The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (12 page)

“The old woman has her shawl,” Jackson continued, “and I have my room. Who knows how each is located in the other? Sukey Tawdrey has her rag. Mother Diver has her shawl. One is music, one is fabric. I have my bone of a room. I toss my bone to them and they thread it subconsciously, unconsciously, into joint fabric, joint music….”

“In ancient times,” said Khublall, “the dead were buried with mutual charms, musical instruments, clothing, food, etc. I say ‘mutual’ because I’ve heard you use the word. I’m not sure—how do you see it, Jackson?”

“The burial of the dead mirrors the responsible imagination of the truly creative living. So I toss my bone of a room to be threaded into other rhythms, other things, until space sails…. That’s how I see it. The conversion of casualty that exists in each moment — the little deaths, the little births, that creep into and out of the world—so that what is inert or helpless is no longer helpless — space begins to sail and one’s life is not entirely wasted, some glimmer of wisdom takes one back, takes one forward…”

“Tell me then about Monmartre club in 1950. You stopped when we came in.”

Jackson’s eyes looked ravished again. He kept his voice rather low. “Sukey wasn’t her real name (it was Josephine) but she wore it like a badge of chimney grease or honky tonk; it was her black bone to toss around, her relic of honky-tonk music in the American South. She had grown up in the blare of honky-tonk bombast —music and battle for survival. When she came to Europe after the Second World War, she revived strip-tease Scott Joplin Rag. It was a defiant performance—a whittling away of honky tonk into a classical kind of gesture—she was tilting against the old South that may have lost the Civil War, may have been defeated over slavery, but was back in the saddle. Scott Joplin died in 1917, she was born in 1927 into a world of Jim Crow…. High time for another revolution to be backed up by a black Napoleon. I had come from Jamaica—just off the USA—that was her Corsica. Where better to find an emperor and a clown? Mind you, she was serious at first. Jamaica had already thrown up a
Marcus
Garvey who had paraded through New York City in military uniform. I was deficient in uniforms but as strong as a horse in those days and that’s as close as I came to an emperor, a horse for an empress to ride.” Jackson was laughing at the prospect of a horse that could rule a kingdom or republic with a woman in the saddle.

“That’s when I became a clown,” he confessed. “She wasn’t really appreciative of my joke and yet the thing is—you can never tell with a woman—I am sure she
knew
from the start I was a born casualty, strong and subtle, yes, a good horse beneath her in bed, but a casualty, a source of trouble, apolitical as all horses are.”

He was staring into space. “The truth is we came together because—though we did not see it then—the problems we faced were rooted in a kind of blockage in ourselves, in our one-sided natures that had grown bombastic. Sukey’s and Joplin’s word! And to become a creature of the furies—to be shorn of bombast —emperors had to regress into horses and through horses into clowns or daemons or angels. It was a regression to the womb as much as to the grave of power.”

Khublall was profoundly startled. Jackson had said he was deficient in uniforms but all at once it was as if he were clad in brilliant style that seemed to combine the mystery of the womb and the grave in the clown as well as the ambiguities of dress in Sukey Tawdrey’s strip-tease as she mounted him in bed.

There was a lull in the conversation. They resorted to
common-or
-garden tasks and replenished their coffee and tea, but Khublall was seized by the sensation of being sliced, half on earth, half on Bale, as if he were the creature of another and resided in her dreams or as if she resided in his. Was this part and parcel of the young woman he mourned? Was she—that young woman—part and parcel of another woman or other imaginary women in whom both Jackson and he existed as “prey of the furies”?

Jackson leaned upon him for support he knew as if the bone of space that divided them in punting the globe from hand to foot, foot to hand, drew many related presences in every continent, sea and air and land, into half-involuntary, half-voluntary cycle or circle or related dance and chorus of brothels as well as temples of history.

All this sharpened Khublall’s ears to Jackson’s confessions and disclosures. An ex-Hindu he (Khublall) sometimes dubbed himself. There were times when he perceived himself a
father-confessor
that the ex-priest Marsden would have understood in relation to the young men and women whose lives he assembled in the Inn. Stella, Mary, Sebastian, and the “no man’s land translator of Mary Stella Holiday’s automatic book of fictional lives”. There were times when Jackson seemed split, almost feminine in spirit—a curious transformation or involuntary humour this was in a man as male as he—as if the bird’s eye of Bale in its mist of painted faces on the ceiling of the room veiled him for an instant with a spark and a feather, womb-spark, beak like a feather within womb or brain. In the animal kingdom—Khublall reflected, staring at the ceiling—the male tended to wear brilliant colours like foetal, sometimes majestic, imperial blood, the female a drab or modest uniform. Whereas in the human kingdom, it was the woman who wore the gay and bright, seductive fashion, the male who tended to be plain. So, when Jackson seemed dressed for an instant in spark and feather he was animal-male in the animal kingdom but his bright adornment drew him down into ridden human-female in the human kingdom.

