside the story of the jockey who had exposed himself in the street or in the narrow garden under the bedroom window. It was all an invention, he said, to put him in the dock. Sheer fantasy on her part, he said. Better still, it was a lie. An age of obscenities and lies. Who would stand there in the broad daylight and do such a thing? Wasn’t it a fact that she was unable to say what he looked like, what clothes he wore, what he had employed to make such a loud and thunderous racket on the door? Did he, for instance, possess a walking stick…?

Stella protested that she had been in a state of the greatest shock, not simply on seeing the man but over the open bottle of pills that John had come within an ace of consuming and she had forgotten what the man looked like. Perhaps under hypnosis … But Sebastian brushed that aside. The man had grown faint as the phallus of the sun. He was an angel dressed up as a beast. He could have been anybody on earth one faces in the street but, because of one’s intimate worries and stresses, eclipses in one’s mind before a fictional moment, fictional eternity, has elapsed. Even the things he had said had sounded bizarre (he had called her “lady” even as he “judged” her). Under hypnosis she recalled something he mouthed as he stood in the garden:

My age is much older than this circle of earth

or this middle-world could ever attain,

and I was born yesterday — a baby

from my mother’s womb, acclaimed by men.

I’m more attractive than gold ornaments,

even if filigree work adorns them;

I’m more foul than this mouldering timber

or this slob of seaweed spewed up here.

I’m broader than the earth entire,

and more wide than this green world;

a hand can agitate me, and all that I am

can easily be held between three fingers.

I’m sharper and more biting than sharp frost,

the fierce rime that settles on the soil;

I’m hotter than the fire, the flames

surging and flickering at Vulcan’s forge.

I am, besides, sweeter to the palate

than the honeycomb mingled with honey;

I’m more bitter than wormwood, too

that stands, ashen, on this hillside.

(Father Marsden identified this as a late eleventh-century English poem of which Mary was unaware from the Exeter Book Riddles; it was a riddle of the creator.)

Dolphin Street was, on the whole, in a quiet if not “seaweed” thoroughfare. The intruder may have been a sailor or a candlestick maker or a butcher who was loitering but posing no good reason for passers-by to suspect him. His back was to the street as he stood in the garden. And even if the next door neighbour had seen him (which was unlikely) it had all happened so quickly that he would have been there and gone before anyone could sing Jackson or, for that matter, Mack the Knife.

Stella appealed to Mary for support but Mary, in this instance, was on Sebastian’s side. She felt almost as guilty as Stella. The danger to John was all she could see; and the wall between the two women rose higher than ever in their fictional identities. Stella blamed herself for blabbing to them of the nightmare riddle she had had. Perhaps it had been a dream, one of the few she woke and vividly recalled. No, it was true. It had all happened though there was no one to prove it but herself.

As the wall continued to rise between them like an ephemeral, yet solid sea Stella saw the tidal deposit or difference between them — between herself and Mary — between herself and an intimate, alien world — clearer than ever now.

Mary’s style or deposit, so to speak, was quite different from hers. Whereas Mary loved a variety of gowns and dresses, she wore rather drab slacks. No eye-shadow, unvarnished nails. Did that suggest a gulf of centuries, weeks, days, religious holidays, profane holidays, on the auction block of fashion? Stella did not know but sometimes she felt she slipped more easily in and out of the crowds of Shepherd’s Bush than Mary did. Indeed she seemed so normal and easy-going that few — perhaps an uncanny Utopian accountant — would have guessed her longing for perfectibility. And even he may have failed to see her obsession with the wall that divided her from Mary (from the graces by which Mary was apparently adorned by Father Marsden) and from others with whom she occasionally rubbed shoulders in the street.

It was difficult perhaps for her to perceive that her shortcomings were a necessary gauge of Mary’s womanhood, that the annunciation of humanity existed everywhere — if it existed at all — even in the deprivations of social and natural order. Her obsession with “the wall” was a way therefore of identifying sexual nightmare and racial, class-fixated, economic riddles. It was a way of identifying hardened inferiority complexes, hardened superiority complexes, dogmas of inequality. Equally it was a revelation of doomed lives, doomed graces or non-graces, on either side of the wall that needed to be re-interpreted as an epitaph of the imagination through which to resume a conception of universal, endangered cradle in imagination. However one dodged it, or faced it, it returned in eloquent fabrics and conflicting emotions of place or status, accents and grunts, terror and reality in the wake of the dying fall of an insidious music of bone and mind. It witnessed to a world of inner and outer mutes, a world in which what was said by the lips meant less than a tightening or opening of the lips, less than a gesture of the body, bite of the eye, tightening of the brow, shiver of the heart.

It was a wall she felt curiously vaguely, yet curiously vividly, she must herself have composed within layers and layers of self, and through which she must seek a door into what lay uncannily close at hand, uncannily far away, and beyond. In certain senses it was less a divide between herself and others and more the paradox of space that divided yet enclosed — enclosed yet released — its inmates and intimates forever. Forever was itself a crack, a flute, a trumpet, an echo of blood and sea, bone and ice, sky and flight, wheel within wheel shaping itself into gesture, radical gesture of hope.

The thought of seeking a job, of going out to work like Mary, led to a transference of obsessed wall from Mary and herself to structures and places around her. She found herself compulsively scanning the cards in the windows of shops and the advertisements in evening newspapers. She deciphered what seemed to her to be fictional secretarial jobs in the unemployment market. She gauged the pleasures of becoming a model. There was an opening advertised — a chance to travel she longed for heart and soul — but she didn’t have the money to pay, just over £500 to gain a place in a party that intended roughing it on expedition to South India and to the golden city of Mysore. Her eye was suddenly drawn to a paragraph requesting women characters (board, lodging, everything taken care of) for Proudhon Utopia in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. “A Walk in the Paradise Garden”’s snow mountains. Who was Proudhon? She wondered. She glanced at the headlines of another newspaper. AMERICAN HOSTAGES HOME FOR CHRISTMAS? Unlikely fiction, Mary thought.

Her enclosed mind wandered round and round, back and forth, before returning to Proudhon Utopia and she decided to enquire at a public library in Goldhawk Road, a rather ancient and overcast series of rooms stacked with buried names in every wall and with Sukey Tawdrey magazines. In her fits of depression and hypnotic elation, the library loomed like a phantom, cracked bureau of the dead in which to stumble upon her own seeping hollow mind or brimming spirits, unreal statistics and characteristics, as upon the hidden, psychical bases and foundations of Father Marsden’s Angel Inn where Proudhon most probably resided in his fissured coffin waving across the city of London to Karl Marx of Highgate.

Ubiquitous coffin. “Forget it, if you wish, though it exists in your dreams. It may store your desires to forget (to be at peace) but will upbraid you nevertheless for every lie.” The lie of power lay in each coffin, the watch-towers and nuclear rockets, the minute hand of ambivalent fate, the judgement-day beastly machines that one unconsciously serves, profits from, creates each day though the strict burden or share of responsibility remains ceaselessly divisible in fictional and mental heights and depths. Each mental valley of responsibility, each precipice of blood, each divisible nail or truth of the stigmata, remains unpredictable capital consumption of Christ’s three loaves and Mary’s fishes displayed upon a stall in Shepherd’s Bush market. That stall multiplies into a million rooms and holiday feasts, a million spectres of the failed metamorphosis of famine, the sorrows of truth hand in hand with every greedy lie.

Stella consulted an attendant in the library who conducted her to an area of wall that may have come straight from Marsden’s Angel Inn table of books. She drew out Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Joseph Proudhon’s What is Property? Property is Theft, William Morris’s News From Nowhere, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Reflections by Mahatma Gandhi. She culled notes about Joseph Proudhon that ran as follows:

In 1843 Engels wrote to Mary about Joseph’s What is Property? in the most favourable terms but in 1848 he and Karl classed Joseph as a “bourgeois or conservative socialist” akin to “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every kind”.

Stella paused to reflect on Engels’ communication to her centuries after she was born in an ancient land but a century and more before her birth in England. Then she continued:

This split or gulf between the guardians of infant truth or humanity’s welfare continues today between those who idolize a centralized leader or saviour of the people and those who incline towards a decentralized marriage of evolving communities. Karl and Joseph were married men and Joseph was to influence Mahatma and Tolstoy. Tolstoy forsook his immediate family to found a wider community or family in which his mysticism veered at times towards authoritarianism. Joseph Proudhon’s half-Gandhian, half-Tolstoyan ideas found a permanent home in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. The emphasis still is on watch-making, on the minute hand of ambivalent fate exercised by virgins of state.

All this was unfamiliar terrain to Stella. She was no virgin of state and yet her desire to change the world was the foundation of Utopian marriage to god. It left her uncertain of the nature of god and god’s family — the nature of extreme vocation — until she cast her eye into another section of the wall where a display of models and books spoke of the quest for life and other civilizations in the universe. Pictures and models gestured at her from obsessed wall, like mutes of galactic space, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, and others far distant as if — for all the cosmos — Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, William Morris, Mack the Knife, and others masked and secretive were cycling there in Anancy chariot whose wheels were the music of Asian plates, American plates, European plates, African plates within the earth’s landscapes and seas. Wheels within wheels of plates and continents in motion… The wall within which they cycled was human space, human controversy, and it differed from Jupiter’s oscillations and intensity of ice-ages. It was as if Jupiter’s paradisean virgin ice had become an epitaph; and thus — though life had never occurred on Jupiter to be buried and mourned — death had arrived there as extreme forerunner of the human imagination.

Four

Mary arose from the covered bench in the St Paul’s schoolground. She had been sitting there attentive to an inner call as if turned to hypnotic stone — however enlivened human blood — for about ten minutes in the mild, misty atmosphere of Friday noon, mid-February 1981. Two months had elapsed since Stella’s visit to the Goldhawk library in mid-December 1980 and her (Mary’s) presence in mid-February 1981 in St Paul’s, Hammersmith.

Time seemed (as she arose from the bench and moved towards the street) less a progression and more a body of instantaneous parallels, parallel masks and “musics”, parallel mutes and voices, November mists, December echoes, Anancy February, running side by side in fictional trance, fictional transfusions of seasonal, yet perennial blood.

She gained the pavement. The traffic, the passers-by, the light that filtered into sensational apprehension of moving legs and arms possessed a stark simplicity in tune with the faint shadow cast by the naked branches of trees against a suddenly clear sky. Reds, whites, greys on the buildings that lined the street suddenly stood at attention.

Mary knew at last the time had come to visit Stella in hospital. The thought had scarcely crossed her mind when a chariot drew up, a head poked itself through a window. “Hello, Mrs Holiday, can I give you a lift home?” She recognized the driver. His voice was blurred. Had he addressed her as Mrs Holiday or Miss Holiday? Perhaps he appreciated the comedy of wife and sister — that Stella and she were not the same … yet the same… For a moment she was tempted to dismiss him from her automatic book, to wave him along and then she remembered with a smile that he was one of the solemn characters of chariot-and-cat in which a spectral hand had waved at Sebastian. Perhaps he was on the way back to the garage from another funeral.

“How kind of you, Joseph,” she said. He didn’t seem to mind her addressing him by his Christian name though he was always formal with her except for the eyes in his rather puffy face that feasted on her legs. He opened the door and she climbed in beside him. The vehicle shot away as if under its own animal, mechanical, parallel volition, chariot and cat.

She asked him, the cat-faced driver — John’s angelic chauffeur — with his slightly jovial, slightly greedy smile, to turn the chariot through a side street before they came to Olympia and drop her at Stella’s hospital. Joseph nodded as if he knew. He seemed all at once a rather coarse but good-natured mask for someone Mary knew. Who could it be? Had he been sent? Was he the messenger she had awaited as she sat on the bench under the net of the trees?

She alighted at a corner close to the hospital, thanked Joseph with a smile and made her way towards the zebra-crossing or cat-bridge opposite the hospital gates. (The founder of the hospital had specially painted it there — as if the whole world reflected a flattened beast, judgement-day signal, in the flat wall of the street to bear the glimmering tread of feathery souls as light as a butterfly’s wings that slipped through the hospital gates day in, day out, in timeless fictional race of death.)

Mary stopped. She felt she must wait for a split-second. Joseph’s timing had been meticulous and perfect. But Christian patience was implied if it were to marry the chariot’s instinct. He had manoeuvred the vehicle — or been manoeuvred by it — through the traffic to bring her now where she stood in minute-hand time. A flash earlier would have been too early; a flash later too late. For in that very split-second that Mary held — as if once again in that long day she had been reduced to stone — Stella emerged from the hospital gates and set foot on the crossing. In that instant the traffic stopped, unconscious of stopping, unmoving though moving. Everything stood at attention. Stella looked pale as the face of Proudhon’s watch. She was transparent, Mary saw, as a feather and one almost saw through her into the echo of the iron fence or hospital building standing at attention on the other side of the road. It was an echo so still it left her imperceptibly shaken as if an underground train passed under her feet bearing joy and sorrow.

It was true, Mary thought, in a corner of her mind, that every unprepossessing or prepossessing vehicle subsists on a buried echo, echo of attention, echo of foundation, at the moment of death. Stella was beautiful despite her casual attire. It was the beauty of longing for flight — a longing beyond foundations and echoes, a longing that gives the human species its unique essence written into mortal bone, mortal gait that mimics the immortal dance of soul on waving air or deck of a ship. To die is to wave every chariot down, to stop every city that knows not it has stopped.

Mary recalled (as if she felt Christ’s fingers tug at her skirt) Joseph’s subtly devouring eyes upon her legs, her breasts, her body. The sensation invaded her from nowhere, it seemed, the sensation of news from nowhere and of being “eaten” by John’s teeth, and this made her wonder whether Stella was the maternal wraith, uneaten, whole, and she the morsel, cat and mouse, Stella and Mary.

“Oh my god,” Mary said aloud. “Stella has died. And yet I am scared. She’s like a divine cat as she crosses the road. She lives in John. John will eat me some day. Or shall I eat him?”

Stella heard her voice and rushed across the bridge of the street into her arms. They seemed almost indistinguishable one from the other as they embraced, longing to stay, longing to move, bound together yet inwardly torn, inwardly fighting each other. Stella knew she was the stronger one now, that the zebra-cat in the street was in her blood, that the soil, the stilled city, the buildings at attention, were in her blood, that she could leap nevertheless across worlds.

“Let me take you to Father Marsden,” said Mary. “I know you can’t go home in your state of mind. He will help you. He knows everything.”

“Not everything,” said Stella. “Remember that when I’m gone.” She embraced Mary more closely. “But not forever gone. I shall come and go.”

“Come?” said Mary. “Go?”

Stella laughed. “I shall do both, Mary. But first let me ask you a riddle. How is it that before Marsden follows me he will take you to India and on a boat that sails in his house?”

“Boat? Sails in his house?”

Mary felt suddenly terrified. There was an assurance about Stella that seemed to overcome the mad-sounding riddle she had posed. She felt that she could no longer stand there in this close embrace and moving quickly pulled Stella with her.

They made their way to the corner where Joseph Barber — the cat-and-chariot chauffeur — waited for them. There was a lean shadow upon his face now, the vestige of Marsden’s beard, the dust of many landscapes, the moss of many places that stand at attention in skeletal blood. He needed a bath, Mary thought. He opened the door of the chariot. They sped back to Angel Inn.

