The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (4 page)

Anancy suddenly hobbled to the door on his bandaged foot. There was something almost deliberate, almost masochistic, in the way he seemed to stand on the injured limb as if it gave him pleasure. Mary remained at the window, riveted there still by fear (or was it by obscurest affection?). Whose need was greater, she wondered, hers or his? All at once he appeared in the street. He waved at her. Her white face through the glass must have looked like a ghost’s! Then suddenly he shot away like greased lightning. Incredible! Her heart almost stopped. She could scarcely believe her eyes. Had it all been a trick, the bandaged ankle, the infirm gait? Was he a practised thief after all who deceived everyone with a twisted foot? She rushed forward without thinking into the corridor of the house, wondering if anything outside had been snatched, a vase, a mask or painting, anything, and in her bewilderment and rage—as she gained the beautifully furnished entrance hall—the sensation enveloped her that he was still here, still in the house, running for all he was worth not outside in the street but inside in the corridor upon the bridge of Angel Inn between worlds past, present and future. She saw him coming out of a future that resembled the past (the significant minority of blacks that had once lived in Europe) and she collapsed in a dead faint.

Mary came to herself with Father Marsden’s beard falling towards her like grey-black moss in a dry riverbed to which she had been transported. She was in a daze and he helped her up from the floor and with an arm around her led her back into the study. “Oh my god,” she said. Her memory was blank.

He led her to the great armchair by his desk into which she slipped with the luxurious sensation of reclining in an upright bed or couch. “A little wine,” he said. She sipped the red wine, the shadow of memory was returning, she felt a trifle better. “Father, I’m sorry I collapsed like that but….”

“Not at all, my dear.”

“I remember now—it was the black man.”

“What … what …?” said Marsden sharply.

“I came upon him in the study. I thought he was lame. But he ran.”

“Ah!” said Marsden with a trace of relief in his voice. “Young Anancy. He’s on his way to … He’s back from … He should
not
have come into the study. But then, I know, it’s Utopia. You left it there yourself.”

The wine imbued her with a gentle fire but she still felt curiously at a loss and as if she had voyaged into another country.

“He was
black
,
Father, and when he fooled me and ran like that I felt he’d been up to no good, that he was a thief, and then … it was as if…” She stopped. She felt ashamed of her double vision now, the running figure (greased lightning) in the street and also in the house, within corridor and bridge, so swift it vanished into locked interior rooms and spaces, locked bedrooms, locked memories, secret files.

Marsden gave her a gentle pat on the head. “Try and relax, Mary,” he said. “How are you feeling now?”

“Better,” she said. But her voice sounded shaky and uncertain. Marsden was watching her intently. His black greying beard fell to his chest and she remembered the sensation of moss falling from rock, the sensation of the many journeys, expeditions he had made of which she had read in his papers, expeditions into many corners of the globe. In her half-dazed, half-waking state, with the wine coursing in her veins, she was struck afresh by his high forehead close to her now, the faintest aroma of incense, she thought, perfumed sculpture of bone, priestly mask of flesh. The domed head sanctified the hidden eyes, almost hooded eyes, that receded into folds of skin and yet occasionally sparkled under the thickest eyebrows she knew with the light of phenomenal sympathy, kindness and understanding.

“A little more wine,” Marsden said gently. “Try and relax.”

She drank the wine and surrendered herself to the sensation that Marsden’s divine knob of a head accentuated his otherwise frail body and gave it a curious strength, the strength of a stick or a rod upon which to lean. As if something, some invisible presence, did lean upon him, did support itself through him, a spirit that towered invisibly above him and clasped him as if
he
were
its
knobbed walking stick with which to patrol the globe … It was an extraordinary half-drowsing, half-protected feeling that ran hand in hand with endangered self and she wondered in what degree the Anancy figure had helped to bring it into play and into being.

