White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
Page 18
A still morning, painted on glass. Black smoke climbs straight from the train. The hats are pipes, polished in stout. The white candle-wax faces. Gloved hands. Walk humbly, walk on. Lord Justice Lindley, Sir Joseph Lister, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, Sir James Paget, Serjeant Surgeon to Her Royal Highness, Queen Victoria. Walk side by side, and slowly. Struggle as you climb. Wind out of the station and up the hill towards the village; no eyes for the dull fields. Eyes set on the braided tails of the great black horses. Heroic!
This is no coffin of stones. Gull’s eyes are open. At last he looks up, out through the thin fibres of wood, at a clear sky. Justified. England marches to a slow beat. Hearts are slowed. The earth turns slowly. Death furls the branches of the trees.
To the village, the lych-gate of St Michael’s church. Gull’s leg is crossed, arms over chest, a penguin mockery. Hands pressed together, his own effigy, Knight of Landermere. Features lose all detail: a syphilis of time. He weathers.
The moving procession stretches over the nautical mile from station to church, from bishops and baronets at the grave’s edge, through surgeons, gentry, wharfingers on the hill, tradesmen, small farmers, fishermen, poachers and lurchers, to the children on the platform.
The ceremony begins.
From the high ground at Thorpe Hall, Gull watches them carry him to his grave. Sees earth fall over his eyes. He is enclosed, nailed down, weighted. In a vault that is big enough for three men. He is free of his own history.
The training began in the private plantation of the Hall. Gull was blind, his back to the window. All the windows painted over with pitch; holding out the star needles, the bride light. Not doctor now, nor patient. Not killer. Nor victim. The house had been in his mind for so many years. Lawns, conservatory, ivy. Flat undecorated front, long windows. Hide it in trees, build up the walls. This is truly nowhere. Gull is the house. That is how he dreamt it. This is what he knew.
The ash of matter, of unsmoked Havanas, powdered his sleeve. All matter is dust. Pulse in his neck. He crosses the floor, blind, eyes trained to see nothing, hand on the cage of ribs, a bird in his chest. Out of time. Cycles of birth occur at margin; decomposing light. His hand on the sill: a glove of white powders, stapled with hair, dissected to vein and fibre. A tide-map of the estuary. An illusion of stillness.
The training began in the private plantation. Choirs of stunted and infertile apple trees were interwoven, Merovingian bloodlines; avenues had been hacked and burnt into this thicket. Brambles, wild thorns, blackberries swollen with sour rain; unpicked, flavourless wart clusters: they surround the orchard. Pig-turned mud. Dark archways; a lattice-work of blades and starlight, a scalping rooftree. Green moulds brushing their stiff corduroys. Lichen bruises on torn skin. The stone of a cracked fountain. They are entangled in a nightmare.
Gull had contrived that certain obstacles should be disguised in this thatched stooping labyrinth. Bend! Or tear open your haircap. There were man-traps, bearpits, mummified, or wrapped figures, chained among the trees. Owl-heads grafted onto the bodies of cats. Trip wires ignited sudden flares.
The coachman and the painter were then blindfolded and set loose, zones of the wood were fired. They ran through their terror, screaming, bumping against trees, clutching at the shapes most likely to wound them. They mutilated themselves – until they learnt to navigate their own fear-traces, to scale down the star map onto a computed ground.
The training continued for many months; now the dark was abstracted, the spine’s eye quivering and sure in its judgments. Netley the coachman, and the other one, the painter, were invited to sit in the library, back to back, street plans spread in front of them, arms strapped to a board – so that only the hand and the fingers could stretch, could direct the well-inked pens. They read aloud, in synchronised voice, from a Latin text that they did not understand, while their hysterically sensitised fingers guided the nibs through the highways, Old Montague, Finch Street, Heneage, Chicksand, Hanbury, through alleys, Angel, Green Dragon, Lion, courtyards, through the secret city that Gull’s will was enclosing.
He could then allow his own vision to fail. He had no further use for it. His eyes could be burnt to the root, their interference countered. He could be wheeled out, or borne on a litter, stretchered, face upwards, freely, among the stars. Beyond the human, involuntary, down paths of merciless light. Connecting the sparks, a child, joining the numbered dots on his slate to reveal a hidden face. Helpless, like the Old Ones, searching the darkness of memory for their gods.
An attendant, on Gull’s unspoken order, wove into his hair the lead weights that fishermen use. His hair was already ash, now twisted into dread; the weights rapping against his stiff collar. The load was imperceptibly increased till his skull tipped and his throat tightened. He was removing himself, by degrees, from the grounded creature: the aggressor, the mucksnuffling beast. His face was forced to the sky, opened. His anatomical skills were tabled to murder all that was not mind.
