The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (6 page)

Jenny stopped the record and put on “Brigg Fair” in which
folk-song
and magical season blended and Sukey Tawdrey was subtilized beyond cheap or sordid encounter into delicate place, all her gaudy, funeral garments swinging in the lightest wind, the lightest alchemy of the fair of death and life; sometimes a slow, quiet swing or dance enveloped her limbs, only to be quickened again, enlivened again, into the commerce of heart and mind. Then came the poignant commodity of “Brigg Fair”’s grief, the “still sad music of humanity”, changing nevertheless into child’s eye wonder, pearls for tears, into a long bar of echoing stillness, sounding the heights and the depths, and summoning her,
summoning
her
,
to follow in the footsteps of the dancers on sarcophagus-globe, earth and sea and sky.

Lastly Jenny played “A Walk in the Paradise Garden”. Here it was that her departure seemed to grow imminent into an
endangered
paradise, half-Utopia, half-inferno. The mosaic sea gave way to snow mountains and ice maidens wreathed nevertheless in flowers plucked from a wild garden. The soft tread of spectres accompanying Jenny Diver and Sukey Tawdrey rose, sank back, rose again. Each spectre clung to the clarinets, to a pendulum that rose in one direction before it returned and melted into stillness, a stillness that was never wholly still, bride of both clock time and timelessness somewhere in the mountains above the sea or somewhere in space above the earth, in another planet where life and death whispered endless secrets to each other.

*

December brought the curtain of weather down over White City and broke upon Stella less with music and more with operatic mutes whose gestures were eloquent enough for the season of the year. They were sullen creditors, scarcely saying a word but threatening catastrophe unless they could collect money Sebastian owed them. They were not—Stella discovered—his greyhound pavement suppliers of speed but others of whom she knew nothing and from whom he had borrowed a fiver here, a fiver there, to bet on “the horses”. The horses had become a new lie. He sweated over bits of paper with the names of jockeys and favourites. Towards mid-December a terrifying jockey arrived, terrifying saviour, moment of truth. It was to make Stella see how dangerous their way of life had become, how prone they were to hurt each other, how third-party child could mirror judgement day.

It had been a depressing morning, damp, cold, heated atmospheres in turn. They had quarrelled over money. He had called her a cold-hearted bitch. Then he had stormed out of the house. The quarrel, on Stella’s part, had been aggravated by the fact that she was suffering from an intermittent cough and had been to the doctor who advised her to stop smoking. It was around noon when Sebastian left the house, frustrated and miserable. Stella undressed. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was unquestionably thin, she felt, but magnetically young all the same she knew from the automatic bite of Sebastian’s blind, metallic eyes. Perhaps the magnet that pulled his eyes into her body resided in her small, rounded breasts and slender legs balancing themselves like fashionable twigs of whittled and daring flesh in league with technical body. It was as if the marrow of sex dared not only to wear bone but magnet, white and rosy marble.

Magnetic exposure! Yes, one throve on hidden varieties of magnetic exposure. One’s mirror was crowded with phantom, shared bodies of fashion. Cinematic nudes. Fashionplate buttocks. Stella pirouetted in the mirror. Perhaps she should have been a model or a dancer. The room seemed now full of eyes as if an invisible camera were presiding over a private auction-block riddle, invisible camera impressed with the faces of
eighteenth-century
, nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, staid accountants who flocked Father Marsden’s Angel Inn in search of the blessing interfused with the curse.

Perhaps Mary could advise her. Forlorn hope. Mary and she had not been on good terms lately. A wall had risen between them. Mary felt Stella was neglecting John.

She turned from the crowded mirror, the invisible camera, and slipped into bed but not before swallowing a couple of valium pills or sleeping tablets. She forgot John who was playing in the sitting room with his trains and chariots. Sleep settled upon her. A thundering knock smote the door like the hooves of a horse. Stella shot up and was filled with horror to discover that she had
not
corked the bottle of pills on the table beside her bed, and John had come into the room and was about to empty the contents into his mouth. Stella snatched it from him in the nick of time.

“You wicked, wicked child,” she said.

But he saw nothing wicked in what he had been about to do.

The thundering hoof came again.

Stella arose, went to the window and peered through the curtains. She could just make out the shadow of someone standing at the front door and was flooded with gratitude. His knock had wakened her, thundering judgement day knock. He knocked rather less loudly now and began retreating down the steps into the narrow garden from which he looked up at the window where Stella stood. Perhaps he glimpsed her naked body through the slightly open curtain and it made him curse softly. “You, lady! Sebastian owes me a fiver. Let me jump you and he can keep it.” And then, as if to confirm what he was, he undid his fly and exposed himself with studied deliberation. It all happened in a flash, phantom jockey, phantom horse. He buttoned his fly again and vanished into the street but Stella remained at the curtains as if she had been judged, if not jumped. Her posture broke. Tears rose, evaporated, rose afresh. Her first impulse was to berate Sebastian’s “horses”, to curse him for his friends and the abuse they heaped upon her. It was he who had summoned the beastly man. Was he beastly? Was judgement day the moment of the beast, mutual beast, mutual animal in whom birth and death are mirrored in sex, truth and lies, salvation and damnation? She pulled John against her and turned from the window. She stared at the bottle of pills she had now placed out of his reach.

“Oh my god,” she said, “thank god! You are safe.”

*

When Sebastian learnt later that day of the events of the afternoon he seized upon them to justify his frustration.

Stella was unbalanced, he said.

It was clear, he said, that John had been in the greatest danger because of her prime carelessness.

