Black Marsden (10 page)

“We’ll take turns,” said Knife. “What did you think I meant? Play and play alike the digging of our cradle or our grave is the music of the future.” And he laughed and whistled to cover his surprise that Goodrich had resisted him: the drollest guerrilla theatre of Namless: such inspired drollery that Goodrich now was taken by surprise. And Knife applauded. “Mr. Goodrich, Mr. Goodrich,” he exclaimed, “it’s our second day on the road to Namless. You have done well. When I report your behaviour to the Director-General he will be impressed.”

“Impressed!” said Goodrich glancing at the murdered man.

“Impressed when I tell him, Mr. Goodrich, that you refused to panic. You resisted
me
—the drill sergeant in me—the commander in me. That’s great.”

“But … but …” said Goodrich.

“No buts, Mr Goodrich. You have passed high noon on the road to Namless with flying colours.”

“Flying colours,” was all Goodrich could mumble with a sense of chill; and he looked at Knife with reluctant admiration—Knife’s colours of despair and broken-headed realism, versatility of tone and action—the droll whistling mask he had flung over the hollow behind his face, over the blunt dead involved in doing his thing, acting his thing upon the world’s stage. It was a political masterpiece—political flag at the heart of savage malaise—a political recovery, nevertheless,
tour
de
force
of ebbing and flowing abstractions which dyed the theatre of mankind with the fiercest broken colours and vessels piping in the name of freedom and still unfreedom, freedom from static illusion….

*

They found a loose patch of sand in which they dug a trench and dumped the Director-General’s intelligence agent. Then they drove another mile or so and turned into the ground before a half-wrecked hostel or inn. There was a large wooden vat on the premises which the guerrillas had not gutted—more than half full of water from the last rainy season—and Knife and Goodrich took turns with the bucket to have a bath. Then Goodrich sat upon the steps of the inn and sipped the bitter clarity of Namless beverage.

The second day of his journey to Namless Town would soon be over. A day of such intense reality it seemed a musical dream of metamorphoses and resources woven through cracked stone, through sand, nature’s pipes and organs as well as man-made ruin, instruments of soul.

Goodrich was making notes in his private diary. He noted the enigma of the Director-General: that curious figure with two faces—one apparently on a pillar of establishment, the other roofed by a revolutionary firmament. For it seemed to Goodrich that the duality of the Director-General’s agents was, in some way, a trial or dispersal of ancient fanaticisms and a sacrificial or multiform head of personality. A token, so to speak, of the bizarre liberalism of the ancient Authorities of Namless as they
reconsidered
the economic and political future of the region (how perhaps to re-capture it or collaborate with it in an entirely different spirit rather than re-conquer it by force of arms). How to sense its proportions as a theatre of inner trial, inner judgement within which to discern the natures of visibility and invisibility as these compounded the biased slate of freedom: as these
compounded
therefore both a creation and a caveat.

The assassination of the Director-General’s intelligence agent raised a number of issues that went to the heart of tabula rasa comedy and drama. One could not but note, for example, the curious stress Knife had placed upon a mysterious orchestra of “intelligences”. Had that murdered agent, for example, a
con
scious
mission to rationalize to the people in the Basin of Namless a certain structure of intelligence—to justify to them an ancient biased conception—to give scientific status, as it were, to a hierarchical abstract realm of intelligence? And a
subconscious
mission to fail in so doing and be brutally done to death?

On its conscious side the mission looked orderly and beautiful enough—in fact ironically consistent with the strategy of a
concealed
enemy enmeshed in their own revolutionary codes. On its subconscious side it had no alternative but to ripen towards disaster in endorsing biases of ugly superiority and inferiority; in reinforcing brutal memories of past injustices at the hands of the Authorities; in tipping therefore a scale into being which
promised
to give endless status, in the body politic of an age, to brutal rebellion (as abstract heads or histories in the past gave endless status to besieged opposition).

Thus in surrendering his agent or pawn the Director-General had concurred with the notion of a sinister ratio or abstract double-cross, abstract status of self-execution into infinity. He had, as it were, with eyes wide open played himself apparently into irreversible checkmate, into kicking the bucket, into a whistling desert or sand; and in so doing therefore precipitated a hollow nemesis, a totalitarian nemesis to which Knife responded by playing commander or leader before Goodrich in order, so to speak, to take over where the Director-General’s agent had
apparently
failed. But Goodrich (as the Director-General may have hoped or intended) had brought Knife to book by resisting him and raising afresh for deeper scrutiny the mystery of “
intelligences
” internalized and externalized.

