The Angel's Cut (29 page)

As they fell, Lucifer fought his way forward. Xas could see the sea below, rushing closer every second. A few further seconds went by, and the howling of the wind abated some. Then the sea was less than twenty feet below them, flashing past, but not coming any closer. Xas looked back under the archangel's wings and saw the blurred air below the cloud. The cloudburst was quite confined, and behind them now.

Lucifer headed in toward the coast, unlocked his wings, slowed almost to stall, and floated up on a thermal that rose against a bluff above the sea. He dropped Xas on to a grassy cliff top, landed beyond him, then whipped around and with a single soft wing beat was back beside Xas and pressing a foot on him.

‘Don't tell me you don't remember,' he hissed. ‘Don't make any more of your abortive parables. And don't tell me again how
things
have come between you and the sky. I know you remember all our words for air, for weather, for the sensations of flight. Where are the human words? Do they have a name yet for that fall of fine ice?'

‘No,' Xas said. Then, ‘Get your foot off me.'

‘Angels never forget anything,' Lucifer said, vehement, then lifted his foot, sat down, and replaced the foot with a hand.

Xas had planned to slither off the cliff and perhaps that way escape. But he found himself caught again. The grass against his cheek was as dry as last year's hay. Their scuffles had raised a cloud of dust, which hung around them, for there was very little wind on that headland, despite the downburst out to sea. There wasn't a human habitation anywhere in sight, and they were in some place where the coast highway looped away from the sea, probably because the cliffs were subsiding. There was a stand of pines nearby, one tree with its roots bared and lying like glossy embroidery against the crumbling cliff face.

‘Shall we continue,' Lucifer said, and gave Xas a good hard shake. ‘You went to Heaven to read the destroyed page
of Leon Jodeau's suicide letter. Someone objected to you being there, and injured you.'

‘Why do you want to tell me this?'

‘Perhaps I mean to tell God, not you.'

Xas shut his eyes for a moment, and gave in. ‘It was Michael who injured me,' he said. ‘It wasn't the first time. In 1819 I stole into Heaven to see Sobran's daughter, Nicolette. She was only seven when she died. I promised Sobran I'd visit her. Michael caught me when I was leaving; coming out of the crater lake of the volcano in Antarctica. He carried me down out of the sky and onto the icy granular dust of the dry valleys, where he battered my head on the ground till it bled, all the while promising that if I ever trespassed again he would break my skull open and eat anything he found there.'

Lucifer gave a faint chuckle, possibly amused by Michael's use of ‘anything' as a qualifier.

‘Michael tried to damage the signatures on my side, the entwined names, yours and God's. I suppose he objected to the treaty. Anyway—when he caught me again in 1835 he did what he'd only tried to do the first time. He put his hand into my side.'

‘And you think that, in 1819, God stopped Michael because you were at that time still chaste?'

‘What makes you think I was still chaste in 1819?'

‘I'm only guessing.'

‘Then you must think it's true that God let Michael half kill me in 1835 because I was unchaste.'

‘I think God can't prevent His great archangels from murdering their brothers. He didn't stop
me
. Or not soon
enough. But even if God didn't stop Michael from hurting you, He might easily have mended you, Xas.'

‘I know that.'

‘Once you were injured, why did you go to your lover?'

‘You mean, why did I go to Sobran rather than seeking help in Hell? I wanted to see him. I was dying and I wanted to see him once more.'

Lucifer nodded. Then he asked, again, ‘Why did I cut off your wings?'

‘God wanted me to live, but out of His presence. He grounded me. This is supposed to be my Purgatory. I'm supposed to repent. Repent loving Sobran.'

‘And Conrad Cole, and who knows how many others—since it's chastity God requires from you, not that you withhold your heart.'

‘God
asked
you to cut off my wings.'

Lucifer said, ‘You think I'd do what God asked me to?'

Xas stared sullenly up at his brother.

