The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (9 page)

Second, one noted the taut twine of their legs, so apparently fragile, so whittled and shaven, it seemed to tie them into premises of space as if they were alighting less on earth than on another planet, space-ship flamingo on which invisible soul sails to another world. Living epitaph.

Third, the swan-like neck was tipped at its extremity with a head and a black beak, phallus of soul. Living epitaph.

Fourth, the scarlet edges upon the wings were automatic fires of dawn and noon and sunset. Living epitaph. Funeral pyre.

They were all “divisions within divisions” of bruised creation (slain by the gang) and marriageable creation (invoked by John), slain antecedents felled by lust or violence, yet evolving relations through sliced kith and stranger kin, memorial slice matching animate slice, densities of re-born illumination and configuration, random, paradoxically exact, in past and present lives in Mary’s hypnotic expedition through regions and riddles of spirit.

Mary and Sebastian were in bed a couple of nights or so after Paradise Park. Sebastian sound asleep, Mary listening to the hypnotic blow of the wind that had arisen and the rain beating softly upon the window. The house in Dolphin Street was sailing in space. With Stella’s departure, the twinship between herself (Mary) and Sebastian had broken, Mary felt, into stages of reversed transference of heightened spirituality from Father Marsden (her larger-than-life psychiatrist and captain or sailor upon a ship of souls) to other related, obscure global presences and antecedents.

She could still recall Stella’s body and shadow lying between her and Sebastian, and her desire (“my desire,” she said to herself to distinguish herself sharply from Stella) to remain frozen and irreversibly apart from her husband by becoming his fantasy twin and yielding the position of wife to Stella. Thus it was possible to feel everything and still feel nothing of sexual intercourse, to transfer unconscious egg and foetus—when she became pregnant in June 1977—from herself to Stella as if Stella were a legitimate extension of larger-than-life Father Marsden and the child was more his than Sebastian’s.

Now that reversed transference had set in, she appreciated all the more Father Marsden’s qualities of persevering victim through which John himself, her child and Stella’s child, began to come strangely into his own—as if his two fathers and two mothers were no longer alienated and antagonistic but suffused by a stranger and more extraordinary veil-in-depth. In that veil Stella gave way to a new complication through which Mary perceived Sebastian. That complication was Mother Jenny Diver and it seemed to arise from the very deeps of a kingdom of mothers over-arching dual fatherhood.

The sheltered bedside lamp beside her by which she read sometimes far into the night cast its luminous, half-mothering, half-consuming Diver shadow upon Sebastian. He was slowly sinking into the sea over which they hypnotically sailed. Mary was reminded of her disappointment in Paradise Park when Jenny had failed to keep an appointment and only Sukey Tawdrey had appeared.

That disappointment had partially shattered a certain lucidity of expectation, a larger-than-life mirror or pool of rainwater in Father Marsden’s head, translucent shroud, in which Jenny resided. Even with the onset of reversed transference, it had been hard to dislodge Stella from such dominant father in Proudhon’s Karl Joseph though the pool of larger-than-life dialectic dwindled into clockwork Utopia, minute hand striking a hypnotic, funeral, celebrative drum of time, the death of an age, the re-birth of an age.

Lucy Brown in India and Sukey Tawdrey in Paradise Park had taken the process a step farther. Infant bride had turned the clock topsy-turvy into infant bridegroom when Sukey Tawdrey appeared. But that was not all. Sukey Tawdrey’s eyes had fallen from her head to give weight to reversals of time in the womb of space. Infant bridegroom became infant cousin. And species of diminutive clock gleamed afresh upon Mary’s obsession with Sebastian as
her
twin,
Stella’s
husband. She had returned to this issue again. It was an obsession from which she was free or cured and yet here it was again! Sebastian her twin, Stella’s husband. Cured, yes, in one sense, but in another still susceptible to the disease. One may be cured of an illness and yet occasionally suffer a relapse. Perhaps that was what Stella had meant as they embraced each other in the street by the hospital when she said she would go but come again, come and go…. Never absolutely depart.