This has not happened – but as you think it, it is happening. Diseases are the dreams of the body. In our diseases we study our future.
While walking alone in the grounds of the Hall, Gull was seized with paralysis. He did not lose consciousness, but fell on one knee. The servants did not discover much difference in his looks and manners, but he said that he felt another man. He walked away from himself, through the orchard and out of the gate. He subsequently had three epileptiform attacks, from which he rapidly recovered; was suddenly seized with an apoplectic attack, fell into a state of coma, and gradually passed away.
Sir William Withey Gull left behind him £344,000, with lands and possessions. An estate unprecedented in the history of medicine.
Awaking to sleep, the same dream. His brain had burst, no boundaries. Catatonic. Wax Lazarus. Sleep of initiation. He runs the edge. Lies on the blade. No colour. Moving in lucid patterns, unhindered, through the labyrinth. As if carried on water: the outline of Mary Matfellon.
His dream was the nightmare that Hinton had lived. He absorbed Hinton’s death into his own. The nurses noted a foetal light emanating from his navel, a specific fear. He saw the houses slide into dust.
His ghost, between a drowned consciousness and the tree, frosts the window. His swollen bearded length covers the branches. Dead breath on the glassed skin: imageless. A yew dripping with earth. The years are wands. Wet clay on his varnished boots.
At night the weight moves from his throat across the damp grass, and above it, a chain of righteousness. The unpeopled garden. Drooping stocks and heavy lidded plants concealing their cannibal instincts.
Himself. Facing himself. Looking in. Looking at. And without pity.
No longer Gull, nor Hinton. No longer contained by those descriptions. A table of fish. It is his mother, unharmed, loading fish from her raised skirts onto the bare table. Shimmering bright water stream. From the bell of her skirts she draws fish. He must swallow this abundance.
He must kill with fish daggers. The fish are weapons to stop the mouths of women. His hand alone would prevent the Dark One from seizing the gentle sisters. Then cut it off! The seven daughters, the escaping brides. He is Orion, mover of the unnumbered. What he has to do, he has to meet his mother in Hell. Stop up the mouths of women, they have shattered the jar of secrets.
Now he sleeps, once more outside; his length stretched on the grass. The skin of a heifer, soaked with urine. Blind man turns, twists, looking for the sun’s track. Where is his mother?
He spills his semen into the grapes. He is cunning. The white grapes are fat with his seed. From this bowl his mother must eat. The taboo is broken. She will bear his child.
On the eastern horizon the seven stars announce his coming. They are doves, also called suicides. Announcing rain. They guard the Water Door, the place of Entrance. Beware now of the scorpion at your heel.
Is it a fish in his closed hand? Juice, unwholesome stickiness; blood. Gull bleeds between his legs. He is smooth. The third son. Boasting of the death of all wi
ld creatures, performance of sacrifice. He menstruates. He holds a beheaded fish between his thighs. He soaks the grass.
Gull’s acts described what he can now dream. He enacted the myth. He rehearsed, but did not perform. Now he is smooth. He is his own mother. Old Star, White Star.
She went through the Water Door, she became the Pleiades.
I will carry my womb to the river. An affinity with Rainbows. Day of sun behind showers. Once again at the White House, the cottages. Over sedge and canal. Among cattle. Water track. In a split of land; face to Horsey, to Hedge-end Island. A path over the water.
I can see the man walk out of the woman. Voiceless, steps onto a beach of tongues, live fish; slides. The dead man walks over. He crosses and does not look back. Under the bow of lights.
When the double departs, there are only three days to live.
The water is become a tent; it climbs above the island, a red mountain, then a sheet, then a sheet of white. And behind the sheet the shadows of his father and his mother; they are making love.
Gull felt in his belly a stirring, a movement, something that he could not name, unknown, too slight to name; unstoppable. A child. Who would not be stopped by any force or blade. Beyond will.
His breath was now the tide. And was held.
28
February 1985, a Friday. It is with ever increasing difficulty that he sustains the illusion of dealing in books; out of Colchester with empty bags, once more down the Clacton road, once more breaking at Weeley and going back into the previous; so many times he has concentrated on that sign, Thorpe-le-Soken. A cold day, settled into its own ambiguities. Everything beyond the road has been cancelled.
He begins to understand, in dread, that beneath this text also is an uninvited shape, denying his notional control; a snake with two heads that he is straining to force together, venomous fangs bared.
He takes the left hand path and settles for the Crown Hotel. A guinness and a cheap cigar, red notebook stays in my pocket. I don’t invoke the ‘MANAC’ anagram which has just occurred to me, ‘JACKS MEN CAME.’ It is no solution.
