Angelo said, ‘Mama …’ Why did she do it? he wanted to ask.
Pierre’s face sagged and his indrawn breath was so deep and long and weary that Angelo could not be in the room with it and he went to the door. Pierre said, ‘Wait,’ and Angelo waited while Pierre put some mutton and cheese between two slices of bread and gave it to the boy. There was a pause that could have been filled with an embrace. Each waited for the other to move, but neither did, and Angelo went out into the dank night.
He scuttled blindly along the alley of Loves Court, tripping on nothing but his own gauche limbs, and he tried to yell, to howl, in an effort to replace the feeling inside with another wild, alive notion, but the sounds that came out sounded false. So he slowed, ate his food and wandered the avenues and alleys. The stretch of his legs heated him and brought a blush to his cheeks. He did not want to go home but wanted to walk and walk, for it felt like progress.
He was careful to cross over when he passed the Lock Hospital in fear of the lunatics, the leprosy and the sinful diseases, all incurable and borne on the wind. He walked on until he reached the cloisters of the courtyard where the orphans slept. Angelo gazed at the ornate grille of the windows, wondering why the place looked like a manor house, like a home where kidneys and kippers were served on silver plates and boys wore curls like girls, their shoes shining as they played on their rocking-horse and nurses scolding them with love, pressing them to their bosoms and feeding them sweets and hot milk sweetened with honey before bed. He wanted to live in the manor house too and he threw stones up and yelled for the boy he had met at St Bride’s. He yelled as if it were daylight, when such noise might be appropriate, for it did not occur to him that he should not be there, that he should not make loud noises or throw stones at night.
A curtain twitched and a face appeared. Little Angelo’s heart skipped a beat and a real smile lit his face, but just then the door opened and a man came out in his nightclothes. He said nothing but gave Angelo the look of the ogre in one of Magdalene’s storybooks. Angelo fled, but his smile stayed with him as far as Stonecutters Alley, and only then did it slip away.
Increasingly, Angelo found the opposite of sadness in the tapestry, and always in the morning he was there, eagerly rubbing his hands together, partly from cold but mostly with enthusiasm, for he couldn’t wait to see what the lady would look like life size. The idea made him happy. But Magdalene was always in the room, and images popped into his mind, making the pit of his stomach sink. He couldn’t believe she was gone; he was desperate to believe she was hiding behind the door or had just left the room, and although he resisted it with all his might, smiling hard hard hard, he could not completely shake the horrible feeling, could not make peace with the fact that he had lost her.
Pierre excused himself from the loom shop one rainy morning, saying he would be back for lunch, and he set off towards his old haunting ground to visit a spiritualist. She turned his hand over and stroked the lines of his palm. After a moment she pushed it from her with a downward move of her mouth, implying it held no interest, like an empty pot. She looked at him with the glinting eye of a sensitive. She was young, her dress clean but dated, and about her throat hung a fine oval locket that seemed to speak to the artisan in Pierre of nobility. Her room was sparsely decorated, with no charlatan accessories except for what appeared to be a vase filled with small pearl-like buttons.
Because it was expected of her, she raised her hands in a theatrical manner and breathed deeply. Then, acting bored, she said plainly, ‘I have nothing for you. You will die, and soon. I have a message for a boy — you know who I mean. He is ugly of face yet his heart is full of love. He must be careful of this love, for it has a forked tongue. It has hate in it, just as faith has fear. Tell him when he feels guilt it is a sign that all is not well. Tell him not to be greedy or he will be trapped in the twin worlds of melancholy and madness.’
Her face took on a faint expression of horror, which she masked. Then she stood abruptly, and Pierre noticed she was fat with child. She ushered him out and he paid her handsomely. Pierre turned his back and did not see her throw a handful of powder after him.
When he returned to the loom shop with two hot mutton pies he received a vivid image of Magdalene kissing her son’s forehead, and in the same moment Angelo touched the spot on his brow, and between them in the room there was a softening. Each received an assault of impressions; it was as though thoughts, images, memories swirled between them like a shared dream. One breathed in a memory and the other breathed it out. Pierre recalled the aroma of her, freshly loved, and Angelo smelt a musky scent.
