The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (5 page)

Sebastian hastily pulled up his trousers, pulled the chain, and shot through the door BANG. His alacrity made it clear to Stella that he was high. Not high like Mary’s Father Marsden upon whom a great spirit leaned to patrol the globe, but high in an inverted sense as if he (Sebastian) ran on the edge of numinous, Alfred Hitchcock coffin or pit, yet stood upon a pole held aloft by a devil in the depths of that coffin, a pole on which he danced with numb toes, and skilfully, however blindly, preserved himself from the swirling grave beneath.

The hierarchies between Marsden’s freedom and swirling depths of possession were multifold, both Mary and Stella knew. Sebastian’s high—in point of fact—stood above other stilts or highs or needles’ points in the coffin of space. Each high presumed that it stood on the lip of the coffin however deep it may already have fallen … that it waved at passers-by rather than sink into oblivion.

“Sebastian, what have you been up to?” Stella said. “It’s been an age. Look! It’s time we sorted out this dole business. I’m not even sure how much you are getting. You’ve been pinching from it, Sebastian. I know it’s hell to be out of work. Do you realize it’s Mary’s salary that’s been seeing us through? Thank god for Father Marsden.”

“I can spend my money as I like,” Sebastian grumbled.

“Your money? What about John? What about food, rent, electricity, gas?”

“We’ll make out,” said Sebastian. He suddenly had an inspiration, a way of making his debts look like high, devilish cunning assets. “I’m writing a play for White City.” It was a euphemistic confession to himself that though he had cancelled his third script he would have to find money and pay something next time to secure a body of speed. Stella was deceived, as she often was, by the faces he made. She opened her eyes wide. “White City television studios? Have you really written a play, Sebastian?” Then she laughed, it was quite absurd. Of course, on the other hand, all he needed was to string a few words together. The camera would do the rest. Still, even so, she was sceptical. “What nonsense, Sebastian.” She was staring at him hard. “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Someone’s been approaching you to appear on a programme about drugs. I know they’ve been talking to addicts and that they appear to pay good money to the heroin people. I’m not sure it’s your scene, Sebastian. Speed’s nothing at all, nothing at all, compared to heroin.”

Sebastian was surprised by the turn of events. He felt he must build on the immediate lie, erect a higher and higher pole on which to dance even if it lasted but for a moment. “My scene does interest them. It does. It does.” But, even as he dwelt on the notion, his mind went blank. The truth was he had been driven by her (the bitch!) into an area that would require of him a confession of obliviousness to the torment he endured. Without that
obliviousness
how could he endure the invisible spectres that waved at him?

“Why should I tell them anything? Why should I say how I feel or don’t feel?” The silent question about oblivious mask seemed to pop into his mind from nowhere and to make him more unhappily conscious of Stella’s uncanny capacity to unsettle him, when he was high, to unsettle the foundations of the coffin that ran far deeper than his perception.

“I shan’t go through with it, that’s all. I won’t appear. They won’t pick my brains.”

“But why not? You needn’t worry,” said Stella. “I shall tell you what to say.”

“You? Tell me what to say?”

“All I mean is I could work out something for you. You won’t have too much—to say too much.”

Sebastian stared at her with rising anger at his risen lie beyond which it seemed now he could not escape. He felt, given a chance, he could rip … Dolphin Street ripper. That was the way to keep a lie solid. When did he and Stella ever say too much to each other? They tended, on the whole, to speak in monosyllabic bursts and utterances; except on those occasions when the need for blood music became so intense it created excited quarrels, terror and loathing, fascinations with horror. And even then those fascinations tended to fade like a forgotten dream the next morning, the phantom, warring cities they had erected tended to fall.

“You’re a bitch, Stella,” said Sebastian now. He’d show her he could talk. “One day you’ll cave in … you’ll write a letter….” It was a random shot. Perhaps he had had a glimmering sensation of the future.

“What letter?” Stella was hurt and puzzled.

