The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (3 page)

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 pigmentation 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:

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
H
MS
Beagle
Round
the
World.
Mary changed
H
MS
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.

“Sir Thomas More’s
Utopia
,” said Mary, smiling against her fear and finding her tongue at last. “I put it there myself this week.” His eyes were upon hers now. “I put it …” she began again, then stopped. “I brought you here,” she thought silently. “
Utopia
was
the
bait
I
used.
”
The thought came of its own volition. It seemed irrational, yet true. There was a ticking silence between them, a deeper pull than she could gauge, a deeper call than she knew, that had sounded long, long ago, even before the time when her father’s great-great-grandmother had been hooked by an Englishman to bear him children of mixed blood. Their names, in an
eighteenth-century
accountant’s ledger, were Chanty, Ambition and Desire. What names with which to saddle a child, names that called to mind Makepeace, Patience and Grace. Nowadays horses were heir to that tradition of names—Cupid’s Bow, Black Romance, Vanity Fair. How inimitable was the wishfulfilment cradle and stable of the human race, how inimitably vulnerable one was, how prone to nurse spectres in every webbed moment or vanity fair of blacks and whites within which one was entangled. Black Anancy (Marsden had told her) meant god’s chariot, god’s tapestry and
trickster-spider
, god’s bandaged, miniature ankle or wheel. How inimitably entangled one was in all fearful nets and creatures one had been purchasing and selling from time immemorial, immemorial object, immemorial flesh-and-blood.