*

They arrived at the Inn; Mary rang the bell and when no one answered presumed Marsden was out. She was in two minds whether to go or to stay but the chariot had melted away on other business in the city. She recalled the chauffeur whose name was Joseph Barber and upon whom she had discerned a shadowy resemblance to Joseph Marsden, a kind of eccentric lust, an inferior Marsden. A shock of humour almost threaded itself into her distraught mind still reeling a little from the meeting with Stella.

Marsden was a great man, a holy man, but who knows whether perhaps a long time ago he too had been prone to eccentric, bodily desires. She felt closer to him now, he was her superior (not inferior) Joseph, and she smiled as she inserted the key he had given her into the lock, turned it and ran into the house. She rushed Stella into the study and repaired to the large bathroom to wash her hands. It seemed to her they were blackened from the park bench on which she had been sitting or from the chariot.

A moment later the door opened and Stella was standing there. Mary felt subtle terror. It was a huge ornate room and Marsden’s presence was everywhere. The bath was full as if he had just run it and Stella laughed and pointed to a ship that floated against one edge. A picture of Gandhi stared down at them from a high wall. Mary felt Marsden’s presence so acutely and potently it was as if she saw him there in the bath, his bony limbs winning approval from the Indian saint and his black-greying beard dripping rain from the skies on to the sea on which the ship sailed.

There were diminutive artefacts on the wall, artefacts of gods, goddesses, processions, the Himalayas. All were from India where Marsden had worked as a young man. One carving — an Indian sailor — Mary now named after her own father. Mack the Knife. He stood just under Gandhi’s feet, a sharp-featured young man of twenty-two, a sharp-featured mask. Marsden, Mary knew, accepted the inevitability of the name and pitted himself — in the diminutive ocean of the bath — against the terror of the shark associated with Knife. Another carving, an Indian child of twelve, her brow wreathed in flowers, Mary named Lucy Brown, It was a common enough name but it seemed uncommonly appropriate in this instance, in tune with Mack the Knife.

Stella leaned forward suddenly. “Here’s the boat, Mary, that sails in the house.” She laughed. “I shall go aboard now for Proudhon Utopia. When the boat returns you will go with Marsden on a flying trip to India.”

“Is that … is that …” Mary faltered, “Joseph’s departure of which you spoke? Shall I too…?”

“Father Marsden,” said Stella severely, frowning on the use of Marsden’s Christian name, “will return with you. But he is to make another trip in a box that’s a planet.”

“A box that’s a planet?” Mary was bewildered.

“You will see,” Stella cried. “Planet Bale is composed of a simple box. You could fill it with silks or dates if you wished. That’s when he’ll really go.” She stopped speaking, pushed the boat off and was away.

After a moment that seemed an eternity the boat returned. It was Mary’s turn to step with Marsden on to the ship.

*

The minute hand that struck, when Stella died, to stay the world, struck again to set it in curious motion. And Marsden demonstrated that Stella’s and Mary’s personal memories — Mack the Knife, Lucy Brown, etc. — possessed a motionless yet moving thread in global memory, sarcophagus-globe. Personal symbol was a rhythmic dimension of global wedding and funeral. Personal minute hand existed in the global clock to read events far and beyond oneself and to delineate a pattern of inimitable divisions of pain, of affection, of subtlety, of wisdom, of cunning. Those divisions were part of an inscrutable, sometimes terrifying law of love.

The sea of the bath undulated and Mary perceived the fate of the ship on which she sailed that was manned by divine shark — Mack the Knife — and divine, non-violent personality, Mahatma Gandhi. A strange pair, she thought; she wanted to close her eyes and vanish into Marsden’s cabin, into the darkness of eerie encounter with a holy man, a god, a priest. But she felt that Stella’s riddle had not yet achieved its climax.

The ship drew them through an upset sea to the continent on the other side of the bath, a map of India, where they landed. They set out for the city of Mysore with its golden turret and its children in the marketplace like birds, divine birds with wounded eyes, half-eaten eyes that were closer to Mary’s flesh-and-blood than to Stella’s uneaten, virgin apparition when she had crossed from the hospital into Mary’s arms. Then they progressed to their destination, a village some two hundred miles or so from Mysore on the bank of a river (by the scale of sprinkled rain from the bath on the map on the wall). There the pain of the law, the divisions of the law, began to cut into Mary’s flesh.

A wedding procession was emerging from a temple in the village. It was crystal clear in diminutive artefact on extended parallel or horizon drawn from the map. Mary kept her eyes glued to that procession as the law seemed to mount her in the bath. Mack the Shark or Knife was the bridegroom, Lucy (twelve years old) the child-bride. Mary felt promissory stab of pain, promissory insertion of the phallus of the sun that covered Mack’s knife.

How had such a priestly metamorphosis occurred? How had the knife been fired, yet blunted, to achieve a climax of the spirit of pain, spirit of creation, a violation that was no violation, a riddling penetration?

Marriages between child-brides and adult men were forbidden by political and legal statute in modern India but ancient and archaic law of tradition (feudal Europe in modern India it seemed to Marsden) died hard. The mutation of knife into phallus of the sun lay less in legal strictures and punishments and more in the genius of the creator-mind to disguise itself within distinctions of the pain of the law and judgement-day scenarios. Thus it was that the Indian sailor-shark found himself seized by judgement-day wedding guests not to be castrated or sterilized or abused (though that threat of judgement was imminent in the logic of karma, the logic of past deeds for which one is punished in present lives), seized not to be castrated or sterilized or abused for the projected rape of a child but to be embodied with the mask of a god. Sick shark. Sick sailor, yet curative genius of love. The mask of Gandhi, the very one in the portrait in Marsden’s Angel Inn, was placed upon Knife to council him against rape of a child.

Mary recalled the divinity of the cat Stella had seemed as she crossed the road. Mack the Knife seemed now — as he clung to sarcophagus-globe in Indian artefact — no longer a shark but invested with the stigmata of the wounded children of Mysore, Gandhi bird-beaked nose and an almost comical pair of glasses stuck not upon blind eyes within the intimate flesh of children but high on his brow where they gleamed with the golden sun, phallic gold, phallic pole of the sun that threatened to lift Knife’s skull into the heavens, Knife’s cruel brain, should he persist with cunning rape of innocence.

The degree in which Knife was torn and translated into the music of pain was abundantly clear, Mary felt. He was torn between brain aloft in the heavens and the mystery of love higher still, in more remote womb of space or heavens still; higher still in order to regress into earth and into every room, shelter, bed, house, cave, forest, bath where Marsden’s beard dripped with the tears of the distraught child-in-the-woman he held in his arms. She had rushed in upon him and he had consoled her without violation.

The mask of Gandhi high on the wall blended into a carving by the Christian carpenter Joseph. Indian Lucy was destined to die as a young woman in India. Khublall was the actual name of the sailor to whom Mary had given her father’s name Mack the Knife. It was written in faint Sanskrit under the carving on the bathroom wall. Khublall would mourn Lucy to the end of his days. Marsden was destined to die in London. Mary would mourn him as her everlasting Joseph, in all vicissitudes of lust and pain, to the end of her days. More about Khublall would emerge — Mary promised — as her automatic book moved, stopped, moved on.

*

Judgement-day paradoxes lay in every foundation of human paradise. Mysore Gandhi existed in Angel Inn, Stella in Proudhon Utopia, Lucy in Khublall’s child-bride. They would never entirely vanish. They would ebb forwards, flow backwards. A tide of reversed transference of every nuance of passion from one person back to the other, a tide of projections upon one from the other running back from one to the other, gleamed everywhere. The mask of Gandhi transferred itself into reverse multi-faceted Joseph and vice versa to encompass judgements of the law beyond personal dogma or wall of bias. The intriguing potential for epic, for comedy, for tragedy, of creator-brain in creatress-womb implied reversibles that Mary had not yet fully grasped. She sought to begin to do that now by descending into inchoate, human paradise as the ship on the bath returned to dock in London.

The compression of an ocean into a bath, a ship into minute-hand sail in the clock of the globe, invoked a new scale into Mary’s epic, tragic, comic book. The scale of the diminutive. No gigantic pretensions. Infinity of hope. Seed of hope. Endangered seed of life everywhere. And so, as a consequence, her fears were enlarged against a mere seed. And yet ominous and enlarged as her terrors appeared at times to become, the conception of the diminutive was in itself paradox, protection and defence. It was the ground of humility — not only that, it was above all an acceptance of miracle in the oldest and the youngest creatures. Age was renewal, age was potency, despite its closeness to death; and the smallest, youngest creature was a measure of deity’s skill in random evolution. Her three-year-old son was the embodiment of miracle, the wonder of the ages.

She disembarked at the docks on her return from India. It was March. A veiled and rainy month. But there came the occasional spectral day, lucid as a moment of rainwater in which Jenny Diver lurked accompanied by the shadow of Sukey Tawdrey. On one such day, overshot by mist, Mary wheeled her three-year-old miracle of a son to Paradise Park. They stopped at the entrance to admire a magnolia tree swarming with flowers curled and white and still, yet seeming to run along the branches like a flock of birds preening their feathers for flight.

“They bloom,” Mary said to John, “and then in a flash they’re gone until next spring.” She paused and added under her breath but John seemed to hear, “A dangerous mystery is human paradise.”

“Why dangerous?” precocious infant asked.

Joseph replied out of hidden retreat in pooled nature but Mary alone heard. “Dangerous, child, because flowers and birds mimic each other’s timeless return around the seasons, yet rarely tell how vulnerable the cycle of nature is, that that return needs to be woven with care. Such rarity of infinite care is the mutual genius of flower and bird — divisions within divisions — mimicries within unravelled mimicries — marriageable creations, birds, beasts, flowers. You shall see….” His voice descended into the pool and left her to ponder the truth.

They were now through the gate of the Park and abreast a sentry box from which an attendant emerged. For a flashing moment Mary was convinced that this was the man who had exposed himself to Stella under the bedroom window but when he spoke the resemblance fled like water from a duck’s back. Mary was startled, conscience-stricken, even amused. How could she recognize a man Stella alone had seen and whose existence Sebastian and she had doubted? Hypnosis perhaps … It was one of those meaningful distortions of voice and self that prepare one to review, she felt, all one’s biased judgements. Poor Stella. Poor Lucy. Indeed diminutive twentieth-century Mary, she thought, as if she stood a faint cosmos outside of herself, solidly present, yet hidden in space with Joseph and the others. Were spectres of solid presence, hidden presence, aspects of what Joseph had called “divisions within divisions — mimicries within unravelled mimicries” to bring home to one an organic necessity for mutual genius if one were to sift again and again daemonic cruelty, daemonic mimicry of “marriageable creation” and so perceive that the human psyche in such marriage is subtly other than virgin isolation and subtly akin to metaphysical game that doubles the animal kingdom into regions of spirit?

She was lost and startled by such game mixed up in “mimicries within unravelled mimicries” and scarcely caught the import of what the attendant was saying until John tugged at her hand.

“I’m sorry, madam,” the attendant was saying. “I know how you feel but I must ask you again for your bag.”

“My bag?”

“We need to examine bags and parcels, madam.”

“Why?”

“Paradise Park regulations,” the attendant said automatically.

Was he joking? Mary wondered.

“There’s trouble in the Park, madam. A gang of youths, we believe. They’ve slaughtered a flamingo and a couple of cranes. Murder.”

“Oh my god!” Mary could scarcely breathe.

“We’ve doubled our patrol. Peacocks, guinea fowl, emus, other such creatures, all at risk. We’ve doubled our patrol. Silent as thieves. Takes a thief to catch a thief. A rotten business.”

Mary began to breathe as John’s hand held hers. “Why … why … search me?”

He looked at her unseeingly to mimic Sebastian, the same metallic, unseeing eyes. Sebastian had stolen his eyes or he Sebastian’s.

“Rotten, routine check. Search everybody.” His voice was laconic business, shut-in, verbal camera clicking sounds on its screen of air. “Everyone who comes and goes. Blame the gang of kids. We’ll get them, have no fear.” He had opened her bag. “A pair of scissors. We’ll hold these.”

“Scissors?”

“Possessions, madam.” He seemed to be joking once again but she was frightened and couldn’t be sure. “It’s scissors and penknives they use.”

“But why?” Mary asked foolishly.

“Why what, madam?”

“Why are kids…? How old…?”

“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, I suppose,” he rattled out ages. “They need a war, if you ask me. A good old shooting war, lots of bayonets, things like that. But we’ve doubled our patrol, eyes everywhere. Rotten business.”

Mary felt she would scream if he said rotten business again and she turned away abruptly. Eyes everywhere. Doubled patrol.

They took a path that led to a pond and she tried to shake off the thief at the gate who had stolen Sebastian’s eyes. The atmosphere of human paradise watched her. Its gaze had changed. Threatening. Ominous. A blossom floated out of a tree and descended upon John’s push-cart. It was scissors-shaped and John picked it up again and waved it at the thief. Miracle-child. Mary’s half-stopped breath came easier again. Scissors-and-chariot. They came to the pond, the thief at the gate who crept up after them was fearful of John’s scissors; a single duck sailed upon the pond, startlingly red, white, blue, brown markings for all the cosmos like a harlequin sea-duck.

“Impossible,” breathed Mary. “Who could have brought it here? Harlequins rarely fly overland. Their haunts are fast-flowing streams in Siberia, Iceland, Greenland, and along the northern Pacific coast.”

John waved his scissors of blossom at random at the thief who still crept after them, thief on patrol. A sharp flutter of wings drew his eyes, and Mary’s, up into the trees. They saw nothing and on turning to look at the pool again found that the harlequin duck was no longer there. Its plumage of snow amidst blue-reflected northern sky, brown-reflected southern earth, red-reflected gold, had melted into a vestige of stream, a sliced ripple, spidery rapids of blood beneath scissors of blossom.

John was suddenly crying. And Mary was jealous (it came as a shock to her that she was) of the harlequin duck. Yet her jealousy helped to offset her fear of the thief. Miracle-child, miracle-duck, to have occasioned such paradoxical emotion, such curious jealousy, that helped to offset fear and make her see nature in a new, sorrowing light. It wasn’t only the grief that the duck had elicited in John but the sensation that this was the first time that the child saw himself as mutual victim — as much victim as the creature from another world he had mistakenly and randomly killed. This was the first time (it was more poignant than the occasion of his visit to the funeral garage in Dolphin Street) that the hypnotic gaze of family fortunes, family abuse, Sebastian’s gigantic faces of millionaires, etc. rose into the animal kingdom so strangely and tragically and occasioned his scissored response. He knew it without consciously knowing it as only a child can. It was a step from passive toys, trains, etc. into active and random technology that possessed its human scale as the origins of reversible natures, large into small, reversible poverty and wealth. Miracle-duck though slain was the origin of the garden of tragedy. Miracle-child though weeping was the origin of the garden of Eden.

Did the infant Heracles strangle the serpent in his cradle with the noose of a feather in order to judge the sorrow of light that mimics random blood? Did Jericho, long before Hiroshima, collapse to the trumpet of the atom…?

One needed a child-bridegroom miraculously eaten by the teeth of the womb to perceive sorrow and gladness as much as a child-bride miraculously whole to perceive the phallus of the sun.

They left the pool and made their way along the path towards the flamingos, the peacocks and other marvellous creatures that belonged to the Park.

John was happy again. He waved his scissors at the trees, at the sky, at the ground. Narcissi fell at each stroke upon a carpet of grass within a huge enclosure at which they had arrived; clumps of bush and trees appeared from which emus strolled followed by leghorn fowl and a cock with a bright, scarlet comb. Then came the crested cranes and the peacocks with starred feathers, all of which John had randomly created. Flamingos drew close to the fence and danced to each scissored slash of unbruised flesh blissfully unconscious of their bruised mates the gang had killed. Not John. He instinctively knew.