He brushed aside the story of the jockey who had exposed himself in the street or in the narrow garden under the bedroom window. It was all an invention, he said, to put
him
in the dock. Sheer fantasy on her part, he said. Better still, it was a lie. An age of obscenities and lies. Who would stand there in the broad daylight and do such a thing? Wasn’t it a fact that she was unable to say what he looked like, what clothes he wore, what he had employed to make such a loud and thunderous racket on the door? Did he, for instance, possess a walking stick…?

Stella protested that she had been in a state of the greatest shock, not simply on seeing the man but over the open bottle of pills that John had come within an ace of consuming and she had forgotten what the man looked like. Perhaps under hypnosis … But Sebastian brushed that aside. The man had grown faint as the phallus of the sun. He was an angel dressed up as a beast. He could have been anybody on earth one faces in the street but, because of one’s intimate worries and stresses, eclipses in one’s mind before a fictional moment, fictional eternity, has elapsed. Even the things he had said had sounded bizarre (he had called her “lady” even as he “judged” her). Under hypnosis she recalled something he mouthed as he stood in the garden:

(Father Marsden identified this as a late eleventh-century English poem of which Mary was unaware from the
Exeter
Book
Riddles
;
it was a riddle of the creator.)

Dolphin Street was, on the whole, in a quiet if not “seaweed” thoroughfare. The intruder may have been a sailor or a candlestick maker or a butcher who was loitering but posing no good reason for passers-by to suspect him. His back was to the street as he stood in the garden. And even if the next door neighbour had seen him (which was unlikely) it had all happened so quickly that he would have been there and gone before anyone could sing Jackson or, for that matter, Mack the Knife.

Stella appealed to Mary for support but Mary, in this instance, was on Sebastian’s side. She felt almost as guilty as Stella. The danger to John was all she could see; and the wall between the two women rose higher than ever in their fictional identities. Stella blamed herself for blabbing to them of the nightmare riddle she had had. Perhaps it had been a dream, one of the few she woke and vividly recalled. No, it was true. It had all happened though there was no one to prove it but herself.

As the wall continued to rise between them like an ephemeral, yet solid sea Stella saw the tidal deposit or difference between them—between herself and Mary—between herself and an intimate, alien world—clearer than ever now.

Mary’s style or deposit, so to speak, was quite different from hers. Whereas Mary loved a variety of gowns and dresses, she wore rather drab slacks. No eye-shadow, unvarnished nails. Did that suggest a gulf of centuries, weeks, days, religious holidays, profane holidays, on the auction block of fashion? Stella did not know but sometimes she felt she slipped more easily in and out of the crowds of Shepherd’s Bush than Mary did. Indeed she seemed so normal and easy-going that few—perhaps an uncanny Utopian
accountant
—would have guessed her longing for perfectibility. And even he may have failed to see her obsession with the wall that divided her from Mary (from the graces by which Mary was apparently adorned by Father Marsden) and from others with whom she occasionally rubbed shoulders in the street.

It was difficult perhaps for her to perceive that her shortcomings were a necessary gauge of Mary’s womanhood, that the annunciation of humanity existed everywhere—if it existed at all—even in the deprivations of social and natural order. Her obsession with “the wall” was a way therefore of identifying sexual nightmare and racial, class-fixated, economic riddles. It was a way of identifying hardened inferiority complexes, hardened
superiority
complexes, dogmas of inequality. Equally it was a revelation of doomed lives, doomed graces or non-graces, on either side of the wall that needed to be re-interpreted as an epitaph of the imagination through which to resume a conception of universal, endangered cradle in imagination. However one dodged it, or faced it, it returned in eloquent fabrics and conflicting emotions of place or status, accents and grunts, terror and reality in the wake of the dying fall of an insidious music of bone and mind. It witnessed to a world of inner and outer mutes, a world in which what was said by the lips meant less than a tightening or opening of the lips, less than a gesture of the body, bite of the eye, tightening of the brow, shiver of the heart.

It was a wall she felt curiously vaguely, yet curiously vividly, she must herself have composed within layers and layers of self, and through which she must seek a door into what lay uncannily close at hand, uncannily far away, and beyond. In certain senses it was less a divide between herself and others and more the paradox of space that divided yet enclosed—enclosed yet released—its inmates and intimates forever.
Forever
was itself a crack, a flute, a trumpet, an echo of blood and sea, bone and ice, sky and flight, wheel within wheel shaping itself into gesture, radical gesture of hope.

The thought of seeking a job, of going out to work like Mary, led to a transference of obsessed wall from Mary and herself to structures and places around her. She found herself compulsively scanning the cards in the windows of shops and the advertisements in evening newspapers. She deciphered what seemed to her to be fictional secretarial jobs in the unemployment market. She gauged the pleasures of becoming a model. There was an opening advertised—a chance to travel she longed for heart and soul—but she didn’t have the money to pay, just over £500 to gain a place in a party that intended roughing it on expedition to South India and to the golden city of Mysore. Her eye was suddenly drawn to a paragraph requesting women characters (board, lodging,
everything
taken care of) for Proudhon Utopia in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. “A Walk in the Paradise Garden”’s snow mountains. Who was Proudhon? She wondered. She glanced at the headlines of another newspaper. AMERICAN HOSTAGES HOME FOR CHRISTMAS? Unlikely fiction, Mary thought.

Her enclosed mind wandered round and round, back and forth, before returning to Proudhon Utopia and she decided to enquire at a public library in Goldhawk Road, a rather ancient and overcast series of rooms stacked with buried names in every wall and with Sukey Tawdrey magazines. In her fits of depression and hypnotic elation, the library loomed like a phantom, cracked bureau of the dead in which to stumble upon her own seeping hollow mind or brimming spirits, unreal statistics and characteristics, as upon the hidden, psychical bases and foundations of Father Marsden’s Angel Inn where Proudhon most probably resided in his fissured coffin waving across the city of London to Karl Marx of Highgate.