The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) (11 page)

Wheeler’s scientific brain was a neo-puritan tool to enjoy the flesh of the cosmos but to reduce leprous or leprotic gaieties, carnival plague. Yet with each reduction of carnival plague, that very brain—in its borrowed spoil or womb of fire—hatched automatic technologies upon which sick gaieties throve afresh in even more seductive apparel. The reduction of plague seemed therefore ultimately meaningless except in the degree that a quality of terror linked Wheeler’s science to Khublall’s mystical despair, a quality of terror that was the seed of conversion within all mutualities, the fire of fanaticism and the fire of humility, the fire of glory and the fire of sacrifice, the fire of hubris and the fire of true pride.

Jackson was intent on returning to earth and had placed his foot on the ladder. From the height on which he stood, the pavements of cities seemed to run parallel in ascent and descent to the rocks of Bale, hills uncoiled into plains, a bird’s eye glitter and mist of proportions ran through the breath of the crowds, crowds with the steam of factories, football grounds, the lighter steam of offices, the variegated steam of cinemas; crowds laughing, it seemed, with one half of a collective face, crying involuntarily with the other half, the individual fall or ebb in tidal collective hypnosis. That individual ebb and flow was Jackson’s body raised like a slightly fluttering feather far up in space. It unravelled the masquerade. The torment remained but an equation existed between material excess and the birth of prophetic spirit.

The walls of the ravine from which he needed to descend to return to Earth were flanked by sculptures he had never seen before. First came sculptures based on acquisitions of material pride so borne—they seemed from where he stood—on the back of aerial fire that they seemed magical creatures of daemonic insight into beauty and intelligence. Pride was the materialization of inner fire as well in bird’s eye glitter and mist of proportions arising from collective torment on earth; pride was increment upon increment of fire into stable form, and stability—the virtue of stability—became a masquerade aided and abetted by intelligence and beauty. Yet there was true pride however buried in a camouflage of glittering ambition.

The bird’s eye mist helped to make it strangely clear.

For it raised in Jackson’s mind the following question: where lay the essence of beauty, the essence of femininity in Mary’s fire? Had Mary incorporated into herself multi-faceted mirrors born of fire, so that one aspect of herself was so brilliantly attired, it caught something of the male animal, the exuberant feather, the exuberant colour of male birds and male creatures?

Had he (Jackson) in seeking to fly from Bale incorporated into himself something of the female animal, the female bird in nature, sober dress, the shrinkage, the reduction of blaze or colour? Was this a sign of his conversion, or of his fear, was it a sign of pregnant memory in him and that he needed to look through the flame of time in Mary’s mirrors back across the years, to look back like Khublall into his marriage and into the birth of a child he had called a “daughter of Man” and whom he had lost?

That day in late March when Marsden narrowly escaped the bale that sped towards him from an overturned lorry found Jackson also within a small heap of pedestrians who had leapt aside in time. He and Khublall were closest to Marsden and for an instant Marsden looked at them with eyes that seized them. So Jackson dreamt in a split second as the bale crashed open and he felt himself a ghost in a bird’s eye mist of bodies on the pavement of the city. Then he recovered as if he had fallen from a great height.
This
was the remarkable ex-priest of whom his father (Jackson sen.) had spoken in Jamaica. There was a clamour, a path was cleared…. Marsden was taken away in an ambulance.

Jackson jun. and Khublall were making their way across Shepherd’s Bush Green towards Wood Lane. “It’s nothing,” Khublall was saying. “The mildest of mild heart attacks. Just shock. They may not even keep him in, the hospitals are
overcrowded
, give him pills and send him home.”

“He knew us,” said Jackson consulting the sky in the region of Planet Bale which was now lost to him in the opaque light of pale noon that concealed the stars.

“Nonsense,” said Khublall. “We knew him. Who doesn’t know Marsden of Angel Inn? Your antecedents and my antecedents were taught by him in India, the West Indies, South America, USA, Africa, everywhere. And we still feel attached to him. Sometimes it’s as if nothing’s really changed….”

They crossed into Wood Lane and made their way past a bus depot and towards the BBC studios and Sebastian’s pavement of scripts in White City.

“Everything’s changed,” Jackson said. “I feel it in my bones. I feel it in the pit of my stomach.”

They both lived in the neighbourhood of North Pole Road (the name reminded Jackson of the Northern Lights he once saw pouring out of space like supermarket powder from Joseph’s hand at the mouth of the St Lawrence river on his way from Montreal to Marseille thirty years ago in 1950). Both men were educated night porters, carriers of subjective cargo. Jackson had studied literature and history at the University College of the West Indies in the late 1940s. Khublall was versed in Hindu lore. Thus they were qualified to cast their net into a river of sorrows encircling the globe. Late March had brought them redundancy notices and six months’ pay. They made their way into a sports ground opposite the old LMR railtrack. The ground was deserted except for the ubiquitous jogger and a group engaged in punting a football.

They sat on a bench under a lime tree and stared across the open ground towards a built-up area half-a-mile away in the vague direction of Willesden Junction.