He paused, scissors of blossom suspended. The way was suddenly open for Sukey Tawdrey and a young man to come into sight along another path from Paradise Park tea-rooms. There was no sign of Jenny Diver. Sukey was black, her hair in rings and her skin bright and blossoming. The light winter coat that she wore — suggestive more of spring than of winter on this mild day — accentuated her hips. Her eyes darted with gaiety and pleasure until they almost seemed on the point of falling into the hands of the young man at her side. With such eyes he would secrete a weapon to stone the heart of Mack the Knife.

As for John, he secreted himself in Mary’s heart and seized Sukey’s eyes before the young man could gasp; split-second seizure, unique child-thief, unique child-creator with creatress eyes in his head. They glistened there uncertain of the bite of the womb in the human brain. Mary recalled the Indian child-bride in Gandhi theatre. Now in Paradise drama, it was miracle groom who confronted a woman ten times his age. He waved his scissors at her and at a flamingo. The flamingo’s bitten neck darted across the woman’s body into the brain of the serpent. Sliced evolutionary wings grew afresh on the other side of the woman’s thighs into the apparition of a swan. Then wings enveloped the scene to disclose a rim of black under a scarlet ribbon of feathers. This startling climax pulled the woman around to face her diminutive tormentor. She was filled with fear (Mary’s fear as well) that a child whom she could consume could strip her of vision….

That stripping of vision into diminutive scale invoked another aspect of all that had happened. Somewhere in the depths of nature, brain and womb had randomly married under an elusive regime of grace to lighten and darken the human heart. Mary had always pretended that her mother Jenny lived — larger-than-life — around the corner to help with John. This was not so. It was unhappiness that made her pretend to see through the shawl of death; it was ambivalent legacy she still had to overcome. Now that Stella had departed her fear, if anything, had increased. The eyes that patently should lodge in John’s head should be Jenny’s, grandmother in grandson.

But now beyond a shadow of jealous doubt John resembled Sukey Tawdrey in the way his mind flashed and his face seemed to darken into hers. They were cousins. It would take time to unravel the riddle. Legendary Sukey Tawdrey (legendary worth as much as worthlessness) had borne Mack the Knife a child years before he married Jenny. And that child had had a child…. Mary remembered it all though it remained vague and reticent. She would need to sleep, to dream, to bring it all back into automatic perspective.

In the meantime John waved his scissors. Halve thirty. Mary fled back to evolutionary year of grace 1769 and the eleven-to-fifteen-year-old girl who had been bought at a sale in London by one Marsden. That girl was a distant antecedent of herself and of John. She stood now in the young woman in the Park. Her plucked eyes roamed space beside an enclosure of admired, yet endangered creatures two hundred and more years later. “Mimicries within unravelled mimicries,” Joseph had said. The family of Mack the Knife was composed of jealous slices and resemblances, divisions within divisions within divisions.

The flamingos were cavorting upon the bed of narcissi where eighteenth-century Marsden was buried in Paradise Park though no one knew. Living epitaph.

First, as they danced, one noticed the imperceptible yet vaguely outlined miniature hump on their backs. The camel of god on which invisible soul rides. Living epitaph.

Second, one noted the taut twine of their legs, so apparently fragile, so whittled and shaven, it seemed to tie them into premises of space as if they were alighting less on earth than on another planet, space-ship flamingo on which invisible soul sails to another world. Living epitaph.

Third, the swan-like neck was tipped at its extremity with a head and a black beak, phallus of soul. Living epitaph.

Fourth, the scarlet edges upon the wings were automatic fires of dawn and noon and sunset. Living epitaph. Funeral pyre.

They were all “divisions within divisions” of bruised creation (slain by the gang) and marriageable creation (invoked by John), slain antecedents felled by lust or violence, yet evolving relations through sliced kith and stranger kin, memorial slice matching animate slice, densities of re-born illumination and configuration, random, paradoxically exact, in past and present lives in Mary’s hypnotic expedition through regions and riddles of spirit.

Five

Mary and Sebastian were in bed a couple of nights or so after Paradise Park. Sebastian sound asleep, Mary listening to the hypnotic blow of the wind that had arisen and the rain beating softly upon the window. The house in Dolphin Street was sailing in space. With Stella’s departure, the twinship between herself (Mary) and Sebastian had broken, Mary felt, into stages of reversed transference of heightened spirituality from Father Marsden (her larger-than-life psychiatrist and captain or sailor upon a ship of souls) to other related, obscure global presences and antecedents.

She could still recall Stella’s body and shadow lying between her and Sebastian, and her desire (“my desire,” she said to herself to distinguish herself sharply from Stella) to remain frozen and irreversibly apart from her husband by becoming his fantasy twin and yielding the position of wife to Stella. Thus it was possible to feel everything and still feel nothing of sexual intercourse, to transfer unconscious egg and foetus — when she became pregnant in June 1977—from herself to Stella as if Stella were a legitimate extension of larger-than-life Father Marsden and the child was more his than Sebastian’s.

Now that reversed transference had set in, she appreciated all the more Father Marsden’s qualities of persevering victim through which John himself, her child and Stella’s child, began to come strangely into his own — as if his two fathers and two mothers were no longer alienated and antagonistic but suffused by a stranger and more extraordinary veil-in-depth. In that veil Stella gave way to a new complication through which Mary perceived Sebastian. That complication was Mother Jenny Diver and it seemed to arise from the very deeps of a kingdom of mothers over-arching dual fatherhood.

The sheltered bedside lamp beside her by which she read sometimes far into the night cast its luminous, half-mothering, half-consuming Diver shadow upon Sebastian. He was slowly sinking into the sea over which they hypnotically sailed. Mary was reminded of her disappointment in Paradise Park when Jenny had failed to keep an appointment and only Sukey Tawdrey had appeared.

That disappointment had partially shattered a certain lucidity of expectation, a larger-than-life mirror or pool of rainwater in Father Marsden’s head, translucent shroud, in which Jenny resided. Even with the onset of reversed transference, it had been hard to dislodge Stella from such dominant father in Proudhon’s Karl Joseph though the pool of larger-than-life dialectic dwindled into clockwork Utopia, minute hand striking a hypnotic, funeral, celebrative drum of time, the death of an age, the re-birth of an age.

Lucy Brown in India and Sukey Tawdrey in Paradise Park had taken the process a step farther. Infant bride had turned the clock topsy-turvy into infant bridegroom when Sukey Tawdrey appeared. But that was not all. Sukey Tawdrey’s eyes had fallen from her head to give weight to reversals of time in the womb of space. Infant bridegroom became infant cousin. And species of diminutive clock gleamed afresh upon Mary’s obsession with Sebastian as her twin, Stella’s husband. She had returned to this issue again. It was an obsession from which she was free or cured and yet here it was again! Sebastian her twin, Stella’s husband. Cured, yes, in one sense, but in another still susceptible to the disease. One may be cured of an illness and yet occasionally suffer a relapse. Perhaps that was what Stella had meant as they embraced each other in the street by the hospital when she said she would go but come again, come and go…. Never absolutely depart.

Every cure of body and mind was also the germ of an ailing eternity. Eternity ailed within Father Lucidity himself like a veil over the sun’s kingdom of returning wives and daughters and mothers. And this, Mary felt, was essential core of the world’s continuing pressure of need, pressure of care, pressure for the lost, the newfound mother. Every bitter crisis affecting the fabric of a desperate world revived the need and the pressure. It wasn’t just the matter of Stella’s return, occasional return, occasionally popping up here and there to lend a hand with John or Sebastian but something graver she (Mary) had partially evaded and must now face. Her lost mother was back even if she didn’t always turn up where one expected to find her and tended to play the oddest jokes about where she resided. The crisis her lost mother brought, the need in Mary that revived her into existence, was not one of race, racial antecedent. That fact was written into other apparitions, such as Sukey’s. Her mother was a different cup of tea! Her return to the scene was a signal of social, economic distress, of compulsive imageries of Mother Care in a bleak recession that Mary felt was part and parcel of aggravated neurosis within her bordering on an obsession with the nature of value in every sphere of life and death. It was good to see it, accept it. That was the illness in which, through which, lay the cure.

Paradoxes of lucidity, cups of tea, were essentials of truth in which what seemed health or disease in one light lent itself to subordination or submersion in another palate, the mighty globe to diminutive brides and bridegrooms across reaches of oceanic civilization, interrelated raw material kinships to the fauna and flora of human paradise. And all these were signals of Jenny Diver’s presence as an apparition not so much between herself and Sebastian (as Stella had been) — though she lay there as well — but between growing inequality and ailing equality, injustice and justice, within the vulnerable fathers of the human race to which she was joined in depths of economic and social crisis.

Mary turned and glanced again at Sebastian’s half-submerged body at her side in bed. His face and head seemed subtly eaten, oddly consumed, in the half-light and taut wave of shadow in the room. This was John’s father beyond a shadow of doubt … and yet so was Father Marsden (he was also John’s father), eaten beard, eaten treasuries of wisdom. She should have been logically repelled by the sight of Sebastian but found herself relating to him within the crisis he endured through Mother Diver’s shadowy arms around him in the sea of sleep. That Diver embrace, that oddly maternal and oceanic shadow upon him, was curiously processional as if it broke him into a multitude of little selves…. It made Mary jump a little — as a mother and a wife herself — to see Jenny Diver in that slumbering light and it raised Sebastian into heraldic procession as Mary recalled a number of sleepwalking faces and figures she had seen in the city that afternoon.

They too were creatures of the sea of disease, they too had that bitten, asleep look as if they were familiar with the most secret currents of vulnerable fatherhood, Father Equality and Father Inequality, within a tidal void — a current both empty and full — in which one sometimes subsided into the minimum of real decision, into the minimum of real insight, as prelude to increments of painful, sometimes half-tragic, sometimes half-abortive, yet slowly maturing perception of the riddle of the womb of age. Mother Diver would save all, would take care of every emergency in that subsidence or ebb tide, that riddle of crisis. Mother Diver was here in response to crisis.

To think of Jenny Diver like that seemed a bitchy way on the face of things, Mary felt, to recall her own mother who had vanished from sight twenty-odd years ago to return afresh now in a tide of depression that nibbled at unemployed Sebastian’s head. Bitch of necessity! Depression, economic and psychological, stimulated the return of a mother for all emergencies to seize upon equal and unequal fathers, Sovereign Father Money, Sovereign Father Gold, Sovereign Father Poverty.

Insatiable mother who seemed now to make starkly clear the inadequacies of Stella and herself! Mary shuddered, she stared at Sebastian. Her own father, she dimly recalled, had run away to live and die at sea. Perhaps Sebastian would learn to run…. Unless he could bear insatiable, eccentric Mother Freedom. And that reflection took Mary by surprise. It seemed a judgement of herself in respect of John, a timely reminder to desist from claustrophobic affection, claustrophobic order. The faces she had seen in the city seemed to move in circles just within or without a strictly designed circumference. The traffic too revolved in grooves or cycles within or without strict location or wheel. There was an indefinable edge, an indefinable tide, that lapped everywhere and drew one into unpredictable haven that was more pertinent than strict, unhappy queue. And that eccentricity seemed necessary. It cast a shadow of curative doubt, however pitiless, upon everything, a curious sense of the mother of freedom lurking everywhere in age-old fixation or diseased habit.

Mary was standing in a supermarket. It was perfectly familiar, rows of household utensils, toilet paper, food stalls and counters with expensive meats and fish, high-priced vegetables, fruit, haberdashery, garish paperbacks with guns and naked ladies, washing powder competing with washing powder, soap and lipstick competing with soap and lipstick. Everything was familiar except the eccentric emotion they engendered in her now, eccentric advertisement, manipulations of greed and appetite, sophistications of excess, sophistications of waste, sophistications of necessity; and through it all — despite it all — perception of Mother Quality as real however marred by brute fashion and uncertainty about the state of the world, its wealth, its poverty.

Shadow of curative doubt was one of the shawls Mother Diver wore to give substance to eccentric insistence on freedom of choice, and to imply unwittingly perhaps that no fact or feature compelled her to pander to self-indulgent daughter or son; her genuine cares therefore were strangely solemn love, even supernatural resolution — on one hand — against nature as brute law and — on the other — a brooding uncertainty about the metaphysical quality of qualities that creates just competition (the justice of intelligent and true competition) as superior in Mother Blood to Thieves’ Manifesto, dreaded Communist Manifesto. Even so, in pursuit of “quality of qualities”, a metaphysic of curative doubt — planted in carnival, diseased quantities for sale in the marketplace/supermarket of history — made Mary wonder at distinctions hidden but resident in Mother Blood, Mother Dread. Could theft by the rich from the poor, by the poor from the rich, possess a metaphysical justification? Was the theft of fire from the gods justified? Were the gods truly rich or truly poor sons of space, Jupiter, Saturn, and others?

Mother Diver’s shawl of curative doubt (as Mary perceived it) enveloped Sebastian and he shifted slightly in bed beside her, uncertain of Father Inequality that gnawed into his frame and made him a lesser mortal than other men, or of Father Equality that raised him in Mother Diver’s arms into a hidden star amongst light years in the womb of space.

The intricacies of that shawl became clearer to Mary as the taut wave of shadow in the room also lifted the room and the house in Dolphin Street until they sailed backwards in time — one human, diminutive light-year back—1981 to 1980.

Now she and diminutive Sebastian were standing on the pavement outside the great supermarket whose goods she had “previously” inspected in “future time”. The sensation of having travelled backwards from 1981 (that lay in the future) into now (1980) that lay in the present reminded her of the slicing logic of John’s scissors in Paradise Park only “yesterday” or “the day before yesterday” that lay in the “future”; another measure of eccentric circuit around the years; reminded her also of Sukey Tawdrey’s eyes falling out of her head to become strangely wider perhaps, more open, in backward glance. That was Mary’s glance now, the strange width, the curious openness of apparently lost yet apparently regained eye for parallel times. It was all symptomatic of crisis — a world crisis — that raises the kingdom of mothers and daughters.

The rain had ceased and the pavement in front of the supermarket glistened like an urban mirage of a stream through that eye. The sun shone bright through a flattened beach of cloud, rainbow iris of sky in the head of space spoke of oceanic distances, the light on the pavement spoke of openness of perception to the curvature of the earth.

The supermarket lay halfway between a church spire at one corner and a subway station at another, sunken in the pavement under one’s feet. This was the religious beat not only of policemen and pedestrians but of an old woman draped, it would seem, in all her possessions, pots, pans, a bag with clothes, and an intricate array of small tins that glistened now in oceanic sun like scales or circular feathers.

Mary’s return to the “now” of 1980 within eyes she possessed that had slipped forwards and backwards across the centuries made her see the old woman as she never had before. Was she (that old woman) resurrection of crisis, was she Mother Diver? How could Mary have passed her in the street so often and not really have seen her? Mary had gone to Paradise Park whereas Jenny was here (was she not?) under a shawl patrolling the pavement between church spire and subway or underground tunnel.

