Black Marsden (5 page)

“Not a bit of it,” said Goodrich. “I enjoyed it.”

“It’s kind of you to say so, sir,” she told him. “But I’m afraid my style is not what it was.” She paused. “It’s all this talk of plays from Doctor Marsden and the others brought it back to my mind.”

Goodrich was secretly moved. It seemed to him that
Marsden’s
presence had fired in some degree everyone with whom he had come in contact. He was suddenly curious to know his housekeeper’s real feeling about Marsden.

“What do you make of Doctor Marsden?” he asked softly. “Do you like him, Mrs. Glenwearie?”

Mrs. Glenwearie looked away from him and out through one of the windows. “It’s not for me to say, sir,” she said. “But since you’ve asked me I would say he’s a very unusual gentleman. My dear mother would have called him a kind of hutherer.”

Goodrich was baffled. “What is a hutherer?” he asked.

“It’s just,” said Mrs. Glenwearie, “och I don’t rightly know how to explain it. Just a hutherer, that’s all.” She was silent for a moment then became very brisk. “Mr. Goodrich, dear, I’m forgetting your tea. I’ll go and get it.” The subject was obviously closed.

Goodrich felt somewhat lost. He felt he should say something in a different vein. “How is your niece?” he asked. “I trust she’s better now.”

“Poor lass,” she said. “She’s a bit better this summer but it’s been a great worry for my sister and her husband. In fact my sister’s ailing herself.”

“If there’s anything I can do, Mrs. Glenwearie, any financial help or anything of that sort, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Thank you, Mr. Goodrich. It’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Glenwearie and bustled from the room, taking with her Grace Darling, Haile Selassie and Tam O’Shanter.

The incongruous triggers of the day—comic and serious—evoked an involuted spectre in Goodrich’s mind and he dreamt that night he stood at a wall overlooking a wide and deep terrain. The light was uncertain. It may have been close to nightfall or it may have been the approaches of dawn. He had come there to meet someone he had known in some buried or vague connection a long time ago. Someone who had been blind, a blind woman he surmised. He himself at this moment could not see her because of the peculiar light in which he was steeped. But he felt all of a sudden that their positions were reversed and the blind woman could see him; something had happened to her across the years since they had last met in an underground of lives. As the feeling entered his mind she arrived and spoke to him. He could not make out entirely what she was saying but her voice rang in his ears with a new and remarkable tenderness which warned him he must keep a secret. That was all he could make out from her words. What secret? he asked but she had already vanished. It was a deeply puzzling dream, and yet it left him with an extraordinary revitalized sensation, a validation of identity.

As though a mysterious cycle of contrasting spaces peculiar to time had come full circle at last. He was now
seen
for whom and what he was in space. Seen by some intimate blind spectre or caveat of history whose judgement was no longer blind. Seen through—or in spite of—himself.

Goodrich made a note in his diary about his dream:

That morning he joined Marsden in the sitting-room filled with a most curious and uncanny tide of energy. Something had validated him. It seemed an irrational conviction and yet it persisted: a sensation of grotesque yet deeply significant
transfigured
relationships, forgotten relationships which possessed ironic powers to return and acquit him not only of hubris but of forgetfulness: despised or forgotten vocations within the muse of history.

It was stimulating and sobering. Indeed the very stimulation was a caution. In describing or gloating upon his dream, had he not partially betrayed it and succumbed to an order of
self-congratulation
or inflation?

As he confronted Marsden the question assailed him:
Marsden’s
phenomenal expression of world-weary conductor, an
indefinable
shroud or pallor (so it seemed to Goodrich in the wake of his own stimulation or tide of energies). For in the shroud Marsden appeared to wear this morning Goodrich sensed a paradoxical feud as well as debt to nameless and intimate
resources
planted in his dream. Over the past months he had given clothing, food, money to Marsden but it was Marsden who symbolized the Bank from which he had drawn rather than the beneficiary to whom he had given. He was indebted to Marsden as the most signal contradiction in his life—a shared community of goods and dreams. An enigmatic historical bank and
beneficiary
within whom the very act of giving became a receiving, a dangerous hypnotic legacy at times as well as a revitalized caveat of originality and community.

“Is this true?” asked Goodrich.

“What?” said Marsden. “Is what true?”

“Oh forgive me—it’s nothing at all—I was thinking aloud.”

Marsden laughed and Goodrich felt sudden anger: anger at the shroud or pallor of history to which he was indebted in forms beyond tabulation or classification. It was one of Marsden’s agents or mistresses—he thought perversely—who had
conducted
the dream scene by the wall….