But it was short, like the break in fighting where enemies play in no-man’s-land. And never again were they generous to each other with their versions of Magdalene. The jealousy each held in her life became stronger after that moment. The pies were left uneaten.
Angelo, having gone upstairs to fetch something, passed the chair Magdalene used to sit in, and over the back was a quilt she had made of patches. He took it and laid it over his bed, but that night he found it over Pierre’s. Angelo’s face went hot with outrage and he snatched the quilt back, but before he had it fully in his clutches Pierre had the other end and they stood, rivals, with the quilt between them like a tug-of-war rope.
‘It’s my mother’s.’
‘It’s my wife’s.’
‘She made it before you came along.’
‘If I hadn’t come along you would be dead from starvation.’
‘Would I? I think fishmonger Bob would have stepped in.’ Angelo’s words had the desired effect, but as he dragged the quilt to his bed there was no triumph. The next day he put it back over the chair and by evening it was on Pierre’s bed. Every time Angelo saw it an ugly jab poked him, like a hated younger brother.
But there was the tapestry. Angelo’s emotions, with nowhere else to find solace, became threaded within the great tapestry as surely as tears cried over soup become the soup. And yet underneath there was a pushing up, like an air bubble just beneath his ribs. Sometimes it would bob up higher and Angelo would giggle for no reason.
Over the winter months, slowly, a row at a time, the tapestry took shape, weft shunting the thread into the weave, Pierre at the treadle and Angelo combing the warp smooth, intertwining one set of threads at right angles to another set, weaving, changing colours from the rack on which spools were mounted on equidistant spikes until required. Row upon row, the lady began to take shape while the rain fell loudly. Upon the loom she emerged from the shaggy outline of threads, like Galatea carved from stone, thought Angelo, remembering the story his mother had read him. The idea of her was there already, some patches filled in, others blank, and yet the feminine shape of her body clearly showed: the dent and pout of her navel and the line that enticed the eye to the giddying curves of her serpentine end, the riot that would be her hair and the sloe shape of her eyes all rendered purely.
So fine was the lady of the tapestry that Angelo felt in his belly a giddy swooping that became more and more important to him. He began to entertain the folly that he might meet her one day, despite her ethereal origins. For hadn’t a whaler drawn her? Therefore she must be real, as real as salt and soil. Something like promise or hope seeded in him, and it became obvious, like a slap in the face or the voice of God to Moses, that the nymph in the tapestry was a gift just for him: a message, a sign, a way. The notion that he had been singled out by a grand power grew inside him the way yeast bloats the drinker. He fell down the steps of what he thought was love, falling ever deeper into a delicious longing. And with the clarity of epiphany he realised he loved the nymph of the tapestry as far as love could go.
He gorged on it, wallowed in it, mooned over it. He wanted to talk about her, shake himself, jump, kick, scream, laugh and roar, throw things and break them. He wanted to let it out — the sudden bubble of beauty that she had inflated below his heart. And in this way he transferred the sorrow for his lost mother into a keening for the nymph in the tapestry
— a longing as real and potent as grief and therefore indistinguishable from ecstatic love, true or false.
On one of his wanderings, under a pale sky, Angelo had the vague notion that he would go to the orphanage and seek the boy Davy. But instead he turned right towards the Thames and passed Fleet Prison, where a prisoner begged at the gate.
‘Come, sinner,’ called the prisoner, and gestured Angelo over.
‘I have nothing for your plate,’ squeaked Angelo.
The prisoner gestured desperately. Angelo moved closer. The prisoner made a grab through the bars and snared Angelo’s wrist. His eyes looked like boiled eggs, goggly and blue-veined, and his voice had a resonance that did not fit with his scrawny body.
‘Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened. Ask and it shall be given. As to your faith so be it unto you, sinner son.’