Now — for the first time that she could recall coming face to face with Mother Bleak Freedom, Bleak Necessity — Mary’s wide-opened eyes were focused on the scales and circular feathers of aroused terror of existence. Each scale or feather was a glittering envelope and Mary wondered about secretions of egg or foetus but these — if they existed in some artificial form — were overcast by shawl of “curative doubt”. What was clear were slivers of subsistence that had been deposited in each scale or envelope or feather. Particles of cheese resembled doubtful gold. Fragments of sardine resembled the colour of inflated money. Grains of sugar resembled precious yet valueless metal. Crumbs of bread resembled alchemies of failed substance. A sliver of green vegetable resembled oil. Such slices or minute hands of the clock of uncertain wealth were the old woman’s irreducible morsels of eternity, and as she patrolled the pavement and stopped in front of the supermarket, she conducted endless conversations with a million spectres that clung to each morsel. Passers-by ignored her or took her for granted but Mary was held as never before. How could anyone not see who she was — from what depths she had come from the revolving past into the uncertain present?

Some spectres to which she spoke arose from areas of famine around the globe. “Now, now, children,” the old woman said in a soothing voice across the sea to invisible presences. Invisible, Mary knew, but with Sukey Tawdrey’s cousinly/sisterly eyes in her head, she (Mary) dreamt that she saw across the seas what Mother Diver saw as she placed her lips to Sebastian’s unconscious lips in bed beside her as to suffering, hungry spirit, genius of famine. The rain had largely washed away from the pavement a drunk man’s vomit. The stain that remained was the colour of gold to buy food for millions. Sebastian slept like drunk, humanitarian rich and diminutive skeleton in Mother Diver’s cupboard of a shawl, so that pots and pans were able to embrace him. She kissed him with her divided lips. It was a holiday from purest loathing, a holy day or mixture of degraded attachment and incorrigible affection.

Some of the spectres that clung to Mother Diver arose from areas of redundancy to address her on her beat from church spire to underground. The old woman stood quite close to Sebastian now, and Mary could hear her talking to a respectable saleswoman who had lost her job that afternoon.

“We were told”, the saleswoman was saying, “to keep our stocks low, Mother Diver.”

“You should have known then…” Mother Diver said to the saleswoman. “I’ve been keeping my stocks full….”

“We didn’t see”, the saleswoman confessed, “that we were being taken over….”

“By me,” said Mother Diver. “By me. Imagine that.”

“We didn’t realize until today the shop was being cleared for someone to take over….”

“Me,” said old Mother Diver. “Me. Imagine that.”

She stared at Sebastian as the respectable saleswoman vanished. A couple of police officers were advancing along the pavement. Or were they descending the church spire? Mother Diver comprehended Sebastian’s fear, and placed her body upon his until he vanished into the pavement. She then called to the policemen, distracted them from their beat, and allowed Sebastian to fly with the speed he had acquired. In actual fact, he was entitled to the drug, on this occasion, by legitimate intercourse with a chemist secreted in Mother Diver’s shawl, prescription from a GP, but a sudden irrational fear of the heights of the law inserted into the spire had caught him and made him unaccountably guilty.

The extraordinary powers of Mother Diver were clear in the riddle of her behaviour. On the face of things, it looked comic that she should absorb the saleswoman’s possessions, that her stocks should be full, the saleswoman’s reduced or exhausted. But this was so absurd, it ceased to be comic. It lay outside of the reach of conventional comedy. Was it tragic then that Mother Diver was rich — however dubiously wealthy — whereas the other, the respectable saleswoman, was destitute? But that was too outrageous to be tragic. It lay beyond the reach of conventional tragedy. Then there was the notion of genius of famine and the gold of the drunk man staining the pavement to feed millions. And here — in loathsome territory — one came closer perhaps to Mother Diver’s terrifying judgement of love that had occasioned guilt in Sebastian under the spire of the law. Guilt? Or was it something else, some nameless emotion?

Comedy? No. A kind of unsmiling humour, yes.

Tragedy? No. A kind of eccentric nemesis, yes.

Guilt? No. Not guilt. Except in response to bleak love.

Mother Diver’s arts of the “kingdom of mothers” possessed no classification, purest loathing yet incorrigible affection for desperate humanity….

An odd vibration shook the world, the timbers of the ship in Dolphin Street. Mary felt an indescribable cosmic tenderness she could not fathom. She turned to Sebastian and made love as if Stella had indeed vanished from their bed. Yet Mother Bleak Love was there and had moved the world a faint inch or two into curative doubt of all conventional classifications to absorb the shock of a wave, the shock of compassion.*

The cosmos had been moved a faint inch or two. The planet Bale was affected. A skull-like formation of rock presided there called Rudimentary Brain from earth where it had been first sighted by an amateur astronomer from Angel Inn. Now the shock of cosmic tenderness and ruthlessness awakened a fire on Bale. Fire was the mind of nature in space. Fire was subtle conversion of nature in space. It became the womb of the brain or the rock on Bale.

Indeed the tremor had shaken Mary’s diminutive cosmos. An ocean had filled a bath when she travelled to India. Now a bale or loaded box from a lorry became a planet. Mary repaired to Angel Inn in the afternoon to find Marsden ill and in bed. He had suffered a shock. In turning a corner, a lorry had overturned that morning and flung a train of bales on to the ground. One narrowly missed Father Marsden before it ploughed into a gate. Was it a meteor from Mother Diver’s shawl? It had happened within a stone’s throw of the supermarket.

Mary sat, quiet as a mouse, by the great four-poster on which Joseph lay. He looked all at once very ill. His black, greying beard lay against his chest and white roughened skin. And for a flashing moment — faint inch moving the cosmos — Mary was reminded of Sebastian’s hollow tree of a body.

“Nothing serious,” Joseph said. “A very minor heart attack. More shock than anything else. They did not even worry to keep me in hospital. As you see I’m here….”

But he was dying. She knew. Bath, bale, hollow tree and other functions of negative capacity or capability became elements in a progression neither comic nor tragic, the diminutive funeral of an age, not large-scale imperial funeral, jet-planes flying overhead, tanks on land, warships at sea, but precarious Utopian utensils in which to store water and food for the baptism of the small soul and the nourishment and protection of the dying body. That a bale, the container of choice dates, silks, clothing, had functioned as a deadly meteor was the unsmiling humour of the Diver woman.

Marsden tried to laugh it away but as he looked at Mary his eyes were grave. It was an immensely difficult task — whether as the ex-priest or the ex-dialectician that ancient Joseph Marsden was — to face his departure, his coming death, in the light of the aroused kingdom of mothers that began to replace him and to shake Mary’s world.

Could he, he wondered, humour her on the very brink of the grave, humour her to see that she stood between him and Mother Diver as Stella had stood between her and Sebastian? That as he diminished, her diminutive stature would increase to encompass men and women everywhere in mutual arts of the “genius of love”?

Could he humour her on the brink of the grave?

Yes, humour of curative shadow and hypnotic fire. That was the comedy of Planet Bale. There — to Bale — he would take her. There she would stage his funeral, the funeral of an age. His coming “absence” could then endure as a protective fire in her matching his rudimentary skull and brain, her “distance” from him in the future could then multiply into the conversion of natures and bodies lit by tender, ruthless grace and the annunciation of life far out in the universe.

“Fire is the womb of brain and mind.” Perhaps his mind was already inching forward into a feminine vessel or evolutionary capacity on another, a dead planet.

He lay on his bed as if it were pavement or street.

“I have been caught, crushed,” he said, “you must begin to see me as an empty container or utensil with capacity nevertheless, a capacity to burn elsewhere when you look into the sky at night, and thus we journey to Bale, my funeral becomes the fullness of occasion, as my bath, remember, was high, as everything that’s hollow moves a faint inch or two in the depths of space, in the depths of the mind.”

Mary closed her eyes. A new page had been turned in her book of hypnotic expeditions, clairvoyant apprehension of Joseph Marsden’s death. What was a faint inch far, far away was an immediate blow or shock close at hand. Joseph had been flattened into miniature valley and bearded peak between a fat bale (Mother Bale) and supermarket pots and pans in a “black holes” beggarwoman (Mother Diver). His peak of beard stuck out from the shadow of his concave body like elusive vegetation or moss from a rocky planet. And yet he was precariously alive, disconcertingly alive, in the midst of deprivations that had hollowed all sensibility within him by heaping upon him what seemed the crest of natural forces (Mother Diver’s stone’s throw or pots-and-pans assault) and economic forces (Mother Bale’s meteoric strike or assault).

Mary would have wept floods of tears as this vision of faint life in the mind of space addressed her except for the parable of deprivation that Joseph seemed intent on bringing home to her. Empty yet full human vessels were the resources to chart a universe. Deprived concert was the inchoate music of the spheres.

She drifted out of the Inn and joined the crowd that had gathered where Marsden had been killed. Her head floated into a million faces pressing upon Joseph’s valley and peak, faces stained by gross sympathy, by gross curiosity, by gross, ribald attachment to ailing father/husband or ailing mother/wife or extravagant brother or cousin or sister or complex child; faces that seemed to know the faint march of the soul and were painted themselves by opaque distances, by addictions to alcohol or tobacco or food with which to assuage the pain of long blurred faculties and hopes, broken human pots, human universes, as hollow as Mary now was in weeping for Joseph.

All these symptoms that rose in her suddenly struck her as the faintest conversion of an age. Joseph’s shadowy pool of blood on the pavement brought home unexpectedly to her now the stain of vomit she had seen by the supermarket when she had slipped back into another time, another “present” age. That conjunction of Marsden’s blood and a drunk man’s gold would have led to an inflation of premises, icy hysteria, protest — another day — but now in the light of genuine funeral (rather than leprous or leprotic gaiety), genuine funeral of an age, yet paradoxical spirit, it gave her a sense of inexplicable, confessional wholeness or passion for truth.

The faint march and conversion of an age had commenced. Feminine hollow and evolutionary brain beckoned from Planet Bale. Three angels accompanied the procession. The first was Khublall. A carving of him, Mary recalled, stood over the bath in Angel Inn. The carving moved now in that faint mirror of fire, womb of mind, towards Bale. The second angel was Jackson. Mary had never seen him before. He was a Jamaican who lived in North Pole Road beyond White City. Jackson was ascending a faint ladder into the womb of history. The third angel was Wheeler, Don Juan of science. His mistresses were flesh, the faintest inch of flesh upon a distant planet, the faintest woman to be screwed out there in the universe.

Khublall mourned not Marsden but the wife nineteen years old he had lost in India after seven years of marriage. The imprint of his mourning was his clean shaven skull. In mourning his lost wife he provided a counter-balance to Mary’s tears for her Joseph to focus the mutual fire or genius of Indian Lucy and Angel Inn Mary. That mutuality addressed Joseph as he lay on the pavement on the point of death. Khublall and Jackson were passing — Marsden seized the knob of Khublall’s head. Mutual human stick rather than mutual animal carpet (that Stella had trodden in crossing to Mary) to fly around the guilty globe and up into space.

Jackson, the Jamaican angel, wore an African hairstyle. Marsden had seized it as an extension of his beard. His beard had been plastered on the pavement when the bale from the lorry struck. It swam in the shadowy blood of the pavement. Jackson tended to run and to crawl in spiral coagulations. His mixed qualities were wing and root, ladder of space; a craving to fly, a disposition to fall back into the soil. The time was ripe for him to visit a source of pregnant memory that would link him to dualities in Sukey Tawdrey and Lucy Brown.

Wheeler had been chosen as a random humanist to set Khublall’s Hindu funeral fire into curious perspective.

They were landing now on Planet Bale, the funeral of an age had commenced, the oddest conversation of an age, seed of the conversion of an age within a black Jamaican, a self-centred Hindu, a Don Juan of science. It was, to say the least, an unpromising start on the face of things to converting the multitude of banalities that ingrained the pavement of the psyche, that encircled the marble of the globe seen from lofty Bale. But faint beginnings are the only authentic shock of reality.

Marsden’s concave body was the gateway into Bale. Mary recalled Sebastian’s hollow trunk as the gateway into Dolphin Street. A neo-physical eye (or accumulation of obsolete structures to mimic the dead or greet the unborn) was planted on Bale to warn of the horrors of an atomic age and to assess magnifications one had taken for granted on Earth. On Planet Bale everything was equally magnified but for a different reason; to portray a fire that reduces “size” into “qualitative mystery” (or nothing at all) rather than “quantity-for-the-sake-of-quantity”.

In that qualitative approach to mesmeric quantity, they found themselves looking up to a mountainous brain with its smooth, bare, skull-like expanse of head turned backwards from a neck of land to expose a low beard of burning trees. It was as if the brain or head he left on the city pavement had been sliced from the region on which it stood in flashing wake or atomic accident to be driven instantly forwards upon the pavement into what seemed a great distance in the porous eyes of broken body. As a consequence they saw — as they had never seen before — the implications of invisible fire as the womb of mind in space. Constellations of random rock or skull shimmering through Mary’s body that had been lit by grace, by prophetic grace and simultaneous warning, simultaneous capacity for conversion of deeds to avert catastrophe… Wheeler’s eyes almost popped out of his head. Khublall remained non-committal but he too was moved more deeply than he wished to say. Jackson felt a profound tremor in the pit of his stomach.

Khublall saw his young bride all over again. He reached out but could not touch her in Mary’s body. Perhaps what he saw was the ash of her robe, the funeral pyre. He shook his head. He had learnt not to cry over the lessons of fate. After all, his wife’s death, by every commonsense Asian calculation, scarcely mattered upon a crowded continent teeming with millions and millions and millions of lives, and yet its very insignificance was a measure of holy atom in shaven skull. The world fell apart for him the day that she died. That a single death amidst millions of meaningless lives should brim with such grief in him was a measure of despair, of insignificance and waste that were oppressive; it was also a reflection of faint person one sees again and again in the womb of fire who is intelligible not only to despair but to prophetic seed of endangered millions and millions in a nuclear age.

Wheeler’s scientific brain was a neo-puritan tool to enjoy the flesh of the cosmos but to reduce leprous or leprotic gaieties, carnival plague. Yet with each reduction of carnival plague, that very brain — in its borrowed spoil or womb of fire — hatched automatic technologies upon which sick gaieties throve afresh in even more seductive apparel. The reduction of plague seemed therefore ultimately meaningless except in the degree that a quality of terror linked Wheeler’s science to Khublall’s mystical despair, a quality of terror that was the seed of conversion within all mutualities, the fire of fanaticism and the fire of humility, the fire of glory and the fire of sacrifice, the fire of hubris and the fire of true pride.

Jackson was intent on returning to earth and had placed his foot on the ladder. From the height on which he stood, the pavements of cities seemed to run parallel in ascent and descent to the rocks of Bale, hills uncoiled into plains, a bird’s eye glitter and mist of proportions ran through the breath of the crowds, crowds with the steam of factories, football grounds, the lighter steam of offices, the variegated steam of cinemas; crowds laughing, it seemed, with one half of a collective face, crying involuntarily with the other half, the individual fall or ebb in tidal collective hypnosis. That individual ebb and flow was Jackson’s body raised like a slightly fluttering feather far up in space. It unravelled the masquerade. The torment remained but an equation existed between material excess and the birth of prophetic spirit.

The walls of the ravine from which he needed to descend to return to Earth were flanked by sculptures he had never seen before. First came sculptures based on acquisitions of material pride so borne — they seemed from where he stood — on the back of aerial fire that they seemed magical creatures of daemonic insight into beauty and intelligence. Pride was the materialization of inner fire as well in bird’s eye glitter and mist of proportions arising from collective torment on earth; pride was increment upon increment of fire into stable form, and stability — the virtue of stability — became a masquerade aided and abetted by intelligence and beauty. Yet there was true pride however buried in a camouflage of glittering ambition.

