The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (2 page)

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
naïve
té
,
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:

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.

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.