To Angelo’s mind the words were directive and he swallowed them like a golden key. But the prisoner frightened him and he wrenched free and ran back to the loom shop, where he stroked the bumps of the tapestry and repeated the prisoner’s words. Then he took black thread and sewed a beauty spot above her lip, to mark her as his family.
Pierre pretended not to notice. He did not pass on what the spiritualist woman had said. Not because he wanted to trip the boy, but because he didn’t want him to know he would soon be an orphan.
Angelo fantasised as his body bulged across the bridge to manhood. He did not know many facts but he did his best in his imagination, indulging in erotic thoughts where only a part of the nymph’s body was revealed — her wrist, the small of her back where her hair swished — and always, always, he imagined water. He imagined he was the foam of seawater soaking her. He imagined that his fantasies could be made true by the wishing of it, and he forced his will out to God as he experimentally groped at his groin to encourage or quell the stiffness that accosted him like a highwayman. His eyes watered. And invariably when given the peace, with a sticky liquid coating his hand, when the ecstasy had passed, sleep covered him.
When thoughts returned to purity his heart went to Magdalene, and in his sleep he combined the two. And even as this new love had only just entered his life he was already sickened by the fear that the nymph would not, could not return his love. For nothing was deeper set in his mind than that underneath it all he was unworthy, because he had failed to come home sooner and save his mother from death.
Pierre saw love blooming in the boy’s face as clear as a rash and it alarmed him. ‘Fool,’ he sneered at the boy, and would have warned him but he was peeved when Angelo smiled smugly in an arrogant way, for Angelo imagined they were creating a new being out of the ribs of themselves. Pierre noted the alertness of the boy’s body and, most annoyingly, the liveliness of the eye that represented the years of youth that lay ahead. It made him feel cheated and old, for his own appendage had shrivelled like a dried mushroom. One evening, prompted by a desire to poke the spark out of the boy and with a courage born of the knowledge that death was near, Pierre shoved a lit candle in the lad’s eye socket.
Angelo screamed and scratched at the hot wax. Pierre, stunned for a moment, and horrified at himself, threw his mug of beer over the eye and helped Angelo pick and peel away the dried wax. The eye scarred in a red welt, as if a seam had been sewn in the lid. It was not noticeable except at certain angles and in certain moods, but Angelo’s vision was damaged.
Between the two a truce took hold. One realised he must hold himself or become a murderer, and the other understood that he was the one who held the prize: the prize of love.
Magdalene’s wish for her boy manifested in a madly misshapen manner. Angelo lay in the yard of St Bride’s Church staring up at the clouds. Yes, God had given him a special role to play. He rolled onto his stomach and nuzzled in the wrinkly flesh of his inner elbow. His love had all the markings of a spiritual awakening. An act of grace foretold and charmed. The martyred pride of it made him puffed and noble; he felt the soulful sorrow of yearning, the sweetness of desolation. He sniggered into the crook of his arm, buoyed by his love, as though his cracked heart had mended and would never break again.
As spring approached, Angelo grew tall. His trousers became too tight and, without asking permission, he adopted the manly status of breeches. The sleeves of the hemp tunic Magdalene had made for him ripped at the shoulders and wordlessly Pierre chucked him a threadbare linen shirt laced with leather cord at the neck. Angelo felt that by growing bigger he was leaving his mother behind — he was racing to be free.
His voice cracked early, breaking notes, squealing like a horridly played violin. A tuft of orange fur grew on his lip to match the soft hairs already profuse in his groin and clashed bizarrely with the thick, prematurely grey hair of his scalp. Hair grew everywhere in verdant crops.
Finally, in the first flushes of summer, the tapestry of the nymph was all but complete. It was a great success and Pierre considered it his finest work to date. Still hooked to the loom, the mermaid nymph sat regal and naked upon a rock set in a topaz sea. Her figure was wet and pearly, her face a melt of passion and compassion, yet her arched brow promised destruction. She glowed with the sensuality of ripe flesh. She was fascinating.