The bird’s eye mist helped to make it strangely clear.

For it raised in Jackson’s mind the following question: where lay the essence of beauty, the essence of femininity in Mary’s fire? Had Mary incorporated into herself multi-faceted mirrors born of fire, so that one aspect of herself was so brilliantly attired, it caught something of the male animal, the exuberant feather, the exuberant colour of male birds and male creatures?

Had he (Jackson) in seeking to fly from Bale incorporated into himself something of the female animal, the female bird in nature, sober dress, the shrinkage, the reduction of blaze or colour? Was this a sign of his conversion, or of his fear, was it a sign of pregnant memory in him and that he needed to look through the flame of time in Mary’s mirrors back across the years, to look back like Khublall into his marriage and into the birth of a child he had called a “daughter of Man” and whom he had lost?

* My translation of Mary Stella Holiday’s automatic fiction now approaches stage that reflects a marked change in the materials on which I worked.

That change actually began in the encounter with Stella at the hospital gates following which Mary started to refer to Marsden by his Christian name, Joseph.

It is interesting to note that one of the first signs of this intimacy, so to speak, occurs when Joseph Barber — the chauffeur who drove her to Stella’s hospital — appears. Joseph Barber has the vestige of a beard and a shadowy resemblance to Marsden. He is an inferior, however good-natured, aspect of Marsden. He “feasts on her legs” Mary reports. He is the messenger who declares that Marsden’s roots run deep in eccentric Joseph Barber lust as well as in the marvel of Joseph Marsden selfless affection. Thus in the midst of her distraught state on meeting Stella at the hospital gates arises a capacity to return to Angel Inn and perceive Marsden not only as a “father” but as “Joseph”, the man of profound, human stature who cares for her.

It is this catalyst — this identification of Joseph with all worlds, common-or-garden, metaphysical, as well as heavens above — that brings into play in Mary’s automatic book the expedition to Planet Bale that follows this interval and is promoted by her clairvoyant perception of Joseph Marsden’s death.

She arrives at Angel Inn, finds Marsden in bed after a shock he receives on the street, and is filled with foreboding as she perceives his coming death (he actually dies in June as I mention in my prefatory Note).

Her foreboding inspires her to visualize him lying dead on the street and to embark for Bale in the diminutive funeral of an age with Jackson, the Jamaican, and Khublall, the Hindu.

This brings me to the prime matter of the change in Mary’s automatic fiction.

Jackson and Khublall are a new range of character that immigrate, so to speak, into Mary’s book. They come more into play in Chapter Six after the expedition to Bale.

Jackson owes something to letters from Mack the Knife that Mary read as a child, letters in which he mentioned his first marriage to a New Orleans woman (whose daughter Jackson married).

Both names (Jackson and Khublall) also appear in Marsden’s papers in which he reports on his stay in Jamaica and the time he also spent in India.

What fascinated me about Mary’s portrayal of Jackson and Khublall is that in tone they relate to Stella — Stella the mutual facet of Mary herself (if I may so put it) — and at the same time possess another rhythm that is closer to Marsden’s inner personality. One is reminded of Joseph Barber in the matter of soil and roots of love but Jackson’s and Khublall’s kinship to Marsden is quite different and not at all as obvious as Joseph Barber’s is.

Khublall and Jackson have an independent life as marked as Stella’s and they mirror a mutuality of cultures that Marsden cultivated. But in essence, however clothed, the resemblance and kinship are there as expressive of Mary’s bond to Joseph.

Jackson’s “enchantment with the womb” lays bare Marsden’s beard-cloaked body — his “fatherhood” and “motherhood” of the people he serves. And the bizarre proposition that comes into Chapter Six that he (Jackson) is possessed by the notion that he is the mother of the child that his wife bears becomes understandable.

Khublall incorporates an aspect of father-confessor, father-inquisitor, as well as involuntary proclivity to feudal age, in his relationship to Jackson through Marsden.

It was clear to me that the marked changes in Mary’s automatic fiction coincided with “Joseph’s withdrawal”, as it were, into “fictional death” to create a curious marriage between himself and Mary (who also began to withdraw symbolically from her own narrative).

That marriage gave birth to a mutuality of cultures that brought new dangers, new potentialities, new temptations, that are visible in the remainder of the book.

It also brought a new confidence to Mary that Marsden fostered. He pointed out that she need have no guilt in the exercise of her talents. He drew her attention in Chapter Seven to W. B. Yeats’s A Vision which came into being through Yeats’s wife and her automatic informants.

Six

That day in late March when Marsden narrowly escaped the bale that sped towards him from an overturned lorry found Jackson also within a small heap of pedestrians who had leapt aside in time. He and Khublall were closest to Marsden and for an instant Marsden looked at them with eyes that seized them. So Jackson dreamt in a split second as the bale crashed open and he felt himself a ghost in a bird’s eye mist of bodies on the pavement of the city. Then he recovered as if he had fallen from a great height. This was the remarkable ex-priest of whom his father (Jackson sen.) had spoken in Jamaica. There was a clamour, a path was cleared…. Marsden was taken away in an ambulance.

Jackson jun. and Khublall were making their way across Shepherd’s Bush Green towards Wood Lane. “It’s nothing,” Khublall was saying. “The mildest of mild heart attacks. Just shock. They may not even keep him in, the hospitals are overcrowded, give him pills and send him home.”

“He knew us,” said Jackson consulting the sky in the region of Planet Bale which was now lost to him in the opaque light of pale noon that concealed the stars.

“Nonsense,” said Khublall. “We knew him. Who doesn’t know Marsden of Angel Inn? Your antecedents and my antecedents were taught by him in India, the West Indies, South America, USA, Africa, everywhere. And we still feel attached to him. Sometimes it’s as if nothing’s really changed….”

They crossed into Wood Lane and made their way past a bus depot and towards the BBC studios and Sebastian’s pavement of scripts in White City.

“Everything’s changed,” Jackson said. “I feel it in my bones. I feel it in the pit of my stomach.”

They both lived in the neighbourhood of North Pole Road (the name reminded Jackson of the Northern Lights he once saw pouring out of space like supermarket powder from Joseph’s hand at the mouth of the St Lawrence river on his way from Montreal to Marseille thirty years ago in 1950). Both men were educated night porters, carriers of subjective cargo. Jackson had studied literature and history at the University College of the West Indies in the late 1940s. Khublall was versed in Hindu lore. Thus they were qualified to cast their net into a river of sorrows encircling the globe. Late March had brought them redundancy notices and six months’ pay. They made their way into a sports ground opposite the old LMR railtrack. The ground was deserted except for the ubiquitous jogger and a group engaged in punting a football.

They sat on a bench under a lime tree and stared across the open ground towards a built-up area half-a-mile away in the vague direction of Willesden Junction.

Khublall and Jackson were casualties of history and they suffered from a mild paranoia, mild inflations of the psyche akin to unpredictable angel or mental fire in the middle of the day or night. It was as if they were both afflicted — Jackson in particular — by states of tidal emotion (camouflages of love or the fear of love) that were more complex than they themselves knew, and which were the grievous substance of bird’s eye mist of proportions of historic fall in the funeral of an age affecting colonial peoples as it affected an entire civilization, through religious or ex-religious peoples for whom the nature of loyalty to state or church — to man or woman or god — the nature of all attachment within tradition — was in crisis.

Jackson’s camouflage was the tall African hairstyle that he now cultivated. Khublall’s was the shaven head he never ceased to shave — and which marked him out as a holy man — in fair weather or foul.

“Everything has changed,” Jackson repeated softly. “I sometimes believe I am threatened by the very forces I used to serve.”

“You should consult Marsden.”

Jackson was staring now into the opaque light of the sky in the region of hidden Bale where he thought he detected a flashing bird’s wing.

“No bird but something of an old spiritual goat is Marsden,” said Khublall with affection yet teasing malice of the ancient East. “He’s on our side. He knows our temptations, our lusts. The young women who go to his Inn! Rumour exaggerates of course but I hear they’re attractive….”

“My father was an old goat,” said Jackson laughing stiffly. “Died from it. Too much of a good thing. Too much love. Nothing spiritual with him though. Pure and simple Pan. Pan — he used to say — has not only hooves to trample the serpent’s brain but he dances to a drum, sometimes a trumpet, sometimes a piano, sometimes a clarinet and sax. The nature-voices of goat.” Jackson grew pensive. He tried to be gay, to smile. “Did I tell you of Mack, my father’s best friend?”

Khublall pretended he’d never heard the tale.

“Mack was younger than my father. At least ten years. In 1950 Mack was forty-five, my father fifty-five. I was just twenty-four….”

“That means you’re now as old as your father was in the middle of the century.” Khublall spoke as if this constituted a milestone or celebration. “We must declare a holiday.”

“Right. The holiday wheel of sobering age comes round again and again. Who said that? I can’t remember. But it sounds okay to me. When one has knocked around as I have … It was Mack who got me a cheap passage out of Montreal to Marseille in 1950. I’d gone to Canada straight from University College to try my luck but things were slow and I elected, god knows why, to come to England by way of the Mediterranean. I suppose it was my elder brother beckoning, he’d enlisted and died in the Royal Air Force. Shot down in a raid over Bremen.” Jackson stopped. His face was veiled. “I’ve never been able to locate his grave. He’s one of those with a blank tombstone. Perhaps his bones are at the bottom of a ditch or a lake and will lie there in an ocean of time. Now where did I read that? Sounds too grand for my brother! Mack also had a wife in England, by the way, and a baby daughter called Stella. She’d be in her early or mid-thirties today. I’m not sure. He also had a grown-up daughter (an earlier marriage) twenty-three or twenty-four, and she was singing under the name of Sukey Tawdrey in a band in Europe. A luscious strip-tease, a beautiful slut. Nothing new in that. He said I’d find her in Marseille and he gave me a letter. It was fate. Within a year we’d had a daughter. I used to wonder when I settled in England whether that child — Mack’s granddaughter — and his English daughter Stella would meet. There wasn’t more than a couple of years or so between them. Four or five at the outside. I’m a stickler for dates and years though much else is retreating into a mist. Perhaps they have met in paradise wherever paradise parks itself nowadays. Perhaps they’ve stood on the grave of the unknown soldier of paradise, a random grave possessed of many faces, the face of the master and the face of the servant. What has Donne said about it or is it Paul in his letters to posterity? I used to dream of bringing them all together, the living and the dead….” He stopped and poked Khublall in the ribs, then stared at his shaven head. “In the 1950s I used to cut my hair close, Khubbie Old Boy. Not as damned close as you …”

“I shave my head because …” Khublall began philosophically.

“I know, I know,” said Jackson irritably. “Gandhi’s a spiritual goat. The sins of the fathers upon their virgin brides are visited upon your bald cranium. When will the funeral cease? It never will I suppose while the wedding lasts….” Jackson looked changed, suddenly sombre, a deep wound inside that he dressed up in a flying tongue. He touched the strings of a bitter harp, a pan-piano within himself, a vibration, a luminous scar, a luminous beak.

“When I got to Marseille — beautiful harbour Marseille has — Sukey’s band was just leaving for Paris. Their first performance was in a club patronized by black and white Americans in Paris, Africans, West Indians, musicians, painters, etc. etc. It’s all like a mist now, a mist of faces. I haven’t been back there these past thirty years. I seem to see it from a great height through her eyes of the South, the black South. Cold eyes nevertheless. Marbles of fate. They glint, they split into many jealous facets. Sometimes when I go into a museum or church of evolution — as my eccentric biologist master used to say — I see them as if they’ve fallen out of the head of a black madonna into animals’ heads, birds’ heads…. Just a glint. Mean at times. Generous at times. Eyes like the name she adopted in which to star in her shows. Sukey and Tawdrey. Dark and Mean popular camouflage of Greedy, Transparent and Rich. A bitter lesson you may say for a bridegroom to prize above heaven and hell. No. Not a soul could have convinced me then. Professional slut she may have been — many a great actress is, acting is a complex profession. To play evil or mean or grand or notorious is to be evil or mean or grand or notorious while the play lasts. I was transported and depressed by every wonderful performance. It was grist of marvel for me, she was a marvellous experience, so marvellous I forgot my father’s hooves, the armour I possessed — or thought I possessed — to trample every bitch…. Not she. She never really forgot. She saw my naked fear of dying in her, my naked fear of impotence….”

“Why impotence?”

Jackson looked at him with blind eyes. “Love of country or of theatrical humanity sometimes kills with a made-up kiss as much as with a real bullet. A great man said that. Not me. To fear or to buy love is the beginning of impotence. And her auction-block strip-tease was the echo of that fear, the echo of my nakedness rather than hers. It was a way of making me see with her body presented to me like a commodity how vulnerable I was….”

“But,” said Khublall, “as a black Jamaican, why should she see you…?”

“As a rotten overlord?” Jackson laughed. “Love’s torment. She fell in love with me and so I was her target, her intimate audience. I was rotten overlord as well as hoped-for liberator. The schizophrenia of the Third World. Pigmentation — she was black American, I black West Indian — was irrelevant. One doesn’t easily dispense with the wounds of the past. The disease is as much in the new ruler’s mind as in the old brothels of empire. Let it suffice to say I became her prime target of war, slave, post-war, post-slave era. Prime slave and prime minister rolled into one. I became her authoritarian ace in a pack of cards that reduced me to a clown. I say ‘clown’ but I have no word for it, it was more ‘prey of the furies’… A mixture of imperial clown and prey of anxiety,” he paused, his eyes ravaged, “that’s how she was conditioned perhaps — I don’t know — to respond to a West Indian, to make love to him, to mock him … I remember the Sacré Coeur in the night sky above the stage where she danced. Her dances were the beginning of ‘half-clown, half-fury’ affair between Jackson jun. (myself) and Sukey Tawdrey (carnival body of bought-and-sold peoples around the globe consenting to their new, black and white masters).” Jackson stopped. He felt the fire of paranoia in his heart, the way he had named himself as if he were speaking of a stranger in the boudoir of chameleon politics, chameleon flesh-and-blood. Khublall nodded. He was confirmed in his vision of early-to-mid-twentieth-century sexual nemesis in late-twentieth-century powers.

“She danced two dances,” Jackson continued. “The first was a unique interpretation of Scott Joplin’s rag, the second Count Basie’s jazz.” Khublall wondered what rag and jazz had to do with clown and fury.

“It’s getting a bit nippy,” Jackson said. “The air seems colder. Why not come over to my place in North Pole Road?”

An apron of light and cloud had arisen in the direction of Bale. Jackson involuntarily shielded his eyes, then looked down and across the green. The players were still punting a football from foot to hand, foot to foot, never letting it touch the ground, though they had moved now much farther away. Their voices were faint. There was the rattle of a train behind him across the road. He turned. He could see the train high upon the embankment above the road. A couple of double-decker buses were approaching from the northern end of the road. For a moment everything seemed still, a still camouflage upon his senses. Someone had died in that instant. That’s why the world had invisibly stopped. Then he and Khublall moved in that instant — oblivious of all the others, the millions, who had died — and made their way to his basement flat in North Pole Road. It was curious but it was as if their faint breath set the train and the buses into automatic progression again. A hairline reflex, hairline moment, pushed the traffic on the road, a sensitive minute hand of gravity in one’s body that possessed its mutual riddle in fused crowd or ball punted from hand to foot.

He lived in a basement flat but would have preferred something above ground. It was all he could afford. He made coffee for Khublall and a pot of tea for himself.