There was a distinction, yet resemblance, between Anancy and Marsden, between masked, black youth and masked, white age. At the heart of the cloud that still partially enveloped her, Anancy returned as sculptured chariot of god (with one wheel that ran round and round as if it were whole, yet served in envisioning a broken revolution to signify the moral fate of all human design). Father Marsden was quite different. His strength was the paradox of spiritual age. His body had been whittled or sliced by fate, it seemed, into a knobbed stick. The apparatus of daemonic possession that he may have endured or enjoyed as a young man had changed; he had been cut and penetrated over many decades into a living evolution or original species of spiritual art until his priest’s body had come to signify not so much “possessed apparatus” (possession by inventive angels and inventive devils) as consenting prop or support, consenting organ or stick, upon which a giant spirituality leaned and signified freedom from desire, freedom from the perversities of affection.

Mary longed to reach up to him, unprepossessing as he may have seemed to others who would have been dubious of his intentions, the hypnotic wine, the hypnotic net he cast far and wide. Ancient lover. Ancient annunciation. She would have yielded herself to him without a moment of misgiving; she would have laid bare her heart to knob or stick or bone upon which a towering spirit walked in space. Laid bare her breasts, her thighs, her body. Laid bare … What was she saying, thinking? Mary was dazzled by—and ashamed of—the many creatures she was, the distances that lay between herself and the consenting prop she had glimpsed. In her haste to reach out to it or to him, to seize his consenting organ of spirituality and hard-won art of freedom, she was suddenly unsure who or what he was, who or what she was. No wonder he seemed unprepossessing to others, priest, ex-priest, lover, seducer.

The distance between “possession” and “freedom” was infinitely great. It had no alternative but to make one faint, make one collapse, run, crawl, diminish itself, yet multiply itself into deceptive wheels, into Anancy chariot, unselfconscious tricks of guilt, black romance, difficult seed of encounter between ancient stick of a master and naïve mistress of god.

“Shall I get you a taxi, Mary?” Marsden broke in. She sensed a sudden weariness in his voice.

“I’m fine now,” Mary protested. “I haven’t yet typed the paper you asked me to do Wednesday.”

“No rush,” said Marsden.
She
had been faint before,
he
now was. Where lay the truth, where the fiction of towering strength?

“I want you to rest over the weekend, my dear. And if you’re down with the curse on Monday, I’ll see you on Wednesday or Friday. Now I’ll phone for a taxi.”

Mary arose from the chair. “I’d prefer to walk, Father,” she said. “It’s a mild day. I feel like walking. I’m sorry….”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Marsden. But she sensed his displeasure. It was so subtle, she could not be sure what she may have said to offend him. He led her to the door and waved after her. Ancient lover. Had she said that? Ancient annunciation of humanity. Had she actually said something like that? Had she held on to him? Had she sought to climb into paradise with him? Unprepossessing, prepossessing summit of freedom, ascent to which is littered by creatures of desire that pop up and speak …

Mary was sorry to go, glad to go. That alone, so to speak, was the measure of two selves.

Marsden was displeased, she felt, yet as he waved after her he was pleased—she sensed it in the way his body was poised, the mysterious alchemy of hidden summons within overt gesture of farewell, hidden pleasure within displeasure—pleased that though she went she would come again as another self or with another self. His apparent void (was it pleasure or displeasure?) endorsed, if anything, a curious blank cheque or invitation to draw upon a bank of fictional “memories” and “non-memories”, “absences” and “presences”, with which to cast her fluid line (in paradoxical kinship to his stick) towards a psychic vitality of encounter that was needed if she were to create various stages, various approximations, to consenting prop she had glimpsed through him. That those approximations—line and prop—could lead her into the strangest veils and territories, into endangered premises and waters of emotion, went without saying. But there was no alternative to that long line, harlequin bait, if she were to salvage what was deepest and truest in herself. Each transfusion of blood from line to stick, as it were, from endangered blood to endangered bloodlessness was the paradoxical resource of divine pleasure and it was fraught with the danger of unconscious, unwitting intercourse and yet therapeutic mystery in brides of god.

It was—as she had said to Marsden—a beautifully mild day. She felt enlivened, thoroughly revived. The net of the sky laced the trees and invited afresh convertible line and support through which the distances between Marsden and herself sometimes seemed wide, sometimes close. Something suggested to her—on coming to the site where St Paul’s School used to stand on the road between Hammersmith and Olympia—that she should enter the deserted grounds and sit for a while on a covered bench under the webbed trees. Someone would call to her in a little while … ten, fifteen minutes…. It had all been arranged—that something seemed to say. She would become susceptible in or after that call—through rod and line—to intimate voyage of “other self’ or “other selves”.