Angelo stood by the loom. His legs quivered, his lip trembled. He wanted to sink his hands into the weight of her abundant hair. He lowered himself to his knees. Pierre used his sleeve to wipe a rheumy tear from his own eye and he knelt too.
‘Pierre, where do I find a mermaid?’ asked Angelo.
His stepfather did not answer but Angelo insisted. ‘Where?’
Pierre was disturbed at the tone of the boy’s voice. It was indecent in its urgency — somehow too full of life. It stirred in him the flaws of reality: the absolute certainty in his thin blood that no one truly finds happiness, not without thorns; the certainty that nothing lasts forever, that the things you care about most will be taken from you for no reason at all. Not for fate, not for destiny, not even for spite. He was certain, too, that hope is better nipped in the bud than allowed to bloom and flourish. The boy had the flimsy sensibilities of a girl. He sneered at Angelo and shook his head. If he knew where to find such a creature then he would be there with it himself. He snorted. The boy was doomed. Pierre would not give an answer.
That night, while Angelo slept, Pierre stole into the loom shop and unhooked the tapestry. He cut its frame, sewed the border down, waxed and burnt the edges, working stealthily like a thief loading silverware in a sack, glancing over his shoulder furtively and holding his breath every time the wind whispered in the eaves. By dawn he’d rolled and wrapped it in calico and put it on the back of a horse and cart to be delivered to the Aria House in France.
When Angelo next approached the loom it was bare, as surely as skin peeled from bone. His stomach clenched in disbelief and he stared at his stepfather with a child’s eyes, the pupils big and black as holes. Pierre stared back with tiny inscrutable pupils.
‘Where is she?’ Angelo demanded.
‘She is not yours. She never was, and never will be.’
Angelo flinched, and the flinch was like a slap to Pierre. The boy had never liked him, and in that moment he saw Magdalene in her son — saw the ingratitude like a second head. The girl he had saved from a life on the streets, a girl with a bastard son to a man who had rejected her … Magdalene had loved that man with all her heart and held to the improbable chance he might return to her life. On the day of Magdalene’s sinful last deed, Pierre had shown her the proof of her lost lover’s death, thinking that that would be the end of it. She would be free, finally, to love him in his old age. And free herself she did. Pierre blew air out between his lips and his fight seemed to leave with it.
‘Why?’ The boy’s voice was so small and, for the first time in years, prompted by guilt and the need to connect, Pierre touched Angelo’s cheek. He tried to explain he’d sent the tapestry away for Angelo’s sake, for his own good; that life is a struggle as it stands, without adding fantasy to the equation
. And yet, he said nothing. In the sudden movement of reaching out it looked more as if he was taking a strike at the boy, who ducked and bounced up, his fists in fighting balls. Pierre stood brittle and uncertain. What could he do with such a boy, so foreign to him?
Angelo began to quiver with emotion.
Pierre knew even less what to do, and so said, ‘In the sea …’ Then generously he added, ‘Perhaps the Southern Seas …’ With another feeble gesture of his arm, meant to convey sympathy — empathy — he made to leave the room. Then he said peevishly, poking the boy hard in the temple with his finger, ‘You’re cracked, boy, for mermaids — they don’t exist.’
‘They blarney do.’
4.
Fathoms of Love: Dreaming
Gilda:
I cannot see her face, not yet, for she is blurred, viewed through a mist, a mirage. But I feel her. I’m not afraid yet — expectant only, a little anxious, you know, as if I have been waiting for her, like she is the reason I am here. I am her and she is me.
It’s awfully cold. A horrible chill worse than life drags me down so far I cannot pull myself up and she is terribly sad; it leaks from her like honey. It’s all green and watery around me and far above in the distance, like looking backwards through time, I can see light up on the surface as from underwater. But I can breathe and there is also the sensation of flight. It’s weird just sinking or falling through weightless space, and always there is her mass of ruby hair, long as forever and wrapped around me, but I cannot tell whether she is cushioning me or smothering me. You know — hurting me or loving me, saving me or drowning me?
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