Every cure of body and mind was also the germ of an ailing eternity. Eternity ailed within Father Lucidity himself like a veil over the sun’s kingdom of returning wives and daughters and mothers. And this, Mary felt, was essential core of the world’s continuing pressure of need, pressure of care, pressure for the lost, the newfound mother. Every bitter crisis affecting the fabric of a desperate world revived the need and the pressure. It wasn’t just the matter of Stella’s return, occasional return, occasionally popping up here and there to lend a hand with John or Sebastian but something graver she (Mary) had partially evaded and must now face. Her lost mother was back even if she didn’t always turn up where one expected to find her and tended to play the oddest jokes about where she resided. The crisis her lost mother brought, the need in Mary that revived her into existence, was not one of race, racial antecedent. That fact was written into other apparitions, such as Sukey’s. Her mother was a different cup of tea! Her return to the scene was a signal of social, economic distress, of compulsive imageries of Mother Care in a bleak recession that Mary felt was part and parcel of aggravated neurosis within her bordering on an obsession with the nature of value in every sphere of life and death. It was good to see it, accept it. That was the illness in which, through which, lay the cure.

Paradoxes of lucidity, cups of tea, were essentials of truth in which what seemed health or disease in one light lent itself to subordination or submersion in another palate, the mighty globe to diminutive brides and bridegrooms across reaches of oceanic civilization, interrelated raw material kinships to the fauna and flora of human paradise. And all these were signals of Jenny Diver’s presence as an apparition not so much between herself and Sebastian (as Stella had been)—though she lay there as well—but between growing inequality and ailing equality, injustice and justice, within the vulnerable fathers of the human race to which she was joined in depths of economic and social crisis.

Mary turned and glanced again at Sebastian’s half-submerged body at her side in bed. His face and head seemed subtly eaten, oddly consumed, in the half-light and taut wave of shadow in the room. This was John’s father beyond a shadow of doubt … and yet so was Father Marsden (he was also John’s father), eaten beard, eaten treasuries of wisdom. She should have been logically repelled by the sight of Sebastian but found herself relating to him within the crisis he endured through Mother Diver’s shadowy arms around him in the sea of sleep. That Diver embrace, that oddly maternal and oceanic shadow upon him, was curiously processional as if it broke him into a multitude of little selves…. It made Mary jump a little—as a mother and a wife herself—to see Jenny Diver in that slumbering light and it raised Sebastian into heraldic procession as Mary recalled a number of sleepwalking faces and figures she had seen in the city that afternoon.

They too were creatures of the sea of disease, they too had that bitten, asleep look as if they were familiar with the most secret currents of vulnerable fatherhood, Father Equality and Father Inequality, within a tidal void—a current both empty and full—in which one sometimes subsided into the minimum of real decision, into the minimum of real insight, as prelude to increments of painful, sometimes half-tragic, sometimes half-abortive, yet slowly maturing perception of the riddle of the womb of age. Mother Diver would save all, would take care of every emergency in that subsidence or ebb tide, that riddle of crisis. Mother Diver was here in response to crisis.

To think of Jenny Diver like that seemed a bitchy way on the face of things, Mary felt, to recall her own mother who had vanished from sight twenty-odd years ago to return afresh now in a tide of depression that nibbled at unemployed Sebastian’s head. Bitch of necessity! Depression, economic and psychological, stimulated the return of a mother for all emergencies to seize upon equal and unequal fathers, Sovereign Father Money, Sovereign Father Gold, Sovereign Father Poverty.

Insatiable mother who seemed now to make starkly clear the inadequacies of Stella and herself! Mary shuddered, she stared at Sebastian. Her own father, she dimly recalled, had run away to live and die at sea. Perhaps Sebastian would learn to run…. Unless he could bear insatiable, eccentric Mother Freedom. And
that
reflection took Mary by surprise. It seemed a judgement of herself in respect of John, a timely reminder to desist from claustrophobic affection, claustrophobic order. The faces she had seen in the city seemed to move in circles just within or without a strictly designed circumference. The traffic too revolved in grooves or cycles within or without strict location or wheel. There was an indefinable edge, an indefinable tide, that lapped everywhere and drew one into unpredictable haven that was more pertinent than strict, unhappy queue. And that eccentricity seemed necessary. It cast a shadow of curative doubt, however pitiless, upon everything, a curious sense of the mother of freedom lurking everywhere in age-old fixation or diseased habit.

Mary was standing in a supermarket. It was perfectly familiar, rows of household utensils, toilet paper, food stalls and counters with expensive meats and fish, high-priced vegetables, fruit, haberdashery, garish paperbacks with guns and naked ladies, washing powder competing with washing powder, soap and lipstick competing with soap and lipstick. Everything was familiar except the eccentric emotion they engendered in her now, eccentric advertisement, manipulations of greed and appetite,
sophistications
of excess, sophistications of waste, sophistications of necessity; and through it all—despite it all—perception of Mother Quality as real however marred by brute fashion and uncertainty about the state of the world, its wealth, its poverty.