Sebastian woke and extricated himself from bed. It was thirteen minutes to eleven by the clock on the table close at hand.

Sebastian felt little, perceived little, or so it seemed to line or rod of place that hovered in Mary’s book of lives and masks above him, seeking support in him, and studying his movements that were those of a log half-staggering a little, half-floating on arousal from sleep. There was no visible bandage around his ankle but he seemed nevertheless as lame as Anancy. Or, if not lame, an inversion of Marsden. Marsden’s consenting support for great spirituality had become in Sebastian a hollow tree, the hollow shadow of towering presence.

Thus an odd puppet-like stiffness distinguished Sebastian’s limbs—odd, one would have thought, in such a young man, Mary’s twin-brother but lacking her fluidity of grace and line. On closer inspection, one was less sure of Sebastian’s true posture (how much had been invented by Mary and Stella to transmit to Marsden), and whether it was less an outer stiffness of body and more an inner deprivation of mind that cast its scales over his eyes.

He did not see the crumpled sheets and blankets he had left on struggling out of bed; he did not see the miniature map and relief model those bedclothes had made as if they were ridden by a cosmic chariot, cosmic anancy plates under Africa, Asia and Europe to divide the bed into land masses and oceans, into compressed towering mountains, into descending boats and troughs, now fashioned into a geologic toy with which precocious baby John could play at continents in motion.

Sebastian parted the curtains on being pulled by the line of place to turn his unseeing eyes up to a mild grey web of sky that seemed more ashen over Dolphin Street than over Angel Inn or St Paul’s schoolground, Hammersmith.

The world of geologic daemon was intrinsically grey in Sebastian’s eyes, possession of ash that turned heaven around into depressive function of hell. Thus even when he drowned his senses they persisted in a crackling or sedimentary conflagration under the sea or high on the land of his hollow spirit. Yet it was here in alchemies of water and fire that Sebastian unwittingly drew close to a religious sensibility, a religious mould within which his deprivations became the soil of an epic callous or torment of being.

That distinction or divide between callous insensibility and genuine torment was a factor in the line Mary unfurled between “possession” and “freedom”; save that possession masked itself as epic callous, freedom as unwitting torment.

Sebastian now repaired to the lavatory in his smouldering boat of a house cast adrift on the winter of space. Then he stumbled into the cave of the kitchen, lit a couple of gas rings, made indifferent coffee, boiled an egg, buttered toast.

Inverted paradise or depressive function of hell—in the degree that he was obscurely conscious of it—made him both lame and desirous of “speed” (a drug he secured on private prescription and also from underground sources). He was also addicted to codeine linctus and this he was able to buy in the open market at any chemist.

When he was on speed he tended to vanish into the lavatory and dream he was Stella’s prisoner but would erupt into gigantic liberator, that toilet paper was the post office he had founded in paradise upon which to scribble messages and wishes. Out of such ash-grey, ash-blue rolls of paper he had constructed laconic music which he afterwards transferred to a diary.

This February morning he felt himself master of the empty house. Stella was in hospital. Mary was at Angel Inn. He stacked egg-cup, saucer, plate, etc. in the sink, and reached up to a shelf in the kitchen where he kept his 1980 and 1981 diaries. Each day was allotted an area of no more than one inch by one inch within which to transfer his lavatory ruminations. Sebastian squeezed a spidery line or two, spidery vein or two, into each restricted day.

The habit of recording seeds of greatness in each locked hour or day stained the wall with invisible hieroglyphics that taxed both Stella and Mary. The diary entries were visible and in conjunction with invisible institution, epic lavatory, they achieved the random alchemy of seed of majestic lament that Mary had dreamt as resident in Sebastian’s ambivalent foundations of paradise in the wake of the letter he had received from Stella and the action of remorse to save her life; it was as if Sebastian had stumbled upon an equation between his unseeing mind in ironies of the liberator and invisible genius or unseen presence, as if he had rifled resources between “epic callous” and “torment of being”, torment of need.