Sebastian ignored this. “Everything has to be your idea. You invent even the lies I tell. You feed me cues, you, Mary and John. I’m your fucking nobody genius. Even this interview (or would it be an inquisition?) at White City, even now…” He didn’t know how to confess at last that there was to be no television programme, that
he
had been lying, not she. He had been building heroic (not heroin) playwright into himself.

Double-edged play indeed, play that accumulated into money masks he owed his drugs’ middleman; but play also that signified the abstract programme of a bitch (that was how he now saw Stella’s cue)—a cue all the more needling in that it constituted the pole he wished to climb from which to wave to a million viewers from the coffined, brilliant box that glowed like live ashes in their sitting rooms.

What was sobering and frightening, Stella felt, was how the trivialities of their lives, the quarrels about nothing, could breed an enormity of double-edged play, Sebastian’s actual money debts, and their mutual debt to the cliff or precipice of inner truth to which they clung for dear life. Stella knew she could slip if she were not careful, that Sebastian could wear her to a shred.

Stella felt suddenly, irrationally, worn to a shred. Perhaps it was true that she tended to stitch words into his mouth and to treat him like a failed coat. Her attitude aroused him to retaliate, to feign a desire to see her perish. How—Stella wondered—did all this reflect on the lie he had told? Was it not, however unwittingly, as much her lie as his?

Here was stage indeed, White City studio, in which she could become his interrogator, and also interrogate herself, implicitly interrogate Mary.

The question they needed to ask themselves was this: what was the difference between lies and truth?

Some lies were called white lies but others such as Sebastian’s were punted around like a ball or seized upon to ease the unbearable pressure of truth that the seed of genius and responsibility resided—however rotten its state—in every man, every woman, every child; seed of dawning consciousness of plagued humanity, seed of unique perception of birth and death—a perception that no paradisean animal possessed prior to Man. For the first time, perhaps, who knows, in the entire universe, the lie had become a little death that affected the body of the animal kingdom in the human imagination, human kingdom. And, as a consequence, truth (however faint) was ubiquitous; it resided in the heights and in the depths, in flower and in beast, in perceived cradle as much as in perceived coffin—in awareness of little births, little deaths in order to usher in the infinite metaphysic that all are born to die several deaths, to endure several lies, if one is to move by degrees into genius of mutual responsibility, shared
responsibility
for the truth, shared capacity to judge and to be judged for the lives one lives, the way one treats everything. That judgement was intrinsic to genius and to the terrifying reality of love.

Stella was almost lost in judgement of herself. Her interrogation was fading, the lights of the studio went down and Sebastian’s voice came to her from within the hollow tree of himself. It was as if he had retreated into perceived coffin or television box and summoned her to follow him. She hesitated. He was humming a tune. Stella was startled almost out of her wits at the consequences of the lie she had unwittingly put into his mouth. It had led to this! It had led to a tune that riveted her backwards in time, into childhood associations. The voice of the humming dead! Her mother’s voice had tended to be deep, contralto, and in the depths of Sebastian’s tree, the depths of the studio, it seemed to rumble anew out of the past.

Her mother’s voice (she could scarcely believe it was so close at hand in coffin or studio) was Mary’s mother’s voice. Why did she have to say that now? Ah yes, said Stella, I am a mask Mary wears, a way of coping with truth. We are each other’s little deaths, little births. We cling to sarcophagus-globe and to universal cradle.

It was the song that her mother was singing that brought it all back. “Mack the Knife”.

“Put on a record,” said Sebastian in the depths of the studio. “Tell the old woman to stop.”

“She isn’t old,” Stella protested.

Her mother stopped.

Stella wondered if she would fly, if she were offended, but no, she didn’t, the music returned once again coming this time from an old gramophone her mother possessed. It was “Mack the Knife” sung and played by Louis Armstrong. The absurdity and tall story lyric, oceanic city, were sustained by Armstrong’s height of trumpet and by his instrumental voice, hoarse and meditative in contrast to the trumpet he played, ecstatic cradle, ecstatic childhood, ecstatic coffin, ecstatic grieving surf or sea.