“No sugar or milk for me,” Khublall said. It was a ritual observation that Jackson knew by heart.

They sat in a bare room, spare and upright chairs, lean polished table, a radio, a vase of flowers, a Flanders poppy that remained on its shelf all the year round. Jackson wanted it and kept the room like that. The only decoration was on the ceiling — a bird’s eye on Bale in a mist of faces. The room possessed an air of authentic, psychological casualty within the nature of things, the marginal conversion of casualty nevertheless into a quality of subjective being. To fall — and to know one has let the ball of ghostly power masquerading as history fall to the ground — is a capacity to leave a wound or scar in space, where the earth turns, to die with others who die and yet in continuing to live to see for them the stillness of death to which they are blind, individual grave, still gravity, still fall that goes on forever to unravel the mystery of truth.

“Yes, a bare room,” Jackson confessed. “Not that it makes me feel stripped of everything. But close to it, meaningfully close to it.” He was smiling and Khublall was nonplussed by such humour until he continued, “What’s the name of the old woman in a shawl who walks Shepherd’s Bush with everything that she has?”

“Mother Diver,” said Khublall, and suddenly he perceived Jackson’s smile against Mother Diver’s unsmiling comedy. It was as if something had flashed in a mirror, one unravelled face hidden in another. It left him puzzled but aware.

“The old woman has her shawl,” Jackson continued, “and I have my room. Who knows how each is located in the other? Sukey Tawdrey has her rag. Mother Diver has her shawl. One is music, one is fabric. I have my bone of a room. I toss my bone to them and they thread it subconsciously, unconsciously, into joint fabric, joint music….”

“In ancient times,” said Khublall, “the dead were buried with mutual charms, musical instruments, clothing, food, etc. I say ‘mutual’ because I’ve heard you use the word. I’m not sure — how do you see it, Jackson?”

“The burial of the dead mirrors the responsible imagination of the truly creative living. So I toss my bone of a room to be threaded into other rhythms, other things, until space sails…. That’s how I see it. The conversion of casualty that exists in each moment — the little deaths, the little births, that creep into and out of the world — so that what is inert or helpless is no longer helpless — space begins to sail and one’s life is not entirely wasted, some glimmer of wisdom takes one back, takes one forward…”

“Tell me then about Monmartre club in 1950. You stopped when we came in.”

Jackson’s eyes looked ravished again. He kept his voice rather low. “Sukey wasn’t her real name (it was Josephine) but she wore it like a badge of chimney grease or honky tonk; it was her black bone to toss around, her relic of honky-tonk music in the American South. She had grown up in the blare of honky-tonk bombast — music and battle for survival. When she came to Europe after the Second World War, she revived strip-tease Scott Joplin Rag. It was a defiant performance — a whittling away of honky tonk into a classical kind of gesture — she was tilting against the old South that may have lost the Civil War, may have been defeated over slavery, but was back in the saddle. Scott Joplin died in 1917, she was born in 1927 into a world of Jim Crow…. High time for another revolution to be backed up by a black Napoleon. I had come from Jamaica — just off the USA — that was her Corsica. Where better to find an emperor and a clown? Mind you, she was serious at first. Jamaica had already thrown up a Marcus Garvey who had paraded through New York City in military uniform. I was deficient in uniforms but as strong as a horse in those days and that’s as close as I came to an emperor, a horse for an empress to ride.” Jackson was laughing at the prospect of a horse that could rule a kingdom or republic with a woman in the saddle.

“That’s when I became a clown,” he confessed. “She wasn’t really appreciative of my joke and yet the thing is — you can never tell with a woman — I am sure she knew from the start I was a born casualty, strong and subtle, yes, a good horse beneath her in bed, but a casualty, a source of trouble, apolitical as all horses are.”

He was staring into space. “The truth is we came together because — though we did not see it then — the problems we faced were rooted in a kind of blockage in ourselves, in our one-sided natures that had grown bombastic. Sukey’s and Joplin’s word! And to become a creature of the furies — to be shorn of bombast — emperors had to regress into horses and through horses into clowns or daemons or angels. It was a regression to the womb as much as to the grave of power.”

Khublall was profoundly startled. Jackson had said he was deficient in uniforms but all at once it was as if he were clad in brilliant style that seemed to combine the mystery of the womb and the grave in the clown as well as the ambiguities of dress in Sukey Tawdrey’s strip-tease as she mounted him in bed.

There was a lull in the conversation. They resorted to common-or-garden tasks and replenished their coffee and tea, but Khublall was seized by the sensation of being sliced, half on earth, half on Bale, as if he were the creature of another and resided in her dreams or as if she resided in his. Was this part and parcel of the young woman he mourned? Was she — that young woman — part and parcel of another woman or other imaginary women in whom both Jackson and he existed as “prey of the furies”?

Jackson leaned upon him for support he knew as if the bone of space that divided them in punting the globe from hand to foot, foot to hand, drew many related presences in every continent, sea and air and land, into half-involuntary, half-voluntary cycle or circle or related dance and chorus of brothels as well as temples of history.

All this sharpened Khublall’s ears to Jackson’s confessions and disclosures. An ex-Hindu he (Khublall) sometimes dubbed himself. There were times when he perceived himself a father-confessor that the ex-priest Marsden would have understood in relation to the young men and women whose lives he assembled in the Inn. Stella, Mary, Sebastian, and the “no man’s land translator of Mary Stella Holiday’s automatic book of fictional lives”. There were times when Jackson seemed split, almost feminine in spirit — a curious transformation or involuntary humour this was in a man as male as he — as if the bird’s eye of Bale in its mist of painted faces on the ceiling of the room veiled him for an instant with a spark and a feather, womb-spark, beak like a feather within womb or brain. In the animal kingdom — Khublall reflected, staring at the ceiling — the male tended to wear brilliant colours like foetal, sometimes majestic, imperial blood, the female a drab or modest uniform. Whereas in the human kingdom, it was the woman who wore the gay and bright, seductive fashion, the male who tended to be plain. So, when Jackson seemed dressed for an instant in spark and feather he was animal-male in the animal kingdom but his bright adornment drew him down into ridden human-female in the human kingdom.

That Jackson therefore had confessed in veiled and adorned (therefore logically feminine) dress of words that he had been mounted and ridden by aggressive Sukey Tawdrey moved Khublall to perceive more deeply than ever the paradox of soberly clad (therefore logically animal-female) ex-priest, ex-Hindu, ridden by the funeral skull of god in Bale and in heaven, ridden by child-bride raised into exaggerated male beak or brain that pointed higher still through priest and convertible god, convertible maiden, into a dark womb-universe susceptible to human and spiritual re-birth in the very death— the very funeral of an age.

Khublall was moved more deeply than he knew. He felt no inflation of consciousness whatsoever and this prompted him to recall an earlier question that had crossed his mind about the matter of relations between “bombast” and “music”…. Jackson studied the question like an involuntary lecturer in Human Paradise University. He tossed his bone at it. It caught the ambiguities of dress in which Khublall had been immersed, the ambiguity of skull, the ambiguity of the daughter that Sukey and he (Jackson) had conceived in the world of 1950. Space changed again into invisible class or audience that crowded Khublall’s mind.

“Bombast was honky-tonk music, honky-tonk sex, imperial sex — a basis for refinements of black power, Sukey used to say. The bombast of the old slave South ran in her blood like a fever…. Joplin had confessed his debt to honky-tonk crowd that ran in his blood too and he sought to convert it into individual compositions of subtlety and cunning. His rag subtlety was to open the dress of a new mood, the new jazz or distribution of talents, the new musical punt of an age. It was a denuded punt (rag) but possessed of imperial memory, imperial bombast, in subtle echoes, sounds that were to cap Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and others, in a black Honours List, a black House of Lords.

“Sounds that cut two ways, into a humanity possessed by good, possessed by evil. Possession by good was daemonic goods, possession by evil was not always the straightforward satanic trumpet it sounded in jazz. It could imply traces of early Christian communism that had been soured by Marx — so the propaganda went — into devious evil saints.

“Sukey’s roots were unmistakably good — refined bombast and daemonic property. Sex was daemonic property. Music and love were daemonic politics and property. She danced like an angel. She danced the tawdry rich-in-the-poor. She danced Joplin’s “The Entertainer”, his “Maple Leaf Rag”, his “Paragon”. She danced hot Count Basie.

“On our return from the club at nights she re-traced her steps with me not as if we were private souls but public bodies under the eye of an inquisitive, invisible crowd. She pursued a divided self playing ball with static inquisitor in static performer. This static emphasis was rag’s decorum of collective individual into which we were bound. Unfree. My consciousness of this unfreedom divided us. She was less — or not at all — conscious of it. I suffered for her. I was she….” Jackson’s tone had changed. Supplicant clown addressing his furies. “She was male … and somewhere in that reversal a crack arose…. I conceived. The music of spaced rain ran up instead of down a ladder of flesh. I knew it was wrong, I would be torn to bits if I were not careful. The static tease of her body defined a strict boundary I had crossed…. I would need to defend that trespass against the ruthless crowd that peered at us…. Mother Diver’s shawled body of gravity hung over a million deaths, a million wounds, that branched from the Sacré Coeur close to our hotel. Scarcely five years had passed since the end of the war … What a moment for horse to conceive a daughter of man, Sukey as rider, I as clown…”

Daughter of man. Son of man. Khublall, the Hindu, pondered the Christian paradox. He felt powerfully grieved, uncannily sad, and sorry for Jackson. “When was she born,” he asked, “and when did you lose her?”

“She was thirty this year when she came to see me in London before going back. Mack’s granddaughter! Mack was a guy for women. Mack’s black granddaughter. Rumour has it — word from the furies — that his white grandson is called John.”

“John would be your daughter’s cousin across the divide of a generation.”

“That is so.”

“Did you remain in Paris?” Khublall sensed that Jackson was evading his earlier question, so he asked again, “When did you lose her?”

“I came to London in the summer of 1950. My wife followed.” He spoke the word “wife” in an absolutely colourless tone. That lack of colour was a gesture for the furies to read. “Our marriage was already on the rocks. When Josephine, my daughter, was born, Sukey returned to America. I cared for the baby, fed her, washed her nappies, spent virtually every penny on her that my father had left me but my god I adored her. I was able to afford a nanny to help out two days every week. Paid her five pounds. Good money in the 1950s. All went well until 1954 when I fell from a ladder, broke my leg.” His staccato voice also broke but he recovered and raced on, lame, yet Anancy swift. “I had to cable her father.” The words had come in such a rush that Khublall was just able to hear. It was as if Jackson were convinced that the woman he had slept with was the father of his child. Did he know what he was saying? Was it a slip of the tongue? Of course it was.

Josephine was his. She had issued from the beak in the horse. That beak had turned inwards. It had sliced, picked, pricked to create agonizingly new mental insides somewhere in the region beneath his heart and under the still vortex or unconscious memory of umbilical navel and cord. That beak was agency of furies. PICK. PICK. BEAK. SLICE. CUT. BEAK. “Oh my god I never knew how I stood it.” Seed of the daughter of man. For if there were a twentieth-century son of man (Mary Stella’s human, divine child), there needed to be also a twentieth-century daughter of man (Jackson’s animal, divine child).

“You cabled the old South,” said Khublall turning away from Jackson’s face.

“When I arose from bed they’d flown,” said Jackson, “Sukey and my Josephine. A fury had taken my daughter away. That’s the answer to your question. That’s how I lost her.”

“You did nothing to get her back, you let her go…?”

“I had had time as I lay in a hospital bed to see into myself.”

“See what?”

“Prey — prey of the furies.” He spoke now almost under his breath. “The beak was too much.”

“You needed a rest,” Khublall protested, “that was all. You’d spent nearly all of the money you had. Then when you fell you were concussed.”

“You’re a good man, Khublall, a stout friend.”

“Me? Good? No one’s good.”

“True,” said Jackson. He was actually responding to Khublall’s remark on the concussion he suffered when he fell. “Even today when I look back across the years, faces, buildings, streets, are a mist. My memory’s erratic.” His eyes brightened. “It was good to see her a week or two ago. But I know I have lost her. She was dancing in Paradise Park in the theatre there.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“I couldn’t face it. Just couldn’t bear the crowded theatre or hall. The play was called Scissors and Chariot. Perhaps I should have gone. I may have seen…” The last words were uttered so softly that Khublall did not hear. They may have come of their own accord from another’s, a silent, throat up in the ceiling. Words of a blind family. The divisions were multifold and lay in part between “fictional human divine” and “fictional animal divine”. It was a division that occupied him now like another devious fury. A division that few could hope to bridge or cross except mutual angels and daemons with a capacity to dislodge the terror of the ignorant blind, the proud blind, the terror that one may learn to see through each and every blind in oneself into the arts of the genius of love within, beyond all spheres, limitations, polarizations one takes for granted as the absolute womb of the living or the absolute hierarchy of the dead.

Seven

It was early April. The newspapers were full of analyses of the attempted assassination of President Reagan and the danger of a Russian invasion of Poland. Mary made her way past the old St Paul’s schoolground and turned into the secluded backwater in Hammersmith where Father Marsden lived. It was ten-thirty, a sharp, cool morning. A car drove past and she glimpsed someone with what looked like a bunch of tulips in her hand. It reminded her of the subtle, majestic carpet in the Angel Inn study.

It was one of those mornings when despite the tulips she was still oblivious of the radiant, yet curiously dense curtain of the sky, the fine pale silent music of a spring day. A blackbird was singing but the song fell upon her ears as if she were deaf. She arrived at the door and entered the house with her key, and stopped at the mirror just inside the hall. She replaced the key in a black, suede handbag. She was smartly dressed, pale-green coat that she began to shed to reveal a light-grey woollen dress and a necklace of jade.

Her eyes almost seemed to flash back at her in the slightly overshadowed, spiritual mirror and to heighten the beauty of her lips and skin: the opaque light of spring turned all at once into a standing pool in which she moved rooted in the floor, yet a vertical swimmer. The self-appraisal was so rapid that she hadn’t realized how absent from herself she had been. She came to the door of the study, still fluid, still detached, still cool. Father Marsden paid her well. The thought slid into her mind for no reason whatsoever to make her reflect almost without thinking on the progress she had made over the past years as his secretary, his patient, his friend, his companion on many a “hypnotic expedition”.

She placed her coat on a rack by the window close to her desk overlooking the garden. Irises were in bloom. W. B. Yeats’s A Vision lay on her desk and when Mary picked it up she found a scribbled note inside from Marsden asking her to type the pages he had underlined.

It was an American edition and the back cover carried a note of contents that Mary read with some astonishment.

“On the afternoon of 24 October 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or so day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. No, was the answer, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”

Yeats and his wife continued to pursue this extraordinary experience over the course of the next seven years, and Yeats recorded the results in 1925 in A Vision. Mrs Yeats’s efforts at automatic writing led to the conscious formulation of an elaborate system of actively related opposites, providing Yeats with something in which he could finally believe, something that left his “imagination free to create as it chose”.