Shadow of curative doubt was one of the shawls Mother Diver wore to give substance to eccentric insistence on freedom of choice, and to imply unwittingly perhaps that no fact or feature compelled her to pander to self-indulgent daughter or son; her genuine cares therefore were strangely solemn love, even supernatural
resolution
—on one hand—against nature as brute law and—on the other—a brooding uncertainty about the metaphysical quality of qualities that creates just competition (the justice of intelligent and true competition) as superior in Mother Blood to Thieves’ Manifesto, dreaded Communist Manifesto. Even so, in pursuit of “quality of qualities”, a metaphysic of curative doubt—planted in carnival, diseased quantities for sale in the marketplace/supermarket of history—made Mary wonder at distinctions hidden but resident in Mother Blood, Mother Dread. Could theft by the rich from the poor, by the poor from the rich, possess a metaphysical justification? Was the theft of fire from the gods justified? Were the gods truly rich or truly poor sons of space, Jupiter, Saturn, and others?

Mother Diver’s shawl of curative doubt (as Mary perceived it) enveloped Sebastian and he shifted slightly in bed beside her, uncertain of Father Inequality that gnawed into his frame and made him a lesser mortal than other men, or of Father Equality that raised him in Mother Diver’s arms into a hidden star amongst light years in the womb of space.

The intricacies of that shawl became clearer to Mary as the taut wave of shadow in the room also lifted the room and the house in Dolphin Street until they sailed backwards in time—one human, diminutive light-year back—1981 to 1980.

Now
she and diminutive Sebastian were standing on the pavement outside the great supermarket whose goods she had “previously” inspected in “future time”. The sensation of having travelled backwards from 1981 (that lay in the future) into now (1980) that lay in the present reminded her of the slicing logic of John’s scissors in Paradise Park only “yesterday” or “the day before yesterday” that lay in the “future”; another measure of eccentric circuit around the years; reminded her also of Sukey Tawdrey’s eyes falling out of her head to become strangely wider perhaps, more open, in backward glance. That was Mary’s glance now, the strange width, the curious openness of apparently lost yet apparently regained eye for parallel times. It was all symptomatic of crisis—a world crisis—that raises the kingdom of mothers and daughters.

The rain had ceased and the pavement in front of the supermarket glistened like an urban mirage of a stream through that eye. The sun shone bright through a flattened beach of cloud, rainbow iris of sky in the head of space spoke of oceanic distances, the light on the pavement spoke of openness of perception to the curvature of the earth.

The supermarket lay halfway between a church spire at one corner and a subway station at another, sunken in the pavement under one’s feet. This was the religious beat not only of policemen and pedestrians but of an old woman draped, it would seem, in all her possessions, pots, pans, a bag with clothes, and an intricate array of small tins that glistened now in oceanic sun like scales or circular feathers.

Mary’s return to the “now” of 1980 within eyes she possessed that had slipped forwards and backwards across the centuries made her see the old woman as she never had before. Was she (that old woman) resurrection of crisis, was she Mother Diver? How could Mary have passed her in the street so often and not really have seen her? Mary had gone to Paradise Park whereas Jenny was here (was she not?) under a shawl patrolling the pavement between church spire and subway or underground tunnel.

Now—for the first time that she could recall coming face to face with Mother Bleak Freedom, Bleak Necessity—Mary’s
wide-opened
eyes were focused on the scales and circular feathers of aroused terror of existence. Each scale or feather was a glittering envelope and Mary wondered about secretions of egg or foetus but these—if they existed in some artificial form—were overcast by shawl of “curative doubt”. What was clear were slivers of subsistence that had been deposited in each scale or envelope or feather. Particles of cheese resembled doubtful gold. Fragments of sardine resembled the colour of inflated money. Grains of sugar resembled precious yet valueless metal. Crumbs of bread resembled alchemies of failed substance. A sliver of green vegetable resembled oil. Such slices or minute hands of the clock of uncertain wealth were the old woman’s irreducible morsels of eternity, and as she patrolled the pavement and stopped in front of the supermarket, she conducted endless conversations with a million spectres that clung to each morsel. Passers-by ignored her or took her for granted but Mary was held as never before. How could anyone not see who she was—from what depths she had come from the revolving past into the uncertain present?