That Jackson therefore had confessed in veiled and adorned (therefore logically feminine) dress of words that he had been mounted and ridden by aggressive Sukey Tawdrey moved Khublall to perceive more deeply than ever the paradox of soberly clad (therefore logically animal-female) ex-priest, ex-Hindu, ridden by the funeral skull of god in Bale and in heaven, ridden by child-bride raised into exaggerated male beak or brain that pointed higher still through priest and convertible god, convertible maiden, into a dark womb-universe susceptible to human and spiritual re-birth in the very death— the very funeral of an age.

Khublall was moved more deeply than he knew. He felt no inflation of consciousness whatsoever and this prompted him to recall an earlier question that had crossed his mind about the matter of relations between “bombast” and “music”…. Jackson studied the question like an involuntary lecturer in Human Paradise University. He tossed his bone at it. It caught the ambiguities of dress in which Khublall had been immersed, the ambiguity of skull, the ambiguity of the daughter that Sukey and he (Jackson) had conceived in the world of 1950. Space changed again into invisible class or audience that crowded Khublall’s mind.

“Bombast was honky-tonk music, honky-tonk sex, imperial sex—a basis for refinements of black power, Sukey used to say. The bombast of the old slave South ran in her blood like a fever…. Joplin had confessed his debt to honky-tonk crowd that ran in his blood too and he sought to convert it into individual compositions of subtlety and cunning. His rag subtlety was to open the dress of a new mood, the new jazz or distribution of talents, the new musical punt of an age. It was a denuded punt (rag) but possessed of imperial memory, imperial bombast, in subtle echoes, sounds that were to cap Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and others, in a black Honours List, a black House of Lords.

“Sounds that cut two ways, into a humanity possessed by
good
, possessed by
evil.
Possession by good was daemonic
goods
,
possession by evil was not always the straightforward satanic trumpet it sounded in jazz. It could imply traces of early Christian communism that had been soured by Marx—so the propaganda went —into devious evil saints.

“Sukey’s roots were unmistakably good—refined bombast and daemonic property. Sex was daemonic property. Music and love were daemonic politics and property. She danced like an angel. She danced the tawdry rich-in-the-poor. She danced Joplin’s “The Entertainer”, his “Maple Leaf Rag”, his “Paragon”. She danced hot Count Basie.

“On our return from the club at nights she re-traced her steps with me
not
as if we were private souls but public bodies under the eye of an inquisitive, invisible crowd. She pursued a divided self playing ball with static inquisitor in static performer. This static emphasis was rag’s decorum of collective individual into which we were bound. Unfree. My consciousness of this unfreedom divided us. She was less—or not at all—conscious of it. I suffered for her.
I
was
she…
.” Jackson’s tone had changed. Supplicant clown addressing his furies. “She was male … and somewhere in that reversal a crack arose…. I conceived. The music of spaced rain ran up instead of down a ladder of flesh. I knew it was wrong, I would be torn to bits if I were not careful. The static tease of her body defined a strict boundary I had crossed…. I would need to defend that trespass against the ruthless crowd that peered at us…. Mother Diver’s shawled body of gravity hung over a million deaths, a million wounds, that branched from the Sacré Coeur close to our hotel. Scarcely five years had passed since the end of the war … What a moment for horse to conceive a daughter of man, Sukey as rider, I as clown…”

Daughter of man. Son of man. Khublall, the Hindu, pondered the Christian paradox. He felt powerfully grieved, uncannily sad, and sorry for Jackson. “When was she born,” he asked, “and when did you lose her?”

“She was thirty this year when she came to see me in London before going back. Mack’s granddaughter! Mack was a guy for women. Mack’s black granddaughter. Rumour has it—word from the furies—that his white grandson is called John.”

“John would be your daughter’s cousin across the divide of a generation.”

“That is so.”

“Did you remain in Paris?” Khublall sensed that Jackson was evading his earlier question, so he asked again, “When did you lose her?”