“Lazy bitch,” said Marsden.

“I beg your pardon.”

“It’s my turn to ask forgiveness, Goodrich. I too have been thinking aloud. Jennifer should have been down early. She can be a fiend at times….” There was a calculated venom in his voice and Goodrich’s attention was drawn to a nearby table on which lay an African hunting knife in its sheath. “Ah,” said Marsden, “that’s Knife’s knife. The one with which he will kill me.”

“Kill you?”

“In the theatre.”

Lucky Knife, thought Goodrich, and an almost irresistible desire tickled both his hand and his heart. Irresistible desire to unsheath the African hunting knife, lift the shaft to his chest and turn the point towards Marsden. Then stab. What a river of blood would flow down Marsden’s vest, what scarlet bank of fanaticism in sackcloth and ashes. What scarlet river in
black-vested
camera. What a flag of joy, of release, of revolution, of liberation. What a hand would be his to stab the very bank and beneficiary of loves.

Marsden reached forward and covered Goodrich’s hand with his. “What about a drink, old boy? The bottle on the
mantel-shelf
is empty. Whisky cheers one up.”

“I felt quite cheerful this morning. I confess I am now depressed.”

“My dear Goodrich….”

“I dreamt …,” he stopped.

“Dreamt? What did you dream?”

“I thought you knew. You seem to know everything.”

“Goodrich! Me know everything?” He laughed. “Tell me your dream.”

Goodrich recounted his dream of Marsden’s blind mistress and the verdict of acquittal….

“Ah—a good dream but good dreams are also dangerous as you know yourself. You need to guard against a tendency to over-compensate….”

“I don’t follow.”

“For example, how do you see me this morning?”

“I see you in relation to my dream—I find myself indebted to you.”

“Ah! quite so. You have given me money, yet you are indebted to me.”

“Schizophrenic, isn’t it?”

“Goodrich! Dear fellow. What a word. But perhaps you are right. We are all schizophrenic in some degree or other. In your dream of acquittal there exists, for example, a mysterious court, a mysterious dawn or a mysterious sunset. Depends on how you relativize or relate the two. But as you can see now that isn’t so easy and you may be overwhelmed by what I call myself
over-compensation
ritual—over-compensated sunset or over-
compensated
dawn. You start out in the first place with a feeling of over-stimulation and then you begin to feel cheated, miserable, drained on one hand, or endangered out of all proportion on the other. You are steeped in an over-compensated sunset (the end of an age with its pollution symbols etc.) or over-compensated sunrise (the dawn of an age with its revolutionary overdrafts etc.).” Doctor Marsden was laughing now with the air of an inimitable clown, philosophical and therapeutic masquerade.

“No wonder, Goodrich,” he said, “that you project it all on me: as many project it all on you: in your eyes at this moment I am seen as one acquainted with all your fears, your hopes, your dreams; everything I say appears to anticipate or express your innermost dreams. No wonder I have become the one who taps your telephone, spies on you, reads your diaries, who threatens, in fact, to rob you of a private existence. You may shout on the rooftops about this or that enemy but it’s really a secret power of choice which you fear to lose … or to surrender of your own accord for the good of the state
to
me
or someone like me (you will rationalize it in different ways according to your
temperament)
.”

Knife came into the room at this juncture. There was a
toothpick
in his mouth and he spoke in muffled rude parody of Marsden’s head of state. “Let there be a grave economic
landslide
or projection in the wind, and everyone believes a
totalitarian
monster is born.”

Goodrich failed to see the joke and took him seriously. “Distinctions and choices and sanctuaries exist,” he muttered, “in the civilized world anyway within law and economics and other institutions, the church, the university etc. etc.”

“How right you are,” said Marsden. “The sanctuary is so perfect, each area or discipline so self-sufficient, that
over-compensation
ritual is the most natural thing in the world. A natural enlargement of one thing at the expense of the other. For some the U.S.A. is an economic sanctuary. For others South Africa is a political sanctuary. For others Cuba a revolutionary sanctuary.”

“The law is a sanctuary,” said Goodrich.

“The body of the law marches on. Yes. I know as head of state. Step by step in some parts of the world it shrinks into the self-conscious enlargement of political institutions which may even claim, mark well, to be bastions of freedom….”

Beehive Knife shrugged. “I give up,” he said laconically. “I give up.”

“Give up!” Marsden appeared to be startled, stroked his beard in Goodrich’s mind and mirror. “Give up to the theatre. What a capitulation that would be.” He growled and laughed. “The play within a play which repudiates the play of bias.”

