The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (14 page)

Immodest! The word struck him. He had never thought of it like that. What did she mean? He stared into the woman’s eyes and caught the drift of half-sealed, half-unsealed consciousness as her fictional death, fictional disrobing, overshadowed the room. She was obsessed, he saw, by the thought that a dead person could come immodestly alive in the “boudoir of the coffin, the boudoir of politics”.

What an outrageous notion! Yet it glanced through his mind as a true conception of dressed urban
angst
and peasant black humour. It drew him down into the grave of the streets, the self-advertised killed around the globe upon Marsden’s towering stick converted now into Lucy Brown’s height of fear, her heightened fear of violence, the theatrical deaths that one saw on television, the tall dead celebrated by fanatics, the extensions of immodest naked action, immodest prosecution of feud, unconscious strip-tease, immodest wishfulfilment, hunger-fasts, hate-fasts.

Young Lucy now got up from her chair and made her way over to the vase of flowers. Her mother’s eyes and Jackson’s eyes followed her across the room. “I wish she would marry a good man, not a freedom fighter, god knows what unfreedom he fighting for like in a nightmare; a good man with a bit of money in the bank, Mr Jackson.
Can’t
you
talk
to
she?
”

It was the kind of half-rude, half-rhetorical question for which the West Indian peasant was famous. By “talk” Lucy Brown meant the magical power to bind to one’s will, to make someone do one’s bidding. That “talk” was equated with “good or bad persuasion” arose from an unconscious conviction that words were a sacred or daemonic medium since their roots were mysteriously cast in the rhythm of things, the implicit voice in every object one uses, implicit trance, utterance of binding contour in every feared object, respected object. Yet fear, Jackson wanted to say but could not, could also breed silence—the fear that’s close to ambiguous love—the fear of nemesis that helps to unravel temptation to seduce others or to be seduced by others.

“Three year pass,” Lucy Brown said, “since the motorcycle accident in 1978. Three anniversary. First anniversary ’79 Sebastian Holiday lose his job.”

Jackson did not know that Sebastian Holiday was hollow relation to his lost “daughter of Man” and assumed the tea-lady was referring to someone at her workplace.

“Second anniversary ’80 the recession bite deep and a lot of redundancy follow. Third anniversary ’81 Lucy Brixton boyfriend in trouble. Can’t you talk to her, Mr Jackson?”

“A day’s just a day for me,” said young Lucy coldly. “No talk will change that.” She turned around a little from the vase of flowers. “And anyway you do enough talking for everybody and your anniversary’s early this year, isn’t it, mother? This is April not June.”

“What motorcycle accident?” said Jackson, turning away for a moment from young Lucy’s hard-edged, disturbing beauty of limb and breast.

“It was a white boyfriend Lucy had. He die on the road in ’78.”

The young woman moved away slowly from the flowers, crossed the room and fondled the cat. Jackson’s eyes were unobtrusively glued to her. It was suddenly clear to him that there was an element of dream in the way she walked however sceptical or cold she seemed. On the surface her body was a wall between herself and eclipsed antecedents. Through Mary’s automatic codes however that clothed the room and propelled her pencil across the page of a mirror, Jackson perceived depths of characterization, hypnotic expedition.

His eyes seemed to open. Something came back to him like a blow of silence. A file of black women walking through the hills of Jamaica. He was a boy at the time in a car on his way with his father across the island. The women were dressed in white. They carried covered trays of food and other materials on their head. There was a statuesque deliberation to each movement they made, a hard-edged beauty akin to young Lucy’s that seemed to bind their limbs into the soil even as it lifted them very subtly an inch or two into space.

That lift was so nebulous, so uncertain, it may not have occurred at all. Yet it was there; it gave a gentle wave or groundswell to the static root or the vertical dance of each processional body. It also imbued the women with enigmatic privacy. Were they on their way to a wedding or a wake? To ask them was to be greeted with a smile one could not interpret. Was it the smile of secret mourning or secret rejoicing? Were they oblivious of secret, ecstatic ladder of space? Did they incline without knowing it into psychology of stasis, the stasis of the hills?

Jackson heard Lucy Brown’s voice again—her obsession with sudden death in the street, her obsession with her own funeral side by side with intimate (almost naked) desire for her daughter to marry “a good man with a bit of money in the bank”. No wonder her fear of immodest exposure possessed an involuntary compulsion or subconscious strip-tease funeral expectation (the eyes that would see her, the hands that would touch her) woven into a vision of her daughter’s wedding….

Such unconscious or subconscious strip-tease was an aspect of enigmatic privacy laid bare in half-comedy, half-tragedy, of Angel Inn mirror. It was an aspect of strangest carnival strip-tease of oblivious mankind, obliviousness of fashionable bullet-ridden nudity in the eye of the camera, obliviousness of Stella’s nudity in the street, obliviousness of Sukey Tawdrey’s rag dances of refined, imperial bombast, obliviousness of Mother Diver’s shawl of possessions.

