Against the Day (174 page)

It
was around this same time that Yashmeen discovered she was pregnant with Reef’s
child—and, as Cyprian would be pleased to imagine, in some auxiliary
sense, in ambiguous lamplight and masked fantasy, his own.

She
dreamed, the night she knew for certain, of a hunter arrived at last, a trainer
of desert eagles, to unmask against her soul the predatory descent that would
seize her, fetch her away, fetch her back, held fast in talons of communion,
blood, destiny, to be plucked up off the defective Riemann sphere she had been
taking for everything that was, and borne in some nearly vertical angle of
ascent into realms of eternal wind, to hover at an altitude that made the
Eurasian continent a map of itself, above the glimmering of the rivers, the
peaks of snow, the Tian Shan and Lake Baikal and the great inextinguishable
taiga.

unter and Dally showed up one day in London, having come by

express from Venice, where accostment by Bodeopacking
coglioni

was showing no signs of dropping off, the Principessa
Spongiatosta

seemed eager to pimp Dally to some doubtful parasitic creeper
upon the

tree of the Italian nobility, and Dally had concluded that
Kit Traverse wasn’t

coming back from Asia anytime soon, if ever. But before they
were through

the Alps, she already missed Venice like a refugee.

Ruperta
ChirpingdonGroin was kind enough to help her find a pleasant small bedsit in
Bloomsbury, while Hunter returned to the starched bosom of collateral relations
someplace west of Regents Park. Though never especially having wanted Hunter
for herself, Ruperta in general could not abide seeing anybody else even
pretending to be content. Once satisfied, however, that nothing too passionate
was going on between her and Hunter, Ruperta promoted Dally to the status of
Minor Annoyance, which was as close to admiration as she ever got, though Dally
would never trust ’Pert farther than she could throw a grand piano. Since
Venice, and that first finicky handshake outside the Britannia, the two had
observed a truce whose purpose seemed to be to maintain Hunter’s fragile peace
of mind.

“But she likes you,” Hunter insisted.
“You really ought to let her show you round a bit. She knows everyone.”

“Little too nervous about you and
me,” it seemed to Dally. “Thinks we’re sweethearts or something.”

   
“Who,
’Pert? Why she’s the most naively trusting person I know.”

“The
woman gets jealous of oatmeal, Hunter.” Dally had recently walked in on Ruperta
with her face inches from a bowl of steaming porridge, addressing it in a low,
vicious snarl—“Oh, yes, you think she wants you now, but wait till

you cool a bit, start to congeal, see how keen she’ll be
then—” while her fouryearold niece Clothilda sat patiently nearby with a
spoon and a milk jug. Neither seemed in the least embarrassed, not even when
Ruperta angled her ear toward the porridge bowl as if it were attempting to
explain itself.

“Well
. . .
I imagine they were only playing.
Some sort of breakfasttable game or something.”

“
Do
come along darling
,” Ruperta one day appearing out of nowhere as usual,
“today your life changes, for you’ve ever such a treat in store.”

Dahlia was immediately on guard, as
who wouldn’t be. Ruperta, keeping up a London patter largely unintelligible,
witched them into a taximeter cab and next thing Dally knew they were in a
sinister sort of tearoom in Chelsea across the table from a voluptuous person
in a Fedora and a velvet suit. Dally recognized the overgrown thumbnails of a
sculptor.

   
“Miss
Rideout, this creature is Arturo Naunt.”

“This
one shall be my next angel,” Arturo declared, gazing at Dally with a brightness
of eye she thought she had left behind in Italy. “Tell me, my dear, what is it
you do.”

Dally
had noticed that these English asked questions the way others made statements,
with a drop at the end instead of a lift. “I’m an exile.”

   
“From
America.”

   
“From
Venice.”

   
“A
Venetian angel!
Perfetto!
”

Not
exactly the sort of angel Dally imagined, however. ’Pert excused herself with
the usual depraved smirk, while Dally and Arturo after a moment of mindless
exchanges proceeded to Victoria Station. Dally had her trusty Lampo in her
reticule, expecting at any moment to have to deal with a chloroformed
handkerchief, but the journey to Peckham Rye was uneventful, even, thanks to
Arturo’s comprehensive grasp of scandals current in Greater London,
entertaining.

From
the station they found their way uphill to a cemetery dedicated to soldiers
fallen in colonial engagements of the nineteenth and what had elapsed of the
twentieth centuries, none of the monuments ever quite plumb, a crazy,
blownabout field of mineral stumps. Quotations from Henry Newbolt’s cricket
masterpiece “Vitaï Lampada” seemed to occur on every other slab, though what
Arturo had come for was something rather different.

“Here.”
They had paused before a sentimental sort of military pietà, in which a
lifesize infantryman with a nearly unbearable sweetness to his face lay dying
with his head in the lap of a hooded young woman, rendered in

black marble, a pair of predators’
wings emerging from her back, who gently consoled him, one hand touching his
face, the other raised in a curious halfbeckoning, halfcommanding gesture. “One
of my better A.O.D.’s,” commented Arturo.

By
which it seemed he meant “Angel of Death.” Dally came close, peered beneath the
hood. She saw a face you could encounter at any time, turning a city corner or
boarding the omnibus, and then it’d be Katie bar the door, wouldn’t
it—the face of a girl this dying boy had dreamed about, the girl who
tended the hearth in a home grown impossibly distant, who promised unvoiceably
carnal delights, at the same time that she prepared to conduct his spirit to
shores unvoiceably far beyond the sunset.