“Do you mean,” said Beehive Knife matter-of-factly, “that the theatre will now gobble us up, become a modern sanctuary?”

“The ground of the theatre is not a sanctuary since it evokes step by step a curious ironic decapitation of over-compensation ritual. Step by step we are fused into ironical contrasts subsisting on each other. We are fused into ironical self-portraits, furnitures and parts, into our own omniscient obscenity, property or solipsism. We ripen, yes ripen beyond every sanctuary.”

“Into whom or what?” asked Goodrich.

“Into an abnormal head, abnormal state, abnormal clown, abnormal self-trial. Surely that is self-evident.”

Goodrich stared into the mirror in his sitting-room which caught the reflection of the sky outside the window and also the furniture inside the room so that it seemed to rain the very objects around him….

As I stared into the mirror—as into a private page in my innermost book—I was immersed in that still rain of shared toys and objects dispersed into the sound of a passing car, aeroplane, the rattle of a windowpane: the scarecrow rain of the twentieth century. Only yesterday it was, I recalled, I had seen a small boy step from his bicycle into a space suit. Marsden’s head of state I now thought, sketching absurdly, stood upon that boy’s feet and stepped into his space suit (innermost sanctuary in an alien universe) which unrolled itself into his future and mine as far as eye could see. I was possessed by that dual child—the head-of-
a-man-
on-a-child in Black Marsden’s Space Suit: the sanctuary of a modern Narcissus which transcended all ages….

“Goodrich,” said Marsden. “Have you heard what I have been saying? You seemed lost in that curious mirror of yours. Is it convex or concave, by the way?” Goodrich gave a start. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking of a child in his space suit with a large head on his shoulders whom I saw on the street corner yesterday. He could have been your son, Marsden.”

“My son. What an idea.”

“There was a resemblance. I recall it distinctly. A childish resemblance of course. And by the way perhaps I should
mention
that in addition to the space suit he was playing at
Hogmanay
with a couple of other children. He held a piece of coal in his hands with which he had put a beard on his features. Perhaps he had seen you passing.” Goodrich could not help laughing. “He was playing the dark man you see who crosses the New Year threshold into the Moon.” Goodrich stopped. Marsden’s attention was riveted upon the door where Jennifer stood. She had come into the doorway so silently that no one knew how long she had been there. A pregnant silence descended in which the very raining objects in the mirror seemed suddenly to curve, to tauten like a new wave stilled afresh by the camera, hypnotic camera.

Goodrich was horrified. One half of her face was covered: draped in a towel which came around her head, knotted at the back. One half of her mouth, one eye, the greater part of her head were bandaged as though she had had an accident. Burnt. Disfigured. Irrational conclusion perhaps but so poignant and real it possessed Goodrich with the force of a revelation, intense self-discovery, womb of fascination. Whom or what was it which judged and acquitted one in the final analysis, and whom or what did one see oneself or acquit when one looked at a still or moving figure? Personality, charm, beauty or so many pounds of flesh?

And now those pounds of flesh, legs, body were marching into the room. “The hideousness of all charm, the hideousness of all compulsion,” Goodrich spoke aloud before he could stop himself. Jennifer eyed him with her unbandaged eye.

“Hideous!” she said. “What an unkind thing to say, Clive. Have you never seen a mud pack, a beauty pack? I have done my right half …” she pressed her right cheek …“and now I’m on to my left.” She pressed her left cheek.

A mud pack, thought Goodrich. He was shaken. Why not stone pack or wood pack?

Whom or what did one see or acquit in the sculptured or dismembered presences of history? To what extent was one capable of real choice, real judgement, real perception, the making up of one’s own buried harassed mind about the secret of personality?

Jennifer’s explanation was common-or-garden enough but it highlighted rather than depressed the sensational workshop of the gods—a sense of gross alchemy which had been fired as he turned and saw the picture framed in the door at the end of a long-forgotten room or corridor or drama of relationships, from the day he emerged head foremost from another body into the light of the sun. He was so immersed now, so steeped in that reflection, that Marsden’s lips moved now but he heard nothing. He may have been Jennifer’s doctor or husband or father or midwife or all combined, upbraiding her or consoling her but the words were stilled within the objects in the mirror of time. Traumatic target. Goodrich began to leave the room. He paused at the door for an instant as if to confirm that gross stillness, sack of coals, mud head, stone head, wood head, gross pounds of flesh: as if to confirm the necessity to choose (or to be free to choose) someone or something of his own secret will.