There were three positions Goodrich reviewed now upon his private chessboard, sketched now into his private diary. Two were already self-evident, namely, hierarchical abstract
intelligence
and totalitarian crude nemesis. The third position could well be the most terrifying though holding out a genuine hope of distancing the fascinations of tyranny. For it brought into
uncompromising
creative play the very essence, the very paradox of endurance: whether one could endure a state of crisis beyond infection by despair.

With the fall of a certain ruling head or pattern of existence one naturally sickened in oneself even when (or precisely because) one entertained a desire within oneself for the essences of change. (That ruling fallen head was quintessential to oneself.) As dead pan Knife, for example, had sickened when he saw the
quintessential
barbarism, the most common savage denominator of change—abstract hand in broken head on the pavement of Namless or upon one’s doorstep: broken by the regime or broken by those who stood against the regime. And in order to cover that sickening sensation of horror, that common denominator of shared barbarism (as if he had committed the crime himself) he drew over himself an assumption of authority, brilliant
tour
de
force,
guerrilla theatre of Namless.

It was as if (Goodrich sketched into his diary) one looked upon a hollow guerrilla stage or extrapolation of intelligences brilliantly constructed to evoke the hypothetical fall of an age and to invite a deeper scrutiny or orchestration of hypothetical resources beyond that fall so that the function of wasted lives (decimated hopes) was transformed into an irreversible warning or motif of capacity to undermine the
hubris
of every abstract order or monument, abstract monument or revered cradle, abstract monument or superior grave.

He (as private Goodrich in the theatre of the guerrillas, private host in the theatre of mankind) sipped the brilliant-tasting but penetrative holy nausea of Namless sunset sky and earth, Namless beverage. The curiously real or curiously imagined half-burnt, half-sweet perfume associated with childhood, came to him across the strangest chessboard of evening lights he had ever seen. The sky was made of marvellous scarecrow cloth like glass and of sensuous fiery intelligences. Above the Basin of Namless and in the vague direction of the grave they had dug that day, the air seemed part and parcel of an animated spectre or family tree and for some deeply planted irrational reason Goodrich wept. He recalled his mother’s bewilderment when news of the
disappearance
of Rigby had come. He recalled how day succeeded day as they waited for news. An irrational body possessed him to take her in his arms. It was the trauma of being alive when the head of the family had vanished; and the notion was born that there existed a scout of love from whose effects of grief no one could escape except across a sea of tears….

Knife had now returned from his foraging expedition in the body of the half-wrecked inn and had set up his tripod and pot and lit the evening fire. “No sign of our woman,” he said to Goodrich. “Perhaps she’s in the hills….” He was staring quizzically at the Goodrich diary (the numerous pages and the drawings clasped together) on the steps of the inn….

*

Night was crystal clear, wild and beautiful with stars. They settled down not far from the fire in their blankets. “We are fortunate,” said Knife, “not to be plagued by mosquitoes in this part of Namless. In the rainy season I tell you it’s hell. Can you smell the orchid of Namless? Comes from the hills over there. Lasts for a week or so. And blooms every other year.”

As he spoke a distant piping music rose from across the Basin of Namless. Goodrich felt his hair stand on end at the extraordinary plaintive lament associated with a nameless piper who had played it in order to warn his master of a threatened ambush knowing that with each note his life was growing forfeit. He was prisoner in enemy hands. The piper’s master Coll Ciotach (left-handed Coll) hearing the music in time turned back and saved his life. The Gaelic words associated with the tune were:

Translated into English this runs:

Knife pricked up his ears as the strange fire music threaded its way into the stars. Then suddenly there was silence, an abrupt eclipse or silence. The piper had been seized by the enemy, his fingers were severed and he was killed on the spot.

“They won’t trouble us tonight,” Knife said laconically. But Goodrich wondered whether he was dreaming. “What in god’s name do you mean …?”

Knife grinned. “Oh I see. The pipes. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? In this part of the world. It’s an agreed signal from the guerrillas in Namless that we are safe tonight and may take the road tomorrow through the narrow pass in the mountains.”

Goodrich was incredulous. “You are quite wrong. It’s a warning—the
Piper
’
s
Warning
—it means beware of ambush.”