The eyes avoid you; they stare at your knees and hands. No room here for irregulars. Threat spreads over the tiles like a blood stain.
A clatter of wheels and hammers inside the fruit-machine. See the purple grapes spin with the pears. ‘Across the Pleiades’. That is the name of the machine. A farm worker, in suede boots, tries to pull its arm out from the socket.
Now the church has gone, the village street, the pub itself. Painted out in a sudden snowfall. Wind from the steppes decodes the stone, hoods the vicious impact of time. It is shifting, uncertain: dangerous.
I have an appointment in Ipswich and I will not abandon it.
The lanes close on me; skidding, wheel spin, not my decision.
The short journey stretches as the light dies. No other traffic on this back road. The sky has fallen into the fields.
The car fails. Unable to climb. The tracks away to the side are walled with drifts. Where I am is nowhere and I have been brought to it, beyond choice. I walk to the top of the hill in leaking shoes, unprepared. Risk insinuates, absorbing the warmth of the known.
A road sign: I beat off the snow, Ramsey. This is truly nowhere and I have arrived.
And again, driving in; the sign remains, but the road is never the same. No pretence at bookdealing; I am here simply to be here. And, of course, it is right, it is Michaelmas, the Rector seems to be waiting in the church porch. It is their special festival, feast of St Michael.
This man is both clown and messenger. In his long black skirts he crows around me, on all sides at once, showing off what he has assembled: photographs, lists, old books, cushions, old anything, extensions of his unfocused enthusiasm.
He produces Fred Kempster, the Essex Giant, shaking hands with a woman at an upstairs window of the Bell. The Gull family tree is bannered across the north wall. He shows me the Gull window, fired by the setting sun. St Luke, St John, and Christ, together with what he calls ‘healing episodes from the gospels’. Rituals of obscure transformation.
But he will not allow me to look; always at my elbow, interpreting everything that I am not interested in. I must return. Tomorrow. The exhibition will be opened to the public, fully hung. He points out the stone carvings on the arches and around the pillars; fruits of the earth, acorns, poisoned berries and bunches of grapes.
I have to stay overnight, to willingly enter the fictions of M. R. James. There is a room at the Bell. Low-ceilinged, windows opening onto the graveyard. Out over the leaning tombstones, the moss and ivy, to the burial place of the Gulls.
‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’
Not a question, but a statement. Long shadows enlarge the monuments. Narrow the fear into my camera; I sit at the window, letting it come to me through the safety of the lens. The beams of the room creak like a whaler, pipes whistle, the light decays but remains benevolent; it is lived through.
The church exhibition will not be open until eleven o’clock and so I decide to walk out of Thorpe to try and discover the Gull family cottage at Landermere Quay.
A heavy sea-fret walks with me, liquid voices. A heightened perception of the trivial throws up from the roadside such named dwellings as ‘Golden Dawn’ and ‘Wolverine Cottages’. But these are soon left behind. There is nothing to guide me but instinct.
Thorpe Lodge is shapeless, soft, gone back. A road turns away for Kirby-le-Soken. I pass it. Cattle in the sea, snorting and stamping, unseen. The sea has rolled over these flat lands: walk under.
Another track, and I do break from the road. A farm building; I turn again. Over a stile and out among the fields. Wet branches soak me as I brush against them. Beaded veils. Glistening webs on the oak. It stops me. I take out the camera and wipe the lens. But this is not the photograph. The field below. There is the foreshortened outline of something like an upturned shed. I move down towards it, slithering on the mud slope. It is the shell of a great barge. Burnt out, charred, flaking; beams broken and twisted, grounded. In this drowned field, where water runs out, at this boundary, on the edge of things, between past and future. A spar goes down into the black silt, umbilical, connecting the hulk to this place. It is split, it is half of something.
I recognise it. And know that I have to write my way back towards this moment. This is given. To release my wife from her dreams of minatory buildings, a wind-invaded house, long corridors of strangers: I will return with my family; and my children will climb up onto the wreck, will stand at that rudder. And the connection will be made, the circuit completed.
Acknowledgements
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings closes the triad begun with Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979): it opens, hopefully, a second triad.
The letter from Douglas Oliver was written in response to Suicide Bridge and is published here with his permission.
Sub-texts have been cannibalised from many sources; some are obvious, some obscure. This is not the place to list them.
The contemporary characters represented in this book are, of course, fictional; though invented more by themselves than by the supposed author.
The Victorian characters lived under the names that I have given them: their behaviour is dictated by sources other than historical record.