Lucifer removed his hand and sat back. ‘Your lover did help you,' he said. ‘Remember the book fountain?'

For the last two and a half millennia Hell had been getting a copy of any written document copied more than ten times. Xas had heard Lucifer describe the arrangement as, on God's part, something like the prosecution letting the defence know what evidence it has—a courtesy, and a legal formality. In Hell there was a kind of
spring
where books and papers appeared. They appeared in one place and pushed away what was already lying there, so that it looked as if books were bubbling up out of the rock. Fallen
angels were always at the spring, waiting for news and entertainment. They took turns looking at newspaper headlines and pamphlets and playbills and sheet music. They kept up with what was going on.

Lucifer said, ‘In September of 1835 one of my brothers brought me a sheet of paper, printed on one side only, a rush job. It read: “
Father, Xas—once your servant—is sorely
injured and will die, if he is not already dead. Father, all things are
possible for you. Save him. If he has sinned or led me to sin let him
at least live to make amends.
” The message was signed “
Sobran
Jodeau
”, and under it was an address: “
Xas is at Château Vully
near the village of Aluze, on the banks of the Saône
.”

‘I gathered then that you had told your friend how human writings found their way to both Hell and Heaven, how what's reproduced goes to Hell, while only destroyed originals go to Heaven. Because an address was included in the notice I reasoned that
I
was the intended recipient of the page. God wouldn't require directions.

‘I'm sure Jodeau had prayed over your bleeding body. I'm sure he petitioned God, no matter what he must have believed about the sin of a man lying with an angel. And God didn't respond. So Jodeau sent a letter to a printer in Chalon-sur-Saône, perhaps the person who made labels for the Château's wine bottles. The printer's name and address appeared in fine print—a single block in the composite—at the foot of the notice.

‘Jodeau knew enough about your history to know that you were as much mine as God's, and that if God didn't seem to want to help you, then perhaps I would.

‘When I got Jodeau's message, several days after you were injured, I immediately went where I was directed, to Château Vully, near the village of Aluze.

‘The Château had many outbuildings, but the trees were dying around only one of them, a coach house with a long gallery above it, a perfect place for a man to wait for an angel to visit him. When I saw that room I understood that you had a life together—you and Jodeau. God must have been with you, seen, known, not interfered. But of course He wouldn't interfere, for the first clause of our treaty says that you can “go freely”.

‘God hadn't interfered, but nor had He mended you, for when I arrived you were lingering at the point of death and trying to live. You had a hole in your side. I could see that your attacker had pushed a hand in there, perhaps seeking to hold your heart, to hold it still. But you're so small—for an angel—and your ribs are close together, and well knit. Perhaps Michael's hand didn't fit. Or perhaps his violence was half-hearted. I don't know.

‘Your heart had stopped beating because you had no blood left to pump. But you weren't yet dead, and you were struggling to live. That's why the trees were dying. Jodeau had wrapped himself about you. He was semi-comatose with exhaustion and grief. Around the bed where you and he were lying I found a dozen dead and dying sheep and goats. The animals were tethered to the frame of the bed. There was a woman sitting on the stairs down to the coach house, a friend of Jodeau's, a clearly intelligent woman who, observing how the life was draining out of everything
around you, had supplied the sheep and goats hoping you'd drain them instead of her friend.'

‘Aurora de Valday,' Xas said, ‘Sobran's employer. She was extraordinary. She found her friend clasping a dying angel and acted intelligently and collectedly.'

‘That's why I gave her my pearls,' Lucifer said, then laughed and added, ‘Also to make her feel compromised and uneasy.' He went on, ‘Aurora, though shaken, was helpful. When I asked her to, she brought me candles, and knives, and needles and thread. Jodeau was useless and irrational—though I confess I didn't command him to be calm. I let him feel his natural terror. He seemed to think I meant to carry your corpse away with me.