All this moved like a stroke of mingled lust and sorrow in young Lucy’s dream-body, hard-edged, disturbing beauty, in the mirror of spectres by which Jackson was held in Mary’s “fictional book”. A series of reflections filled his mind from nowhere it seemed. She was a stubborn young woman, no one would deny. But there was more to it than that. The file of the folk by which Mary’s mirror had invested her emphasized that her feet were upon the ground but also made darkly clear the precarious linkage of secret ladder of space and static hill of earth. The link was actually broken, the static had begun to engulf them, that file of women, even in those far-off days of his boyhood.

He was witnessing—without realizing it—in that procession he saw in the hills, the regression of the dying folk into mysterious tune of love and death: mysterious attunement to a gulf or divide between sky and earth, between territorial, animal imperative and humankind or human space within all innocent/guilty, sad/happy places where Mack the Knife had moved or settled upon and around the globe….

Jackson recalled with sorrow how he himself had fallen from the ladder of space and into that fall was threaded his “lost” daughter of Man. Or was it that a descent of “daughter” was needed to match an imperfectly understood notion or “ascent” of son—daughter of man, son of man? The question loomed in Mary’s automatic book.

The question brought the hills into his room as he faced the two women and listened to Lucy Brown’s appeal to “talk” to her daughter. The silent hills were running down to the sea not up to the sky. The rivers ran down the island of his boyhood to a sea that possessed so little tidal range there was no reversal of flow back upland or inland. Until the silent hills grew again to match the faint ascent of the spidery rain into the great cloud ancestors of Anancy heaven.

“Ah,” said Jackson turning away from the Jamaican hills to the young woman of Notting Hill, “to fulfil your mother’s trust …” he was speaking to himself “… I must learn to be silent in the face of your obliviousness, I must learn to paint or sculpt what lies stranded between earth and heaven….” He stopped. He looked at her with longing and clouded eyes. Lucy was so young. The minute hand of the clock moved in him to embrace her as Stella had embraced Mary by the hospital gates; as Khublall had embraced his child-bride a long time ago in the riddle of death and love.

Nineteen Lucy was but she seemed younger. He wanted to touch her like a painter or a sculptor and in so doing to create
through
the mystery of temptation.

What was that temptation? Enchantment with the womb of nature, an enchantment that remained the greatest danger still in bedevilled populations around the globe.

It had led to the arousal of the furies. It had damned him across a generation, no, longer than that, it seemed, a century, two centuries, three. It had given him, only to pluck from him, his “daughter of man”.

And now as he looked at Lucy the temptation was in flower again but with a difference. In the greatest flowering danger lies the greatest prize of artistic wisdom. Lucy was smiling at him as if she knew, yet did not know what he was saying to her, a Mona Lisa smile.

Does every lost daughter of man change into unconscious
child-bride
within cultures that are stranded between animal divinity and human divinity?

The notion was staggering. It explained so much. It made him see with the eyes of ancient cultures conditioned by the bizarre purchase of love, inner fury that sets its seal of remorse or grief upon sanctioned rape.

Does every sculptor, painter, enchanted by the womb, imply humanity’s involuntary proneness to revert to feudal tradition however camouflaged by technology or promiscuity?

Why could he not reach out and seize Lucy by the nape of her exquisite neck, or by the lips with his lips upon her secretive, enigmatic, curiously
hard
mouth?

The cat-and-mouse metaphor made him laugh. How ridiculous. Hard lips indeed. The fact is she was practical. He was
middle-aged
. She had no use for him. And yet it was clear that her very hardness matched his coolness and sobriety, and that his invisibly enraged mind possessed therefore some counterpart in hers. And that was the key to her danger less from him than from some other ancient grievance dressed up in twentieth-century sentiment or authoritarian regime.

Her flat-earth practicality or rejection of cosmic hope could conceal the masked intentions of others in the grip themselves of compulsive illness or regressive force they little understood.

There was nothing he could say to her now. Silence was a measure of terrifying love that creates
through
every temptation to seize or to speak. There was a time to accept oneself as rooted in the hardness of an age that only non-possessing love beyond given presences, given voices, given conventions, could begin to dissolve.

Fear of the abyss was the beginning of silence he had sensed on Bale in the fire of the hills and trees that had seemed to clothe the woman Mary. Thus in her dissolution lay the conversion of his obsession with the womb, her symbolic dissolution, the acceptance of chastening and mutual responsibility for the body of humanity. He was her authentic messenger of a gleam with which to retrace his steps into faint consensus of radical hope. He was both true person—his crown of hair echoing Marsden’s beard or cloak, fertile spirit, echoing intelligence—and a character in a book that begins to know himself, to thread himself into mutual anguish, mutual authorship between creatress and created.

Mary’s automatic narrative drew to a close. It was as if she knew that to be whole was to endure not only Stella’s comings and goings but the traffic of many souls, endangered souls, in ceaseless angelic/daemonic paradox that cures, yet never cures wholly.

Staring into the spiritual mirror, Mary had no illusions about the difficulties and the tragedies that the making of new community of self presented. They were rooted in her own riddles of body and mind and the tormenting camouflage that Joseph Marsden had helped her to begin to unravel.