“It’s of ancient derivation, yes,” said Knife softly. “There has been a long piece on it recently in
Dark
Rumour.
Apparently initiated by Scottish refugees who came to Namless in the eighteenth century to escape Butcher Cumberland. Note,
however,
Mr. Goodrich,” said Knife almost ingratiatingly, “that the
Piper’s
Warning
has been converted into its opposite role by the present folk in the hills.”

“Opposite role?”

“Yes—the stranger, the new arrival like yourself is being counselled through me your guide and interpreter to pass rather than pull back. When the piper is seized the music stops and the metaphor of a forfeit is implied but in an open-ended sense. The tunnel is clear. The way is open. There is no danger. You have been granted assurances….”

But Goodrich was not convinced. There was something about Knife he distrusted at this moment. He lay back on the ground and the thought obsessed him like a dream that the music he had heard had come from the stifled lips of Marsden’s dead agent…. In his dream Knife’s role as guide was now finished.

I stop writing suddenly and clip the pages together—nearly twenty to thirty pages of notes and sketches I have made since Jennifer disappeared several hours ago around a bend in the Botanical Gardens. My notes are corrections and revisions of an early “diary of Namless” in order to build a new eye of the Scarecrow or stage or theatre of essences occupied by a
phenomenon
of personality reaching back into the slate of childhood. Upon that slate Clive Goodrich is a given existence and other buried traumatic existences as well wrestling one with the other to express a caveat or unknown factor, an intuitive fire music within the hubris of assured character, assured rites of passage into death or namless town.

My name is Clive Goodrich. Yet a name is but a cloak and sometimes a strange denuded nameless “I” steps forth. A
denuded
“I” who is absorbed by the mild spirit of an afternoon like this, or the mild ripple of a breath of wind upon the stretch of water near at hand overshadowed by trees. Or the shadow which now grows upon the sun, a mild self-effacing shadow as I rise to my feet and make my way to the gate leading to Inverleith Row.

My shadow joins others in the queue waiting for a bus to take us into or through Goldenacre. I am aware of a thin stooping woman dressed in a light coat and of a burly man, both in their sixties I imagine. I may have taken little notice of them but for the quaint rich lilt of their voices. The burly man says: “How is Willie Macdougall these days, Maisie?”

“Did ye no hear?” The woman sounds surprised. “Willie’s away.”

“Away?”

“Aye. He passed over at three o’clock in the morning in November last year.”

“Well, well, imagine that. I never heard.”

“Ah well, it was all for the best. He was near eighty and failing.”

“Poor Willie.”

“Not so poor. He left a guid sum and a car and a shop.”

“Fancy that. He did well for himself then.”

“Aye,” says the woman. And they sigh in respectful unison.

A moment later the man asks softly: “Who did he leave it to then?”

I sense a change of weather in the woman’s voice: “Would you believe it—d’ye know that daft besom …?” I miss the rest of what she says as the bus draws up and we climb aboard. I am left with a vivid sketch of Willie; intrigued also by the curious melancholy practicality of the conversation and the puritan indictment of Willie’s “daft besom” whoever she may be.

Invisible Willie has stood before his judges in the queue and some portion of his anomalous estate has rubbed off on me so that his fortune becomes a pooled reflection to sum up the state of the world in which I live.

I get home still denuded, hang my coat in the hall and am about to make my way to my room when Jennifer pokes her head out of the kitchen: “Oh Clive, I’m glad you’re in—Mrs. Glenwearie’s away.” She laughs as she tries to mimic Mrs. Glenwearie’s voice.

“Away?” I cry.

“She asked me to apologize for going so abruptly but she said you would understand. There’s been a message about her niece. She didn’t say what it was.”

“Oh,” I am relieved. “Yes, her niece is an invalid of sorts.”

“In the meantime I promised to keep things shipshape.”

“That’s nice of you, Jennifer.”

“Clive!” Her manner changes, grows almost apprehensive. “Can I have a word with you?”

“Why of course.”

“Mardie’s out at the moment. In fact I don’t think he’ll be back for a couple of hours or so.”

“I’ll join you in the sitting-room in a few minutes.”

When I get there she has laid out scones, bread, butter, biscuits, cake, which I eat (I am suddenly ravenous) and enjoy. “I saw you in the Botanical Gardens today.”

She turns and looks at me now as if she sees me for the first time: “Why didn’t you say something, then?”