‘Before I laid a finger on you, I had a word with God. The double doors of the gallery were ajar. They opened on to empty air about twenty feet above a pit of sand, and hot cobblestones, and young lindens with dying foliage. God was there, but because you were nearly dead there was a kind of cloud over God's presence, like a cataract.

‘It was over a thousand years since I'd been in His presence. You see, I'd kept away from you. Even in Hell, where God wasn't, I'd kept away. I was unused to God, and I—' Lucifer broke off and shook his head. ‘I hurried. When I spoke to God I was in a hurry to get out of His presence again. I thought we were having a consultation, and failed to hear Him telling me what would happen. That's what God deals in:
What will happen
.

‘I said, “Do you mean to let Xas die?” And God said, “I mean to have you save him.” And I imagined that it was a
test. God hadn't lifted a finger to save you, but I was to raise myself to the task. I'd have to sew up the wound in your side, tell you to live, and stay with you for a time to make sure the telling would take.

‘And that is what I did. But I believed that God meant to make me feel that if I kept you alive then that was proof I wanted to keep you near me—a table at which He and I could one day sit down together. And because I believed that, I cut off your wings so that you couldn't come near me again. I crippled you. I left you in the world of surfaces with only the remainder of your body.'

Xas felt numb and stupid. He thought that Lucifer was lying, not about what had happened, but why he was telling the story. Lucifer had said ‘He' of God and ‘you' of him. Lucifer had been talking to him, not to God.

But, as it turned out, Xas was mistaken. For as he sat there on the cliff top, trying to fathom his own new understanding, at least enough to come up with a question, God began to talk to Lucifer. Xas heard his brother's response. Lucifer sounded very tired. He said, ‘It does me no good to be good to me.' And then he broke off, looked at Xas, and reached for him. Lucifer clapped his hands over Xas's ears, and pulled the angel toward him so that Xas's face was buried against his chest. Xas was unable to hear his brother, or read his lips. He could feel the vibrations of Lucifer's voice in his chest, and his ragged, shallow breathing.

The consultation took only a moment. When it was over Lucifer shoved Xas away from him.

Xas shouted, ‘Go away!' But Lucifer was already in the air.
The archangel tore straight upward, rapidly dwindling from sight. The sound of his wing beats grew softer and seemed to spread till they were coming from every part of the sky.

When Xas walked back into Flora's house two days later, he found her suitcase by the door. She was in a sparkling kitchen polishing cutlery. ‘Where were you?' she said. ‘I called Cole and he was cagey. He really is putting all that behind him, isn't he?'

‘All that?'

‘His wild past,' Flora said. ‘Look—Connie's calling every hour now. I've been putting him off, but I don't want him to think I'm reluctant to go away with him.'

‘Where?'

‘Palm Springs again. But I didn't like to leave O'Brien.'

‘I'm here now,' Xas said.

Flora closed the lid of the caddy and put it, and the polish, away. She left the rags for Xas to deal with and washed her hands at the kitchen sink. ‘I'm sorry to sound brusque. It isn't as if you're unreliable. But I couldn't think where you'd got to. I even called Tram and Lee Young.' Flora ran through a list of jazz musicians. ‘And Lockheed, in case you were back there and somehow managing double shifts, though I didn't think it likely.'

Xas said, ‘Why don't you just ask me where I've been and whether I'm all right?'

‘I'm afraid to.' Flora fell quiet and fidgeted. She flipped up the edge of her wavy bob, and fiddled with her beads. Finally she said, ‘Well—you're in one piece, so…'

‘Have a nice trip,' said Xas.

I
t was when they were in Florida, where Crow was meeting with a writer about a book he planned to film, that he finally fell out with Flora. Or maybe it was less a falling out than a series of exclusions. Whatever, Flora had seen it coming. In Miami, after a few days, she noticed that whenever she'd say something—her ration of conversation in a room full of men—Crow wouldn't look at her. Instead he'd purse his lips and wait for her to fall silent. She'd review what she'd said. Had she said something silly or slight? Or something that ‘called undue attention' to herself—as her exacting grandmother always warned her a girl must never do.