“I came to London in the summer of 1950. My wife followed.” He spoke the word “wife” in an absolutely colourless tone. That lack of colour was a gesture for the furies to read. “Our marriage was already on the rocks. When Josephine, my daughter, was born, Sukey returned to America. I cared for the baby, fed her, washed her nappies, spent virtually every penny on her that my father had left me but my god I adored her. I was able to afford a nanny to help out two days every week. Paid her five pounds. Good money in the 1950s. All went well until 1954 when I fell from a ladder, broke my leg.” His staccato voice also broke but he recovered and raced on, lame, yet Anancy swift. “I had to cable her father.” The words had come in such a rush that Khublall was just able to hear. It was as if Jackson were convinced that the woman he had slept with was the father of his child. Did he know what he was saying? Was it a slip of the tongue? Of course it was.

Josephine was his. She had issued from the beak in the horse. That beak had turned inwards. It had sliced, picked, pricked to create agonizingly new mental insides somewhere in the region beneath his heart and under the still vortex or unconscious memory of umbilical navel and cord. That beak was agency of furies. PICK. PICK. BEAK. SLICE. CUT. BEAK. “Oh my god I never knew how I stood it.” Seed of the daughter of man. For if there were a twentieth-century son of man (Mary Stella’s human, divine child), there needed to be also a twentieth-century daughter of man (Jackson’s animal, divine child).

“You cabled the old South,” said Khublall turning away from Jackson’s face.

“When I arose from bed they’d flown,” said Jackson, “Sukey and my Josephine. A fury had taken my daughter away. That’s the answer to your question. That’s how I lost her.”

“You did nothing to get her back, you let her go…?”

“I had had time as I lay in a hospital bed to see into myself.”

“See what?”

“Prey—prey of the furies.” He spoke now almost under his breath. “The beak was too much.”

“You needed a rest,” Khublall protested, “that was all. You’d spent nearly all of the money you had. Then when you fell you were concussed.”

“You’re a good man, Khublall, a stout friend.”

“Me? Good? No one’s good.”

“True,” said Jackson. He was actually responding to Khublall’s remark on the concussion he suffered when he fell. “Even today when I look back across the years, faces, buildings, streets, are a mist. My memory’s erratic.” His eyes brightened. “It was good to see her a week or two ago. But I know I have lost her. She was dancing in Paradise Park in the theatre there.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“I couldn’t face it. Just couldn’t bear the crowded theatre or hall. The play was called
Scissors
and
Chariot.
Perhaps I should have gone. I may have seen…” The last words were uttered so softly that Khublall did not hear. They may have come of their own accord from another’s, a silent, throat up in the ceiling. Words of a blind family. The divisions were multifold and lay in part between “fictional human divine” and “fictional animal divine”. It was a division that occupied him now like another devious fury. A division that few could hope to bridge or cross except mutual angels and daemons with a capacity to dislodge the terror of the ignorant blind, the proud blind, the terror that one may learn to see
through
each and every blind in oneself into the arts of the genius of love within, beyond all spheres, limitations, polarizations one takes for granted as the absolute womb of the living or the absolute hierarchy of the dead.

It was early April. The newspapers were full of analyses of the attempted assassination of President Reagan and the danger of a Russian invasion of Poland. Mary made her way past the old St Paul’s schoolground and turned into the secluded backwater in Hammersmith where Father Marsden lived. It was ten-thirty, a sharp, cool morning. A car drove past and she glimpsed someone with what looked like a bunch of tulips in her hand. It reminded her of the subtle, majestic carpet in the Angel Inn study.

It was one of those mornings when despite the tulips she was still oblivious of the radiant, yet curiously dense curtain of the sky, the fine pale silent music of a spring day. A blackbird was singing but the song fell upon her ears as if she were deaf. She arrived at the door and entered the house with her key, and stopped at the mirror just inside the hall. She replaced the key in a black, suede handbag. She was smartly dressed, pale-green coat that she began to shed to reveal a light-grey woollen dress and a necklace of jade.

Her eyes almost seemed to flash back at her in the slightly overshadowed, spiritual mirror and to heighten the beauty of her lips and skin: the opaque light of spring turned all at once into a standing pool in which she moved rooted in the floor, yet a vertical swimmer. The self-appraisal was so rapid that she hadn’t realized how absent from herself she had been. She came to the door of the study, still fluid, still detached, still cool. Father Marsden paid her well. The thought slid into her mind for no reason whatsoever to make her reflect almost without thinking on the progress she had made over the past years as his secretary, his patient, his friend, his companion on many a “hypnotic expedition”.

She placed her coat on a rack by the window close to her desk overlooking the garden. Irises were in bloom. W. B. Yeats’s
A
Vision
lay on her desk and when Mary picked it up she found a scribbled note inside from Marsden asking her to type the pages he had underlined.

It was an American edition and the back cover carried a note of contents that Mary read with some astonishment.

