The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds)

by Harris, Wilson

  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.