By the end of the trip Flora was reduced to pleasantries in company, and Crow was always out late, and tired or inebriated by the time he came to bed.

Flora and Crow had sleeping berths on the airliner back to California. Flora turned in early, hoping to avoid any argument with Crow. He was annoyed with her, or disappointed in her, and she judged that it was better she didn't seek to know why. Not just yet. Back in Los Angeles she'd be at her house and he'd be at his and they could resume contact when it suited him—go on as they were, or as they'd been before their affair.

Flora turned in, got into her pyjamas, and climbed into her bed. A little over an hour later a hostess shook her awake. She was told she had better get up and strap in. The pilot had decided to put down ahead of a storm in a little airfield in Texas.

The plane was already descending, gunning its engines against gusting winds. The craft was jostling, its lights dim and bright by turns. Flora got up, put on her coat over her pyjamas, then pushed her slightly swollen feet into her shoes. She returned to the seat opposite Crow and buckled up. He nodded to acknowledge her, then continued to peer out the porthole beside him.

Rain was washing the glass, rain and slushy snow. Beyond the raindrops the world was black. Then it appeared—the sky around a thunderhead lit up within by lightning flashes. The plane vibrated as the thunderclaps pushed through it. Flora couldn't hear the thunder over the engine noise, but she felt it in her teeth, and in the bones of her skull. Her ears popped.

For a short time the plane passed out of the rain and the coach was quieter, then the engine sound grew as the plane
accelerated before touching down. The plane came in to land and ran, tilted nose up and back down, fast, then slowed in spurts, pushed by the wind.

Flora cupped her hands by her eyes and pressed her face against the glass. She saw hangars and a huddle of Quonset huts, one showing lights. The plane taxied to this shelter, rocked by wind gusts. Yellow dust drifted in waves on to the edge of the tarmac. The black front of cloud Flora could see from her side of the plane bloomed with light one more time, then blurred. The rain hit the airstrip, washed the dust down out of the air so that, within seconds, sand-filled rivulets were running across the tarmac, and the hard-packed earth was filmed and shiny with fallen water.

The plane came to a standstill. The hostess reappeared and told them they would be all stopping a while to shelter in the building just to the right of the door.

Crow went down the steps ahead of her, waited to help her, then let her hand go and dashed for the hut. A hostess came after Flora with an umbrella, but they were only under it for a moment before it turned inside out and was torn from the woman's hand.

Flora struggled into the building. Crow had waited at the door, and drew her inside. The other passengers were there already, panting, shaking their coats. The building had a tin roof, no ceiling, only beams from which bare bulbs were suspended. Under the deluge the room was roaring. The hostess arrived, without her umbrella, apologised on behalf of the airline and invited them to make themselves as comfortable as possible. She gestured at a shy looking man
who seem to be saluting them with a steaming coffee pot. He retreated behind a counter and began to pour coffee. Most of the passengers kept their coats on and stayed standing to drip dry. Flora accepted a cup of coffee. She followed Crow to the window.

The room faced east. It was flat country, the nearest range of hills only a low stickleback at the edge of the world. The sun was coming up, but it didn't appear. All that showed over the silvered ground and in the thick silver air was a bright oval like the view through an antique Claude glass, an eighteenth century optical instrument that concentrated and isolated a view so that it could be painted.

Flora saw that there was a bird just beyond the window. It had been beaten out of the air by the cloud burst. Its drenched wings were spread, its beak gaping as if it couldn't catch its breath. It fluttered about, kicking up water, then stopped struggling and drooped. Its breathing gave a little hitch.

Flora hurried back outside. She got down on her knees to retrieve the bird. Her coat trailed in the puddles. When she got up, clutching the bird one-handed against her silk pyjama top, she put her other hand on the windowsill in order to keep her balance, and it came away covered in flakes of sun-blasted paint. She went back in. One of the other passengers opened the door for her.