Mary stopped, replaced the book on her desk, and sank into her chair. She had been standing by the window as she read and the light outside seemed as pooled now in the glass of the window—a passing yet strangely fixed shadow and abode of cloud—as in the mirror in the hall that had accompanied her into the study. It stood alongside her, that mirror, like an upright river or pool, a door into inimitable fluid spaces. It was a gratifying shock to discover that her relationship to Marsden possessed a treasury of potentials, that her pre-menstrual stresses were “phases of the moon” that held elaborate tones with which to dress both fire and flood and to secrete the majesty of the seasons in a minute cell, minute spark of infinite sensuous apparel. As for “anti-self”
this
she read as native to herself, her many antecedent selves; “gyres” was a term she had never encountered before and all she could make of it in her own “narratives” was emphasis on “reversible transference” and upon inanimate features, wheel, scissors, chariot, bale, shawl, line, ladder, etc. that awakened her to the hidden rhythms of her own unconscious.

It was as if Marsden had died and she would never see him again in Angel Inn except in the mirror that walked beside her and stood now in the room like a companion wreathed with faces, misty faces, Marsden’s beard into which Jackson’s tall hairstyle arose, Khublall’s shaven skull into which Marsden’s tall, knobbed stick arose, footballers punting on the green into which Marsden’s floating globe arose, dancers in Paradise Park playing
scissors-and
-chariot into which the magical child John arose with Josephine’s eyes in his head as if born as much from the South as from the North, as much from Marsden as from herself, perhaps more Marsden’s cross-cultural, religious seed than Sebastian’s physical penetration of Stella’s body on this side of the mirror of life.

In the depths of the mirror—on the other side of the mirror—lay marvels of funeral progression, yet re-birth residing in every deprived circumstance of being.

Mary recalled how deaf she had been to the voice of the blackbird that morning on her way to Angel Inn and yet it returned to her now in the depths of the mirror that stood beside her. Half-reflected voice, shaded sound, silent echo. Was this the source of musical composition? Did music issue from reflections that converted themselves into silent, echoing bodies in a mirror? Did the marriage of
reflection
and
sound
arise from deaf appearance within silent muse (or was it deaf muse in silent appearance) from which a stream of unheard music rippled into consciousness?

The voice of the bird in the mirror converted itself into the spirit of bird-like appearance as if one’s ears were partially unstopped, unsealed, at last, in order to listen to a sound that had no natural antecedent in bird or beast despite a resemblance to something one thought one remembered hearing in the interstices of obliviousness to everyday utterance. That paradox of deaf mirror filled with voices and faces was a cautionary note inserted into “animal divine” and “human divine” voices and it seemed unsurprising to Mary when Marsden appeared
not
in the room but in the mirror from the other side of life or death to say without utterance, “All voices that claim to be divine are to be distrusted. Remember that, sweet Mary. Nature’s crude therapy is the seal of deafness to reality, seal of blindness to reality, that it plants over our eyes and our ears to render us immune to the voices of temptation and mystery. When that seal lifts a little and one is, in consequence, exposed to great dangers within Angel Inn mirror into which one has stepped, one falls under the action of another protection, a protective grace. And even then what one begins to hear and to see needs to be accepted as partially arisen marvels of conception within still biased appearance, still biased voice, still biased sight, still biased sense, still biased nature.

“One steps into Angel Inn mirror to a rhythm that still embraces all our past, lapsed, vulnerable apprehensions, our states of being deaf, being blind. Within that embrace one learns that to match one’s step or state to past lapsed states is to see (through the blind eyes of others who still need that protection), to hear (through the deaf ears of others who still need that protection). That paradox is a mutual guard, it signifies that the sculpture of apparent death of the senses is itself a guard to save from unbearable processes of knowledge that could mean extinction if one came to them before one should. And this is reflected not only in science but in every ordeal of unequal state in which the gulf between majorities and minorities tests us to the core to find solutions by mutual effort, the blind protected by the seers (who imperil us all if they succumb to temptation), the ignorant by the wise (whose wisdom is itself a temptation), within world cultures that share the brunt, the tragedies, the humiliations, the burdens, that accumulate on the threshold of radical, human possibility….”

Marsden receded into the mirror. He had spoken without speaking. Perhaps for the last time. As his silent voice faded Mary recalled the anguish she had experienced when she had typed an article he had written on the Soweto riots in South Africa. The keys of the typewriter descended again under her fingers in the mirror and left her shaking with fright. Over two hundred young people had been shot in the streets. The next day was pay day in Angel Inn. Should she send her pay to the bereaved? Was money tainted gold? How could sterling be tainted? Nonsense! Rand perhaps, not sterling. If sterling were to be married to rand then too must roubles, dollars, yen, francs, and every denomination subsisting on gold as far back as Atahualpa.