Khublall and Jackson were casualties of history and they suffered from a mild paranoia, mild inflations of the psyche akin to unpredictable angel or mental fire in the middle of the day or night. It was as if they were both afflicted—Jackson in particular—by states of tidal emotion (camouflages of love or the fear of love) that were more complex than they themselves knew, and which were the grievous substance of bird’s eye mist of proportions of historic fall in the funeral of an age affecting colonial peoples as it affected an entire civilization, through religious or ex-religious peoples for whom the nature of loyalty to state or church—to man or woman or god—the nature of all attachment within tradition—was in crisis.

Jackson’s camouflage was the tall African hairstyle that he now cultivated. Khublall’s was the shaven head he never ceased to shave—and which marked him out as a holy man—in fair weather or foul.

“Everything
has
changed,” Jackson repeated softly. “I sometimes believe I am threatened by the very forces I used to serve.”

“You should consult Marsden.”

Jackson was staring now into the opaque light of the sky in the region of hidden Bale where he thought he detected a flashing bird’s wing.

“No bird but something of an old spiritual goat is Marsden,” said Khublall with affection yet teasing malice of the ancient East. “He’s on our side. He knows our temptations, our lusts. The young women who go to his Inn! Rumour exaggerates of course but I hear they’re attractive….”

“My father was an old goat,” said Jackson laughing stiffly. “Died from it. Too much of a good thing. Too much love. Nothing spiritual with him though. Pure and simple Pan. Pan—he used to say—has not only hooves to trample the serpent’s brain but he dances to a drum, sometimes a trumpet, sometimes a piano, sometimes a clarinet and sax. The nature-voices of goat.” Jackson grew pensive. He tried to be gay, to smile. “Did I tell you of Mack, my father’s best friend?”

Khublall pretended he’d never heard the tale.

“Mack was younger than my father. At least ten years. In 1950 Mack was forty-five, my father fifty-five. I was just twenty-four….”

“That means you’re now as old as your father was in the middle of the century.” Khublall spoke as if this constituted a milestone or celebration. “We must declare a holiday.”

“Right. The holiday wheel of sobering age comes round again and again. Who said that? I can’t remember. But it sounds okay to me. When one has knocked around as I have … It was Mack who got me a cheap passage out of Montreal to Marseille in 1950. I’d gone to Canada straight from University College to try my luck but things were slow and I elected, god knows why, to come to England by way of the Mediterranean. I suppose it was my elder brother beckoning, he’d enlisted and died in the Royal Air Force. Shot down in a raid over Bremen.” Jackson stopped. His face was veiled. “I’ve never been able to locate his grave. He’s one of those with a blank tombstone. Perhaps his bones are at the bottom of a ditch or a lake and will lie there in an ocean of time. Now where did I read that? Sounds too grand for my brother! Mack also had a wife in England, by the way, and a baby daughter called Stella. She’d be in her early or mid-thirties today. I’m not sure. He also had a grown-up daughter (an earlier marriage) twenty-three or
twenty-four
, and she was singing under the name of Sukey Tawdrey in a band in Europe. A luscious strip-tease, a beautiful slut. Nothing new in that. He said I’d find her in Marseille and he gave me a letter. It was fate. Within a year we’d had a daughter. I used to wonder when I settled in England whether that child—Mack’s granddaughter—and his English daughter Stella would meet. There wasn’t more than a couple of years or so between them. Four or five at the outside. I’m a stickler for dates and years though much else is retreating into a mist. Perhaps they have met in paradise wherever paradise parks itself nowadays. Perhaps they’ve stood on the grave of the unknown soldier of paradise, a random grave possessed of many faces, the face of the master and the face of the servant. What has Donne said about it or is it Paul in his letters to posterity? I used to dream of bringing them all together, the living and the dead….” He stopped and poked Khublall in the ribs, then stared at his shaven head. “In the 1950s I used to cut my hair close, Khubbie Old Boy. Not as damned close as you …”

“I shave my head because …” Khublall began
philosophically
.

“I know, I know,” said Jackson irritably. “Gandhi’s a spiritual goat. The sins of the fathers upon their virgin brides are visited upon your bald cranium. When will the funeral cease? It never will I suppose while the wedding lasts….” Jackson looked changed, suddenly sombre, a deep wound inside that he dressed up in a flying tongue. He touched the strings of a bitter harp, a pan-piano within himself, a vibration, a luminous scar, a luminous beak.

“When I got to Marseille—beautiful harbour Marseille has—Sukey’s band was just leaving for Paris. Their first performance was in a club patronized by black and white Americans in Paris, Africans, West Indians, musicians, painters, etc. etc. It’s all like a mist now, a mist of faces. I haven’t been back there these past thirty years. I seem to see it from a great height through her eyes of the South, the black South. Cold eyes nevertheless. Marbles of fate. They glint, they split into many jealous facets. Sometimes when I go into a museum or church of evolution—as my eccentric biologist master used to say—I see them as if they’ve fallen out of the head of a black madonna into animals’ heads, birds’ heads…. Just a glint. Mean at times. Generous at times. Eyes like the name she adopted in which to star in her shows. Sukey and Tawdrey. Dark and Mean popular camouflage of Greedy, Transparent and Rich. A bitter lesson you may say for a bridegroom to prize above heaven and hell.
No.
Not a soul could have convinced me then. Professional slut she may have been—many a great actress is, acting is a complex profession. To play evil or mean or grand or notorious is to be evil or mean or grand or notorious while the play lasts. I was transported and depressed by every wonderful performance. It was grist of marvel for me, she was a marvellous experience, so marvellous I forgot my father’s hooves, the armour I possessed—or thought I possessed—to trample every bitch….
Not
she.
She never really forgot. She saw my naked fear of dying in her, my naked fear of impotence….”