Mack the Knife was a sailor. His follies, his callous epic of loves and crimes, left him bereft and exposed and storm-tossed, trumpet-tossed, on the hoarse sea or voice upon which he sailed from port of call to port of call through a procession of phantom women, Sukey Tawdrey, sweet Lucy Brown and Jenny Diver; all were apparently as doomed as he. Only a consummate
naïveté
, consummate riddle of childhood truth, could beach Mack the Knife in Armstrong’s and Stella’s mother’s voice and turn him into anti-climactic folly or hollow crime and into a pageant of tricks, the lame that walked, the blind that saw, the dying body that oozed life.

Stella was shivering. The fascination of the song for her mother was something that she grew up with. Mack was also the name that her father bore. Mack was her mother’s god. And her mother’s name?
Guess
,
Stella whispered to Sebastian in the darkened studio. Jenny! It was a random hit, bull’s eye. It struck home. Jenny heard. She was weeping. It came with the faintest whisper of the sea, the faintest whisper of a flute, in the studio. Mack’s women were the Sukey Tawdreys, the sweet Lucy Browns, of the world. Between the ages of four and seven Stella thought that the postman was her father. Until she realized that he was but the middleman between her real father and Jenny her mother. He brought the letters from foreign ports with foreign stamps over which Jenny wept. On her seventh birthday the last letter arrived. Her father was dead, his ship sunk. It was a lie. It drove her mother in to an asylum where she contemplated Mack clinging for dear life to sarcophagus-globe even as she vanished into the arms of god, bride of god.

Stella was taken into care by a Social Welfare Body and placed in an orphanage in East Anglia.

The loss of her parents imbued her at an impressionable age with an ambivalence that was to haunt her all her life; an ambivalence that subsisted upon the apparent eclipse of her antecedents (Mack the Knife and Jenny Diver) hand in hand with a sensation of being pulled by them nevertheless into the depths and heights of the studio of place, studies of earth and sea and sky. It was akin to a dream of intensest moment she had forgotten though that dream was alive to contain her in its folds of unconscious memory, to possess her and to give her a sense of being charged with flight, a sense also of charging others to come to her or to be possessed by her. The energy of that charge broke life into several masks, several paths, several patterns of obliviousness by which Stella could bear her earliest terrors of love and death.

Jenny had been careless with the letters she received from Mack, and Stella read them all. Jenny’s carelessness had random design, random madness, random legacy. The letters she deposited infiltrated the records she played from rag-time to jazz, Delius to Sibelius. Stella recalled (yet did not recall) the names of the women of whom Mack wrote as if they were encapsulated forever in Lucy Brown and Sukey Tawdrey. Those musical names were masks that internalized themselves into arrested states of being, into curious half-child, half-woman brides of god—a failed god at times that she mocked. A god nevertheless she sought to prompt, to feed with cues, cues of her longing to change the world … The sea of East Anglian landscape became a mosaic of seasons as well as of nameless places within and without itself, an endangered paradise, an endangered ocean, haunting summons, a haunting
enchantment
.

Out of the depths of the studio “Mack the Knife” ceased and was followed by the music of Delius sailing across the Anglian sea of Stella’s orphanage upon which Mack’s women were subtilized into spectres of perennial however sordid grief, perennial however enchanting beauty.

First came “A Song of Summer”, one of Jenny’s favourite records.

The generous rise and fall of the waves (the cellos and basses) and the seagull gliding by (a flute theme) transported Stella into a meditative, child’s eye exultation and vision. Jenny Diver’s tears streamed down the sky into the sea but they were rich beyond every calculation, they almost seemed to choke her into serenity. In the midst of the waves the gull altered its shape. It beckoned, it called, from some endangered, yet serene, climate in which the no longer blind, no longer paralysed, no longer deaf composer lived.

Jenny turned now to “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring”. Stella listened for the faint
cuckoo,
cuckoo.
It came after—or in the midst of—a body of repeated phrases, short, glancing tears from Lucy Brown.
There
it
was
,
faintest crack in the coffin of nature,
cuckoo
, phantom egg deposited in the nest of a stranger….