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 pigmen
tation 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 HMS Beagle 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.
The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) Page 2