“Why impotence?”

Jackson looked at him with blind eyes. “Love of country or of theatrical humanity sometimes kills with a made-up kiss as much as with a real bullet. A great man said that. Not me. To
fear
or to
buy
love is the beginning of impotence. And her auction-block strip-tease was the echo of that fear, the echo of my nakedness rather than hers. It was a way of making me see with her body presented to me like a commodity how vulnerable I was….”

“But,” said Khublall, “as a black Jamaican, why should she see you…?”

“As a rotten overlord?” Jackson laughed. “Love’s torment. She fell in love with me and so I was her target, her intimate audience. I was rotten overlord as well as hoped-for liberator. The schizophrenia of the Third World. Pigmentation—she was black American, I black West Indian—was irrelevant. One doesn’t easily dispense with the wounds of the past. The disease is as much in the new ruler’s mind as in the old brothels of empire. Let it suffice to say I became her prime target of war, slave, post-war, post-slave era. Prime slave and prime minister rolled into one. I became her authoritarian ace in a pack of cards that reduced me to a clown. I say ‘clown’ but I have no word for it, it was more ‘prey of the furies’… A mixture of imperial clown and prey of anxiety,” he paused, his eyes ravaged, “that’s how she was conditioned perhaps—I don’t know—to respond to a West Indian, to make love to him, to mock him … I remember the Sacré Coeur in the night sky above the stage where she danced. Her dances were the beginning of ‘half-clown, half-fury’ affair between Jackson jun. (myself) and Sukey Tawdrey (carnival body of bought-and-sold peoples around the globe consenting to their new, black and white masters).” Jackson stopped. He felt the fire of paranoia in his heart, the way he had named himself as if he were speaking of a stranger in the boudoir of chameleon politics, chameleon flesh-and-blood. Khublall nodded. He was confirmed in his vision of early-to-mid-twentieth-century sexual nemesis in late-
twentieth
-century powers.

“She danced two dances,” Jackson continued. “The first was a unique interpretation of Scott Joplin’s rag, the second Count Basie’s jazz.” Khublall wondered what rag and jazz had to do with clown and fury.

“It’s getting a bit nippy,” Jackson said. “The air seems colder. Why not come over to my place in North Pole Road?”

An apron of light and cloud had arisen in the direction of Bale. Jackson involuntarily shielded his eyes, then looked down and across the green. The players were still punting a football from foot to hand, foot to foot, never letting it touch the ground, though they had moved now much farther away. Their voices were faint. There was the rattle of a train behind him across the road. He turned. He could see the train high upon the embankment above the road. A couple of double-decker buses were approaching from the northern end of the road. For a moment everything seemed still, a still camouflage upon his senses. Someone had died in that instant. That’s why the world had invisibly stopped. Then he and Khublall moved in that instant—oblivious of all the others, the millions, who had died—and made their way to his basement flat in North Pole Road. It was curious but it was as if their faint breath set the train and the buses into automatic progression again. A hairline reflex, hairline moment, pushed the traffic on the road, a sensitive minute hand of gravity in one’s body that possessed its mutual riddle in fused crowd or ball punted from hand to foot.

He lived in a basement flat but would have preferred something above ground. It was all he could afford. He made coffee for Khublall and a pot of tea for himself.

“No sugar or milk for me,” Khublall said. It was a ritual observation that Jackson knew by heart.

They sat in a bare room, spare and upright chairs, lean polished table, a radio, a vase of flowers, a Flanders poppy that remained on its shelf all the year round. Jackson wanted it and kept the room like that. The only decoration was on the ceiling—a bird’s eye on Bale in a mist of faces. The room possessed an air of authentic, psychological casualty within the nature of things, the marginal conversion of casualty nevertheless into a quality of subjective being. To fall—and to know one has let the ball of ghostly power masquerading as history fall to the ground—is a capacity to leave a wound or scar in space, where the earth turns, to die with others who die and yet in continuing to live to see for them the stillness of death to which they are blind, individual grave, still gravity, still fall that goes on forever to unravel the mystery of truth.

“Yes, a bare room,” Jackson confessed. “Not that it makes me feel stripped of everything. But close to it, meaningfully close to it.” He was smiling and Khublall was nonplussed by such humour until he continued, “What’s the name of the old woman in a shawl who walks Shepherd’s Bush with everything that she has?”

“Mother Diver,” said Khublall, and suddenly he perceived Jackson’s smile against Mother Diver’s unsmiling comedy. It was as if something had flashed in a mirror, one unravelled face hidden in another. It left him puzzled but aware.