The system of supernaturally revealed images of A Vision gave Yeats both a method by which he was able to categorize humanity and a method for dealing with history. (He) did find in these communications the metaphors for poetry he had been promised. Explaining as it does the sources and significances of such recurrent images and themes as the “anti-self”, “gyres” and the “phases of the moon” A Vision is…

Mary stopped, replaced the book on her desk, and sank into her chair. She had been standing by the window as she read and the light outside seemed as pooled now in the glass of the window — a passing yet strangely fixed shadow and abode of cloud — as in the mirror in the hall that had accompanied her into the study. It stood alongside her, that mirror, like an upright river or pool, a door into inimitable fluid spaces. It was a gratifying shock to discover that her relationship to Marsden possessed a treasury of potentials, that her pre-menstrual stresses were “phases of the moon” that held elaborate tones with which to dress both fire and flood and to secrete the majesty of the seasons in a minute cell, minute spark of infinite sensuous apparel. As for “anti-self” this she read as native to herself, her many antecedent selves; “gyres” was a term she had never encountered before and all she could make of it in her own “narratives” was emphasis on “reversible transference” and upon inanimate features, wheel, scissors, chariot, bale, shawl, line, ladder, etc. that awakened her to the hidden rhythms of her own unconscious.

It was as if Marsden had died and she would never see him again in Angel Inn except in the mirror that walked beside her and stood now in the room like a companion wreathed with faces, misty faces, Marsden’s beard into which Jackson’s tall hairstyle arose, Khublall’s shaven skull into which Marsden’s tall, knobbed stick arose, footballers punting on the green into which Marsden’s floating globe arose, dancers in Paradise Park playing scissors-and-chariot into which the magical child John arose with Josephine’s eyes in his head as if born as much from the South as from the North, as much from Marsden as from herself, perhaps more Marsden’s cross-cultural, religious seed than Sebastian’s physical penetration of Stella’s body on this side of the mirror of life.

In the depths of the mirror — on the other side of the mirror — lay marvels of funeral progression, yet re-birth residing in every deprived circumstance of being.

Mary recalled how deaf she had been to the voice of the blackbird that morning on her way to Angel Inn and yet it returned to her now in the depths of the mirror that stood beside her. Half-reflected voice, shaded sound, silent echo. Was this the source of musical composition? Did music issue from reflections that converted themselves into silent, echoing bodies in a mirror? Did the marriage of reflection and sound arise from deaf appearance within silent muse (or was it deaf muse in silent appearance) from which a stream of unheard music rippled into consciousness?

The voice of the bird in the mirror converted itself into the spirit of bird-like appearance as if one’s ears were partially unstopped, unsealed, at last, in order to listen to a sound that had no natural antecedent in bird or beast despite a resemblance to something one thought one remembered hearing in the interstices of obliviousness to everyday utterance. That paradox of deaf mirror filled with voices and faces was a cautionary note inserted into “animal divine” and “human divine” voices and it seemed unsurprising to Mary when Marsden appeared not in the room but in the mirror from the other side of life or death to say without utterance, “All voices that claim to be divine are to be distrusted. Remember that, sweet Mary. Nature’s crude therapy is the seal of deafness to reality, seal of blindness to reality, that it plants over our eyes and our ears to render us immune to the voices of temptation and mystery. When that seal lifts a little and one is, in consequence, exposed to great dangers within Angel Inn mirror into which one has stepped, one falls under the action of another protection, a protective grace. And even then what one begins to hear and to see needs to be accepted as partially arisen marvels of conception within still biased appearance, still biased voice, still biased sight, still biased sense, still biased nature.

“One steps into Angel Inn mirror to a rhythm that still embraces all our past, lapsed, vulnerable apprehensions, our states of being deaf, being blind. Within that embrace one learns that to match one’s step or state to past lapsed states is to see (through the blind eyes of others who still need that protection), to hear (through the deaf ears of others who still need that protection). That paradox is a mutual guard, it signifies that the sculpture of apparent death of the senses is itself a guard to save from unbearable processes of knowledge that could mean extinction if one came to them before one should. And this is reflected not only in science but in every ordeal of unequal state in which the gulf between majorities and minorities tests us to the core to find solutions by mutual effort, the blind protected by the seers (who imperil us all if they succumb to temptation), the ignorant by the wise (whose wisdom is itself a temptation), within world cultures that share the brunt, the tragedies, the humiliations, the burdens, that accumulate on the threshold of radical, human possibility….”

Marsden receded into the mirror. He had spoken without speaking. Perhaps for the last time. As his silent voice faded Mary recalled the anguish she had experienced when she had typed an article he had written on the Soweto riots in South Africa. The keys of the typewriter descended again under her fingers in the mirror and left her shaking with fright. Over two hundred young people had been shot in the streets. The next day was pay day in Angel Inn. Should she send her pay to the bereaved? Was money tainted gold? How could sterling be tainted? Nonsense! Rand perhaps, not sterling. If sterling were to be married to rand then too must roubles, dollars, yen, francs, and every denomination subsisting on gold as far back as Atahualpa.

“I know what I’ll do,” Mary said to her fingers in the deaf mirror, “I’ll ask Stella to collect my pay. I’ll scribble a note to Father Marsden. He won’t mind. He’ll understand.”

There she was. Stella. In the shower. The faintest suggestion of a line of bullets running across her thin shoulders. Flawed but attractive limbs, slightly out-thrust stomach. Her hips flared like a subtle tide, a subtle moon, and it came as an astonishment to Mary to see her naked in the street, a bit thin perhaps, walking along the pavement towards Hammersmith and Angel Inn. The other pedestrians saw nothing but a coat and a dress, high-heeled shoes, a bag on one arm. She wasn’t wearing her slacks this time.

Mary read their obliviousness of Stella’s faintly bullet-ridden, naked body in the mirror. It was true that she (Mary) was as oblivious as they — she was oblivious of their hidden global wounds as they were of Stella’s. She was as oblivious as they were of punctured camouflage or metaphysical strip-tease genius in their midst. And yet in confessing to their obliviousness — in perceiving it so starkly — she seemed to see through their eyes not only how blind they were but the endangered messenger one sends time and time again out of oneself in dream or involuntary reverie into an unexpected shower of bullets, hard rain out of the sun that leaves a pool of blood.

Stella advanced in the street towards Angel Inn, a slim, tantalizing target, high-heeled trance. She came to the door of the house, entered the Inn, moved along the hall into the study. She paused in the mirror close to where Mary now stood, inspected roses that summer long past where irises now stood.

The money she had come for was there within the manuscript that Mary had typed. Marsden was absent. He had left the coast clear. Better to make such exchanges of daemonic currency as bloodless as possible. One needed the daemon to buy food, pay the rent, buy clothing, pay electricity and gas, income tax, bus fare, rail fare, bale fare into the stars, chariot fare for christenings and weddings…. And, said the voice in the deaf mirror, let it be done in all decency by a bloodless machine or, if not that, by Anancy sleight-of-hand in which the giver and the receiver run from each other when the deed is accomplished.

Had Marsden been there he might have been tempted, in all the circumstances, not to run but to stay and to kiss Stella’s thin shoulders. A kiss to cure faint bullets. Better a kiss than a wound one cannot bear to contemplate. Better a blessed pound note slipped from between the pages of a book than prostitution of body and soul. Better the veil of spring or winter or autumn blood in all its celebrative beauty of flowers and vegetable gardens than money that speaks aloud, weapons that drink milk and chew bread, one man’s investment that turns into another man’s or woman’s or child’s seed or grave in the depths of past and present, past and future place and time.

*

Jackson walked past naked Stella in the street. The mirror picked him up and bore him past her (as if she were not there) to North Pole Road. He switched on his radio in search of the blues or Mozart. The batteries were low and the voice reporting the news of the Brixton riot seemed to come from a far way off. Another planet. It was a thoroughly British accent. Not foreign…

*

Stella returned to Dolphin Street to find an angry and bewildered Sebastian. That very day (Mary’s pay day) he had lost his job as an electrician and been told that his qualifications were inadequate. The sight of Stella with money he had ceased to earn aroused a depth of frustration in him allied to passion, a sensation of injustice, and of belonging to inchoate consensus or body of unemployed millions around the globe. Mary had left when Stella returned. She knew how to be “absent” when Sebastian’s “crowd” or “consensus of deprivation” erupted and drew her into bed.

Sex was sometimes better than “speed” to place a seal upon his undervalued life and the undervalued lives of others.

In coming by degrees to run into darkness and see little, he acquired a terrible protection against seductive horror. He acquired also the subtlest link to Marsden’s “death” or “withdrawal into the mirror of space” and to Mary’s “absence from herself” in Stella. Their fictional death and absence resembled his need for protection, and his need resembled their comprehensive acceptance of layers of non-sensibility to offset total despair. His collective darkness remained therefore a shared reality of individual psyche. To see as they saw with stark complexity was to pay a price for his non-sensibility and to incorporate his eyes and ears into their minds and into camouflaged intercourse with history, the violations, the pathos, the brutality, and yet the paradoxes of protective armour — even death — upon each profoundly vulnerable witness. (There—Mary saw in a flash in Angel Inn mirror that drew into itself worlds as a pool draws an ocean — lay an approach to the camouflage of diminutive seed, essential life, that torments and teases heart and mind in living epitaphs that surviving, embracing creatures are for extinct species.)

Now—as he drew Stella into bed — Mary perceived him and Stella as through “absent body” from a meaningfully distorted angle in the mirror.

That angled intercourse with history spoke as she listened to deaf and silent mirror gathered between them into each other’s crowded arms — crowded with the million facts of birth and death it was hell to bear. “Unemployment is hell” his body asserted to conceal the fires from himself in the way he moved into blank slate or erasure of pain within Stella’s thighs like reversed blackboard of the birth of his son, reversal of emergent child into regressive foetal parent.

*

Jackson switched off the radio in his room, got up, and stroked with an uneasy, absent-minded finger the Flanders poppy on the shelf beside him. The voice of the news-reader detailing events in Brixton still seemed to address him as if it arose now from under his feet or from within the other startled flowers in the room speaking silently to Mary in Angel Inn mirror that flashed upon North Pole Road.

Jackson donned a coat and made his way up into the garden that ran just above and behind his basement flat. He too was suddenly naked in his clothes, not bullet-ridden but scarred by a few random burns he had picked up without knowing it. His legs were slightly bowed with the stalwart defiance of a cricketer rooted in defence of an invisible wicket behind him. Jackson had once played opening bat in the West Indies in 1949 for his University College eleven. The flesh on his bones was now spare as a crumpled tattered dress across the years waiting to slide or to slip on to a pitch of darkness. The hair on his chest was thin, straggly and grey. His body had lost much of its spring as if the memory of the fall from a ladder persisted. Yet there was a vitality, an unpredictable capacity for inner decision.

The garden was neglected; there were two battered buckets, one empty, the other half-filled with mossy soil; there was a wiry rose-bush in one corner and the stump of a sunflower plant in another. A clothes-line ran across the square of the garden and Jackson ducked to avoid it. He paused on the other side with one hand still on the line, his body so angled in Marsden’s supernatural mirror, it seemed about to run on an implicit horizon of space. The back windows of other buildings stared down at him like opaque galaxies, a faint glitter here and there. A blackbird was singing its heart out up on one of the roofs blissfully unconscious of the dereliction of the little garden. Jackson looked up but could not see it. All at once the singing ceased. But not before a curious almost thrilling sadness, thrilling note of warning, descended into the garden and seemed to issue without antecedent from an unseen throat.

As the silence deepened and the traffic itself grew dumb, Jackson was aware of another or other presences in the garden. A cat had appeared. It held a mouse by the nape of its neck.

It deposited the mouse. The mouse ran. One could hear its shriek in a dumb aeroplane that passed overhead. It appeared on the point of secreting itself under a cloud of bricks but the cat sprang, gave it a glancing blow and flung it into the open again. The mouse lay still under the stump of the sunflower. The cat tapped it lightly like wind rustling a dead leaf. It moved, advanced, the cat played with it softly. The mouse’s fur was in the cat’s teeth, gloved silence, gloved uproar and cessation of all sound. Jackson recalled as if the mirror that held him, held the sky, the scene of a street fight he had once witnessed in downtown Buffalo, USA, the conflicting bodies like shadows against a satellite wall in the evening sun.

The cat let it fall. After an eternity, it seemed, the mouse darted like an enlivened root or leaf blown by an unfelt wind across the earth. The cat remained wooden for a lightning frozen instant. Then it pounced, seized the mouse, bit deeply again and again into nape and neck before consuming its victim, starting with the head and eating into space downward.

Jackson was gripped by fascination. Rioting foreigners at the South Pole had vanished. The worn battery voice of the news-reader had grown cold. Minute drops erupted from sunflower in the garden. The cat came towards him. He wanted to strike at it but as it paused by his leg and rubbed itself against him, recognizing its master, its eyes held him with a fiendish innocence, a yellow, imperturbable light as of animal divinity, animal suns.

“Innocence,” said the mirror with a start. “Fancy that! What an idea. Whose discovery I wonder? Neither innocence nor guilt resides in the garden unless one converts play to death into womb of qualities that resembles nature, yet is other than nature as it gleams in a mirror of consciousness. Call that gleam, if you like, innocence and guilt.

“We regress into a womb that is other than any given womb — we regress into silence in the midst of noise, we regress into original light and darkness in the midst of complacent blind — to seek a way across the gulf between animal, divine priority (food, territory, hierarchy) and human, divine perception of innocence and guilt, human inimitable space that converts the food of lust into redemptive passion….”

*

Sebastian rolled over in bed and lay beside Stella. His mind was blank. The roar of a motorcycle passed in Dolphin Street but he heard nothing as if he had died in Stella’s arms and become a log beside her. Or as if he had been flung into space by the passing machine. Nothing lived except the whisper of growing hair, infinitesimal stabbing growth in callous flesh, infinitesimal breath, web and spider of non-sensation. He had forgotten to buy a packet of razors and had awoken that morning, the morning of his death it could have been, unable to shave. Perhaps he had been fired from his job for coming to work unshaven and unkempt. A year it was today that one of his senior mates had lost a son in a motorcycle accident. Sebastian had been at the funeral and placed a wreath on the grave. The dead young man had been growing a beard that would continue to grow for weeks. Unemployed dead. His son (John) was then four months old. The Jamaican tea-lady had said it was a bad omen. Not John’s age… She meant that accidents came three or four in a row. Another would follow, and still another, each a year apart. Instead he (Sebastian) had lost his job on the anniversary of his mate’s son’s death. Was that an accident? A little death perhaps. Living casualty. Another unshaven self-portrait of collective funeral. Where did such thoughts come from? They were foreign to him. Sebastian wondered. He lay still, without thought, yet thinking as if the creature of a larger, absent mind; without reflection, yet reflected as if the creature of a larger pooled reflection; without life, yet alive as if the creature of non-memory of the origins of life.

He floated in the mirror of Mary’s “absent body”, immersed still it seemed in the very gateway of dying into Mary’s messenger of ephemeral bullet. She (Stella), in the first distant roar of approaching motorcycle coming at them in the mists of Dolphin Street, had submitted to him, but it had all been an orgasmic confidence bullet, flood and ebb, fullness and vacant hollow. It was a trick whose subtlety never ceased to amaze him, a trick of resemblances, webbed blood and bloodlessness, cellular evaporation into life. Even John in his cradle, it seemed to Sebastian, was a born chameleon, capable of interior, random fire, presences and absences, in each sudden cry, sudden smile.

Every chameleon-in-depth was a creature of glass. One touched it and it became the colour of one’s flesh. One drew blood from mother-in-child, child-in-mother. Each bloodbank assisted one to venture upon the dangerous web between divinity of the son (Sebastian’s John) and humanity of the mother (Sebastian’s Stella). Sebastian lay now absolutely still. Thinking without thinking as if he were fathoms deep, yet floating above his bed like unshackled soul from body. Just an inch or two up the ladder of space beneath the warring factions under his shadow of the globe where he slept and knew nothing.