Someone emptied a wastepaper basket and, when Flora put the bird down on the floor, they placed the basket over it. Flora stood over the basket and watched the bird collect itself, blink, shake its wings, then shut them. ‘It'll be okay, I think,' said the person who'd found the basket.

Flora's pants clung clammily to her shins. Her coffee was cold. Crow wordlessly brought her another. He watched her drink it. He was wearing a cool, blank expression. ‘Are you cold?' he asked.

‘Only very wet,' she said.

‘That was a little sentimental, you know.'

‘If it was filmed it would be sentimental.' She sipped her coffee. It had been stewing and was shockingly bitter.

The world beyond the waiting room was now only that lozenge of yellow light. A waterfall dropped in solid splashes from the gutter by the door. The water made so many sounds it seemed to be different kinds of water, softer or harder, colder or warmer; dense and misty, clean and dirty. It came from everywhere, fell straight down from the sky, then in cascades from the building, then rebounded from the ground to thump the clapboard walls.

‘This is biblical,' Flora observed. She was feeling drowsy, uncomfortably damp, but comforted by something—something she couldn't quite figure out, about the bird, about her decision to scoop it up, and bring it in out of the storm.

She had always liked animals. ‘Too soft for farming,' her grandmother had once said. That was twice in one night she'd thought of Grandma McLeod. Did it mean anything? Was that why good people shouldn't go to Heaven? Because—as Xas had once seemed to hint—they couldn't go whole? And, if they didn't go whole, was that because if they were good and beloved they left useful bits of themselves behind them? Things that their loved ones had to keep in order to live. To live well. To know that a bird being
beaten to death by the rain is like a woman on fire and running in panic through the horrified guests of a café.

Sometime later Flora woke up. She was propped against the wall. There was a space beside her on the bench, yet Crow was on the other side of the room, straddling a chair, his arms across its back and head hanging. There was a scattering of cigarette butts beneath the chair, one smoking faintly; it had been pinched out halfway along its length, yet Crow had lit another and already its tip was a fragile inch of ash.

The rain was quieter, the radio audible again. Flora's neck hurt. She thought that Crow might have considered lying her down and bundling his jacket beneath her head. Or he might have stayed by her and let her head rest on the cushion of his arm.

She got up, went to the window, and wiped a clear circle on the misted glass. She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered out. There was the plane, its propellers strapped. There were several other planes, the Quonset huts, one illuminated, and a hangar. There was a sign above the door of the hangar. It read:
Millie Cotton Memorial Flight
School
.

The glass squawked as Flora's hands dropped. She leaned against the window, her damp coat blotting the glass in clear furry-edged patches. ‘Connie,' she said.

Crow didn't respond.

She called him again.

‘Uh-huh.' He got up slowly as though he was having trouble with gravity. He dropped the cigarette and ground it out. Did all this with an elaborate show of effort.

‘Look,' Flora said, once he was beside her.

Crow gave a grunt of surprise. He said, ‘Her friends must have got together and done it anyway. Then named it for her.'

‘Don't you think it's strange that we didn't know?' Flora said.

Crow shrugged. ‘Different worlds, I guess.' He knocked on the glass with his knuckles. ‘Now
that
would be sentimental if it was in a film.'

‘Yes,' Flora said, ‘it would be sentimental because it would be supposed to mean something.' She paused, then said, ‘It might mean something anyway.'

‘It means her friends found money to start a school and named it for her.'

‘But we're here.' Flora touched her own chest, and then his arm. ‘We're here by accident.' Then, ‘What's wrong, Connie?'

‘Must something be wrong?' Crow said.

‘No, but—I thought that it all went well in Miami.'

‘It did.'

Flora moved her hand from his sleeve to his hand, she wrapped her fingers around his. Crow let her hold his hand but didn't reciprocate, didn't close his grip.