Perhaps Sebastian was a thief of love, a thief of genius, to shore up his rotten life. If so he was oblivious of it. Sick genius of Dolphin Street.

The first entry in his diary (the first transferred lavatory code) was on 5 November 1980. He had lost his job that day as a porter in the Victoria Maternity Hospital. The entry ran in spidery, sad letters BANG BANG to imply not only that it was Guy Fawkes Day but that he had drunk two bottles of codeine linctus on top of speed. He was unemployed again. One could barely decipher what he had written and the effect of BANG was like a muffled drum or silent shape of ghostly liberator, ghostly, confused freedom-fighter. The explosions, the fireworks, constituting Guy Fawkes Night, were therefore fodder of blindness as far as Sebastian was concerned except for the thief of grandeur he saw flitting in them, in their ash-grey, ash-blue flares.

He had attempted on that Guy Fawkes Night to steal Stella from John and take her to bed but she had resisted saying she hated him when he was on drugs. He had retaliated with words that had been put into his mouth by blind jealousy. “I know what it is—you’re just like my bloody sister Mary. You want to be fucked by a holy man.”

Stella went white. She knew it was less Sebastian speaking than the hollow giant he was, the hollow founder of epic institution, epic family. Yet she was angry. She saw (if Sebastian did not) the effect on precocious baby John who was listening. He responded to their quarrel by bleating like a lamb, then he became mute as rock, his face nevertheless like glass or a mirror in which the sad, stifled refrain of the baton of place passed, the shadow and the rhythm of blood. The spectacle of the music he had stolen confused, yet held Sebastian. Stella clung to John and wondered whether she had been right to resist her husband. She imprinted a kiss on John’s face of glass. Hysteric imprint. She became a toy herself, even as she held, or submitted to, a toy. Flesh-and-blood glass in her hands and upon her breasts. The quarrel of drugs and sex had fused into a third party—their child in whom (in whose
tabula
rasa
mirror) were contained all hostages to love and fortune. Thus in their child—whom she wished to protect in the sullen gift of herself to his father—lay also a catalyst through which to break that sullen gift by aligning it to him and to all pledges of liberation, pledges against sexual blackmail or pawns of flesh-and-blood every freedom-fighter unconsciously makes.

Which alternative she chose depended on the measure of toy she became. She could—at one stroke—select a square inch of mirror possessing all hostages to the devil and imprint it with a kiss until third-party child-hostage of the family of man mirrored all
unfulfilled
pledges and hypnotic abuse.

Sebastian apologized to Stella for his behaviour the following morning and sought to please and placate poor John by making faces of saviours and kings he had liberated from prison, the faces of millionaires, astronauts, coalminers, even barbers and emperors, all in his name, his (John’s) body. John bided his time. His troubled innocence, the price he had been for so many liberations, needed now to invest in a bank of flowers. He wiped away the faces Sebastian invited him to mimic and drew him into the street. Sebastian was taken by surprise. He suggested that they go to Paddington Station where the great trains run. John refused to be bribed by sweets and promises. With a sweep of his hand he insisted on another
rich
train,
rich
fate.

The emphasis on
rich
was consistent with Sebastian’s adoration and unconscious parody of liberated millionaires but because of the troubled innocence of a child, it was all the more compelling, all the more layered with naïve traces of angelic moral and subtle grandeur. Wealth or riches had achieved great things, aeroplanes, nuclear rockets, fantastic buildings, fast trains, ships, cathedrals, etc. etc. etc., but in essence it seemed now even to blind Sebastian—as John thumped him with his small fist—that all these magnificent conceptions were native to a child’s genius. They were—whatever their splendour—still divided from the lighthouse of maturity no one had yet founded in paradise. And therein lay—in the irony of hostage to the devil who commanded the globe—the memories of hypnotic family, hypnotic abuse, upon which great architects and scientists, great composers draw as they too, like John, wave a hand, strike the ground, strike up the orchestra of a train of flowers to match every gamble of soul.