“Oh well, you seemed so absorbed in your companion. I did in fact try to call out to you later but you had already turned a corner. I found a comfortable seat overlooking a stream and wrote.”

“Is it an autobiographical work? Mardie knows about it.”

“Does he?” I ask darkly. “Very little one does is private nowadays. There’s always someone spying at every word. From bureaucratic camera or taxman or censor to the livid clock on the wall. But to return to your question. My book is not
autobiographical.
I lose myself in it, you see. In the same token I need to intuit when to pull back. The existences I probe are dark and sometimes the very spectre of oblivion confronts me. But what is the nature of oblivion? How close can one come to it, learn from it, without succumbing to it, without being swallowed up in it? Is there a warning that lies just beyond all given shapes of knowledge in order to distance (in some degree disarm) the traps or
fascinations
of ritual knowledge?”

“Clive,” Jennifer is pleading. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I wish I could spend all night listening to this. It is really fascinating. But I am in trouble. I need your help and I must speak of it before the others get back….”

“Jennifer! What is it?”

“Clive, I believe I am pregnant.”

“Pregnant?”

“I’m almost certain. I’ve missed one period and the doctor is pretty sure. He’ll know for certain when I see him in another week. But the thing is …”

I feel I have been dealt a blow. I am astonished, flabbergasted and blurt out the first thing that comes into my head: “You want to get married. You want money.”

“No, no. Not that.”

I blurt out again: “Jennifer, what do you mean—has he refused to marry you—is he the one in the Royal Mile or the one I saw you with in the Gardens today?”

“Clive, since I’ve been here you and I have quarrelled
occasionally
but we’ve been friends.” She lowers her head. “I think I can be honest with you.” She looks at me now a trifle defiantly. “I want to keep the baby but I don’t want to marry.”

I am silent.

“How can I help you?” I ask at last. “If it’s a question of money?”

Jennifer decides to take the bull by the horns. “It’s more than plain money. If I accepted a straight gift of money from you I could live with Ralph whom you saw me with today (poor Ralph hasn’t a penny to his name) until the baby is born. But who knows what claim he may make after upon me or upon the child? I couldn’t risk that sort of thing. I need a neutral establishment which I could leave whenever I wish. Clive,” I see her steeling herself, bracing herself, “could you let me stay here, let me pretend I’m your mistress or assistant housekeeper or something—anything? I don’t care. I know it sounds immoral and all that but you’re a rich man. And you
believe
in people. A rare
combination,
believe me. All I want is to have my baby in an atmosphere that is really secure. Perhaps I’m cheating. I want a kind of family prop, though in fact I don’t believe in family props any longer. I want to have a man beside me who can afford to give me all sorts of things without making any demands on me. I need someone like you, Clive. I’m not in love with anybody. I’m not in love with Ralph. I like you as much as any of the men I’ve known including Ralph. I want—I want my baby all for myself.”

“Have you told Marsden?” I blurt out.

“No. Not yet. He would be absolutely mad.”

“Mad? What do you mean by mad? Does it matter so much whether he’s mad or not?”

“Of course it does. I’ll tell him when I’m sure of everything. When I know what I’m going to do about it. Then perhaps when he understands, perhaps if you agree to what I ask of you, Clive, he’ll be less furious.”

“I need to think about this. Perhaps when you have seen the doctor again I’ll have come to a decision. In the meantime it’s our secret. I won’t say a word of it to Marsden.”

She comes close to me, my pregnant Salome. Her lips brush mine. For a moment at least I have more of her than Marsden and this pleases me.

*

In the late evening Goodrich made his way down to the wall near Newhaven Harbour and became absorbed in the flickering shadows on the water and the lights far across the water on the shore of Fife. In his mind he could still hear Jennifer’s voice like a pulse beating inside him, a smiling wry pulse almost, imbued with a brutal candour and yet a childlike ripeness.

His present reaction, perhaps irrational, to her proposal was a sense of the interrupted journey he had made across Namless with Knife. It was odd, he knew, to think of the pages he had written that afternoon as an actual journey but, in fact, related as they were to an earlier diary (which was related, in its turn, to actual but transformed family histories and movements and events) it all loomed now as stranger than fiction and therefore in that sense as life.

