The Tree of the Sun (6 page)

The atmosphere began to change abruptly into a tide or bar of spacious houses possessed of an air of leisure and well-being.

They ascended St John’s Gardens and came upon St
John’s Church on the summit of the hill from which
spectators
, in the middle of the nineteenth century, had had a grandstand view of the Hippodrome racecourse.

The choir was practising inside and the sound of blurred organ and voices came like orchestrated applause from a past day. Limbo horses swung to that spectral applause through Clarendon Road, across Ladbroke Grove and into Portobello Road’s sea of a market that dipped into all periods and accents, book bargains, antique voices, trade voices and rough cheer.

Each hoof deposited its climax of curious, half-glittering cargo or prizes. A cloud-horse drifted back towards
Ladbroke
Grove, stood over St John’s steeple and stepped into Eleanor’s bedroom and mirror….

The door to the apartment was slightly ajar. Leonard entered, stood on the thick carpet that led into the flat. He shut the door softly behind him. He knew Harlequin was away. But he was almost persuaded that a shot might ring out and he would fall by the side of the swimming pool he had passed or be trampled under a horse’s hoof.

One area seemed drawn into the other, giant racecourse into guarded hallway, one fortress of chance or death into another, until a sprinkle of fate seemed as swift as a bullet. Until sprinkle and bullet, phallus and perfumed temple in which Eleanor sat, were an intimate paradox and
brushstroke
between one fortress and another.

Francis stopped dead in Leonard’s fictional tracks in the hall of the apartment as da Silva unveiled another
translation
of the elements in his book. He was shocked anew to see the intimate thoughts of his body and mind painted into broad daylight, thoughts of Eleanor, of her absent “husband”, of the “fictional” Eleanor and the “real” Eleanor in bed, in his arms.

It was the strangest climax or notion by which he (a secretive writer) was possessed to import black Leonard into his book.

There
, away on business in Liverpool, yet looming like the shadow of war over the flat—in da Silva’s translation
of Francis’s book—stood the older jealous man with whom Eleanor lived and whose house this was.

There
stood also, with a finger on the trigger, the young revengeful Harlequin, of Leonard’s age, obsessed by thoughts of nondescript parentage in the miscarried foetus of the gods. Until he believed himself the older man’s son conceived, all the same, by Francis (or Leonard in bed with Eleanor at the heart of the book of fictional yet
terrifyingly
real inner life).

And as Leonard waited for the young daemon of his own age to fire, on behalf of father time, he felt himself
projected
forwards into future wars and conflicts in which the “old” Harlequin had “unaged”, had shed half his years, in order to become Francis’s and Julia’s unborn son given fictional projection into cruel, half-incestuous, half-foreign, life. So that as the bullet sped, its material consequences seemed less overwhelming, almost as if it were tipped by ineffectuality to vanish into an apparition or creative
paradox
. Could Julia’s miscarriage of flesh-and-blood be
converted
into profound sensibility of apparitions of community (in resurrections of the unborn) one lives ahead of one’s time in order to be whole and to survive? Could a queen’s unborn son prove the trigger of fictional life, parable or strangest blessing or miscarriage of bullets by ageing/youthful jealous tides of populations? And it was as if a subtlety of shocking comprehension, that drove the creative imagination to run far deeper than moral
convention
or grave or cradle or appearance, led Francis into bed with another man’s wife in pursuit of a supreme fiction or book or treaty of sensibility between the born and the
unborn
; led him into a voyage of affections, that appeared promiscuous, but was other than promiscuity within a design of unfathomable premises of imaginative unity as compensation for losses endured; led him into a conception of the miracle of survival, immunity from fire, immunity from water, immunity from bullets, as limbo complications in the dancing strangers in his book….

As the threat of a gun—that mirrored the half-curse, the
half-blessing, of unlived lives or dormant ages, lived lives or translated feuding ages—began to dissolve, Leonard moved forwards again along the hall until he came to
Harlequin’s
study or “holy of holies”.

He poked his head in, fascinated all over again by a tiny model of a machine gun and by larger-than-life “percussion transitional revolvers”, on a wall of the room, like emblems of menace that could blow one to smithereens. They had been rifled with six chambers and there was a “sighting hole” in the bar hammer; a unique short-lived weapon that stood between the “percussion pepperbox” and the “true” or “atomic” revolver.

The other half of another wall was lined with books in red leather binding, from the age of Homer to the age of Dante on to Dr Johnson, side by side with a startling
display
of weapons that ranged from models of variants of the sixteenth-century German wheellock through
mid-seventeenth-century
north Italian wheellock and late
seventeenth-century
Scottish all steel flintlock. (The Scottish models were particularly impressive with scroll or “
ramshorn
” butts.)

There were guns with Spanish miquelet locks that were crude and angular with their huge-jawed cocks and
right-angled
steel and pan covers. There was the prepossessing English dog lock of the middle seventeenth century in which the cock and tumbler or axle were forged in one piece.

There was an admirable French lock designed by one Marin le Bourgeois, a gunmaker, painter, sculptor, musician.

“The dance of the guns,” Leonard sighed, almost
flippantly
, but the sense of his miraculous survival in history, the sense of having escaped jealous retribution, folly, his own and that of others, from the madness of hate or feud or war—across middle passage ages, middle passage
generations
, centuries—had not entirely faded as he retreated from Harlequin’s “holy of holies” and made his way to Eleanor’s bedroom.