“I know what I’ll do,” Mary said to her fingers in the deaf mirror, “I’ll ask Stella to collect my pay. I’ll scribble a note to Father Marsden. He won’t mind. He’ll understand.”

There she was. Stella. In the shower. The faintest suggestion of a line of bullets running across her thin shoulders. Flawed but attractive limbs, slightly out-thrust stomach. Her hips flared like a subtle tide, a subtle moon, and it came as an astonishment to Mary to see her naked in the street, a bit thin perhaps, walking along the pavement towards Hammersmith and Angel Inn. The other pedestrians saw nothing but a coat and a dress, high-heeled shoes, a bag on one arm. She wasn’t wearing her slacks this time.

Mary read their obliviousness of Stella’s faintly bullet-ridden, naked body in the mirror. It was true that she (Mary) was as oblivious as they—she was oblivious of their hidden global wounds as they were of Stella’s. She was as oblivious as they were of punctured camouflage or metaphysical strip-tease genius in their midst. And yet in confessing to their obliviousness—in perceiving it so starkly—she seemed to see
through
their eyes not only how blind they were but the endangered messenger one sends time and time again out of oneself in dream or involuntary reverie into an unexpected shower of bullets, hard rain out of the sun that leaves a pool of blood.

Stella advanced in the street towards Angel Inn, a slim, tantalizing target, high-heeled trance. She came to the door of the house, entered the Inn, moved along the hall into the study. She paused in the mirror close to where Mary now stood, inspected roses that summer long past where irises now stood.

The money she had come for was there within the manuscript that Mary had typed. Marsden was absent. He had left the coast clear. Better to make such exchanges of daemonic currency as bloodless as possible. One needed the daemon to buy food, pay the rent, buy clothing, pay electricity and gas, income tax, bus fare, rail fare, bale fare into the stars, chariot fare for christenings and weddings…. And, said the voice in the deaf mirror, let it be done in all decency by a bloodless machine or, if not that, by Anancy sleight-of-hand in which the giver and the receiver run from each other when the deed is accomplished.

Had Marsden been there he might have been tempted, in all the circumstances, not to run but to stay and to kiss Stella’s thin shoulders. A kiss to cure faint bullets. Better a kiss than a wound one cannot bear to contemplate. Better a blessed pound note slipped from between the pages of a book than prostitution of body and soul. Better the veil of spring or winter or autumn blood in all its celebrative beauty of flowers and vegetable gardens than money that speaks aloud, weapons that drink milk and chew bread, one man’s investment that turns into another man’s or woman’s or child’s seed or grave in the depths of past and present, past and future place and time.

*

Jackson walked past naked Stella in the street. The mirror picked him up and bore him past her (as if she were not there) to North Pole Road. He switched on his radio in search of the blues or Mozart. The batteries were low and the voice reporting the news of the Brixton riot seemed to come from a far way off. Another planet. It was a thoroughly British accent. Not foreign…

*

Stella returned to Dolphin Street to find an angry and bewildered Sebastian. That very day (Mary’s pay day) he had lost his job as an electrician and been told that his qualifications were inadequate. The sight of Stella with money he had ceased to earn aroused a depth of frustration in him allied to passion, a sensation of injustice, and of belonging to inchoate consensus or body of unemployed millions around the globe. Mary had left when Stella returned. She knew how to be “absent” when Sebastian’s “crowd” or “consensus of deprivation” erupted and drew her into bed.

Sex was sometimes better than “speed” to place a seal upon his undervalued life and the undervalued lives of others.

In coming by degrees to run into darkness and see little, he acquired a terrible protection against seductive horror. He acquired also the subtlest link to Marsden’s “death” or “withdrawal into the mirror of space” and to Mary’s “absence from herself” in Stella. Their fictional death and absence resembled his need for protection, and his need resembled their comprehensive acceptance of layers of non-sensibility to offset total despair. His collective darkness remained therefore a shared reality of individual psyche. To see as they saw with stark complexity was to pay a price for his non-sensibility and to incorporate his eyes and ears into their minds and into camouflaged intercourse with history, the violations, the pathos, the brutality, and yet the paradoxes of protective armour—even death—upon each profoundly vulnerable witness. (
There
—Mary saw in a flash in Angel Inn mirror that drew into itself worlds as a pool draws an ocean—lay an approach to the camouflage of diminutive seed, essential life, that torments and teases heart and mind in living epitaphs that surviving, embracing creatures are for extinct species.)