He recalled the piper’s warning threaded into the stars which in the wake of Jennifer’s proposal returned to him now with renewed potency. Knife had said that the music had ceased to counsel retreat and had turned into an invitation into the tunnel, the open-ended tunnel. But suddenly he was stricken by an illumination; by the fact that he had elected to pull back from the tunnel; and in abandoning the journey had obeyed the original counsel of the pipes. Had he gone forward—written another page in that direction (his heart was beating fast) would he be here now—would he have literally collapsed into coming face to face with the Nameless Other in a death for which he was unprepared? Yes, he was unprepared to die—his knowledge of death was not only incomplete but too biased. So biased it could prove a grossly shattering event. It was a strange climax to absorb within his private book—that another step forward would have proven one too many and Knife would have tricked him and silenced him and his life would have been absorbed into a dead man’s silent pipes.

It was an irrational but immensely powerful conviction which welled up inside him and seemed to imbue Jennifer’s pregnancy with an enigmatic secret in contrast to his enigmatic return….

A lorry was rolling past behind him on the road to Granton. The cry of the gulls came over the water. There was a murmuring subtle crash and wave on the foreshore.

And he felt in his denuded state or shadow against the wall a new tide or re-creative
decision
at the heart of a crowded world. It was a strange realization, a chastening realization, in spite of apparent intoxication: chastening in that he saw himself now in line with both the pale rider in the Royal Mile and the out-
of-doors
mechanic who had been Jennifer’s companions over the past months. He now, as her third potential consort, saw himself equally riddled with the malaise of the twentieth century—with a bankruptcy of authority. And yet in clinging to the annunciation of decision which he made at the door of death, he was beginning to relate himself differently both to the dreadful vacuum of his age and to the implacable biases underlying that age—biased
flesh-and-
blood, biased creeds, biased refuge in wealth.

The air suddenly began to grow chill and he turned and made his way back up the hill with a feeling of absurd authenticity, authentic family man wrapped around in his scarecrow past, scarecrow fears of standing in a shivering bread line or queue at the door of death. Scarecrow fears which his intelligence imbibed, scarecrow fears which his marriage imbibed as the road to doom or the way of life.

He felt as he inserted his key into the lock of his front door that he stood face to face with a far-reaching dilemma—a far-reaching decision which in some curious way he had already made.

*

The next morning Marsden and Goodrich breakfasted
together,
Goodrich knowing he must disclose nothing about
Jennifer,
Marsden looking less sardonic than usual, his beard more disordered than usual, and Goodrich recalled the intelligence agent he had seen in Namless: another deeply planted association of assassinated book or dream and interrupted reality. And it gave him a sense of ascendancy over Marsden, a dangerous illusion of ascendancy perhaps. Yet how could he help but entertain it? For it was as if Marsden silently pleaded with him, as if he had been drained of some measure of diabolic self-assurance, depleted of an omniscient function.

It was this
hiatus
of knowledge—Marsden’s unpreparedness for a new life which matched Goodrich’s unpreparedness for Nameless Other—which saturated their relationship this
morning
like an omen of the future. Marsden’s complexion seemed a shade darker this morning, half-Oriental, half-Celtic. He dawdled over his coffee and toast. What was quite extraordinary, however, in all this procrastination was the expression of neutral age which adorned him. He could have been forty years old or twice that for all Goodrich knew. It was the Oriental detachment perhaps, an Oriental vacuum that seemed to bring him into line with
Jennifer’s
depleted consorts. At first it seemed a defeat for him of all persons, a reduction of his overwhelming stature and yet (
Goodrich
wondered) was it a ruse—the significance of which he could not yet judge?

“Would you pass the marmalade, my dear Goodrich?”

As he did so Goodrich felt his eyes upon him, pleading still but demanding also to know what he knew. And he fought him off easily now that they stood, as it were, on equal footing in a
post-hypnotic
threshold to life.

“You seem greatly preoccupied this morning, Goodrich.”

“I was thinking,” Goodrich said, toying with the idea of a personage of property as one would reflect upon a body of superstition, “of a new section I would like to add to my book—a journey through Demerara which I visited once many years ago and attended an East Indian wedding ceremony.”

Marsden pricked up his beard like antennae of perception. “Sounds interesting,” he said, biting into his toast and
marmalade,
“I have never seen an East Indian wedding ceremony. What is it like?”

“It’s a question—at a certain stage anyway—of getting the bridegroom to eat.”

“To eat?” Marsden dabbed his lips with a napkin and poured himself another cup of coffee.

“Yes, you see at a certain stage unless the bridegroom eats the marriage ceremony falls through.”