Divinity of sleeping son in the cradle! What did it mean? It meant that the baby in its cot, dreaming of playing on the floor, dreaming of food, was a privilege beyond words; its waking gesture should be a miraculous command, its arousal from death immune to punishment, its beauty remind one of the terror of love plucked from appetite and the temptation to batter innocent life that provokes and is helpless.

Humanity of wife and mother! What did it mean? It meant that Stella was vulnerable, that all his imaginings of Titan coition with her made her reflect him in herself as less the masterful lover and more the mimic child, mimic phallic train, father mimicking emergent vehicle or son from mother’s body, jealous father in face of privileged son, privileged wheel of sleep and waking. Except that the child’s unselfconsciousness was beyond the reach of the father’s machine or log; beyond yet linked to it paradoxically not as parody of the son by the father, of the foetus by the parent, but as potential riddle of capacity for related features across all ages, all things and beings and creatures… Heracles strangles a serpent in his cradle. The mouse arises and kills the mystic cat in Jacksonian reversed epic as it descends animal, divine throat into human temptation to strike or intervene.

*

Lucy Brown, archetypal Jamaican tea-lady, of the electrical factory from which Sebastian had been fired in the summer of 1979, came to see Jackson during the week of the Brixton disturbances in 1981. She brought her daughter (whose name was also Lucy) — a young woman of nineteen — with her, and Jackson could see from the younger woman’s manner that she did not altogether relish coming. It was her first visit to North Pole Road but her mother — who was attached to Jackson — spoke of it often. Young Lucy sniffed and cast an unappreciative glance at the spartan room with its mist of faces on the ceiling. The cat lay coiled and still in a corner.

Lucy’s boyfriend had been arrested three days before in Brixton, and the older woman was unhappy over her daughter’s political acquaintance. She hid her anxieties and bustled all the more strenuously with trays of tea. Few of her friends saw her as she was, sagging body, psychical exhaustion. For nothing was self-evident on the surface. She dressed to preserve a robust appearance. Her composure in public was wooden save for a sudden, occasional flicker of alarm when she became enlivened — almost ecstatic — in confessing that blessings and misfortunes came three or four in a row.

Lucy Brown (the mother) had arrived in England from Jamaica on the day Jackson fell from a ladder. Lucy (the daughter) was born in Notting Hill Gate. Her birth coincided with the death of Indian Lucy in India after which Khublall had come to Europe with his shaven head. It was all recorded in Mary’s automatic writing and Angel Inn mirror’s wealth of a-causal coincidence enfolding series of “absences” and “presences” through which to read a conception of the family of Mack the Knife.

Lucy Brown had had a difficult time as an unmarried mother bringing up the child. She had met Jackson comparatively recently, scarcely more than four years ago, by chance, when he was returning home from his portering duties in a large hotel. They were sheltering from the rain in the wide doorway of the Odeon Cinema close to his workplace and he had casually asked her, on hearing her accent, whether she was interested in having some old furniture he had decided to get rid of.

It was what she wanted and she jumped at the opportunity, and that was how she first came to visit him in North Pole Road. Spartan as his flat was, it needed cleaning at times and she cleaned kitchen, bath, sitting room, etc., everything except the garden at the back in which the cat roamed and killed the occasional bird or mouse.

It was a curious friendship since Jackson was of middle-class Jamaican origins (he no longer possessed a bean of his father’s money) and she was of peasant stock from the hills and had retained traces of her accent and a modified pattern of West Indian speech.

She grew to trust him implicitly and he found himself by degrees linked to her by wry comedy, exasperated spirit, yet ominous and serious understanding.

“Oh Mr Jackson,” she said, “I been promising myself to bring Lucy to see you these past four year. She need counsel. The girl headstrong. She won’t listen to me….”

On the surface it seemed a familiar enough story to Jackson, the gulf between the generations. “You look well, Lucy,” Jackson said, trying to make light of her woebegone countenance. “I mean your dress,” he added soberly. “It’s new, isn’t it?”

Lucy was wearing a full dress that disguised and suited her large figure. “I not feeling as bright as I look, sir. And if I collapse on the road and got to be taken to hospital…” She lifted her dress almost unconsciously to reveal a snow-white, spotless petticoat. “They say I would win a prize for the best-dressed tea-lady in London.” Her voice rumbled into a laugh.

Jackson smiled. Lucy, the daughter, stared into space. It was astonishing how swiftly the older woman’s mood could change from sad to bright like flickering shadows in Angel Inn mirror.

“You know, Mr Jackson,” she confessed, “there’s nobody else in the world I talk to like you. You know my private feeling.” She turned to her daughter. “I don’t mean by that what you thinking Lucy. All you young people is a hard generation….”

“Platonic,” said young Lucy, “how good.” Her accent was Notting Hill Gate, flat-earth English, sharp, sceptical, it stung a little, but Jackson felt oddly stimulated. Her mother ignored her except that her demeanour changed again within chameleon bite of blood. “I frighten one day of dropping down on the road, sir. All them prying eye, prying hand, undressing, dressing me.”

“What does it matter?” Jackson said. “You won’t know a thing.” He turned to hard-edged, slightly enigmatic daughter for support but she looked away swiftly to stare into space. Why had she bothered to come, he wondered. What could he say to please her?

“It matter,”said the older woman. “I would know, my hair would breathe, when strange hand touch me. Nowadays nobody care. People shooting each other in Jamaica. Call an election and bullet fly. Killing, wanting to kill, wanting to be killed, wanting to fight in the street, is immodest…” She stopped.

Immodest! The word struck him. He had never thought of it like that. What did she mean? He stared into the woman’s eyes and caught the drift of half-sealed, half-unsealed consciousness as her fictional death, fictional disrobing, overshadowed the room. She was obsessed, he saw, by the thought that a dead person could come immodestly alive in the “boudoir of the coffin, the boudoir of politics”.

What an outrageous notion! Yet it glanced through his mind as a true conception of dressed urban angst and peasant black humour. It drew him down into the grave of the streets, the self-advertised killed around the globe upon Marsden’s towering stick converted now into Lucy Brown’s height of fear, her heightened fear of violence, the theatrical deaths that one saw on television, the tall dead celebrated by fanatics, the extensions of immodest naked action, immodest prosecution of feud, unconscious strip-tease, immodest wishfulfilment, hunger-fasts, hate-fasts.

Young Lucy now got up from her chair and made her way over to the vase of flowers. Her mother’s eyes and Jackson’s eyes followed her across the room. “I wish she would marry a good man, not a freedom fighter, god knows what unfreedom he fighting for like in a nightmare; a good man with a bit of money in the bank, Mr Jackson. Can’t you talk to she?”

It was the kind of half-rude, half-rhetorical question for which the West Indian peasant was famous. By “talk” Lucy Brown meant the magical power to bind to one’s will, to make someone do one’s bidding. That “talk” was equated with “good or bad persuasion” arose from an unconscious conviction that words were a sacred or daemonic medium since their roots were mysteriously cast in the rhythm of things, the implicit voice in every object one uses, implicit trance, utterance of binding contour in every feared object, respected object. Yet fear, Jackson wanted to say but could not, could also breed silence — the fear that’s close to ambiguous love — the fear of nemesis that helps to unravel temptation to seduce others or to be seduced by others.

“Three year pass,” Lucy Brown said, “since the motorcycle accident in 1978. Three anniversary. First anniversary ’79 Sebastian Holiday lose his job.”

Jackson did not know that Sebastian Holiday was hollow relation to his lost “daughter of Man” and assumed the tea-lady was referring to someone at her workplace.

“Second anniversary ’80 the recession bite deep and a lot of redundancy follow. Third anniversary ’81 Lucy Brixton boyfriend in trouble. Can’t you talk to her, Mr Jackson?”

“A day’s just a day for me,” said young Lucy coldly. “No talk will change that.” She turned around a little from the vase of flowers. “And anyway you do enough talking for everybody and your anniversary’s early this year, isn’t it, mother? This is April not June.”

“What motorcycle accident?” said Jackson, turning away for a moment from young Lucy’s hard-edged, disturbing beauty of limb and breast.

“It was a white boyfriend Lucy had. He die on the road in ’78.”

The young woman moved away slowly from the flowers, crossed the room and fondled the cat. Jackson’s eyes were unobtrusively glued to her. It was suddenly clear to him that there was an element of dream in the way she walked however sceptical or cold she seemed. On the surface her body was a wall between herself and eclipsed antecedents. Through Mary’s automatic codes however that clothed the room and propelled her pencil across the page of a mirror, Jackson perceived depths of characterization, hypnotic expedition.

His eyes seemed to open. Something came back to him like a blow of silence. A file of black women walking through the hills of Jamaica. He was a boy at the time in a car on his way with his father across the island. The women were dressed in white. They carried covered trays of food and other materials on their head. There was a statuesque deliberation to each movement they made, a hard-edged beauty akin to young Lucy’s that seemed to bind their limbs into the soil even as it lifted them very subtly an inch or two into space.

That lift was so nebulous, so uncertain, it may not have occurred at all. Yet it was there; it gave a gentle wave or groundswell to the static root or the vertical dance of each processional body. It also imbued the women with enigmatic privacy. Were they on their way to a wedding or a wake? To ask them was to be greeted with a smile one could not interpret. Was it the smile of secret mourning or secret rejoicing? Were they oblivious of secret, ecstatic ladder of space? Did they incline without knowing it into psychology of stasis, the stasis of the hills?

Jackson heard Lucy Brown’s voice again — her obsession with sudden death in the street, her obsession with her own funeral side by side with intimate (almost naked) desire for her daughter to marry “a good man with a bit of money in the bank”. No wonder her fear of immodest exposure possessed an involuntary compulsion or subconscious strip-tease funeral expectation (the eyes that would see her, the hands that would touch her) woven into a vision of her daughter’s wedding….

Such unconscious or subconscious strip-tease was an aspect of enigmatic privacy laid bare in half-comedy, half-tragedy, of Angel Inn mirror. It was an aspect of strangest carnival strip-tease of oblivious mankind, obliviousness of fashionable bullet-ridden nudity in the eye of the camera, obliviousness of Stella’s nudity in the street, obliviousness of Sukey Tawdrey’s rag dances of refined, imperial bombast, obliviousness of Mother Diver’s shawl of possessions.

All this moved like a stroke of mingled lust and sorrow in young Lucy’s dream-body, hard-edged, disturbing beauty, in the mirror of spectres by which Jackson was held in Mary’s “fictional book”. A series of reflections filled his mind from nowhere it seemed. She was a stubborn young woman, no one would deny. But there was more to it than that. The file of the folk by which Mary’s mirror had invested her emphasized that her feet were upon the ground but also made darkly clear the precarious linkage of secret ladder of space and static hill of earth. The link was actually broken, the static had begun to engulf them, that file of women, even in those far-off days of his boyhood.

He was witnessing — without realizing it — in that procession he saw in the hills, the regression of the dying folk into mysterious tune of love and death: mysterious attunement to a gulf or divide between sky and earth, between territorial, animal imperative and humankind or human space within all innocent/guilty, sad/happy places where Mack the Knife had moved or settled upon and around the globe….

Jackson recalled with sorrow how he himself had fallen from the ladder of space and into that fall was threaded his “lost” daughter of Man. Or was it that a descent of “daughter” was needed to match an imperfectly understood notion or “ascent” of son — daughter of man, son of man? The question loomed in Mary’s automatic book.

The question brought the hills into his room as he faced the two women and listened to Lucy Brown’s appeal to “talk” to her daughter. The silent hills were running down to the sea not up to the sky. The rivers ran down the island of his boyhood to a sea that possessed so little tidal range there was no reversal of flow back upland or inland. Until the silent hills grew again to match the faint ascent of the spidery rain into the great cloud ancestors of Anancy heaven.

“Ah,” said Jackson turning away from the Jamaican hills to the young woman of Notting Hill, “to fulfil your mother’s trust …” he was speaking to himself “… I must learn to be silent in the face of your obliviousness, I must learn to paint or sculpt what lies stranded between earth and heaven….” He stopped. He looked at her with longing and clouded eyes. Lucy was so young. The minute hand of the clock moved in him to embrace her as Stella had embraced Mary by the hospital gates; as Khublall had embraced his child-bride a long time ago in the riddle of death and love.

Nineteen Lucy was but she seemed younger. He wanted to touch her like a painter or a sculptor and in so doing to create through the mystery of temptation.

What was that temptation? Enchantment with the womb of nature, an enchantment that remained the greatest danger still in bedevilled populations around the globe.

It had led to the arousal of the furies. It had damned him across a generation, no, longer than that, it seemed, a century, two centuries, three. It had given him, only to pluck from him, his “daughter of man”.

And now as he looked at Lucy the temptation was in flower again but with a difference. In the greatest flowering danger lies the greatest prize of artistic wisdom. Lucy was smiling at him as if she knew, yet did not know what he was saying to her, a Mona Lisa smile.

Does every lost daughter of man change into unconscious child-bride within cultures that are stranded between animal divinity and human divinity?

The notion was staggering. It explained so much. It made him see with the eyes of ancient cultures conditioned by the bizarre purchase of love, inner fury that sets its seal of remorse or grief upon sanctioned rape.

Does every sculptor, painter, enchanted by the womb, imply humanity’s involuntary proneness to revert to feudal tradition however camouflaged by technology or promiscuity?

Why could he not reach out and seize Lucy by the nape of her exquisite neck, or by the lips with his lips upon her secretive, enigmatic, curiously hard mouth?

The cat-and-mouse metaphor made him laugh. How ridiculous. Hard lips indeed. The fact is she was practical. He was middle-aged. She had no use for him. And yet it was clear that her very hardness matched his coolness and sobriety, and that his invisibly enraged mind possessed therefore some counterpart in hers. And that was the key to her danger less from him than from some other ancient grievance dressed up in twentieth-century sentiment or authoritarian regime.

Her flat-earth practicality or rejection of cosmic hope could conceal the masked intentions of others in the grip themselves of compulsive illness or regressive force they little understood.

There was nothing he could say to her now. Silence was a measure of terrifying love that creates through every temptation to seize or to speak. There was a time to accept oneself as rooted in the hardness of an age that only non-possessing love beyond given presences, given voices, given conventions, could begin to dissolve.

Fear of the abyss was the beginning of silence he had sensed on Bale in the fire of the hills and trees that had seemed to clothe the woman Mary. Thus in her dissolution lay the conversion of his obsession with the womb, her symbolic dissolution, the acceptance of chastening and mutual responsibility for the body of humanity. He was her authentic messenger of a gleam with which to retrace his steps into faint consensus of radical hope. He was both true person — his crown of hair echoing Marsden’s beard or cloak, fertile spirit, echoing intelligence — and a character in a book that begins to know himself, to thread himself into mutual anguish, mutual authorship between creatress and created.

Mary’s automatic narrative drew to a close. It was as if she knew that to be whole was to endure not only Stella’s comings and goings but the traffic of many souls, endangered souls, in ceaseless angelic/daemonic paradox that cures, yet never cures wholly.

Staring into the spiritual mirror, Mary had no illusions about the difficulties and the tragedies that the making of new community of self presented. They were rooted in her own riddles of body and mind and the tormenting camouflage that Joseph Marsden had helped her to begin to unravel.

Content

Wilson Harris
The Angel at the Gate

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