“A growing shock”, da Silva echoed the subtlest
dispersal
of gunfire, upon the ladder of fate on which he was painting scenes from Francis’s book as if each step or bar were a box in which times danced, “to see your characters unveiled before you within scenes that unravel a series of lusts and connections in
you
, their creator. In
me
as well upon the swings of conscience. Your daemon of conscience.
Conscience
indeed. What is the conscience of art in a promiscuous age, a vicarious age?” He was serious as he asked, yet laughing like an artist-clown, to veil his late twentieth-century naked discomfiture. Francis was laughing too from within the swings of the grave to the cradle to unveil his early-to-middle twentieth-century skeleton
discomfiture
—“
What
is
community
Da
Silva?
Ours is a
promiscuous
age, a vicarious age, indeed.” He confronted da Silva as one who spoke unspoken thoughts and hidden dreams from the canvas or silver screen of the dead to the very hand that painted it or him with flying strokes or phantom bullets.

“What is my greedy connection to Eleanor, yours to Julia and Jen? Are we not all greedy for immortality as we swing from the past into the present, the present into the future? I need Eleanor to return to Julia as vicarious queen. You need Julia to come to Jen as living lady-in-waiting with whom you play your games of divorce from death and re-marriage to life. We are immersed—as you make so plain in each brushstroke of hidden darkness or light—in the strangest intercourse of survival, those of us who suffer statistics of disaster, in each minute, and need to
resense
a bond of survival through ages.

“There is, I know, an ineffectuality, no one can fathom, to material oppression that may illumine an individual’s life in a sudden moment, beyond expectation or control, and bring about a sense in him or her—his small life or hers—of unexpected kinship to the very kings or queens, to the greatest souls in time. That is the mystery of poverty. How does a mere straw, tossed on the rubbish heap of human waste, accumulate an intensity or new passion in creation, a brilliancy of surviving bodies within the most
unpromising
field of circumstance? Perhaps no one can say what everyone burns to say—I am the link between the
apparently
failed ones and the apparently great ones.”

It was this link between ineffectually or miscarriage and complex human greatness that drew Francis to mask himself in Leonard, in bed, in Eleanor’s arms; to suspend himself over her—upon her perfumed body—within her perfumed body that annihilated his senses until he became oblivious of whom or what he was. And this very obliviousness led to a character of supreme fiction, in limbo sex, as an animal’s or bird’s orientation, in limbo flight, appears mathematics of genius, though it is nothing more than supreme instinct.

“Is there an equation between supreme fiction and supreme instinct and both are marvels beyond logical categories of comprehension?

“Is there an equation between fallible lust and infallible divinity? Have the most virtuous gods, who came to maturity in the pressure of aeons, ascended from their terrestrial encampment, desert or jungle, to sow wild oats or stars, at the end or the beginning of worlds, as if to establish a canon of unfinished (half-defeated) humanity that resembles the mathematics of unfinished (half-defeated) deity?”

Eleanor knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Francis was aware of her as half-dormant, or unfinished creation, who had been lodged in the milky way by ironmonger statistics and consumer affections. Her infinite coarseness and thickness of soil drew him to rape her in the middle of the stars to which he had fled. And she dreamt in turn it lay with him perhaps to assuage—if not cure—the
injustices
and incompatibilities in her half-created state or kingdom. By assuagement she visualised an extension of herself surviving within the most cruel elements, surviving with him, or through him, into accumulative shadows of approximation to the resurrection of the self like creatures of matching instinct and supreme fiction who pass through fire.

“
Abed-
negro,” said Leonard (in whom Francis had masked himself). He sat up in bed with a flippant command or prayer on his lips and admired the black spirit of his painted body, decked out like a savage, in the flame of the mirror in Harlequin’s bedroom. “Shadrach, Meshach,
Abednego
. The great ones, the kings of fire. I have often
marvelled
at my admission to such a citizenship, to such a state of survival. I am wholly undeserving….” He still seemed flippant but, in fact, an incredible tenderness lay between him and the young woman at his side who feared for her own flesh and sanity in ironmonger statistics and consumer affections.

*

The ladder of fate drifted out of the room (as Francis unmasked himself) into the street beneath St John’s spire.

The sun stood overhead upon a subtle pillow of cloud suffused with whiteness. Across the blanket of the road, in a square of garden, the filtered light seemed curiously solid with each precipitation of paint. Dancers were poised on the steep ladder of the senses and non-senses, twig, branch, centaur tree, bound to a moment’s bridle of
enchantment
. Bound to a silver climax, the clock of space that troops into each minute in masked houses, bodies and appearances.

Perhaps each brick or beam that dances in the sun ages into a young lamp, pregnant with fossil resources and glories, with which to light one’s way into the coming of electricity before it had been dreamt into nights of
existence
.

It was this coming of miraculous translations of a motivated creator of terrifying universes into kings and queens in fire (in drought and ice) that gripped Francis, as he glanced back to Eleanor’s window and sensed a
climacteric
vision, relating to intuitive bodies of the imagination based on concrete, apparently common-or-garden, affairs and events. The coming of expeditions of rescue within cavalry seasons and elements, within precipitate fires and floods, upon racecourses of history buried in time,
translations
of intensities of odds pitted against the foodbearing/ love-making spirit as it auctioned its wares of dread and beauty, its memorials of incredible survival, unceasing marvel and fear….

They descended Ladbroke Grove, turned into
Westbourne
Park Road where the first intimations resided of the thronged river of a painted market and place of auctions. Some of the houses were already dressed like stalls with gaily-painted doors and the sudden sparkle of flowers on a miniature deck of a balcony overhead.

Then suddenly they were in the flood of the market itself that seethed by degrees along the reduced pathway of the road between a variety of stalls.

The pathway of the street was crowded with a carnival of spectators who slipped in and out of currencies of deaths and lives, of masks and appearances, in and out of the foodbearing tree of the sun.

A mock auction was in progress at the stall of DAVID AND BATHSHEBA.

“One hundred thousand.”

“Two hundred thousand.”

Francis nodded. “Three hundred thousand.”

“Four hundred thousand.”

“Five hundred thousand.”