‘Though I did spend some time on the phone arguing with Cole,' Crow said. Cole was to produce this next film.

She said, ‘Con's feeling his oats. Since flying around the world he's the world famous Conrad Cole. No one is his equal when he gets full of himself like that.'

‘I couldn't ever be his equal, Flora. He always had me at a disadvantage. You understand that, don't you? You understand that our friendship was founded on compromise.'

‘In what way?'

Crow turned his head to examine her. ‘Oh—come on!'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Flora—I obtained film stolen from him and cut it into my own film. It was dishonourable of me.' Crow turned away and looked at the white glass, for the condensation had closed Flora's window again. ‘Don't you have any idea of the kind of position that put me in with him?'

‘Are you saying,' Flora began, then hesitated. ‘Are you suggesting that
I
put you in that position?'

‘I'm not
suggesting
anything,' Crow growled. Then changed the subject. ‘Do you think your friend's failure with Millie is the reason he takes such good care of you?'

‘Xas?'

‘Yes, your friend, Cole's powder puff.'

‘I don't know.'

‘Though it can't be too much trouble—taking care of you—what with one thing and another, like his advantageous relationship with Cole.'

It sounded to Flora as though Crow was accusing Xas of being involved in some kind of lucrative blackmail. What
had
Cole been saying?

Crow asked suddenly, ‘Whose idea was it?'

‘What?'

‘Stealing Cole's film?'

‘It was unwanted footage.'

‘Apparently there
is
no unwanted footage.'

‘It was my idea,' Flora said. ‘Xas had nothing to do with it. I'd only just met him.' Flora wanted to deflect Crow's
hostility from Xas. It was silly of her to want that. Crow was saying she was a thief—that
she
was if ‘Cole's powder puff' wasn't. It was herself she should defend, but she couldn't see why Crow had suddenly found the need to blame her or, if he was in fact blaming her, why he'd given her an out, why he'd offered her someone else to blame instead.

But Crow had always been like this. She shouldn't kid herself. Crow was prepared to respect what people could do for him. People like Xas. Crow would pay for work. He'd offer praise. He'd offer the largesse of his company, his approval. But he'd not alter one of his prejudices, so that everyone had to eventually remain where he'd first filed them, under ‘a good sport', or ‘fake', or ‘fag', or ‘traitor'.

Crow said, ‘You have to be able to trust people.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘I don't like this,' Crow said. He sounded uncomfortable, fastidious. ‘I don't like having to give anyone the air, Flora, but I think I have to tell you that I don't want you editing this next film.'

Once Flora was able to react she only shrugged. Crow was firing her before he'd in fact hired her. They had no agreements, no contract governing the terms of their work, or their affair, or their friendship. Flora was ashamed of his behaviour. Whatever had prompted it, boredom with the affair, panic about her being some burden to him—whatever—his behaviour was shameful. She found she couldn't look at him. He was letting her go. She loved him, and he was letting her go.

At that moment Flora understood that she'd be all right. In a day or two she'd feel indignant, scornful, straight in her head. ‘Life goes on,' she thought. ‘Life goes on and you find you can't even control which way you turn your head. You refuse to look at someone, then lose sight of them for good.' She made herself look at Crow then. She met his pale blue eyes and made herself imagine a time, months or years from now, when they were over this, and were sitting together somewhere having a drink and chewing the fat. In her head Flora turned the knobs of her Moviola, and let the film run on. She shut one gate, let the loop of film appear, shut the other, and made a cut. She pushed the unwanted footage aside. She'd forget this, then she'd forgive him.

She looked out the window again, at the sign:
Millie
Cotton Memorial Flying School
. She said, ‘Cole gave Xas some money back in 1930. Xas invested it in a funeral home, the Madill Brothers in Santa Monica. They have branches in Long Beach and Pasadena now. The brothers send Xas quarterly reports. I always imagined he reinvested his dividends. But perhaps some of it comes here. That would be like him; to do that and not mention it.'