With a sinking heart Sebastian was being tugged and pulled by John along Dolphin Street. They did not have far to go. The pale November sun painted the houses on their side of the street with glimmering pearl and threw the other side into chill and luminous shadow. There was no wind and the sun in which they walked was warm as a light rabbit or a piece of cheese on toast. They came to the garage John had in mind. A procession was emerging, it crossed the pavement at a snail’s pace and moved on to the street. A faint chime of bells rang far across the city.

“Millionaire,” said John, pointing to the great black hearse banked high with flowers that seemed to Sebastian’s hollow senses remote or faded like squares of toilet paper stuck together with ash. Sebastian felt the faintest, yet stifling, burden, he seemed to see unseeingly his own addiction laid bare before him; to see unseeingly as if the eyes of ashen bell in his head were open in the other’s head, whoever the other was in the coffin in the hearse. It was faintest awakening, faintest baton, faintest cracked coffin (rather than resurrection) that the angel of liberated wealth invoked. And it was still shrouded in parallel wheels of oblivious innocence and guilt (his guilt and John’s troubled innocence). John was delighted, convinced it was all a celebration; it was as if he knew (though how could he know?) that the hearse possessed millionaire hostage to faintest awakening, faintest orchestra of the unemployed, faintest descent into the funeral of an age.

If John were not rabbit-child, cheese-child, paradise-child, to be consumed in the games they played, Sebastian would have sworn that he
knew
,
that he had planned the cultivation of a rich procession to mimic or strike back at his (Sebastian’s) hollow games of wealth and theft of genius. That theft required the foundations of the coffin, that the scales should not fall from one’s eyes until the faint time was ripe to re-visit paradise. When would that be? Sebastian looked at John but John kept his own counsel. The procession now began to roll. Each car was a sleek composition of chariot-and-cat. The hearse possessed wheels to accentuate the deaf road on which it ran even as it incorporated the blind springs of animal grace one associates with sombre countenance, purring fate, angelic chauffeur.

“Holy, oblivious chauffeur,” Sebastian thought he heard John say. But that was impossible. The faint bell had ceased to chime but an invisible presence peered over the rim of the coffin and waved to Sebastian.

*

Sebastian waved back from his cell, the last day in November, meditating upon lavatory codes he had compiled over the month that bore upon the debts he was accumulating, the credit he had received, unpaid bills, for drugs.

There were three spidery entries for the 13th, the 21st and the 29th that ran as follows:

Minute
actually signified
day
,
and 90 days’ supply Sebastian knew would last for scarcely a fortnight.
Script
was code for
prescription
but in the underground market it implied high-priced scene or promised money.

White
City
implied the pavement opposite the greyhound stadium close to the Broadcasting Studios in White City. That was the rendezvous where Sebastian met his producer or middleman.
Cancell’d
implied that he was up to his eyes and ears in debt (he owed his producer close to fifty pounds and had had to cancel his last script). Thus it was clear that Sebastian had paid dear to the underground market for speed.

The slide into debt had started when he had forfeited prescriptions from his GP after a quarrel and had thus lost his normal supply at the normal rate or price. The facts were that as a porter on night duty at the Victoria Maternity, he had successfully appealed to his doctor or GP for a prescription by explaining how starved he was for sleep during the day by the fiendish racket that a road repair gang was making just beyond his bedroom window. He needed a rich speed to face the night, the abyss of the night, after a snail’s crawl of sleep during the day; eyes pounded and barely shut when it was time for him to open them to the last shades of the sun.

In any event—even if he had not lost his job at the hospital — the gang had long since dispersed, and the funeral, long-suffering faces he turned upon his doctor, long-suffering, coffined day husband, long-suffering, coffined night porter, were of no avail. His deception had worn thin when the doctor happened to drive through Dolphin Street at noon and to come upon no sign whatever of the mysterious road gang, the mysterious grave diggers of Sebastian’s exasperated daytime soul.

Sebastian was awakened rudely by Stella’s voice just beyond the lavatory door. “Sebastian, Sebastian, how long are you going to remain in there? I need to have a word with you before I leave for the market.”