“Fiona
Plush,” said Arturo, “lovely girl. Became fascinated regrettably with a variety
artist who fancied them curvaceous. Was presently observed bringing her lunch
to work in a Pegamoid traveler’s satchel with a faux alligator grain. The more
she ate the more she wanted to eat. Drapery issues arose. If you look closely
in there at the eyeball treatment you’ll see I’ve caught the hunger
there—rather nicely, I think—that false compassion which is of the
essence in the A.O.D. trade, if you can keep a secret.”

“And
now—let me just jump ahead here—you’re in the market for a new
model.”

“Perhaps
a new approach as well. You must have noticed how people admire your hair.”

   
“Guess
you’re fixing to do away with the hood.”

“Well.
Tradition has been to hide the face, I mean, it’s Death isn’t it. The best
you’d expect is a skull, and depending how nightmareprone you are, it only gets
worse from there.”

   
“But
this Angel here is—”

“True,
but that’s old Fiona, not her fault she’s presentable, though I finally did
have to slim her down a bit.”

In
the days following, they were to visit other graveyards, and the more of
Naunt’s A.O.D.’s Dally had a look at, the stranger matters became. There were
perverse intentions at work here, procreative as much as mortal. In the
complicated drapery of the A.O.D.’s garment, at certain times of day, beneath
the duress of the prevailing light, one saw clearly in the shadows of the gown
the shape of an infant, or sometimes more than one, clinging to what might have
been an indifferent body. When the clouds thickened, drifted or passed, or the
day drew to evening, these figures disappeared, or sometimes modulated to
something else that likewise did not invite close inspection.

   
Dally
had put in a little time as a sculptor’s model. Back in New York, in

one of the capitalist temples downtown, among the allegorical
statues lining a particular marble corridor, she could still be found as
The
Spirit of Bimetallism,
face correct as a face on a ceremonial urn,
garlanded, chiseled onto each iris a wedge of radiant attention aimed at her
right hand, which held suspended a symbolic sun and moon as Justice holds her
scales
. . .
like the other models,
little chance, in the expression she had assumed, of wistful regret for what
she’d come to. What had they been like as girls, Supply, Demand, Surplus Value,
Diminishing Returns? Had any of them sat on a porch at the edge of some
prairie, riding a storebought rocker through the pearl afternoon, into the
evening, imagining her family gone off without her, the house a shell, taken
over by these slow, wood rhythms? Was she from even farther west, say up in the
mining country, freezing through her days and nights in some shack above the
snowline, was that how she’d come to be a child of gold and silver? Noticed by
a mine owner, or an owner’s lieutenant, brought to the city, some city,
introduced to some sculptor fellow, some smoothie who’d been to France, veteran
of artistsandmodels shenanigans, knew his way around the salons down in
Kipperville
. . . .

Unlike
others in the modeling line, she had taken the actress’s approach and actually
read
up on
the abstractions she was instructed to embody, as a way of “getting
inside the character.” What was the point in trying to incarnate Bimetallism
unless you could learn everything you could about It? So with Arturo Naunt and
his A.O.D.’s. This job of riding herd on military souls— Dally couldn’t
help seeing it from the Angel’s point of view. Maybe the hood had been there
not to conceal but to protect, the way the shawl of a classic
semeuse
was
sometimes drawn over her head for the sun—against something from above,
potent yet deflectable, some radiance or unsuspected form of energy
. . .
God’s grace?— Why should the
Angel of Death, acting as agent for God, need to be screened from grace? What
other, unsuspected dark energy, then? What antigrace?

There
was friction from the beginning. Arturo wanted repose, stillness— what
Dally gave him was a dynamic athlete, surrendered to a wind only she could
feel, mindlessly orgasmic from its velocity. “Well. I’m not Charlie Sykes, am
I,” he was often heard to mutter. Like the face of Fiona Plush before her,
Dally’s was too specific for prolonged viewing. We have seen these faces, at
the changes of daylight, against the long, featureless walls of suburban
warehouses, on days of fog or of distant fires whose ash drops unseen,
steadily, accumulating white as frost. . . their faces seem to require this
derangement in the light, and perhaps a willingness to see them, however
anxiously denied by those of us who do.

·
    
·
    
·

Meantime ’Pert
, who had been busy trying, with
little success, to plant doubts about the girl in Hunter’s mind, had also
learned through elements of the T.W.I.T. something of his earlier adventures
and the frailties resulting, and appointed herself a sort of antimuse, hoping
out of meanness to provoke Hunter at least into work unlikely to endear him to
the British public. Her history was soon to undergo a certain adjustment,
however. In September, Hunter would invite her to accompany him to Gloucester
Cathedral, where as part of that year’s Three Choirs Festival, a new work by
Ralph Vaughan Williams would be having its first performance. Ruperta, who
despised church music, must have seen some irresistible opening for idle
mischief, because she went along wearing a sportive toilette more appropriate
to Brighton, with a hat she had always found particularly loathsome but kept handy
for occasions just such as this. The composer was conducting two string
orchestras set like cantores and decani facing each other across the chancel,
with a string quartet between them. The moment Vaughan Williams raised his
baton, even before the first notes, something happened to Ruperta. As Phrygian
resonances swept the great nave, doubled strings sang back and forth, and
ninepart harmonies occupied the bones and blood vessels of those in attendance,
very slowly Ruperta began to levitate, nothing vulgar, simply a tactful and
stately ascent about halfway to the vaulting, where, tears running without
interruption down her face, she floated in the autumnal light above the heads
of the audience for the duration of the piece. At the last long diminuendo, she
returned calmly to earth and reoccupied herself, never again to pursue her old
career of determined pest. She and Hunter, who was vaguely aware that something
momentous had befallen her, walked in silence out along the Severn, and it was
hours before she could trust herself to speak. “You must never, never forgive
me, Hunter,” she whispered. “I can never claim forgiveness from anyone.
Somehow, I alone, for every single wrong act in my life, must find a right one
to balance it. I may not have that much time left.”